Ava: Grand, how’s you?
Same old. Working hard. They say New York is the city that never sleeps, but I think San Fran beats it hands down. I’m pulling all-nighters here.
Ava: Joseph Delaney, you’ve got to slow down. Haven’t you heard that you can burn out by the time you’re thirty?
Joseph: As long as I don’t fade away like a damp squib.
Ava: Not likely. There’s nothing damp squib like about you. I’ve just tried to find a damp squib emoticon, but there isn’t one so here’s a squid instead. Gap in the market for you right there, tech nerd.
Joseph: That’s it, I’m going to make my fortune designing a damp squib emoji.
Ava: As long as you call it Ava.
Joseph: Of course. I wouldn’t want you coming after me for a cut of the profits. So, what’s happening?
Ava: I’m sitting outside Finn’s house while he’s inside shagging some random girl.
Joseph: What? No way.
Ava: Yes, way. We broke up. Or he broke up with me. But either way it’s over, and he’s in there doing you know what, and I’m balling my eyes out.
Joseph: Aw, Ava don’t cry. Do you want me to go around there and knock him out?
Ava: Maybe.
Joseph: Can it keep till next time I’m home?
Ava: Suppose it’ll have to.
Joseph: Are you still crying?
Ava: No. Not really. Later, squid boy.
Joseph: Later.
Ava started the engine and drove away, tears tripping her sorry face.
4
Guilt just about cracked open Ava’s heart every time she pulled into the grounds of the nursing home Maggie resided in. A stroke had left the formerly robust and seemingly unstoppable Maggie paralysed down one side. Caring for Maggie at home had been Ava’s intention and greatest wish, but Maggie had other ideas. Before the stroke had rendered her frail and dependent, she had set the wheels in motion to gain admittance into the Sisters of Mercy convent nursing home.
Ava parked her car in the section marked out for visitors and walked up the crunchy gravel driveway. Quinn the gardener, who tended to keep to himself, gave her a cursory nod as she passed him on her way. The former converted convent building was set in sumptuously lush and landscaped grounds. The twelve-foot-high hot pink rhododendrons and bridal white azaleas in full bloom were enough to lift the weary spirits of the most depressed resident. The main building had been a large family home before being bought by the church many years earlier, to house the Sisters of Mercy nuns. In an effort to earn their keep, the Sisters of Mercy had turned their hands to managing a nursing home as a profitable enterprise, much to the Bishop’s pleasure.
Ava buzzed the intercom and was waved in by Sister Lucy, a tall angular-looking day-nurse who reminded Ava of Miss Clavel from Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeline books. She pushed open the heavy wood door and entered the warm hallway. Security was more about keeping the more senile residents in than visitors out.
Ava thought Sister Lucy suited her name. She was light and bright with a twinkle in her eye that suggested a certain mischief. There were still a few nuns working at the care home, though they were a dying breed. While most of the sisters working as carers were nice, some could be standoffish and preoccupied as if listening to some internal Godly dialogue. Sister Lucy was always clued in and seemed to be a buffer between the nuns and the outside world.
‘Good afternoon, Ava. How are we finding you today?’ Sister Lucy asked in her southern Irish brogue that always lifted Ava’s mood and made her want to smile.
‘Grand, Sister Lucy. Everyone okay here?’ she asked in her tentative way of finding out if anyone had died overnight. Ava had come to realise that success rate for the carers and the sisters was to see their residents off comfortably to the next life. Not that there was any helping hand, so to speak. No, it was more a matter of feeling that their residents were moving on, and part of their job was to help prepare them to meet their next landlord with a clean conscience and a good reference.
‘Maureen Harper was looking a bit peaky, but she seems to have picked up,’ Sister Lucy replied all smiles as if to indicate, sure wasn’t Maureen Harper the lucky one to be one step closer to the great shindig in the sky. ‘Your gran slept well, and we managed to get the medication into her without a fight.’
Ava knew that Maggie resisted the tablets. She had a distrust of taking anything even remotely medicinal. To take a paracetamol to cure a headache was a sign of pure weakness in Maggie’s book, and she considered anyone ridiculous enough to take vitamin supplements as needing their head seeing to.
