Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  ‘Not even in markets, then?’

  Gael sighed and looked down at her Taiwanese knock-off Converse trainers. ‘Grafton Street looks like one giant closing-down sale.’ It was the bust half of 2008, after all. She picked off her stolen silver nail polish with her thumb and let it fall to the floor as sarcastic confetti. Her mother’s teeth chattered and her breath was distantly visible. The exhaust pipe of an idling car. Sive hadn’t updated the payment method for the gas bill.

  ‘Gael, I can’t be responsible for you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You don’t know. I feel that I should be. And it’s exhausting me.’ She said this in a low and pragmatic voice, though there was barely any will behind it. ‘Every day the thought of it, another …’

  Gael shifted her weight, searching for a body part that would put up with it. Her mother turned towards her, eyes dimmed with the dissociative pain of the past months, and looked at the wall to the left of Gael, at the spot where a family portrait might have hung. ‘You can go and live with him,’ Sive said, at length. ‘You may, I mean. You have the choice. I won’t hold it against you and I won’t love you … any less.’

  The last two words were grace notes. Gael saw her mother’s skin goosepimple so piercingly it might have been for good, as though her thoughts were cold enough to benumb their environment. Being let down by the one person you had ever trusted, had entrusted some twenty years and the very pith of your being to, involved a pain unlike anything Gael recognized. Gael knew now it hadn’t been cheating. Cheating implies a thing gotten away with. There is something very fun, very blithe, about cheating. Whatever it was though, the way to keep living through it was to move headlong, the way a shark can breathe only by conveying water through its body – all the time advancing, even if that movement is in circles.

  ‘I’m moving to England.’

  ‘You’re – what? Are you?’ Sive turned fast, her shawl sloughed off one shoulder to reveal limbs, ribs, her structure defined as cast-iron railings. The impulse was to run one’s fingers across her to hear the hollow thrum.

  ‘For college. But I won’t, if you need me to stay.’

  ‘No. When? I hadn’t realized, you were, there already, at that stage.’

  ‘It’s nearly May, Mum. It’s been–’ Gael stopped herself and allowed time for a response. ‘I’d only get in somewhere useless here, but England only counts three grades so I could–’

  ‘Go! Of course. Go. Live your life. I’ll have your brother to keep this place lit, unless he chooses Jarleth.’

  ‘Stop, Mum. He won’t.’

  ‘He’d be entitled to.’

  ‘Stoppit.’

  ‘Don’t tell me to stop. Your father might be better for him.’ She lifted the travel brochure and held it before her for a long time like a treasured photograph. Then, she slowly wrung it out on the sill. It dripped an unrealistic blue.

  ‘You could take him away with you?’ Sive said without looking up, appalled at the truth of what she wanted. It had stopped raining and everything smelled of what it had been before. The front lawn. The letter box. Electricity cables. The corridor. Dried lavender stuffed in hessian sacks as moth deterrents. Ash in the hearth.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘What is it, Gael.’

  ‘Is this rock bottom, do you think?’

  Sive burst into a coughing fit, which she tried to disguise as surprised laughter, but it ended up causing her to choke on the unswallowable substance that was this moment of her life. As her mother tried to catch her breath, Gael looked to the oak parquet flooring, which was buckled all over – especially by the fireside, where clarinet lessons had dribbled through the floorboards and down the drain and, soon, by the bay window, where Maldivian fluorescent heavens were seeping in wrongly. At last, Sive replied and it was with a question.

  ‘How would I know?’

  Sive refused Gael’s pleas to drive to the Fitzwilliam Casino & Card Club that night to gamble whatever lay in the balance of Jarleth’s and her overlooked credit union account and thereby occasion rock bottom and catharsis all in one. Instead, she consigned to lying back on the easy chair, taking as a blanket the pearl-and-plain slate grey scarf Guthrie had knitted her in home economics (adamant that if his mother was going to wear mourning clothes, they should at least be made to measure). When every whisper of resistance had been wearied out of her, finally, she resigned to helping Gael draft an obituary.

