In White Ink

by Elske Rahill

  But the items set in careful clusters on Suzanne’s kitchen table were things touched too intimately with another’s ownership to ever become a prized possession. There was an upholstered jewellery box, its folds clogged with dust and a woozy pallor across the lid where years of sun exposure had pulled the colour from the once-pink satin. A small plaster-cast dolphin emerged pompously from crumbling waves. A wax octopus held an unlit candle in each tentacle. In the centre of the table lay a heap of plastic dolls, twisted and naked but for one Barbie’s tiny glittering heels.

  Usually Suzanne was considerate with me, speaking slowly, miming with a dedicated zeal the words I couldn’t catch. I was her petite fille irlandaise – little Irish girl, and when she said that my cheeks went hot and sometimes she hugged me to her loose throat. But she was speaking too fast now and I couldn’t unpick the phrase into its component words. To show incomprehension I shrugged, stuck my lower lip out and pushed a fart sound through my mouth. It was a gesture I had learned since moving here. It could be used to mean ‘I don’t care’ or ‘I don’t know’ or a range of negatives in between. Suzanne pushed the bottle at me with hurtful impatience, and when I continued to stand dumb she gave a reluctant sigh and used that deep, slow voice she had for speaking English: ‘Dez eet smelle?’

  I sniffed the bottle and shook my head, but she took it from me anyway, sniffed it and scowled and turned towards the sink. As she waited for the bottle to fill I thought I saw her taut form fold against the draining board like a lapse in concentration. Then her neck stiffened and her shoulders squared, and her parts were pulled back in together by a deep, loud gasp. She turned the bottle upside down and let the water glug out. Still with her back to me she gave the explanation: ‘Brigitte m’a envoyé un SMS.’

  I tried to wipe the sting from my face before she turned around. It was the way she spoke her daughter’s name – the Br and the gi plunging down into her gut – depths impenetrable to me – and then the pretty, sorrowful inflection at the end; the lovely sounds she had given her daughter to know herself by: Brigitte.

  My name was Alison. These days it is Ali, because the French have a particularly ugly way of pronouncing the full name: Aleezun.

  I had no memory of my mother speaking my name. She called me ‘her’ – ‘I can’t stand the sight of her.’

  I had used gestures and a dictionary to tell Suzanne this and she had not cocked her head in pity. She had written the new words out for me, and made me conjugate the verbs. ‘Et voilà,’ she said, ‘les mots pour raconter votre histoire’ – the words to tell your story. Suzanne said I was lucky to have an uncle with a kind wife, and my warm, unruly cousins. My father had done the right thing. I would settle in fine.

  Most days I neither thought nor spoke of my mother at all, but sometimes, while I was working, Suzanne would look at the table and push a question into the silence, a hint of incredulity in the tilt of her brow – What did I mean about my mother’s nails? What was I trying to say about her nails? It pleased me to think that Suzanne mused over such things. It made me light and giddy, to think that she must have been playing my story over and over, fleshing it out for me with her adult mind and strange words.

  The nails – I told Suzanne about my mother clawing for my face and being wheeled off, and me standing to let her do it, and disappointed then when the room was empty – and I wondered if she believed me or if she suspected I was leaving certain bits out, if she knew, and was too polite to say, that it was some dark, jagged thing in me that made my mother the way she was. I tried to lend plausibility to my story by telling her the medical bits, but it all slipped into moments and scenes – my mother’s voice, or the slide of her jaw, or the way my father’s chest would swell with sucking in his sighs. I knew that my mother hadn’t always been ill and I knew I had heard, over and over, the name for what was wrong, but the word – even the English word – wouldn’t come to me. So I told Suzanne instead about how my mother’s hands shook more and more. I tried to describe how pain twisted her face and shrank her hands to the curling gristle of chicken feet. I had some vague idea that she was expected to die soon; the conclusion to a chain of broken neurons that my birth had set going, but I didn’t tell Suzanne this.

