‘Yes, darling?’ She turns round to Cian. He’s hopping from foot to foot clutching another Dr Seuss book. This is just one big adventure for him, thinks Christina.
‘Mammy, can I have this book?’
‘No, sweetie.’
‘I’ll get it for him,’ Angeline says, taking the book and going back into the shop.
‘Thank you, Granny!’ Cian spins on the spot, then hops over towards Christina. ‘Mammy,’ he says, reaching up towards her, and even though he’s big now, she still picks him up. ‘Are we going home?’ He presses his cheek to her face.
‘Do you want to go home?’ she asks him.
‘I don’t know.’ He pauses, then squeezing her arm with his fingers, says, ‘Only if you can come and live with us again. I want to be with you.’
She sits down, still holding Cian. He wraps his legs around her waist and squeezes her tight. She can feel his skinny chest pushed against hers, the quick beat of his heart.
Christina gives in to the hug, inhales his breath on her skin and embraces his need. She could hide forever inside the love of her son.
Darling Christina,
Happy birthday! I hope you like the card. It’s by a local artist and is called Salmonberries. Of course you don’t get those in Ireland, but when they come out every year it’s the most wonderful aroma. They’re delicious and they make me think of you as the berries come out, just before your birthday.
And so you’re eighteen! It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed since I last saw you. I’ve been writing to you all these years, darling, because I want you to know that not a day has passed when I haven’t thought of you. I’m sure that you’ve often wondered why I left in the first place, but it’s such a terrible tale that I felt I couldn’t write to you about this when you were a child. It’s a story I feel your father should tell you. He was there and he knows what happened, and now that you’re an adult it’s up to him to tell you the truth.
I often wonder if you’ve ever received any of these letters. Am I writing to no one? Will these words be cast aside, burned, destroyed before they ever reach your eyes? I pray not. I would prefer to believe that you read every one of my letters and chose not to reply rather than you never saw them at all. At least you would know then that I love you still and that I’ll always be here for you, Christina, whenever you need me.
You’re a young woman now, and it excites me to think what possibilities there are for your life. Always follow your dreams. I know that sounds corny, but so few of us actually fulfil our calling in one lifetime, and you know we all have one. For me, I’m just beginning to discover what I should do. I’ve opened up a small healing spa here in our house in Tofino and at the moment I only have a couple of clients but I enjoy the work so much. For once I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile.
Henry’s still fishing. Oh, it’s an awful stink when he comes into my sweet-smelling house! Remember that whenever you feel ready to come and visit, just let me know. I don’t have much, but I always have enough set aside to send you the fare. It will be a surprise for my husband that I have such a wonderful secret to share with him – you!
Oh Christina, I could write to you forever, ask you so many questions. What do you look like now? What do you like doing? Do you have a boyfriend? Are you going to college? Is your father with Angeline? Do you remember her? Is she still there with you and Tomás? I would love to know the answers to all these questions and more, so please, darling, find it in your heart to forgive me and write.
I think this will be the last letter I send you. If you decide not to contact me then I must accept your choice that you don’t want to be a part of me. Just remember, darling, that as far as I’m concerned you always have a home, right here with me.
With lots of love,
Your mother, Greta
CHRISTINA
It’s no longer blank, the canvas of her mother. Christina lies in bed listening to her son’s breath. She has the cotton reel in her hands, some of the hair wound round one finger, and she moves it back and forth between finger and spool. She watches the reel on her belly spinning and glinting as first light creeps across the room. She sinks into the past. They are the halcyon days, when she was very little in The Mill.
What can she gather up?
Her mother trying to manage Christina’s hair, their two faces side by side looking into the dusty mirror. She remembers her mother’s long, pale oval face with straight orange hair and Christina’s cherry-shaped face, still babyish, with the cute rings and curls that her mother always failed to plait.
