Children's Children

by Jan Carson

  ‘Jesus, Liz, you have to give this up.’

  ‘Don’t swear,’ I say, ‘not in front of Freddy.’

  We have made a pact not to swear or shout at one another in his presence. It is a pact from the time before, but I insist that it still holds. Mostly we manage to keep to the no-shouting rule or, if we can’t keep our mouths kind, I put him to bed early and we go at each other as quietly as possible in the kitchen, with the door pulled shut. When we are having our Freddy-might-hear arguments, our voices are like water forced down a tube, which is to say, they are strong and insistent, capable of lifting skin.

  You are holding your head in your hands now, leaning your elbows on the tablecloth. A smudge of relish has attached itself to the cuff of your shirt. It is brown and a little lumpy. I should reach over and wipe it off with a napkin or at very least tell you it is there. I don’t. It makes me feel superior to look at the stain and know you have not yet noticed it. I’m not sure why I feel like this. It will be me who washes your shirt later and that stain will need bleaching.

  ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I didn’t ask for a ghost child. It’s not an ideal situation. But you’re still his father. I’m still his mother, and I don’t think I have it in me to turn my back on him.’

  You don’t reply. Your face is moving up and down slowly inside your hands. At first I think you are chewing a bite of hamburger, but you have no hamburger left to eat. Then, I notice that there is water on your plate, puddling through the crumbs and the greased streaks of burger relish. You are crying. This is a new thing. You don’t allow yourself to cry any more.

  I reach across the table, past the menu holder and the condiment bottles. I put my hand on your hand. It is colder than I’d expected. Our hands lying on the table look like the hands of dead people, folded across dead peoples’ chests. You do not move your hand. In the past you pulled away when I tried to touch you. Today you don’t.

  ‘Look John, I’ll move,’ I say. ‘If it’s this important to you then sell the house and buy your old house. I’ll go with you, under one condition.’

  You raise your head and look straight at me. I can see where the tears have left lines on your cheeks. Your skin is dry these days and there are tiny circles of eczema in the hinged part of your elbows. This is from the stress. (I have stomach cramps and the hair is thin enough on my crown to see scalp pinking below.) You are still handsome even when you are crying, even when you have eczema. You are handsome and sad like Eastern European men in movies. You look at me hard. Your eyebrows are all up at the edges as if you are asking me a question.

  ‘What’s the condition?’ you ask.

  ‘You need to get Freddy to move with us.’

  ‘Liz, please.’

  ‘That’s my only condition.’

  ‘Freddy’s dead.’

  ‘That may be, John but he’s still with us, and I’m not moving anywhere without him.’

  You take your hand back. You look at the palm of it, then the fingers and the fingernails. Eventually you shrug and say, ‘OK, if that’s what it takes, I’ll ask Freddy if he wants to move with us.’

  You look like a man who has been driving a truck all night by himself. You go to stand up, unhooking your jacket from the back of the chair.

  ‘Do it now,’ I say.

  ‘Here, in the restaurant?’

  ‘No time like the present.’

  ‘People might hear.’

  ‘People be damned. People don’t have to deal with the kind of shit we have to deal with every day. Ask him right now.’

  ‘Freddy do you want to move house with us?’ you mumble into the napkin dispenser.

  ‘He’s not at the table, John. He’s under the table,’ I say. I make a pointing finger and use it to point towards the place where Freddy is making his crummy castle beneath the tablecloth. I am kind of enjoying this. I am hating every minute of it.

  You swear under your breath, something vaguely Catholic. Then, you lift the edge of the tablecloth and duck your head under the table as if you are looking for a dropped phone.

  ‘Freddy,’ you say, ‘do you want to move to a new house with us?’ I can hear you through the table and the tablecloth. I can hear your disbelief louder than your words. You are not even using the right voice for children. You are using a voice for people with learning difficulties or grandparents, just before they die.