  Once, while I was conjugating aller – to go, Suzanne, who had been gazing attentively at the moving pencil, suddenly looked at my face and puffed out through soft lips – a dignified version of the fart sound. ‘Mais...’ Her head made a gulping dip, as though drinking in some sudden information. She spun a pencil between her fingers and watched it as she spoke. Motherhood is a strange thing, she said. The birth of her Brigitte had made her mad, ‘une tsunami de sentiment’. She had been afraid of drowning in it; the love was too much. Sometimes it just goes wrong, said Suzanne, and there is no one to blame. Things go wrong. ‘Et voilà.’

  *

  Suzanne placed the washed bottle on the draining board and bent to the cupboard beneath the sink. She took out a tall, pale green bottle with a cap on it as big as a cup. It was the same fabric softener my aunt used for the baby’s blankets. The label showed the hand of an infant, fingers open in sleep and a feather resting on the puff palm. She unscrewed the cap, poured some of the softener into the empty bottle, and topped it up with water from the sink. Then she screwed on a spray-pump, shook the bottle and shot a spritz at the air, releasing the sweet, sleepy musk into a room more familiar with the odours of bleach, cigarette smoke, and perpetually stewing coffee. Suzanne used bleach for everything – a blocked toilet or an infected toe. The merciless smell of chlorine still sends a thrill of love into me.

  I wanted to ask about our lesson. She had told me to come at half past ten and not to be late, and I had left a promising snake hunt and rushed to her flat, afraid of disappointing her. As she came towards the table I prepared to speak, but her mouth was set in a hard, distracted silence that sent my mind scrambling and slipping on the vocabulary that she was keeper of, and the questions collapsed in my mouth.

  She picked up the jewellery box and made several twists to a key on the side. Eyes all expectation, she pushed it bluntly towards me: ‘Ouvre’ – open.

  When I didn’t move, she nudged the air with her chin: ‘Ouvre.’

  The inside smelled neglected and unclean, like the dirtier corners of basements. There was a removable shelf in a darker pink satin flecked with mould. It had little clefts for the rings and rectangular compartments for earrings. A tiny plastic ballerina twirled to a weary melody. She had a tutu made from gauze and a hurriedly painted mouth, slightly off centre.

  ‘Belle – eh?’ said Suzanne. The music began to fade and blur as though the box was slowly drowning.

  Suzanne took it from me and wound the key again. She put it to her ear. ‘Ça marche?’ – does it work? She was going deaf. The doctor had told her she had twenty-five per cent hearing and it would get worse. He wanted her to have an operation, but Suzanne could read lips and hands and faces. She said she got along fine so long as she had her sight.

  I nodded, ‘Ça marche,’ as the music began to sink again. She lifted out the insert to show me the snarl of jewellery beneath, and untangled one of the rings – a bulbous thing made from glass in a jelly-sweet shade of blue. She put it on her pinkie and sighed wetly, and for a moment I was afraid that tears would bubble up from her throat.

  ‘Voilà.’

  She couldn’t hear the scraping sound her phone made on the laminate, as she slid it across the table to me. Brigitte’s message was simple and formal. It said only that she would be coming by this afternoon to collect her things. I looked at Suzanne who nodded, took off the ring and tapped a steady beat on the table, her hand clenched so stiffly that the blood shrank from her bulky knuckles, showing them in all the white violence of bone beneath tired skin. ‘Voilà...’

  She spoke in quick, careless French now, and it was up to me to follow. We had to sort through the things, throw out what wasn’t needed and pack the rest in boxes for Brigitte. It was final. She would be marryi
ng ‘ce mec. Son musulman’ – that guy. Her Muslim. She would make a child for him, Suzanne said, ‘c’est sûr’ – for sure.