They’re in the local shop and her mother is wearing a pair of white trousers. Christina stands right by her, her arm wrapped around her leg, tight, and sucking her thumb. She’s cleaving to her side; she remembers the feeling of never wanting to be separated.
Making daisy chains. It’s summer and they’re sitting on the front lawn at The Mill and her mother is wearing a red dress. They’re barefoot. It’s hot, unusual, and she remembers her mother putting a small blue and yellow hat on her head. They’re talking, her mother telling her about when she was a little girl and going with her father to watch a foal being born. Her grandfather was a vet.
She remembers now that her mother was a lover of animals, wild and tame. She had befriended a small sparrow and she only told Christina this. Not even her daddy knew. In the spare bedroom at the back of the house Christina’s mother had made a little nest for the bird on the windowsill, and together, in secret, the two of them would creep into the room, watch the bird busy about its home and scatter a few crumbs on the ledge. Once or twice Christina had watched the bird step onto her mother’s hand and cock its head at her.
Her mother never shared the view that foxes were pests. She remembers her gently explaining that when the fox killed the kittens it was the law of nature. She hated to see the men go after it with their guns.
And there she is, little girl Christina sitting on her mother’s lap, her mother’s arms wrapped about her, her cheek pressed close on hers. She can see her eyes sparkling, feel the beat of her heart. Her mother is patting her knees in a steady rhythm and Christina is singing, Whiz, whir, whiz, whir. They’re making the cotton reel song.
Christina’s mother loved her. There’s no denying it.
She closes her eyes. In the pale dusk of her mind she sees another picture. Her mother now, older, the flare of her hair faded. She’s smaller. She sees her in the water, her little boat tipping over, her body popping out and hands trying to grab each other, big man hands, and hers, Christina’s hands. She can see her own hands trying to pull her mother up. Christina’s wedding ring is a tiny drop of gold in all the blue swirling mass of the Pacific Ocean. It’s the same colour as her mother’s hair. She watches the last strand swirl away, like a piece of electric seaweed. And she’s gone. Her hands failed to grasp her, and she has lost her mother all over again, this time forever.
Christina shudders. She’s suddenly cold. She gets out of bed and puts on a sweater, then sits on the sheet, cross-legged, looking at Cian as he sleeps.
Luke is gone.
She can still feel the imprint of his hand on the small of her back. He has made a small opening, a tunnel back down inside her heart. She has such an urge to see him now, just talk, just be together.
The shadows shift outside her door. There’s someone out there. She waits for the knock, then slides off the bed. Maybe it’s Luke?
But she knows that isn’t his way, and when she opens the door she isn’t surprised to see Angeline standing there, still in her nightclothes, a large green cardigan hanging off her shoulders, holding a suitcase in one hand.
‘What are you doing up at this hour?’ Christina asks impatiently.
‘I wanted to speak to you,’ Angeline whispers, glancing over at Cian. ‘Before Cian wakes up…before the day starts.’
She walks into the room, uninvited, dragging the case behind her.
‘What if I don’t want to talk to you?’ Christina replies churlishly
, pushing back her hair.
‘Put the kettle on please,’ her stepmother replies crisply, ignoring her last comment and leaving the bag on the floor beside Cian’s bed. She goes over to the porch doors, slides them back and steps out onto the balcony.
Jesus! Christina thinks to herself, flicking on the coffeepot and pulling out two cups. Why can’t she just leave me alone?
‘It’s cold,’ Angeline says, shivering and pulling her cardigan tight across her breasts as Christina comes out with the tea. ‘But very beautiful.’
The bustling bay still sleeps and a hypnotic fog hangs over the sea. Christina says nothing, just sips the hot bitter tea and stares past her stepmother at the still landscape, hoping to let it swallow her, leave her dispassionate, detached, uncaring.
‘I had to talk to you,’ Angeline says. ‘I couldn’t sleep. All night I was thinking about Greta. She was my best friend, you know.’
