The Family Gift

by Cathy Kelly

  He had been staying with my parents following a hip replacement operation, had never quite got around to going back to his own house and then, when my father had his stroke, had stayed on to ‘help’.

  What this help means and when it is going to materialise is often discussed, because his presence in the house means more meals to be cooked and frequent interruptions to talk about ‘the most dangerous snake on earth’, courtesy of one of the Most Fascinating Facts books which he gets from the library once every two weeks. But my mother insists he’s vital to her household.

  ‘Eddie sits and talks to your father for hours,’ Mum says, and, as always when she talks about my father, her eyes get wet and we both agree that if making my father happy is the price for Granddad Eddie insulting all and sundry, and complaining that he likes lamb chops on Mondays and has no truck with vegetarian recipes, then it is a price that has to be paid.

  Eddie is entirely compos mentis but has developed rudeness into an art form by making vulgar hand signals at other drivers when they are on outings in the car. He is rude to the expensive carers who come to the house seven mornings a week to wash and dress Dad, and on certain days, help him and Granny Ryan too.

  Comparing one sweet lady to ‘a hippo – look at the size of the backside on her’ has just lost Mum another carer.

  ‘The agency rang and said they were running out of people who’d come,’ my mother says, somehow imbuing this with a hint of humour, even though it is not funny at all.

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ Maura says, ‘look after him, that is,’ every time Granddad does some other Wildly Rude Thing.

  ‘Does that mean you won’t take care of me when I’m old?’ says Pip, her husband, only half-teasing.

  ‘I’m hoping you’re going to look after me,’ Maura says grimly.

  The presence of irascible Eddie makes us all think about this. That and the presence of our father, who is my mother’s age.

  We try not to talk about this, me, Maura, Scarlett and Con. It hurts too much. Instead, we co-ordinate times to be there to help out and pool extra resources to pay for the precious carers.

  Mum is coming today, as are Maura and Pip, who is known in the family annals as the worst shopper in the world but would love to cherish Maura if only he knew what perfume to bring, or what she means when she says, ‘. . . Oh, get me a surprise.’

  When they turn up, they have brought along a pile of Sunday newspapers, a giant tin of shortbread, their vacuum cleaner and enough black plastic bags to coat the entire property.

  I ask Maura if we’re disposing of dead bodies, what with all the black bags.

  ‘It’s a great time to throw things out,’ she informs me loftily. ‘De-junk. Clear your space and your head.’

  Maura is totally into the Japanese art of having no junk in your house and folding your knickers beautifully. I have tried this but just don’t have the patience. Neither does Pip.

  ‘Don’t let her throw me out,’ he begs me with a twinkle in his eye. He waggles a celebratory couple of bottles of wine at Dan, who grins back.

  ‘There will be no wine until people have helped move furniture and we set up a vacuuming rota,’ I order. ‘We were at it for hours yesterday and I swear, it’s worse.’

  Dan nods. ‘I think I tore a ligament moving the kitchen table.’

  I moved the kitchen table again while he was off trying to fix his coffee machine, but say nothing.

  ‘Auntie Mooway!’ shrieks Teddy, spotting her aunt Maura. ‘I’m hungry. Want crunchy sweetie brekkie things . . .?’ she adds cunningly.

  You give the child cereal one day and she’s after it every day.

  ‘Can she?’ asks Maura, who is putty in Teddy’s tiny little hands.

  ‘Only if you run around after her for two hours while the sugar buzz is on,’ I say.

  In September, Teddy is starting school and I fear for whatever junior infants teacher has been assigned to her class. Teddy is very sociable as a result of two years of Montessori but rarely does anything she’s told unless a bribe is involved.

  ‘None of the girls coming?’ I ask Maura now.

  My two nieces, a scarily grown-up seventeen and eighteen-year-old, both of whom are still in school and one of which has her huge State exams coming in June, would be handy for playing Super Mario with Liam and gossiping with Lexi because the Wi-Fi is still patchy and this is a fate worse than death.