  You lift your head. The tablecloth is caught on the back of your neck so you are wearing it like a shroud, like the Virgin Mary. I reach across the table and gently detach it. You are crying again.

  ‘Well?’ I ask.

  ‘He says yes,’ you reply. ‘He says he’ll move house with us.’

  I know this is a lie because Freddy does not say anything any more, but I haven’t the stomach for another argument.

  Then, the waitress is here beside us. She asks, ‘Is everything all right?’ and you say, ‘Yes, I just dropped my mobile.’ When she lifts Freddy’s untouched toastie, you say, ‘Sorry, he’s not that hungry today,’ and I feel like something has come between us again and it is a kind of glue. I do not want to move into the house where you grew up, but I will if it means we can be a team again and Freddy can be part of this team too.

  ‘I think the new house will be good for us,’ I say. This is what you really want to hear. I offer you my hand and you take it. Under the table I am reaching for Freddy’s hand. We are all three joined together in a chain but you cannot see Freddy and Freddy cannot see you.

  By the time you get round to bidding on the house it has already gone out of our price range.

  You call the estate agent yourself and make a point of saying, ‘I grew up in that house. It’s special to me.’ Special means nothing to the estate agent. He only speaks money and we do not have the extra ten thousand required to outbid our rivals. When you start talking about how important the house is and how it will be a new start for us after a very hard time, it is like you are speaking French and the estate agent cannot understand a word of French. I can hear his silence from the other side of the kitchen. He is trying to make you hang up with his mind.

  After you hang up the telephone you go sit in the corner of the kitchen, hunkered down between the fridge and the back door. You hold your head in both your hands as if it is too heavy for your shoulders. I am afraid to touch you. This is not the fear of being hit. It is more like the fear of being stung.

  ‘Oh well,’ I say, ‘it wasn’t meant to be.’

  I make you magic pie for dinner. This has been your favourite dinner since you were around eight years old and your mother invented it from leftover sausages and mashed potato. The magic pie is a bad idea. It reminds you of the house you grew up in and the way you used to sit at the kitchen table, picking the beans out with a teaspoon so they lasted longer.

  You are very angry in a quiet way. Your anger is like clean drinking glasses stacked top to bottom in a tower. It is shrill. I am afraid to brush against your anger. I am afraid to make even the smallest noise in its presence.

  Freddy is in the utility room going through the laundry basket for odd socks. He likes to stuff eggs into the toes of socks. He has been doing this for years now, hoping the heat will hatch a chicken. He knows there is a link between chickens and keeping an egg warm. This is your fault for borrowing that book about farm animals from the library, the one which was intended for adults, not small children. For a city kid, Freddy has always known far too much about livestock. I was afraid he’d turn out to be a vegetarian. This is not the worst thing a person can become but it is sometimes awkward at dinner parties. Now he is dead I do not have to worry about this or about keeping him clean or well-slept. Having a ghost child is about fifty percent less work than having a real child. No one told me this at the funeral. It wouldn’t have been appropriate.

  I go into the utility room and close the door gently behind me.

  ‘Daddy’s having a bad day,’ I say, ‘we should probably just stay in here and keep quiet till he feels better.’


  Freddy smiles at me. He is no different than he was before. I’d always imagined ghosts as pale creatures, but he is, if anything, the brightest he’s ever been. He still has the tan lines and freckles from our holiday in France, and his hair is almost white-blond with the sun. He is always wearing the same outfit: red shorts and a blue shirt with thin black lines hooping around his belly. He does not wear shoes and his feet are without lines or flaws of any kind. He is like a postcard from our last good holiday. We have not taken any holidays since; we have not even been to the beach. You find the ocean too much water to manage in one place.