‘You wouldn’t have thought so!’
Angeline turns on her; her dark eyes are fierce. ‘How could you possibly understand the kind of relationship I had with Greta? You never had a sister.’
‘But she wasn’t your sister,’ Christina counters weakly.
‘As good as. I don’t think you’ve ever shared the intimacy I had with Greta with another woman. Have you?’
Christina says nothing. She kicks a small blue stone off the balcony and watches it drop onto the grass below.
Angeline is right.
But who’s fault is that? She was always so cosseted by her father and Angeline, then pushed into marriage as soon as she left school. She’d made friends with other mums, but nothing close. She had never confided in anyone – until she met Luke.
‘We immediately hit it off. The first day of school, we were next to each other in the dorm.’ Angeline smiles and her features soften. ‘Your mother was such an innocent. That was why I loved her. You could tell her anything and she’d believe you. I could be rather wicked to her sometimes. I remember once we were walking from the church to the main school building and it was lashing rain, and your mother had an umbrella and I didn’t have one, and I told her that if my hair got wet it would turn green, so she gave me her umbrella. She was worried I would be embarrassed of my green hair! I didn’t think she’d really believe me, but she did, bless her! I felt bad when she got a cold.’
‘You were always a bitch then, were you?’ She can’t help it. It makes her angry that Angeline knew her mother, that she could tell her things about her.
‘Do you really enjoy saying such things, Christina?’ Angeline pauses and looks at her closely. Christina shrugs her shoulders, says nothing. ‘It was just a prank. There’s no need to be so melodramatic, Christina. Greta always forgave me.’
‘I’m sure she never forgave you for stealing her husband and her child.’ Christina feels the cold hurt slide down her throat as she says the words. This is what it comes down to, doesn’t it?
‘It’s not that simple, and you know it,’ Angeline sighs. ‘I don’t want to argue with you any more. What’s the point of hurting each other?’
Christina shrugs again and tries to look nonchalant, but she can feel a lump in her throat, her eyes tight and wide.
‘I was awake all night, trying to work out what your mother would want me to do.’
It’s on the tip of Christina’s tongue to pass another cutting remark, like ‘It’s too late for that now’ or ‘As if you’d really care’, but she bites it back, suddenly feeling like a difficult teenager.
Her stepmother cradles her tea, sips it and then speaks again.
‘And I’ve come to a decision,’ she says, her voice steady and clear. ‘I don’t think you should come back.’
Christina gulps down the hot tea, opening her eyes to the early morning light. Surely she didn’t hear right?
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I mean what I say. Stay.’
Christina stares at her stepmother. She seems smaller to her now, shorter and thinner, and with her dark hair and the green cardigan wrapped about her, she looks almost native. Christina notices she has no shoes on, just a pair of large woolly grey socks. She looks down at her feet and is almost afraid to speak.
‘Here?’
How can she stay?
Angeline walks over to one of the sun loungers and sits down, pulling her cardigan even tighter about her. She shivers and gazes past Christina at the sea behind, its promise of eternity.
‘Yes,’ she says so softly that Christina can hardly hear. ‘Greta and Henry had no other children. That house should be yours. Make your claim and stay, meet the people who knew Greta, learn about your mother’s life.’
‘I can’t do that.’ Christina’s voice shrinks to a squeak.
‘I think Greta would want it.’ Angeline looks straight at her. She smiles. Christina looks away.
‘How could you possibly know that?’ she says tightly.
‘Because she was my friend.’
Christina walks over to the balustrade and leans on it. Her head is spinning and the fear is still there, in her like a bitter taste in her mouth. ‘But…didn’t you come here to bring me back? What about the others? Daddy, and Declan, and Johnny…’ She trails off.
‘They don’t know that I’ve found you, and I can tell them you weren’t here. I can say Greta is gone.’
Christina turns around and looks at Angeline. She has folded her hands on her lap and still smiles at her. Christina can tell that she has made up her mind.
