Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  Even if he wanted to, Guthrie couldn’t hear her. It’s like a helmet – he had once explained – that mutes all familiar, consoling sounds and amplifies instead the anonymous: changes in direction of the wind, paws clicking asphalt, the lick of substances dissolving in fluid, sun salutations, whistling, glass cracking, hue and cry, tides retreating, fast-food wrappers, keys, leashes, cartilage, prognoses.

  The moisture in the air has muscled up into drizzle. Not quite droplets, nonetheless wet. Gael takes out a small umbrella from her shoulder bag. Its flimsy metal skeleton cracks a joint when she forces it open. She pulls Guthrie under, holding onto the arm of his vintage tan leather jacket, which feels damply like skin. It’s the kind of clothing that gets him pummelled. (‘Very Oxfam,’ she’d said when she arrived home to see how her absence was making its mark on him.) Guthrie veers to the far left of the pavement, almost onto the road, pulling Gael after him. I’m not walking, he says. Gael can feel the pulse at the crook of his elbow.

  ‘I’m turning back–’

  All at once, she sees them. ‘Guthrie. Walk normally.’ She holds her brother fast, approaching the threat that’s come darkly visible as a drove of bees. ‘I’ve got you,’ she says, but she has to straitjacket him to keep him from fleeing.

  ‘Let. Go.’

  ‘Stop. They’re only knacker brats. Don’t make eye contact.’

  Cheshire-cat kids choose dare over truth in their little circle of tracksuit chaos: spin the bottle, smash the bottle, bottle whatever ye bleedin’ well like; bottle it up, lads; they slink round a homeless man; daunt one another into nicking the meth without waking the junkie. Crust cracks on his sleeping bag and the kids are let down by the lack of hidey-holes on the dirtied naked limbs. Not a steroid, a pipe, the eye of a needle to embed. ‘Dry cunt,’ one says, hoicks up phlegm. Someone is making a small to medium-sized enterprise of robbing the clothing bins around Ireland. Everyone is blaming the Polish. The Polish are nowhere to be seen just now. Two wrongs make no one right.

  If they’re spotted now, they’re done for. Guthrie won’t be able to move – not to soften his smack against tarmac, not to free Gael’s arm, which might spare them a few teeth. They’ll make a piñata of his head. She toys with getting her keys from her bag to set between her fingers. Mace wasn’t allowed in her hand luggage. It takes all her strength to goad him towards and past the hissing, helium-voiced arsenals of disentitlement. ‘Prick!’ a giddy rat-tailed boy slurs at the tramp, throwing a half-dozen kicks like eggs, so puny they remind Gael of her recurring dream: she punches a familiar stranger over and over, but each time her soft punches land, his face becomes fleshier and chewier and – though she punches until all her energy is spent – he only chuckles and swipes her fists away like ditzy bluebottles. When she described the dream to Guthrie once, he told her it was because she didn’t pray.

  In a decent neighbourhood, in the light of day, a passerby might call social services, with how Gael is wrestling him. He’s going to shout. The guards will come, he’ll say, and you’ll be caught, the lot of you. What consolation it must be to believe in hell. Gael can feel the seizure start in the augmentation of his chest. Not here. She drags him from the road. Just then, he managed to say, ‘It’s because of me.’ He’s dazing out; setting like concrete. ‘Mum quit–’ he sputters, thick-tongued. He is conscious for this part of it. It begins like this. ‘–because of the babies.’ He gasps. ‘Look–Morning–’ His arms go stiffly up before he falls, as though he might be thrown a rope. Gael reaches around his ribs from behind and takes the brunt of it on her spine; curses the pavement. His fingers go numb, he says, until they no longer belong to him – then it spreads up his arms and to his tongue. He sees brilliant cloud-break light. An aura. Most often, he remembers and describes it as butter-yellow on ice-white. But it’s a colour all of its own. Teeth clamping is what hurts the most. It feels as though the roots retract from the irradiated soil that is his head. Tin for a hard palate.