  Freddy shuffles over to make room for me on the floor. He hands me a sports sock, greying at the toe and heel. I hunker down beside him on the cold lino. It smells of laundry in this room. It always does. I reach for an egg from the carton and carefully palm it into my sock, doubling the cuff over so it cannot slip out. Freddy is doing the same with a black dress sock. We line our socks up next to each other on a folded-over towel. Gently, gently so the shells do not crack. It is a kind of surgery. We are happy to do this without talking. Sometimes my hand catches against Freddy’s hand and it is not cold like the hand of a corpse. It is lukewarm, like water coming out of a tap last thing at night.

  While we are wrapping our eggs and I am humming a kind of work song (possibly Elton John, possibly Radiohead), you are in the kitchen ruining everything. You are phoning up the estate agent and saying, ‘Look here, if we can’t buy the special house, the one I grew up in, then what’s the closest house to it that we can buy?’

  The estate agent is speaking the same language as you now. He says, ‘I understand, sir. It’s a great neighbourhood isn’t it? There are good schools in the area too. For your ten thousand less than the original house I could easily sell you the house next door.’

  ‘Done,’ you say. You are so desperate to be close to the place you want to live that you do not even ask what sort of a house you are buying.

  It will turn out to be a small white house with a swing in the back garden and three bedrooms: one for us, one for the new baby and one which I will call Freddy’s room and you will call the guest room, as if our son is an old college friend you have invited to stay for the weekend. You will pace the fence of this house nightly, watching the lights blond off and on in the house where you grew up. You will imagine they are laughing at you.

  ‘We could have been happy again in that house,’ you will say. The near miss of this will be your excuse for ignoring the young couple who live in the house now. You will also ignore their dogs and their cats and their happy future children. You will pretend not to see them in the drive when you are backing the car out. You will throw their undelivered Amazon parcels in the bin, despite what you promised the postman. You will not blow their leaves. You will not lend them milk. You will not trim their side of the hedge, though it is an effort on your part to leave their bit untidy.

  You will go through their rubbish at night with a torch, separating scraps of wallpaper, taps, bathroom tiles, lampshades and door handles from the everyday detritus of their life. You will keep these items, carefully labelled in plastic tubs which you will buy from Ikea particularly for this purpose.

  ‘Someday,’ you will say, ‘those dreadful people will move out. Then we can buy the house I grew up in. Then we can be happy again.’

  I will nod towards the Ikea tubs stacked in the corner of the utility room. ‘Are you planning on putting all those handles and windows and rusty kitchen taps back into the house?’ I’ll ask.

  You will look at me like we are on the same team again and say, ‘It’s got to be exactly the same as it used to be, Liz.’ You might even rest your hand on the round of my belly where the next baby is starting to swell. This will feel like the kind of bandage which has been put on too tight.

  I will stand in the kitchen of our new white house, beside the sink, where I can clearly see the house you grew up in. Freddy might be there with us, beneath the table or under one of the chairs, because being under things will make him feel safer in the new house.

  ‘This is not the place I want to be,’ I will say, and you will reply, ‘This is not the place I want to be, either.’ If Freddy is still with us, he will be saying exactly the same thing from his spot, beneath the table. He won’t be using out-loud words, but I will still be able to hear him with my mind.

  I will wonder how we got here and how long we’ll have to stay in this place, which is like a motorway service station, which is like a not-very-good compromise, which is like a thing you say at the end of an argument when you are too tired and should not be saying anything at all.

  But, all of this is many, many months away. Right now, you are still on the phone with the estate agent, ruining everything.

  With one hand, I am holding the door closed between us. I do not want you in here with Freddy and me – you and your stupid trying to move on. I am quite content to stay here. On our side of the door everything is not ruined yet. On our side of the door we are putting eggs inside socks, as we often do at the weekend.

  We are concentrating. We are quiet in each other’s company. We are brave and happy. Then, you shout through from the kitchen, ‘Liz, come out here. We’ve bought a house.’ Freddy drops the sock he is holding and the egg cracks as it hits the floor. He makes a little noise like air settling in a radiator and a thing comes between us like magnets turning against each other.

