Gifts for the One Who Comes After

by Gifts for the One Who Comes After (v5. 0) (epub)

  Her mother took up a silver-backed brush with fine white bristles and began to run it through her hair. It whispered like a scythe as it fell from crown to waist, over and over again.

  “Ja,” she muttered. “Whatever you say, daughter mine.”

  “Please, mum.”

  “Stupid child,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  Her mother’s mouth twisted into an ugly scowl.

  “You just want my things!” her mother shrieked. “You want my blessings! My gifts! Just take them, you ingrate! Take what you like. They don’t mean anything. Here, take this!” Her mother flung the hard-handled brush with bruising speed. It bounced off Eileen’s flinching shoulder with an audible crack, and spun into the jug of water, which crashed again the dark blue tiles.

  “No, mum!” Eileen cried out, rubbing viciously at the spot the brush had struck her. She felt a wave of anger. She wanted to slap her mother. She wanted to. . . .

  Her mother was staring at her with wide eyes. She was trembling.

  “You don’t want it? You must take it, Eileen. You must. It’s yours,” she said, and now her voice was quavering. She stared at the jug on the tile. “They’re yours, darling. You must take them with you. Please, darling, won’t you just—?”

  “Please, mum,” Eileen begged. Her throat was raw. “I don’t want them.”

  “You must,” she said, “You must take them.”

  Dr. Jans had warned her it would be like this. When she was frightened. When she was unsure. Her mood could spin so quickly—but it still shocked Eileen to see that stranger where her mother had been.

  “Oh, my darling. I should have protected you. I should have let you go more easily. We fought, didn’t we?”

  Eileen turned away.

  “Yeah, mum. We fought. But it’s okay. Children fight with their parents. That’s what they do.”

  “I should have set the gas, shouldn’t I? Just let it leak out, ja? No one would have known. I should have done that for you.”

  Eileen wrapped her arms around her mother. “Don’t say such things. Please, mum, don’t ever say such things.” Shivered.

  But the thought stayed in her mind: the house quiet and still, surrounded by the dark expanse of ocean. And not a passenger on board. Beautiful. Still as a tomb. The quiet hiss of the gas. . . .

  “It would have been better for you.”

  Eileen took her mother in her arms and held her, with the vinegar smell wrapped tight around the two of them, and her mother making little sobbing noises. Eileen felt the bones clicking against one another and she tried not to make a noise, to keep her lips perfectly sealed against her own tears.

  Because her mother was right. It would have been easier. And she hated herself for thinking it, hated herself for knowing that it was true because, at the same time, it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all. It was awful to think of, her mother with her blue lips lying still on the bed.

  She felt her mother stiffening in her arms.

  “Brush my hair, would you, girl? Your father’s taking me out later. Jacob and Rees will mind you for the evening, so be sure you don’t give them any grief.”

  “Okay,” Eileen pleaded in a soothing voice, “it’s okay.”

  She began to run the brush in gentle strokes through her mother’s thinning hair. It seemed to calm her.

  “Sing to me, would you?”

  “Sure, mum. Of course.” The brush came down in slow, even strokes and the hair parted around it easily.

  “Bobbejaan climbs the mountain,” Eileen sang, “so quickly and so lightly.”

  The men were hairy: thick-bristled as boars. Their arms hung down around their knees, bald only at the pebbled skin of their elbows.

  “Why did you forget our name?” the men said to Eileen.

  Eileen didn’t want to answer.

  They frightened her badly, made her skin pucker and crawl with fear as they touched her wrist, her hair, her neck. When they turned the wrong way, Eileen could see that they were not men at all, they were merely two halves of the same man—an ugly, dwarfish brute—a man split in half with his insides scooped out like a melon.

  “I’ve never met you in my life,” she said.

  “Oh, but you have,” said the first half, and smiled half a wide, white-toothed smile.

  “And we have chucked your chin, and counted your fingers, and called you best beloved,” said the second half.

  “If you did,” Eileen said, “it was a very long time ago.”