  Obittery: A Loath Story

  On Friday 2nd May 2008, Jarleth Moeder Falker Foess, of 24 Amersfort Way, County Dublin, failed to pass the ECG-SE exam of why he should remain plugged in. The IV league of afterlives wouldn’t take him, on account of too much vain. Jarleth was a small man with a large heart attack and a malicious malignant egosarcoma. He deceived experts with his apparent good nature/health. What were initially believed to be scruples were in fact scabies. Jarleth was a families man, borne by his children, liked by his partner, prayed for by his mother, and dearly preyed on by his girlfriend. He will be sorely miffed.

  For her every surge of weepy laughter, her mother sank a measure farther into the chair as if into long-denied submission. She reclined crosswise so her legs hung over the arm. Gael lay on the warped oak flooring and blinked cracks in the ceiling plaster into view. She read the final farewell aloud seven times, each more conclusively. The words vibrated between her rib cage and the floor, and her mother said she had always been a cello being sanded by the skilled hand of time into her final form and that, before long, Gael’s complex timbre would be listened to and danced for and pored over and when that day came she should refuse every follower, every accompaniment, every offer of rest most certainly – all that she was bidden – and live only to satisfy her own ear. That is what she would have to sleep on for the rest of her life. Gael didn’t want to say anything contrary that might coil her mother back into herself. Surely she knew that the worst time to impart wisdom was when you’d been humiliated to the point of psychosis?

  She’d been dozing, imagining closing a Velcro strap around her mother’s upper arm and listening for a little hiss of pressure releasing, when clattering keys brought her to. Guthrie stood at the open front door in the hallway, a draft pursuing him. He let his satchel fall from his shoulder, worked his shoes off at the heel with the toes of each foot and took his place on the living room floor, all too readily. The span of his grin made Gael want to spit something at him, to spare her brother of an optimism that could only ever be briefly lived.

  Though his eyes and heart were wide open, Guthrie couldn’t see from where he lay – though Gael saw well enough for the both of them – that their mother was dreaming of the life she could have lived without Jarleth; rid of the desperation he elicited; innocent of the assertion of his body upon hers and the pain of its lifting away. Reclining like Anna, that personification of a river, confined to a pond, she dreamed a life free of his soldering. The welded join holding her in place, to the ground. Ever the child who walks towards her.

  A few days after a version of the obituary had been published in the only newspaper whose sub-editor it had slipped past out of the dozen she’d sent it to, Gael had to stay home to field calls from Jarleth’s gallingly large circle of friends and family to assure them she had no idea as to Jarleth’s state of animation and couldn’t give two fucks. She protected her mother from discovering it had made print, aided by her sequestration. It had been a selfish little act and a good one. Gael wasn’t the sort of person to keep mementos – she clung to nothing, not savings or compliments or favourite items of clothing – but if she had been, the newspaper column would have made the scrapbook. Guthrie cried angrily. His chest swelled with all he had to had to say. How could she. He was their father and always would be. He was dead to no one. Gael was vicious and heartless and evil and he had willed her to go to England and that was why she was going, so that she would leave them and he could look after their mother properly alone and Gael could just go and leave them to be gentle to one another
and kind.

  Grow up, Guthrie. Watch this line you’re taking. You’re becoming a holy prig, she said. His face bloated and shone with a virgin’s integrity. Gael left the phone askew of its cradle to silence further calls. She hauled the largest suitcase from the attic, swatting away its confusion of dust.

  It would be a year and a half before she returned.

  That was before Art.

  Before Art arrived, dancing whatever foxtrot, backstep or pallbearers’ shuffle the mood required of him.

  3

  A Man Walks into a House

  August 2009

  With corrections from her brother, Gael told Art the evincive story of the painting hanging in their kitchen, Figures in Moonlight.

  He’ll see it differently from now on, she hopes. Maybe he’ll persuade Sive to sell it. ‘2006 was le Brocquy’s big year,’ Gael says. ‘Some of his paintings went for a million euro before the crash. Which is like … unheard of for a living Irish painter. It’s the only thing Mum has that’s worth anything, besides instruments. But no one’s buying art in Ireland right now. They’re all, like, reading the return policies for their indoor swimming pools. Maybe you know some moneyed Brits?’

  ‘Gael!’ Guthrie says. ‘Don’t be obnoxious.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ says Art, ‘I frequent all the la-di-da circles in Leeds.’