  In catching him, Gael dropped the umbrella – their slapstick shield. The wind picked it up and has blown it onto the road. Gael watches it move in half circles, back and forth, a pendulum, as her brother shivers and calms, shivers and calms in her arms. He makes fists to regain control of his hands. Maybe it’s the fists and the mention of babies, but Gael is reminded of Monday mornings before French in school when Tamana Tiernan used to pound her stomach with her fist. The womb-pounding was the knelling of her hollow Angeles: an alternative to the morning-after pill she treated as a nutritional supplement, of which she’d exceeded her lifetime’s quota.

  Gael lets go of him and watches his tense, forced recovery – defying exhaustion, like a new parent bolting upright to the soundless alarm of silence in the night. When they’re both standing, she sees that the kids have scattered off down a side street. ‘Jesus.’ She wipes her palms on her jeans. She bends to collect the umbrella and tries to joke. ‘Which came first? The sperm or the egg?’ They look at one another, properly, finally. Guthrie’s face is a mess of tears, rain and perspiration. He has skipped several stages of emotion. ‘Hey?’ She pulls him back into her arms. He passes his weight to her again, knowing it will be taken automatically as one takes the salt at a dinner table. She rubs the wet leather of his back clumsily with the umbrella handle. ‘It’s over. They’re gone. You’re safe.’ He’s heaving in her arms, weeping hoarsely into her neck from the depths of himself, his front teeth slipping against her skin. ‘I’m sorry I left you for so long,’ she says. ‘You’re right. I didn’t know how bad it’s got.’ She pushes him away to arm’s length, holds him by the shoulders and searches his face. ‘How bad is it, Guth? Is Jarleth having a baby? Did Mum miscarry? I thought she looked gaunt.’

  ‘It’s me,’ he says. ‘I am.’

  The adrenaline of a moment prior is gone. There’s no hormone in her body that can come to his rescue. ‘Oh fuck,’ she says before she can choke it back. ‘Whose–’ She stops short. The first thing Jarleth would ask. ‘Forget it. It doesn’t matter. Don’t–’ She has let go of him without intending to. ‘Just–’ Catch up. ‘Tell me it was immaculate conception.’

  Guthrie’s sobbing bursts into laughter, as if coming up for air, and surges back towards despair, with only a hiccup’s worth of oxygen. Gael stands out in the road in front of an approaching cab and collapses her umbrella. ‘Thank fuck.’ She shakes it off. ‘Come on. You need to get to bed. You’ll get sick.’ Do you have money, he might be thinking, unable to ask. ‘We’ll sort it out,’ she says. ‘Remember Tamana Tiernan? With the lovely hair … and face and body? She had a method for dealing with these things. Very scientific.’ She calls in the driver’s window. ‘Crumlin?’ He nods, with a hassled look. Gael tries to move Guthrie about, but he won’t be pushed.

  ‘It’s twins.’

  He’s standing by the door Gael’s holding open for him. The gang’s bedlam still sounds in screeches and clatter – it pings around the corners of the neighbourhood like ball bearings.

  ‘Yous in or yous out?’ the cabbie says, all eyebrows.

  ‘In,’ Gael says. ‘Give us a sec.’

  ‘I left school.’ He insists on telling it now. His breathing has eased. He’s calmed almost too much, too sudden. ‘Ára wanted to put them up for adoption. She’s going to Holland to study. They’re letting me … Because I can’t … not. The doctors even said it wouldn’t be good for me, to have had them and then to lose them. But Mum has to help. There’s an agreement.’

  ‘The meter’s tickin’ here, lads.’

  ‘Let’s get home, Guth.’

  ‘One girl, one boy.’ The chasmal pupils of his eyes are the only parts of him to brave movement. ‘Due in seven weeks. Forty-eight days.’ They search Gael’s face, as if for proof otherwise. His lips are the pasty-purple colour of an empress plum – one not yet ready to be picked. He adds, ‘But they don’t … you know … come on the day.’

  He sounds to Gael like a stranger who has mistaken her for a confidant. She would offer advice, if
she could have nothing to do with the consequences. She feels her own chest complain and gets into the cab to control it.

  Seventeen.

  ‘Aura?’ she hears herself say to the headrest, shrinking at the sound of it, knowing somehow that it’s spelt with a fada. It feels a luckless sort of fluke. Ára. The light he sees before his seizures. The medical term for this perceptual disturbance is an aura, he almost proudly informed the family one teatime when Jarleth still lingered.