  “We know,” said the men, “we know all this. It is you who have forgotten.”

  “No,” said Eileen.

  “Yes,” said the men. “You have been gone so long. But blood runs true, does it not?”

  “Blood run true,” the other whispered.

  “Two by two by two.”

  “Such a pretty girl. Such a pretty, pretty girl come home to us.”

  Emma had been such a pretty child.

  Eileen loved her daughter the way she always imagined mothers were supposed to love their daughters. Cleanly. Effortlessly. Her love was transparent as a wineglass. Habitual as putting on a sweater.

  When Emma was five she used to stand on the bed, a wobbly little girl, and run her hands through Eileen’s hair, her fingers never quite tangling in it but just gently touching her scalp, the back of her neck. Sometimes she would lay the sweetest little kiss on Eileen’s cheek and when Eileen turned, Emma would be smiling like an imp.

  “I’ve got the apple in your cheek,” she would say. “I’ve stolen the apple of your eye.”

  Emma didn’t know what the words meant, but she’d tear off, giggling, out of the bedroom until Andrew caught her up in his arms.

  “Give them to papa?” he would say.

  “Of course, papa. I stole the apples just for you!”

  When Eileen had been pregnant with Emma, Andrew would sometimes run his fingers over the giant balloon of her stomach when they were lying in bed together, the house quiet as it would never be quiet again afterward.

  “Look at you,” Andrew would say. “Grown so big. What have you got inside you?”

  “An apple?”

  “A cherry pip?”

  “A girl?”

  “A boy?”

  “Could it be twins?”

  “God, I hope not.”

  But there had always been twins in the family, her mother told her. Jacob and Rees. Johanna and Eirlys. Always twins, except for the first generation, the first apple of the womb. Granny Tamsyn. Her mother. And her, of course. But there were two beds side by side in her room in Ship House. The one hers, and the other empty as an overturned basket.

  Eileen and Andrew didn’t talk about the other baby.

  They didn’t talk about the second set of kicks or the second heartbeat. And they didn’t talk about how when Eileen pushed and pushed, out had come two little bodies: one pink and thriving as a piglet and the other purple as a blood clot. They didn’t talk about that other little baby because Emma was such a good girl. A pretty girl.

  “She just wasn’t ready,” Andrew had said to her, “She wasn’t even really there—not a little thing like that. She didn’t die, hon, she wasn’t even there yet. She was just a piece of a little girl. So hush up, my love.”

  Eileen hadn’t cried for that other baby.

  She hadn’t let herself cry.

  She had clung to the little piglet child, and she had kept it close to her until it resolved itself into a small person, a scampering, singing toddler and then a coltish and wise youngster too old to suck her thumb, and, oh, time had marched on and brought her this strange teenager with a fringe of black hair cut below the eyes.

  “Bring her to Ship House,” Andrew had told her. “Don’t deny her a grandmother. She has a right to see her.”

  But Eileen had said, “No, she’s too little. Maybe when she’s older. She’ll go w
hen she wants to go.”

  She had said that every year.

  And every year Emma had grown older and older until she could join in the chorus too: “I don’t want to,” she said. “I’ve got friends here. They promised they’d take me skiing during the break, before the snow melts. Have you seen the hills, mum? They’re beautiful. They’re just waiting for me. Can I go, please, skiing?” And who could deny her snow angels and skiing? Emma was a child of a different place, with her cheeks that went gloriously red when the frost kissed them.

  And Eileen felt happy when Andrew relented. She felt giddy with relief. She didn’t push.

  Perhaps Emma would go to Ship House one day. But not now. Not now. Not until she was older.

  Some things just slip away from you.

  The men slipped around her, moving the way that shadows move.

  They stood, each on their own one leg, on either side of Eileen, their good sides toward her. But still she knew. Still she knew on the other side of each of those faces was no face at all. Their cheeks were cored apples with nothing inside them but white pulpy flesh.

  “Come, my girl,” they said. “Let us show you the way.” Their voices were deep and high at the same time, forced through their strange half-bodies.