Ava made her way down the hushed corridor to Maggie’s room. She had to admit the carers had created a lovely homely feel. When Ava had initially thought of Maggie going into a nursing home, she imagined odours of boiled cabbage and fermenting wee, but the old convent house smelled of incense, melting candle wax and cinnamon, a churchy smell that seemed to come from the nuns themselves.
Just as Ava was about to turn into Maggie’s room, she took a deep breath, as if to brace herself. Maggie was sat on her comfy chair, with her feet up on the coffee-coloured suede pouffe Ava had purchased for her. She was facing the window overlooking the gardens and turned her head as Ava walked in.
‘Hi, Gran. How are you doing?’ Ava was aware of her over-breezy tone. She couldn’t help it. No matter how nice the carers were or how comfortable the home felt, she still struggled with a lump in her throat when she visited Maggie. To compensate for her rush of emotions, guilt mingled with sadness, she tried to sound all carefree and bright whenever she arrived. Always the same chirpy tone, which Ava knew rang out as forced and unnatural. She longed to go back to the days when Maggie was the carer, the responsible adult who made all the hard decisions, and protected Ava from the harsher side of life. Selfish as that was, she couldn’t help but want to revert to their former safe and comfortable relationship.
Maggie looked up and tried to smile. One side of her mouth gamely cooperated.
‘Ah, there you are,’ she said as if she had expected Ava to appear at that exact minute. The stroke had affected her speech, but Ava could understand her well enough.
‘The shop was busy today, Gran. Hazel took another standing order for that big hotel at the bottom of Royal Avenue. I made a lovely arrangement of those scented stocks you like with cream germini and blush pink roses with just a few touches of baby’s breath spray. You would have loved it.’ Ava tried to keep the conversation going, knowing that Maggie wasn’t up to saying much.
‘Aye,’ Maggie managed, and waggled her head in an approximation of a nod of agreement while raising her good hand to point to the vase on the windowsill filled with lilac, pink and white lisianthus which Ava had brought in a couple of days before. Maggie’s fingers were gnarled claws, mutated by arthritis and old age. Ava took a tissue from the bedside cabinet and wiped the spittle collecting in the corner of Maggie’s sunken hole of a mouth. Without her false teeth to give her face form and structure, her whole mouth looked like it was turning in on itself, an empty cave of unsaid words.
‘Shall I change the water for you; keep them fresh for a little bit longer?’ Ava asked, not waiting for an answer and already busying herself with the flowers.
Ava tidied up the room a little. Moving the jug and the glass from the bedside table, straightening the already perfectly made bed and plumping up the starchy-covered pillows; she liked to pretend she was being useful and that she was still looking after Maggie. Her boggy, peat-coloured eyes were misted by age, but still held Ava’s gaze with an intensity which time could not diminish.
For once, Ava had loads she wanted to say. She longed to pour her heart out about Finlay, call him all the bad names under the sun, and have Maggie tell her he wasn’t worth crying over. Instead, she launched straight into the mystery home.
‘Gran, I’m thinking of moving to a new house. Would you mind?’ Ava emptied the murky, stagnant water from the jug which still held the pink and lilac but
wilting lisianthus she had brought in a week earlier. The heating was always turned up too high in the rooms, so the flowers died quickly, a scummy mildew building up on the inside of the vase.
Maggie just stared ahead, watching the gardener, through the window, manoeuvre his sit-on lawnmower over the flat stretch of lawn.
‘I’m not thinking of selling Moonstone Street, it’s your home after all. But something so strange has happened, Gran. I’ve inherited a house. A lovely, big, old house. Nothing this exciting has ever happened to me before, Gran, and I just want to run with this and see where I end up. Do you know what I mean?’
Ava was aware she was rambling, but Maggie’s lack of response made Ava want to fill up the silences. She turned the tap off and replaced the jug on the bedside cabinet with a fresh bunch of lime-green hydrangea and pink curcuma.