  Since arriving here I had learned to speak some French, and how to tell a harmless snake from a viper. My cousin Annie had taught me how to set a flea trap by placing a candle in a pan of water, how to change a nappy and how to tell if a melon was ripe, and a week earlier I had found a painless scrap of blood in my gusset – promise of a long-hoped-for puberty. From Suzanne, though, I was learning exciting things that belonged to a different sort of order. I had learned that a woman could become pregnant by accident, and that this could mean many different things. There were options other than the molten sea that drowned my mother, or the rowdy waves my aunt bobbed cheerily along with in her daily effort to keep drawing breath. A few months before I came here, Brigitte had found herself pregnant. The father was a stupid man obsessed with fishing and Brigitte, though loneliness had driven her more than once into his bed, did not want to marry him. ‘C’était pour la sauver de lui que je l’ai poussée...’ Suzanne explained – it was to save her from him that Suzanne had driven her daughter to the clinic and had the thing undone. It was an act I had heard alluded to by older girls at school back in Ireland, but only as a mythic horror involving perverse midwives in backstreets. It was a simple thing, Suzanne had explained – a little tablet to stop a thing before it started – but it had been a mistake. Brigitte was old enough to make up her own mind. She had taken the abortion badly, and falling under the influence of son musulman was the ultimate punishment for her mother.

  I had learned all this steadily over the course of our lessons, and in the last six weeks I had seen the chubby, too-adult daughter grow sullen and hulking as she passed from her bedroom to the kitchen and back again. The brave skirts that had once stretched across her shuddering brown thighs were replaced with longer ones, then loose trousers, and finally floor-skimming curtains. And as her daughter seemed to shrink beneath increasingly opaque layers of fat and fabric, Suzanne in her brightening rage began to unwrap for me all sorts of knowledge I had never thought to look for.

  Sometimes she got up from the table and disappeared into the small room which in the other houses served as a pantry. She would emerge with a book or a pamphlet. It was books that had made her reject her bourgeois upbringing, she said. She didn’t always open them, just ran her hand over their covers, as though pulling strength from the object itself. I thought of the words as little bricks, the pages as walls; structures that held her up when her straight spine seemed so close to tumbling. Suzanne told me about a socialist colony she had once lived in with Brigitte’s father, where shitting in private was discouraged. The thought of it sent a guilty tremor through me. She had been injured at protests, Suzanne. She showed me a little dent that ran crooked along one shoulder. Her flat was like a dusky cocoon in which my mind worked clearly and more than it ever had, the links connecting, the channels opening to life. Ideas sparked like forest fire, catching branch after branch as I munched the apple that she had peeled and cored and cut into clean wedges, until my brain was a mighty thing, fierce and crackling.

  But this business with the musulman had only become more and more serious. It was starting to make Suzanne quieter, less sure when she spoke. Now, Brigitte had stopped coming home – she was living with her boyfriend’s aunt. Over the past week Suzanne had been shaking her head a lot during our lessons.

  ‘Comment peut-elle trahir ses sœurs comme ça?’– how can she betray her sisters like this?

  I was sorry to see Suzanne’s cheeks white with grief, pink blooms of rage on her neck. But she was all alone now, and I had started to wonder about the empty room. I knew my aunt could have done with one less mouth to feed. And in French fille can mean daughter, as well as girl.

  *

  Suzanne asked me if I had any interest in the dolls. I shook my head. She asked me if my little cousins might. I did not want to touch the smooth limbs and tiny, hinged waists so I shook my head again, and she swept them into a black sack with sudden brutality.

  She did not give me a choice about the jewellery box.

  ‘Pour toi’ – for you.

  *

  When we had folded Brigitte’s clothes carefully into boxes, stacked her books into crates and wrapped her small porcelain figurines in newspaper, Suzanne said she had a special job for me to help her with. From a high shelf she brought down an old doll with a cloth body, stiff limbs, and friendly plastic head. It was as big as a real baby. It had lively painted eyes, a pretty nose and a clumsy knot for a navel, but the hair was an obscene mat of yellowish strings and there were red felt-tip swirls all over its face. Suzanne cradled it in the crook of her elbow, her gaze tilting down like a lamp, in the same way as I had seen my aunt watch the baby at her breast. With balls of cotton dipped in nail polish remover, Suzanne worked away at each of the chicken pox. Her eyes stayed fixed on the doll’s face while the spots were erased one by one, and she explained the next step of our project. She was running out of time, she said. She needed to sew up the dress she had knitted for the doll, so she would finish that while I untangled the hair. It was Brigitte’s favourite toy when she was a child, and it would help Suzanne, to know her daughter would have something to hold.