  ‘Later,’ Maura says, heading to the kitchen. ‘You know they’re vampires at the weekends. Alex goes to bed at one a.m., up at noon because she’s internetting all night and Gilly studies at those exact hours, no matter what I say about how studying late doesn’t work.’

  When Dan’s brother, Zed arrives, there is a lot of good- humoured teasing about the size of the place.

  ‘Madame, or should I say, Your Grace,’ he says to me, bowing low. ‘The Palace of Versailles is looking lovely this morning. May I be shown to the drawing room or the red salon? I hear there is a bathroom in the fashionable shade of avocado that is worth seeing . . .?’

  I whip my trusty kitchen roll from the front of my apron and bop him on the head with it.

  ‘It’s not that much bigger than our old house,’ I say, which is true. But our old house was semi-detached, which is the big difference.

  ‘She likes the wall,’ says Pip, and he and Zed laugh. Clearly this is a topic which has been laughed over before.

  ‘Keeps the paparazzi out,’ says Zed.

  I feel the hot sting of being misunderstood but dampen it down. Zed and Pip haven’t a clue why I like my wall. I am determined to be grateful and not argue with anyone.

  ‘It’s just a wall,’ says Dan, glaring at them both.

  He walks past and plants a tender kiss on my temple.

  ‘Thanks, darling,’ I murmur, then I turn to my two brothers-in-law.

  ‘You pair are hereby charged with lifting and organising the heaviest furniture,’ I say with the special TV smile I’ve perfected to tell viewers that really, anyone can make crème brûlée. Anyone can but it turns out that many people find it deeply threatening.

  All is soon forgotten as my mother rolls up in her elderly estate car circa 1981 and tries to do a three-hundred-and-fifty-seven-point turn in order to be facing the gate. She was never a fabulous driver but having my grandfather in the back roaring instructions at her undoubtedly doesn’t help. He has to sit in the back middle seat since he flipped the bird at a traffic policeman.

  I look at Dan. ‘Will you go and—’

  ‘Yeah, she’s going to bang into that little yellow bush. What’s it called?’

  We both stare.

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘I thought you said you loved the plants here?’ he asks, genuinely confused.

  ‘I do,’ I lie. Not totally a lie. I do like plants. I just don’t know anything about them.

  ‘I’ve forgotten the name of that one. No, it’s coming: Ibexia,’ I say grandly, because making anything sound a bit like Latin is very plant-like. An ibex is some sort of mountain goat, I think, because Liam likes natural history and has moved on from dinosaurs to books with other, more recent creatures in them, which he then draws.

  Dan will not know I am fibbing. As an economist, he only reads books about economics and politics and he is always busy, what with the world constantly being in a state of economic flux.

  Dan goes out to take over from my mother in the turning of her car.

  From here, I can hear Granddad shrieking about women drivers and how giving them the vote was where it all went wrong.

  My mother has selective deafness when it comes to her father-in-law. She knows he’s just trying to start a row for fun. Eddie loves rows.

  ‘I’m getting out,’ she says serenely and helps out her own mother, Granny Bridget, whose fluffy hair has a pink tinge to it today.

 
; Granny, my mother and a handbag that’s nearly as big as Teddy progress towards me. The handbag is the life support system of a carer of invalids and weighs a tonne.

  My mother is tall, like me, and today is wearing one of her colourful Scandinavian peasant outfits in a variety of turquoises, with wild tribal jewellery around her neck and on her strong wrists. This is all from her other life when she had some spare cash.

  Her greying hair, blonde like mine not that long ago, is in a single plait down her back, also like mine. Despite having to get two people out of the house and into the car, no easy task, and to leave my father with the carer, my mother is cheerful, and has applied make-up so that her northern European pale grey eyes gleam and she has a sheeny glow to her skin that always astonishes me.

  My mother’s life has not been easy this past year and yet she makes it look so. She is serene.

  ‘I do what I have to do, Freya,’ she always says, a statement so simple and yet courageous that it silences me every time. My mother would not need a high wall and a gate or sleeping tablets, I think, shamed.