  Gael and Guthrie laugh. Art is handsome in a very different way to Jarleth. He’s thick in body, yet flabless. He has tanned skin, round green eyes and his chest hair greets the stubble of his throat as if he’s almost fully coloured-in (aside from the crown of his head, gleaming under the incandescent kitchen lights).

  ‘Let me tell you two my art story that happens to be about the only la-di-da person I’ve ever known. Our Auntie Beverly.’

  ‘Our Auntie?’ Guthrie asks.

  Gael shushes him. ‘Let him tell it.’

  ‘Beggin’ your pardon. Our is Northerner for my. My Auntie. Our Bev. Anyway, Bev married into money, but it were for love. Her husband were an art dealer. Got that gig from his lot who’d left him a collection of paintings he never learned how to appreciate fully, though he did learn how to appreciate them, if you follow.

  ‘Since her thirties, Beverly’d been a professional fundraiser. Did her homework too. Only worked for charities she could stand tall behind. Didn’t go in for heartstringers – balding children or adorable three-legged pugs. Eh, Guthrie? I’m not telling you two anything new when I say people’s mostly bastards, and they’ll not actually give money to blind people if you show them videos of blind people struggling with daily tasks, but they’ll donate their livers to lovable Labrador pups. Anyway, Bev fundraised for all the worthy stuff that weren’t an easy sell. She was phenomenal at it. She only got better once she married Lucas. Could hold benefits, auction off paintings, that sort of thing, to those lucrative circles. She were so knowledgeable and likable and persuasive, she knew she were making a difference, though it tired her badly. She worked like a madwoman to make that difference. Every moment not working was a responsibility that weighed on her, sickened her to the belly. And she’d calculate all what she’d lost in funds over morning tea.

  ‘Lucas hated that about their marriage. Her dedication to altruism was what you might expect of a nun and wun’t get from one neither. He couldn’t see an end to it – no cushy retirement. Bev wouldn’t have it. He knew she’d always secretly wanted to paint, but she wouldn’t allow herself the luxury of time to learn. Nights he’d wake up and catch her standing close as a crew cut to a landscape piece in the corridor, trying to study its technique. Oils were dead hard. She might’ve tried watercolour but she didn’t think she could draw well enough to warrant all that self-indulgence. Called her a charity case, Lucas did, but it never changed nothing. Till he died.

  ‘He wrote a will. Asked her to leave off fundraising and take over the family business longside their nephew. They’d never had kids. Made him use rubber johnnys right through her menopause for all the funds she’d be robbing the world of with a miracle babe. Anyhow, the will specifically asked her to retire early – she’d given fundraising the best part of her life, Lucas said, and he as good as ordered her to take up painting. It w’n’t legally binding, but it’d been his dying wish like. So, she did it. She told me once the only thing to remedy the guilt was the relief she felt at finally stopping the sales pitch. Everything’s for sale, she felt, and what worked best in fundraising was to sell ideas. It was like you were selling the portrait of the benefactor to themselves, only they got to have less baggy eyes and got to stand with a nice famine-free world in the background that had been partly their doing. Slowly but surely, Bev got a touch more comfortable holding a palette in place of a subscription form. She were working part time for the dealership, but she w’n’t really needed for t’ business side of things, just her connections and arranging skills. And after all them years of abstinence, at long last Beverly was doing what she’d always fancied. Though she knew she hadn’t much in the way of skill, the more she did it, the more the guilt fell away.

  ‘Still, she were shy as you like. Worked up in the attic where no one’d stumble on her handiworks. I’ll happen it were serendipity she found a whole stack of blank canvases up there with lovely old frames to go with. Wun’t have found them had she not been so coy as to hole up up there. She’d never’ve been so bold as to frame her own paintings, but she didn’t like to see a thing go to waste, so she thought to make use of the materials best she could. They were old, used white painted-over canvases, home-primed with gesso, from what she could tell. She liked the way all the old layers of paint made her painting on it more interesting. Give it texture, helped her along to cast shadows in the sea surf like real waves. There were a kind of ghosty communication she felt going on, not that she fed on that baloney but, she liked the notion of it, bringing old things back to life, for company, seeing as Lucas couldn’t be restored so easy. Esprit de corpse. Give her solace, you know. She’d’ve been lonely something proper had she not them canvases to lift her blues.