  She can see it now: weary before he’s thirty, nursing a prescribed addiction, scraping by on benefits, investing his life in the children as if their loyalty is a given, as if their happiness is worth a methodical kind of loneliness. And the mother will swan in one day, in homemade culottes and a hemp blouse and long chalky hair she cleans with baking soda weekly, and she’ll discover the truth of his condition, deem him unfit for parenting, and whisk the kids off to her cousin’s commune where their brains will be washed to vegetable broth so that by the time they recall they had a father, they’ll know they can live without him. Though the reverse won’t be true.

  The radio says the unemployment rate has just broken state records. Tests carried out on four Irish people with suspected cases of swine flu have proved negative. A near miss. More details about the Bank of Ireland burglary that took place in February will be revealed tomorrow. World news to come. By the time Guthrie’s sitting, there’s four euro fifty on the meter and two in the corner for unspecified ‘Extras’.

  ‘Planning on robbing us, are you?’ Gael says, leaning forward from the back seat.

  ‘Policy,’ the cabbie says, in place of Yep. ‘It’s the going rate.’

  Right. That’s the stuff that will accrue, in these mired years, on these stagnant waters, Gael thinks. Slime.

  ‘Can we go the Clougher Road way?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter which way yiz go this late in the day. Tariff’s the same. It’ll land yiz in the same spot.’

  The volume on the TV is almost at a whisper. Belt and shirt draped over the ottoman, Art is down to vest and trousers. The hot air balloon tattooed on his bicep expands and hoists up whenever the muscle is put to work, though tapping the remote control doesn’t quite inflate it. The pink and green ink has faded pastel. His shoulders are almost black with hair, no matter how the light from the TV washes them. Guthrie’d headed straight for the living room when they got back, sure of Art’s being there. ‘Turned in soon as we were home,’ Art said, when Guthrie asked after Sive. ‘She were fair jiggered.’ Even though Gael warned him against being so high-minded, Guthrie wanted to apologize to Art for earlier. Auntie Beverly probably would have suffered if she was told the truth more than Ramsley would have been brought to justice, he’d decided. Gael had the feeling Guthrie was practising for being a parent. If he could teach another human being one thing, it would be how to express regret. She steps out to clear the composting pile of junk mail that’s shoved to the side of the hallway welcome mat. Another thing she’s missed by not coming home. She should have been chucking expired medicines, tightening flickering lightbulbs, replacing fire alarm batteries, clearing out whatever belongings remained.

  Junk mail is invariably depressing and the hall has accumulated a particularly sad lot. CLOSING DOWN SALE! Liquidation! All Stock Must Go. Our economic sovereignty, going, going, go – She takes it all to the recycling bin in the kitchen. Separating paper from plastic, she sees that a few letters addressed to Sive are mixed up in the junk. One is from the bank, but the others don’t look like bills. A speeding ticket for driving at nighty-five kilometres an hour in a fifty zone. Sive owes sixty euro and has incurred three penalty points on her driving licence. Gael will phone in the morning and pay the fine with Jarleth’s MasterCard, which are the only details of his she cares to recall, for settlements such as these. Looking through the plastic window of the last envelope, she sees an embossed letterhead: Hurley & Co. Solicitors. She opens it.

  Dear Sive,

  In lieu of an eviction notice, I am writing so that you might more gently come to terms with your circumstance.

  As you know very well, the title deeds for 24 Amersfort Way are in my name. For the sixteen years we spent under its roof, your income supplemented household costs, but the legal situation is that you did not make either direct contributions (towards the initial down payment or monthly mortgage instalments) or indirect contributions to the property. You may look into what ‘indirect contributions’ are, but let me save you the legal fees by passing on, verbatim, what my solicitors have said: ‘It is held in the courts that working in the home, looking after children and money spent on (or work done on) home improvements are not contributions that give the cohabiter any right of ownership.’ Your NSO income was your own, for shopping, holidays, your retreats, what have you. I am in the process of closing the mortgage and have employed a manager to arrange the property’s lease, as its sale should be postponed until the market recovers. It’s bad luck I didn’t sell a year and a half back when I had a mind to, but I didn’t want our separation to be more painful for you.