  I lead Granny into the kitchen because she probably needs to sit down and she loves kitchens, the heart of the home, she says. My mother will not be lifting a finger to help with the tidying or shifting of furniture either, I tell her. She is going to rest with Granny.

  Teddy is busy with her aunt Maura, Liam is playing another car racing game with his uncle Pip, who has escaped off with the wine. I turn up at the door to the room where the Xbox has been installed and give Pip a stern look, which he ignores completely.

  ‘Pip’s really bad, Mum,’ says Liam gleefully as he makes mincemeat out of his uncle on a psychedelic racetrack.

  ‘Half an hour,’ I warn Liam in order to keep his computer playing limited.

  Why am I the grown-up?

  ‘Tea, anyone?’ roars Maura from the kitchen.

  Tea is the answer to all the family prayers.

  If an earthquake hit, someone would boil the kettle on the grounds that we would think better after a pot of tea and some apple cake and that the giant earthen rift outside the house could wait, couldn’t it?

  ‘I brought fruity tea bread,’ says my mother, who is one of the few people not even slightly overwhelmed by my cooking abilities. Nobody ever brings food to my house anymore, except Maura, who does not have the culinary gene but shops for food well, and my mother, who works on the theory that I am too busy whipping up amazing dishes for work to whip them up at home too.

  I have absolutely no idea how she finds time to cook.

  ‘I have meatballs for the kids in a Tupperware container and some spicier ones for you too in another one,’ she says. ‘Also, I brought cheese and ham sandwiches, along with pâté and crackers because you’ll never have had time to shop and this horde will want filling.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I hug her tightly, checking surreptitiously as I always do for signs of her getting too thin.

  Maura, Scarlett and I worry.

  Con, little brother, lost to the world of finding the perfect woman and, until this current girlfriend, working his way through the Northern hemisphere in order to do so, would not notice his mother’s weight loss. With the trauma she’s gone through this past year, it is a miracle she is still here.

  ‘I’m fine, honey,’ Mum says gently, grey eyes sparkling.

  She is on to me. She is so empathic that, I swear, she can read minds.

  Which is why I never, ever talk about the mugging with her or even imply that it has left long-term damage to my soul.

  By the time Scarlett and Jack have arrived – both hideously glamorous in the manner of people from drinks’ adverts on the telly: Scarlett with platinum hair in an updo and with red lipstick on her full lips, and Jack looking like he’s up for a role in a Nespresso advert – Granny Bridget is installed in a comfy chair in the kitchen room where she admires the wallpaper and promises to French plait Lexi’s hair.

  ‘I had hair as long as yours once, and it was the same colour as your mother’s,’ she says happily, as Lexi sits with her and rifles through Granny’s bag of knitting and ribbons to find something she approves of for said plaiting.

  Eddie has already stomped upstairs and can be heard roaring about damp in the bedrooms.

  ‘There’s not damp, is there?’ says Granny, anxious.

  A trickle of tears appear on her cheeks.

  Granny can’t get anxious without a flood of tears. Or happy. Or even mildly entertained, for that matter. She says she cried at her own wedding, at my mother’s birth and at every family wedding since. She is a danger at funerals and at bingo once, when she won the jackpot, she cried so much that an off-duty nurse raced over in case an ambulance was needed.

  She’s a highly sensitive person, Mum told us all years ago. ‘It’s an automatic reaction for her: nothing strange, nothing connected with any medical issue like Parkinsons or MS.’

  ‘No damp,’ I reassure her now, as my mother hands over a pack of tissues. ‘We had a surveyor.’

  ‘Really?’ says Granny, mopping up and taking a shaky breath.

  ‘Eddie likes a bit of chaos,’ Mum reminds her mother, patting her hand where the skin is dotted with liver spots.

  ‘He does,’ agrees Granny, and blots away the last of the tears. ‘He locked Delilah in the utility room this morning and I thought she was lost!’

  ‘But she wasn’t,’ says my mother quickly.