  ‘It were Shrove Tuesday – stack of pancakes, caster sugar, wedge of lemon, no mucking round – when Bev’s-your-Auntie phoned me up. It were late-ish and I wondered had she taken a fall or OD’d on batter. The excitement in her voice was like a child’s. Did I remember that quantity surveyor from Bristol, something-or-other Ramsley? The handsome one, she said. He’d called round to the house when there were no one else there and she’d asked him to help her carry down a box from the attic. When he got to the top of the wee ladder, his mouth hung open in a leering sort of way and Bev suddenly felt the tightness of the space, the dust in her lungs and Lucas’s absence hit her something harrowing. Were Ramsley making a pass at her? Nay. He’d caught sight of her work and insisted on buying one of her paintings! She dint want me telling nobody, but she had to share the news and she knew I were out of sorts at the time – another story – so she thought it’d lift my spirits, knowing I worried after her. And it did. Glass of Cragganmore good as levitated to my lips. I’d seen her paintings and they were … abstract, to be kind. She were no Guthrie Foess, regionally Highly Commended child prodigy. But I were well pleased for her. Till she said the Ramsley bloke’d commissioned her to paint him another, so long as she’d use the same materials and throw in one of them old frames – he’d have it mounted. Were it anyone else, I would’ve cautioned them somehow but, it were as if … her life had just begun, the second life Lucas left her in his will. I’d not be the one to snooker that.

  ‘Cut to t’ following two long years she spent toiling for your man Ramsley. Seven days a week, she poured herself into them canvases. He’d said something to her about the “generosity of spirit coming through in the delicate detail” and so she told me that if she didn’t wring some deep mineral from herself into each work, Ramsley’d surely see through her for an amateur. I dunno what sort of manor she supposed he lived in with so many blank walls to decorate, but the commissions kept coming, till she was down to the last
canvas of the attic stash. Finally, he declared his wife would leave him if he bought a single new Beverly Aldridge masterpiece. He thanked her for her work and she never heard from him again. That were that. Bev fell into an exhausted state of satisfaction she’d never known the like of. Now, she hadn’t only spent her life drawing resources from others – albeit redirecting them to where they were badly needed – she’d contributed something of her own too. Something original. Something that could someday be auctioned off, p’rhaps, like a beautiful renewable energy.

  ‘Call me cagey, but it just sat wrong. The whole story. I mean, her still-life daffodils looked like a Simpsons family picnic. ’At’s putting it soft like. So I went on a bit of a snoop. And … you would not believe … what I found out. Either of you fancy mincing up that load of garlic? It’s not the pong. Just garlic’s bad as onions to my eyes. Reminds me too much of–’

  ‘Wait!’ Guthrie says. ‘What did you find out?’

  The kitchen is cosy and convincingly crammed with the accoutrements of a functional family. Finicky single-purpose utensils that accumulate over the years: nutcrackers. Preposterous salad scissors. Hanging basting spoons. A spatula smelted to a rugby player’s ear. Multiple blenders. A bemagnetted fridge. The pressure cooker lying under the cake tin below the chafing dish beneath the sink; it’s all still there, except for Jarleth.

  The seating is a table-and-bench affair T’d up against the wall opposite the kitchen worktop, stove and oven, above which a double window would look out onto the dusky, August evening were it not fogged with dinner-in-the-making, potatoes aboil, frozen fish fillets whitening, tomatoes roasting. Gael sits on one bench with her back against the wall; her right boot up on the varnished maple, the other stretched out – heel to the tiled floor – making a leisurely ten to twelve with her limbs, though it’s ten past six. Guthrie’s straddling the edge of the other bench, near the end so that he keeps tipping forward. He allows himself to be unconscionably vulnerable for a seventeen-year-old, as if he doesn’t believe in the armour of body language or the refuge of teenage scepticism. His hair is free of product and hangs light as parchment over his Pavlova-like, shatterable features. He’s wearing a shirt for their mother’s big night. It’s the closing of the Autumn Programme, the Bruckner Symphony, which she’s allowing them to make an occasion of because of Art. Guthrie’s shirt is bedizened with tiny violins. The sleeves don’t cover his wrists. It had been a Christmas gift from Gael a few years back.