Since seeing Finlay with that girl, Ava had been convinced she was doing the right thing. Life was supposed to be about growing, experiencing new things, moving onwards, but all Ava had been doing, for the last God knows how many years, was waiting time out. Letting life drift past her instead of rushing headlong into it.
She had spent the previous night torturing herself, visualising her life ten years, twenty years, from now, and the only picture she could foresee was one where she was sitting in the floral green patterned armchair in Moonstone Street watching wildlife documentaries with only Chris Packham for company. No harm to Chris Packham but she needed something more than conversation about nesting and sibling owls eating each other to keep her warm at night.
Number ninety-seven was an opportunity to be grasped. She didn’t know what it would bring, but surely something different, something more, was better than what she had at present.
She sat down close to Maggie, their knees touching. Maggie was wearing the navy trousers Ava had bought for her from Marks and Spencer with a nylon cream blouse buttoned up to her scrawny, tortoise-like neck. One of the nursing attendants would have washed and dressed her that morning. It was a Sunday, so they always tried to dress everyone in their good clothes.
Maggie was smiling her crooked, lopsided smile and with her good hand, she tried to reach over to pat Ava’s knee. It was as close as Ava was going to get to a sign of approval.
‘You used to dance everywhere. Those feet never sat still; dum de, dum de dum, I’d hum and off you’d go. Took you to Maria Black’s the Irish dancing class up the Ravenhill Road, do you recall?’
‘Of course, I remember.’ Ava was used to this. Sometimes, Maggie would go off reminiscing, seemingly oblivious to the conversation they were having.
‘The costume cost me a right few bob even though I bought it second-hand off Bridie McLetham. You swirled around and around in it, the full skirt floating out with your every turn. It was royal blue with beautiful swirls of coloured interlinking embroidered chains. A cape sat on your shoulders held on by two brooches I found down in Smithfield market.’
Ava smiled. Maggie’s face was alight with the memories. She was off on one. There would be no stopping her now; one story after the other would fill their conversation. Ava would be lucky to get a word in edgeways as Maggie would travel into the past.
‘Do you remember your wee rag doll? That wee cloth thing was threadbare by the time I threw it out. Holly Hobbie was her name and you carried it everywhere. Cried for days over that doll, you did. But sure, what was the point of keeping it when it was worn out? I wasn’t one for holding onto things for the sake of it.
‘Your granddad used to walk you along the Lagan. I used to say to him, go slow now she’s only a youngster, but he said you would skip along no bother, never complained or wanted carrying. If you did get too tired he would put you up on his shoulders. ‘Up in the sky’ you called it. You were the light of our world. Once Scarlett went, we looked to you to fill the void, and God knows you helped to mend my broken heart. Was it you or was it Scarlett he walked along the Lagan? I can’t remember. It’s all mixed up now.’
Since the second stroke, Maggie had really struggled. She seemed so frail and vulnerable, but Ava knew she was being well looked after. She could always give up work and spend her days looking after Maggie, but then she knew it wasn’t what Maggie wanted and besides, Ava wouldn’t be able to afford to hold onto Mount Pleasant Square with no salary coming in. Not that what she earned was a great deal. Still, she couldn’t complain since money had never been a priority before and now for the first time in her life she was working out how to maximise her income while cutting back on her unnecessary expenditure — all with the intention of ploughing every spare penny into Mount Pleasant Square. Just the bare essential maintenance work to make the house decent enough to live in was scarily expensive. She had toyed with the idea of taking in lodgers, but the thought of sharing with strangers was a step too far out of her comfort zone.
The plumber had told her that the whole heating system needed to be ripped out. She was pretty sure the house needed rewiring, and that would run into thousands of pounds before she even began thinking of the kitchen and bathroom remodelling. It was a crying shame that she did not have Finlay’s expertise on hand. Maybe it was worth giving him a call to give the house a once-over in a professional capacity.
In the wee lonely hours of the night, she wondered was she really being naive to take on the house. She had a romanticised view of scrubbing down skirting boards and unearthing original 1900s features, but in her heart, she knew it would be a hard slog just to make the house semi-habitable.