‘But why?’
‘Because now is my chance to make the right choice.’
The light is breaking through the fog. It illuminates the view behind Angeline’s head, a stretch of blue sea and a gathering of cedar trees. Christina can sense the town stirring, boats starting up, her anxiety rising.
‘I have something for you,’ Angeline says. She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve and blows her nose, then walking over to the case, she pulls it down on the ground and, kneeling before it, clicks it open. Christina looks in. The case is full of paper, piles and piles of envelopes, some written in black pen, some in blue and red, and all written by the same hand. And all of them, every single one, addressed to Miss Christina Comyn, The Mill, Oldcastle, County Meath, Republic of Ireland.
There are hundreds of letters.
‘These belong to you,’ Angeline says, stepping back. ‘They’re from your mother. She wrote to you every week until you were eighteen, and then I suppose she just gave up. I could never find the right time to give them to you.’
Christina bends down as if in slow motion. Her knees feel incredibly stiff, her body like lead. She picks one of the letters up and turns it over. Her mother’s address in Tofino is written on the back. The letter is unopened. She picks up another and another. They’re all the same – sealed. Each sheaf of paper inside is a particle of her blood mother. Her hands shake. She’s too frightened to open even one.
She looks up at Angeline, her dark skin strangely flushed, and feels a wave of compassion for her stepmother, that she would covet these letters and hide them from her. And every week another one would pop through the letterbox, reminding Angeline that her own motherhood was an illusion. Greta would never let go.
ALONE
Now the room is locked.
Christina knows where the key is. She takes off her shoes, climbs on the broad window ledge next to the door, and then, on her tippy toes, she reaches around for the key. It’s slipped behind the lintel. She has seen Angeline put it there many times.
The handle is a little stiff, but then suddenly it snaps open. Even standing on the threshold is different. Christina immediately feels disappointed.
Where has the temple gone?
Everything is missing. The bed is made up tightly with brown blankets and the little bedside table is bare apart from an old lamp. Even the crucifix is back up on the wall.
Christina walks around, opening the drawers of the dresser and the doors of the wardrobe, but they’re all
empty. She goes over to the window. It’s jammed shut, the thick white paint peeling off the woodwork, the corners of the panes thick with cobwebs. She looks at the river below. How green it is. She can see thick emerald reeds running through it, pushed forwards by the current. They make the water look like soup.
She peels some paint off the wood. What will she do now? She’s so bored.
And then, in the window, she can see a reflection of herself, and behind her, the bed and something else.
She turns and runs across the room, bending down and looking under the bed. There’s a case.
Christina pulls it out. She sees a brown cardboard label and she reads it.
Angeline Mahony, 64a Station Road, Harrow, Middlesex, England
She tries to open it. It’s heavy and stiff, but she doesn’t give up.
Inside is her treasure – all the colour she has desired since her mother left.
There is Angeline’s pink scarf and her scarlet dress and all the little gold pots. There’s even a packet of the smelly sticks. Christina takes one out and smells it. It reminds her of last year, and the snow.
Right at the bottom of the case is the paper with the Japanese writing tied up in a roll and the little red book and orange beads. Why has Angeline put all these things away?
And suddenly it comes to her. Maybe she’s leaving too. And the thought of that is so terrible that Christina feels like being sick.
She has to stop her.
CHRISTINA
‘Christina, it’s important that you understand something.’ Angeline stops and looks up at the canopy of green that hangs above them. They’re in the rainforest, walking back in time, sheltered by heavy damp swathes of trees, cut off from the open sea. Cian is ahead of them on the boardwalk. They follow him as he skips along the trail’s languorous curve, a large figure of eight, which crosses over the highway and plunges straight back into the rainforest on the other side. Angeline is wearing a large straw hat. Light filters through its weave, freckling her face, reflecting soft olive shadows onto her skin.
A Small Part of Me Page 29