  Tomorrow morning there will be a shiny mark on the lino where the egg white has crusted over. I will peel it off with the edge of my fingernails. It will come away in flakes. As I am scraping at the egg white I will think, Here is a mark which my son has left on this house. It is not a permanent mark. There is nothing to tell his presence after we leave. Then, I will take the edge of a cheese knife and carve the height of him into the doorframe. I will rest the knife’s handle against the bone of his head and wonder if this will be the last time I feel Freddy solid beneath my hand, like a thing I cannot pass through.

  14.

  Dinosaur Act

  For Damian Smyth

  Jim died on the day before Pancake Tuesday. Sandra didn’t bother with pancakes, nor did she give up anything for Lent. The loss of a husband seemed sacrifice enough. Besides, the house was full of pies and sponge cake left over from the wake.

  Their friends sent sympathy cards, more than she’d expected. Sandra lined them up along the mantelpiece, moving her ornaments to make space. When the room ran out she asked their son to string a wire, and hung the cards across the wall. They’d only ever done this with cards at Christmas. The effect was too jolly for a death. Her daughters told her so, suggesting that the sympathy cards be moved to the dining room, where they wouldn’t be so demanding. Sandra didn’t listen to them. She liked the way the strung cards lifted in the breeze each time the door opened. Something is settling, she thought, and folded her arms accordingly.

  After Jim died, people came to sit quietly on Sandra’s sofa. They balanced her good cups and saucers on their thighs. Some of the women cried. They expected nothing of her. This was not true. They expected sandwiches, strong tea and a measured grief, neither too hot nor too cold to credit the loss of a just-retired husband. Sandra delivered all this and sausage rolls on an Evesham platter. She was good with death. All four of their parents had passed away in the last few years. The language of wake and burial still lingered at the back of her tongue, loose as holiday Spanish.

  For three days, Sandra opened her door to neighbours, family friends and relatives who’d driven from Ballymena and Tandragee just to say they were sorry and drive straight home again. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ they said, and Sandra replied, ‘Thank you.’ She wished there was a script for such conversations and, at the same time, understood that liturgy made her feel awkward, as if her teeth were too large for her own mouth. On Easter Sundays, when the minister announced, ‘He is risen,’ she could never bring herself to reply, ‘He is risen, indeed.’ Instead, she smiled and stared into the gallery, fixati
ng on the spot where the paint was peeling off in the shape of a bird. She hoped no one would mistake her silence for apostasy. For this, and other reasons, Sandra could never have been a Catholic.

  She wasn’t cut out for duty either. If Jim had not anchored her into it, she’d never have visited the dead or dying, never have gone round to commiserate with any of their more unfortunate friends. Jim had always known exactly how to approach a sadness. Sandra sat quietly by his side, nodding. ‘We’re praying for you, especially at the minute,’ she’d say, if a statement was required of her. She meant every word, but could not have elaborated on the theme. She hugged the women like they were once again children, and shook the hands of the men lightly as if holding a particularly fragile plate. She brought chicken-and-ham pie in a tinfoil dish; home-made, not shop-bought. Afterwards, they could bin the dish. This seemed to be what people required of her. She was known to be good in a crisis. This was not true. Jim was good in a crisis, and Sandra was extremely good at standing next to him.

  In the days following Jim’s death, Sandra could see that other people were equally shy of loss. She watched them filing in and out of her front room. She recognised herself in the way they held their mouths oddly, as if unsure whether to laugh or spit. People who could not fully speak their sympathy baked it into fruit loaves and flakemeal biscuits. They left their cake tins, without saying, in towering stacks on her kitchen counter. Some of them were labelled with handwritten names: Mrs Adger, Mrs McKeown, June McNeilly. Sandra wasn’t sure if this meant they wanted their tins back, and, if so, how long she should wait after the funeral to return them. There was too much cake for one person, and the freezer was still full from Christmas.