When she thought of the light coming in through the stained-glass window and the old cast iron bath, though it was stained a horrible shade of ochre, the wonderful view of the garden from the back bedroom and the quirky little walk-in cupboard which would have served as a pantry, she knew it would be worth all the hard work and expense.
Somebody wanted her to have the house, and it felt right to try to make a go of it. Maybe Maggie’s health would improve, and Ava could make the house comfortable enough to bring her home. In the meantime, she had a lot of work to do. Hazel was heading off on her romantic trip to Sorrento, so Ava was to be left in charge of the shop.
She had to sort out some finances to start the repairs on the house and she intended to make an appointment with that solicitor Amanda again, to try to find out the identity of her benefactor and ask her how she could go looking for her mother. She had done a search on Niamh’s computer in the vain hope that modern technology would lead her straight to her mother. She had typed “Scarlett Connors” into Google waiting to see what it would throw out at her. But all they could find were references to her music days. There was nothing to give them a clue as to what she was doing now or where she was living.
Maggie’s failing health had kick-started a whole range of emotions in Ava; most significantly, she couldn’t stop thinking about her mum. She was curious for the first time in her life. What was she like? Did she not care enough about Ava to check in on her from time to time? Try as she had to push such thoughts from her head, she had been unsettled by finishing with Finlay and the inheritance of Mount Pleasant Square. Something had shifted in her and for once she felt brave enough to go with it. Finding Scarlett, or at least finding out what had become of her, seemed important.
Perhaps Ava was getting old, nearly thirty and not yet settled down, and then thinking of Mount Pleasant Square too, it made her want to be part of a family. A proper family.
Every now and then over the years she had thought about tracking down her mum. But as she became older, she didn’t want to ask Maggie for fear of upsetting her. She assumed that Scarlett and Maggie had fought and that the rift had been beyond healing.
Sometimes when she was growing up she would daydream about Scarlett coming back for her. They would hug and kiss and make everything just perfect and be the best mother daughter team ever. She imagined Scarlett looking like Doris Day, all puffed up coiffured blonde hair and little matchy-matchy suits, shoes and a clutch bag. She would march right on in and they would all l
ive happily in Moonstone Street.
But deep down, Ava knew that Maggie had been good to her and was all she could ever wish for. For whatever reason, Scarlett couldn’t give her the security and love Maggie had lavished on her, and Ava would never forget that.
The door opened, and a nursing attendant popped her head round.
‘Tea for you?’ she asked in a voice still heavy with her Filipino accent.
‘Yes please, Nena.’ Ava accepted the two cups of tea and helped herself to the tea trolley biscuits when it was rolled in.
‘I will help you feed Mrs Connors. She looks good today. I gave her lunch and she ate all of it.’ Her dark eyes radiated compassion.
‘I’ll manage, thanks. You go and have a cup of tea yourself,’ Ava said as she set about helping Maggie sip the lukewarm tea. Like any small task of helping Maggie, Ava enjoyed doing it.
‘Oh, I’m too busy for tea. Everyone is waiting for their supper.’ Nena laughed, not complaining at all, seemingly happy to be needed.
Ava was touched by Nena’s gentle kindness. Nothing ever seemed to be too much trouble for her. Ava wondered who she had left behind in the Philippines to come to Belfast to seek work. Maybe she had left a baby girl in the hands of her mother, just like Scarlett had done.
Nothing was ever black and white. Everyone had their reasons.
Hey Joseph. Saw your Facebook post. Looked amazing.
One of those nights. They throw these mad parties, and everyone gets roaring drunk, but if you’ve any sense you stay sober enough to know your boss is watching.
Hope you behaved.
Of course. I’m always well behaved. How’s Maggie?
She’s having a snooze. I’m at the care home now.
Hope you are okay, too.
Yeah, sorry about the other night. I’m pathetic.
Didn’t like to say. You know he doesn’t deserve you.
According to Niamh, I didn’t deserve him.
A Posy of Promises_a heartwarming story about life and love Page 4