  By now, the children are no longer children. Gael has already fled the nest, as we knew she would. Thanks to your repeated rejections of marriage proposals in the early years of our relationship, much to my mother’s chagrin, I am not a legal guardian of my own children. I don’t intend to seek joint guardianship at this late stage. If I did, you would need to sign a statutory declaration, involving costs and headaches. I propose we avoid all such nastiness, custody and so forth, and accept that our offspring are now adults and should they continue to have a relationship with either of us is a matter of their choosing and, of course, ours.

  It is both parents’ legal duty to financially maintain their children until the age of eighteen. Gael is nineteen in August. Nonetheless, I offered to pay her college fees. She refused. Even in these difficult times, I have no fear for Gael’s financial well-being. She is industrious, if mulish. Guthrie would be wise to take whatever support he can get. I intend to bring the subject up when next we meet – I assume his every waking hour is busy with Leaving Cert preparations, and that he understands the permanence of his score. His college plans are unclear to me, which is a concern. Again, you’ll see that no legal intervention need be necessary. We are all adults.

  You can respond to my solicitors’ address with suitable times for the property manager to show my house to prospective tenants. Dare I suggest it, you may rent it yourself. I understand there’s been a cohabiter for some time now. With you already in situ, it would save me the nuisance of vetoing tenants. It needn’t be impossible for us to be civil towards one another, and sensible. Refrain from posting death notices and the like.

  I intend to discontinue payments for your father’s care in Mystery Rose Residence this month. It would be odd, my keeping on that responsibility. If you cannot manage the fees and you won’t have him moved to a public facility, we can discuss options. After all, Guthrie would be traumatized to think his grandfather wasn’t having the burn scraped off his toast for him, which is about the height of what I’ve been paying for with that place. Unless I hear from you on this, I’ll assume you can make arrangements.

  Regards,

  Jarleth

  The letter is several months old. If she destroys it, Guthrie might answer the door before long, nappy in hand, to some young professionals and an estate agent arriving for the open home. Would he tell them they have the wrong address; that this home may be open, but it’s not for sale? Then, hearing his father’s name, would he stand corrected? And Ned – had he been wheeled from the nursing home to a bus stop, unbeknownst to his daughter? A feeling comes over Gael as if her loved ones’ passports are set to expire. She wonders if Art came here by boat. Yes – there’s something in that. He was once a pilot and now he is decidedly not. She takes the letter and her phone into the living room where Art is watching darts, making pencil markings on the back of the Times. The slats of Guthrie’s childhood bed complain from the room above and she shut
s the door after her. Art sits up a little. The slim cigar that’s tucked behind his ear drops. Gael places the letter on top of his newspaper and leaves the cigar to roll under the armchair. In the rinse of television light, it becomes clear that it will never be smoked; that Art keeps these things close to hand – scoreboards, tobacco, spirits, solitude – to remind himself of what he’s negating.

  ‘Should’ve known you’d have a comedy tat,’ Gael says, expressionless.

  Art idly searches for his cigarillo. ‘Comedy tats, I’ll have you know. Got “Made in Bolton” on me fewt. Co-pilot had me branded in the air force. Case I wound up out me tree and crashed in some forrin land … I’d find my way home. Were the idea. It dint work though, when the time came. And I needed it.’

  Just when Gael realizes he’s telling her something and tries to put her other line of thought on hold, he closes up again: ‘’Sides, I never known anybody go for just the one tat. Pair is what’s normal.’

  ‘Good to know you’ve the full set,’ Gael says, distracted. She paces the room, tapping her phone.

  ‘One up on normal, me.’ Art pulls down the neck of his vest with a tearing motion, as if to check for a scar – to prove to himself that whatever it was had really happened. Behind the steel scouring pad of his left pec, a faded red Cupid’s heart is arrowed through. It says:

  Gael stops pacing and looks at the heart. It’s concealed by the vest again, but Gael stares at where it had been, putting the right words in the right order before giving voice to them. Art angles the newspaper and letter to the light, finally catching on to its weight. ‘Oh. I’ve never shown that to anyone an’ had it be … true.’ He pats his chest. ‘I hope it w’n’t, inappropriate–’

  Gael shushes him. She’s making a phone call, he’s relieved to see, and he runs his chunky fingers over the letterhead and then along each line, as though reading Braille. His lips move as he reads.