  Eileen went with them. She couldn’t resist. Their strength was the strength of mountains. As they went they made the same strange dragging sound as wounded animals, each with their own single, bent knee.

  “Bobbejaan climbs the mountain—” she giggled madly, unable to stop herself, but the first half shushed her with a dirty, stunted finger.

  “We do not like that song—” he said through half of a mouth.

  “—we do not like it at all,” the other one said.

  Their bodies were warm. She could feel the air heating around them as if their skin was molten copper. There was a rank animal smell to them. They smelled of tunnels. They smelled of her mother’s hair as she brushed it.

  And they were touching her. They were gripping her elbows, and she had to walk quickly and carefully between them. She was so afraid to touch any part of them. She hated the feeling of their oily, dirty fingers touching her skin. Their sharp, hooked nails.

  “Where are you taking me?” Eileen asked them.

  And the two men looked at each other, each with one good eye as blue as a robin’s egg.

  “To see what is what—”

  “—and which way the wind is blowing.”

  “Are you going to hurt me?” She wanted to ask, but the question lodged at the back of her throat like a tongue depressor held too firm.

  She did not like the way they moved, even with their good sides toward her.

  She closed her eyes and pretended it was Rees and Jacob, one on either side of her. They were taking her to the harbour to watch the bottle-jellyfish bobbing beneath their sandals. She could smell the vinegar of the vendors. It smelled of the ocean. It smelled like the crisp and sweet taste of the fish. It made her mouth water.

  “Oh, my lovely,” said the first one, “my little button. My dearie. You don’t know the story of this house, do you?”

  “She’s let it drift out of her head—”

  “—along with us.”

  “She doesn’t remember the grandfathers.”

  “Tell me,” Eileen cried out, for she was frightened of the little jig the men had to dance to stay with her. They capered, each with their one boot moving, their one ankle twisting down the hallway, and her dragged between them like a caught trout—down and down and down.

  Eileen and her mother started in the downstairs: in Auntie Johanna’s room where the dust was thick and choking.

  Eileen’s mother seemed all right. Her eyes were clear. She chattered easily as they went through the closets, pulling out gorgeous old dresses with big boxy shoulder pads in colours that had gone out of fashion years ago. There were hat boxes and shoe boxes, silk gloves with beading, and a portrait of a handsome man with a dark, pencil moustache—a darker, sharper Errol Flynn—hidden at the bottom of the dresser.

  “She was a looker, your great-auntie was! A real choty goty,” her mother remarked as they stared at the old albumen browns and beiges. “You’ve got something of her features, I think, sometimes I see her when I look at you. I think, oh, that’s Johanna. She’s come back!”

  Eileen didn’t remember Johanna very well. Just the vague floating image of tight, golden pin curls and a strange, low-lidded despair in her eyes. But Eileen didn’t look a thing like that. Eileen had her mother’s sharp cheekbones, narrow hips, and tiny plum-shaped breasts.

  “Did I tell you the story of how I met your father?” her mother asked. “It was Johanna who did it for me, ja? The wild one. We were travelling together by boat to England, a big old steamer and, the noise, my God, the noise! She was older than I, your great-auntie Johanna was, but you know that, don’t you? She was supposed to be minding me, although I’ll never know why Granny Tamsyn chose her for a chaperone! She was just a few years younger than your grandmother but she was always a dotty old thing. . . .”

  “I know the story.”

  “You know the story?”

  Eileen sunk her hands deep into a closet filled with pretty silk and gauze dresses. Beaded fringes tickled like spider webs, and for a moment she closed her eyes and it was like being a child at a party, seeing the world through stockinged knees, hiding under tables and stealing sweets off silver platters.

  “Tell it to me anyway, mum.”