  Granny pauses. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m going to hide his teeth when he’s asleep one night. See how he likes that.’ Her tiny little face lights up with an impish grin.

  We all laugh.

  Once her hair is plaited, Lexi decides she’ll go upstairs to oversee Granddad Eddie’s house viewing.

  That leaves the three Abalone sisters, our mother, and Granny Bridget in the kitchen because Jack has gone off to talk to the men.

  Scarlett and I have hauled one of my big pantry boxes onto the table. Mum wants to help unpack it, but I say no.

  ‘Sit down and I’ll make tea. You’re having a little rest.’

  The showing Granddad the house tour is going hilariously badly. I know this because I can hear the roars.

  ‘What do you want with a house this size?’ Granddad is shouting at the top of his voice, which is his only volume. ‘Landed gentry are we now? I never thought I’d see the day. Far from big houses you were reared . . .’

  We all grin at each other, apart from Granny Bridget, who is so used to the sound of Eddie’s shouting and talking about how strange people are these days that I swear she can block his voice out completely.

  ‘I like what you’ve done with this room,’ she says in her soft dreamy way.

  The rest of us say nothing for a moment and then I say. ‘Thank you, Granny.’

  We have done precisely nothing with the kitchen apart from put in the big stove, but it is lovely, with its simple cream wooden cabinets, large kitchen window overlooking what was once a herb garden, I think, and gleaming stainless steel splashbacks.

  Up to now, my TV show has been filmed in a grim industrial estate in the west of the city in a fake kitchen, so the producers are thrilled they’ll be able to use my home.

  I wait for Mildred to tell me the modern-obsessed producers will hate the sight of the pretty herb garden visible out the window – the only sliver of weeded ground in the whole place – but for once, she shuts her mouth. My mother adores me so much that I think my unconscious cannot self-sabotage when she is around.

  ‘You’ve got flowering jasmine tea,’ says Scarlett in delight, pulling a tin out of the big pantry box. ‘I love this stuff.’

  Granny Bridget looks up, interested.

  ‘When you add the boiling water, the blossom opens and it’s just beautiful.’

  Mum and I smile at each other. It’s lovely to see Scarlett animated like this. I’m not sure i
f she’s really trying her best to be happy about the new house, because I know she’s so broken after the last heartbreaking round of IVF treatment. Two embryos were all they were left with after harvesting. The fertility team implanted those and she didn’t even have to wait till the sixteen days were up to know she wasn’t pregnant. The early bleed told her.

  Still, as she said to me at the time, when she was clearly trying very hard to be strong: ‘We can try again, I don’t care, we are going to have a baby.’

  I think of the bad things that have happened to our family over the past year: Dad’s stroke, Scarlett and Jack’s hideously sad infertility journey, and my being mugged, and I wonder where people get the sheer belief to think good things will miraculously begin to occur? How have humans decided that if we really want things, they will come to us? Why do we think we can make lemonade out of lemons?

  I would do anything to stop Scarlett’s pain, but there’s nothing I can do.

  With that amazing ability she has to almost see what is going on inside all our heads, Mum gets to her feet, takes the jasmine tea tin from Scarlett and hugs her.

  ‘I think Freya has been hiding this and I think we need to have it now,’ she announces. ‘Have you unpacked many of the cups, darling?’ she asks me.

  I laugh.

  ‘Five mugs, plastic beakers, cereal bowls and sundry plates unpacked.’

  ‘Right,’ says Mum. She leaves the kitchen and returns with Pip in tow, instructing him to fetch the crockery boxes, which are, of course, despite many giant ‘kitchen’ signs plastered on them for the movers, not in the kitchen. Once Pip, ever obliging, has hauled them into the room, he heaves the correct box onto the table and Mum starts unpacking.

  ‘These ones will do, I think,’ she says, by the time crumpled newspapers litter the floor. ‘Special china for a special day.’

  The special china is made up of old fragile things that I have collected over the years. For my first TV series, when Simplicity with Freya was born, I thought my old china would look beautiful for filming but the stylists for the production company overruled me.