  She used a green-backed sponge to clean a workspace on the table, opened her knitting bag and laid out the parts for the dress: the back, the front, a daisy-shaped button, a coil of yellow ribbon and a small ball of extra yarn for the collar. It was a beautiful, simple thing all in fine white cotton yarn with pearl stitching along the hem.

  Suzanne showed me how to spray the hair with her fabric softener mixture and work out the knots with a wide-toothed comb. She sewed up one of the shoulder seams, watching me the whole time, and began to pick up the collar stitches, hardly glancing at her hands while she worked. She had a clever way of sewing up her knitting from the outside so that no seam was visible. She used a thick, blunt needle with a little bend at the tip.

  I set to my task with meditative concentration, taking a small section at a time and starting at the ends. It was not easy – some of the knots seemed only to tighten to lumps, and more than once I was tempted to snip them with scissors, but Suzanne gave me a sharp knitting needle and showed me how to stick it in the centre of the knot and wriggle it out. My neck began to ache from hunching over the doll on my lap, but I didn’t raise my head until I had worked the hair into a syrupy slick on the table.

  By then the completed garment was hanging on the back of a chair and Suzanne was smoking a cigarette at the open window.

  She took her time with the cigarette. Then we began to dress the doll. The dress fit her perfectly. There were little eyelets along the breast-line, and Suzanne put the yellow ribbon on a darning needle and threaded it through, so that the two loose ends met in the centre of the doll’s chest. She asked me to tie a small bow at the front. The flower button closed the dress at the back of the doll’s thick neck, just covering the sequence of tough, dark stitches where cloth met plastic. Then we sat her on the table. I held her upright while Suzanne parted the hair, squeezed out the excess liquid and wove each side into a tight plait, which she closed firmly with brown rubber bands, her lips small with concentration.

  *

  Brigitte did not arrive in a hijab as Suzanne had feared. A thick black band kept every scrap of hair from her forehead and temples, but before entering she had let her scarf fall down around her neck. Her hair was tied in a loose plait at the back and we could see that she had dyed it a glaring shade of beetroot.

  She avoided facing her mother, locking eyes with me as she kissed Suzanne on each cheek.

  Brigitte’s skin looked lighter, and her eye sockets had retreated deeper in her face and when her eyes met mine I felt a tantalizing chill. She moved differently. Her body seemed more agile now under the loose camisole and thick long skirt and her mouth was set in the sort of dignified, closed smile I had only seen in old portraits of princesses.

  Su
zanne had warned me about this. She had told me Brigitte had been brainwashed by the musulman, and to her, we were all dirt. We did not count and she could not hear anything we said. She had used the word gentiles – we were gentiles to Brigitte. I didn’t know what that meant. I thought of fancy ladies with long gloves and complex hairstyles, the bourgeoisie that Suzanne so despised.

  ‘Alors, le mariage?’ – so you are marrying him?

  Brigitte said nothing. She rolled her eyes, and her lips made a slight twist at the edges, which I could not read. She began to lift things out of the boxes and put them back on Suzanne’s round kitchen table. Suzanne lowered her mouth to my ear. ‘Ce sont des représentations de personnes. Ils sont interdits’ – they are representations of people. They are forbidden.

  As I stood before Suzanne, watching Brigitte gently remove the dolphin and the figurines, and many of the books, I thought I could feel Suzanne’s weary hurt pulling heavy in my limbs. I could sense her throat tremble behind me. I would not be able to hold her if she fell, but I pressed the back of my head to her shoulder to steady her. She took a small, high breath as Brigitte lifted out the doll that we had lovingly groomed. The neat red oblongs of Brigitte’s nails tightened on the soft body, but her face didn’t change. She brought it to her lips for a moment, and smelled the hair.

  Suzanne turned away, moving to the other side of the room, which had an old couch in it and a TV. She sat on the couch and flicked blindly through a newspaper, her face angled away from us. I stayed and watched Brigitte.

  Brigitte glanced at her mother, and when she thought she would not be seen, she pulled some towels out of one of the boxes, laid the doll gently inside, and tucked the towels back on top.