  Her mother drew in a breath, blinked. “He was handsome. Ja?” she ventured as she stared at the photograph of the handsome man. “This isn’t him, of course. This was Johanna’s husband. The one who left her. The one who divorced her.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “Handsome,” she said firmly, “but in a way I had never seen before, not like Rees and Jacob were handsome. They were golden things, like angels, ja? But your father, no, he was crosswise handsome. We met him on the steamer heading out from the Cape of Good Hope. He’d just finished his degree and wanted to see the world a bit before he settled down. Got a job working for one of the mining companies. We all did it back then. The European Tour, Granny Tamsyn called it.”

  “But you ran away.”

  “I did!” she laughed. “There was your father, this handsome, young engineer. And you know what Johanna said to me? She said, ‘Away with you, girl, and—’”

  “‘—don’t come home until you’re pregnant!’”

  “She was a wild one,” Eileen’s mother fingered the photograph delicately. Someone had loved her once, Eileen thought. She tried to imagine her mother young and gorgeous, pretty as a new dress. “I don’t know why Tamsyn chose her to watch over me. Barely five minutes, and she sent me flying.”

  “But she told Granny Tamsyn.”

  “Oh, she did. Eventually. And Tamsyn sent the boys after me, but by the time they caught up with us in Paris I was round as a pumpkin with a ring on my finger, living in a little apartment on Rue Puget in Montmartre. But Jacob and Rees, well, when they came they talked straight to your father. They insisted that you be born in Ship House. Like all the others come before you.”

  “Well.”

  “I was such a happy old thing there, in that little apartment. Your father used to bring me pain au chocolat every morning! Ha! Imagine that. But my mother was a difficult woman to deny, and I wanted you, my dearie, to come into the world in your own proper place.”

  Eileen looked down at the photograph tucked away in the cardboard boxes they had filled. The room was almost finished. But there would be other rooms. There were so many rooms. A whole hidden warren of them. She imagined if she went into the cellars there would be a tunnel—a long tunnel, a twisting tunnel—and if she followed it far enough she would find her way back home. Back to the other side of the globe.

  “You’ll do the same,” her mother said. “When it’s your turn. You sha
ll bring them back to Ship House just as you should, won’t you, darling? Won’t you, lovey? The twins? My little granddaughters?”

  Eileen turned, touched a finger to her mother’s wrist. Her skin was powdery and loose, Eileen could feel the thick worm of a vein. The wrist. Her fingers touching against it, and the soft pulse of the flesh, almost dead, soft and clinging. Her mother was slipping away. Her mother was bleeding out one day at a time, like a cloth running out its dye in a damp, sticky puddle.

  She suddenly had the urge to run. Ship House was a crypt. A grave. A coffin.

  Her mother was speaking. “Lovey,” she said. “Johanna loved you, do you remember? You would watch her in the mirror some evenings. Just there, on the bed, as she brushed out her hair. How we all wanted to have hair like hers, how it curled in her hand like a little flower. She was so beautiful but then something happened to her . . . I don’t know what happened to her. . . .”

  One part of Eileen was in the tunnels.

  “ . . . it was bad though, wasn’t it? The thing that happened?”

  One part of her was walking away from all this. Stumbling through the darkness. Smelling the whisper of sulphur and dirt and copper and vinegar.

  “Eileen?” her mother asked, and she twisted her arm, twisted it out of Eileen’s grasp. “What happened to Johanna? You’re hurting me, Eileen. Please let go.”

  One part of her was almost free of this place.

  But that was only one part of her.

  She felt her fingers go slack and nerveless, and her mother touched dizzily at the place.

  “Ellie?”

  She would never be free of this place. Eileen could feel it taking hold of her. The old country. The dark country. With its blood spilled in the streets, its wars and its corruption, its buried bodies and its hidden resentments turned from whispers to violence. She remembered what it had been like to live here. What it had been like to go to school.

  Every time Andrew asked her, she said it had been normal. She had gone to school the way that anyone had gone to school. She had read magazines made sticky by the heat of her fingers—could still find one or two of them if she looked on the shelves in the bedroom—had listened to Radio 5, not Pink Floyd, not The Police as Andrew had, because they weren’t allowed then, they were banned by the government, but there had been other bands, other music. . . .