by Elske Rahill
*
‘Is this finished?’
The waiter was hovering at Pam’s plate. Eoin nodded. ‘Yes, thanks. I think you can take it. Thank you. Thanks.’
As the waiter lifted the dish onto his tray, Eoin spotted Pam approaching. She had brushed her hair to a block of static and clipped it up at one side.
‘I let them take your plate,’ said Eoin.
‘I’ve been thinking about that gift, Eoin. I think you should take it back and put it in the car. We can give it to her another time.’
‘I let them take your plate, Pam.’
She leaned in, put her face in front of his. ‘Eoin, did you hear me? I think we shouldn’t give that gift just today.’
She had touched up her make-up – red paste already drying to scales on her lips, and a layer like nylon over the hatch of lines that scrunched her mouth.
‘I thought we talked about this.’
His wife shut her eyes for a moment, took a breath to speak, and opened them.
‘Okay, but Eoin—’
‘Just leave it now. Just leave it and enjoy the wedding.’
Pam put an elbow on the table and lowered her forehead into the cradle of her palm. Her nails were like porcelain, and thicker than nails should be. She had been to a salon for them. She wrapped the other hand around the back of her neck, and rubbed back and forth, back and forth. All bulking veins and leathery creases, Pam’s flesh was testament to the sleepless nights, the dull work and a mother-joy that had wrung her dry.
‘—I just think it might be best to give it to her another time.’
It was hard for Eoin to look at his wife sometimes, at the thick middle of her, and those silver scars that rucked like claw marks across her belly. Making love was hard after, and it was a long time before it stopped feeling like a wrong thing and a sad thing. Pam’s breasts had suckled their child and her thighs were the strong things that had fed her into the world. His wife’s body had become a site of grief with no natural way to heal, and she had turned on it, turned away from it. She did not often shave her legs now, or have her hair done, or buy pretty things and like herself in them. He did not at all like the way the salon had made her nails.
Eoin lowered his voice. ‘I don’t understand you, Pam. I think Clara will be delighted...’
But the room hushed to the tink of silver against glass.
*
‘When Brona and I decided to raise a family...’ began Steve Mahon.
Steve Mahon was an eejit. ‘Raise a family’ – was that even an expression? It sounded like raising pigs, harvesting corn. It sounded like an investment. Steve was mole-eyed with the drink. His comb-over had loosened to cottony tufts. He was proud, so proud of his daughter here today, he said, opening a palm to the room and swinging it around to present Clara, who smiled and touched the sheet of tulle that hung either side of her face.
‘I hope you’re all enjoying the splendid meal...’ Steve said. ‘The wines are from three of the vineyards near our summer house in Italy...’
Eoin felt an ugly grin start on his lips, and he lowered his head. Pam didn’t like it when he sneered. Recently, she told him it was the thing she least liked about him, and a thing that wasn’t there when she married him – he had become sneery, she said, he ‘sneered at others’ and it didn’t suit him. She had a merciless way of putting things sometimes.
To stop from sneering he kept his eyes off Steve Mahon, flitting his gaze instead over the other guests. There were many strange headpieces – pillbox hats and feathers and gauze. One girl wore a miniature top hat set in a bed of spiky netting. The bright Easter-time dresses seemed foolish now under the dim chandeliers, like flowers opening to the night.
Some flowers folded up at nightfall and opened in the morning – you could catch them doing it if you chose the right time. Poppies were like that, and crocuses. Others stayed blooming until they were ready to die. Daffodils stood soldier-straight on their straws, beaming moronically into the darkness. It made them whackable, easy to stomp or hack, easy to cut and take indoors. Eoin preferred crocuses. He liked the neat oval beginning of them, the way they cracked clean out of their waxy buds, unfussy in their prettiness. They used to grow at the back of the garden around the roots of the plum tree; pale purple and white and egg-yolk yellow, and a few buttermilk ones shot through with dark flecks like poisoned veins. When had they stopped coming up?
Someone was looking at him. It was the jowly man he had seen perusing the table plan earlier. He was sitting two tables away, a hulking presence, looking at Eoin with that bulldog expression. As Eoin turned away, he caught a mirthless jeer in the man’s hooded eyes. Eoin had seen him before somewhere. He had known him, perhaps, but he was changed.
*
There had been no mention of Sharon at the ceremony – ‘Why would there be, Eoin?’ Pam shrugged. He thought that perhaps Clara would remember her in the speeches, but the bride didn’t speak. Only her father, then the best man, and last the groom.
While his new son-in-law spoke, Steve Mahon sat small in his chair; his flat-topped head low like an owl’s in his ruffled neck, the small eyes dark and slow in his pink face. How did Steve feel? What was it like to watch his daughter sit silently like that, skinny and pale and quiet, about to start out on a married life?
It wasn’t stoicism that Sharon’s death had brought, but a toughness of sorts. Even though Eoin could be brittle now – given to rages and bouts of mute panic, sudden shyness and, Pam said, a tendency to sneer – these were only an outward reflex. A still grief wrapped steely around his core. Nothing quite cut beneath the skin now. But people with children had so much to fear.
A few days after Sharon was born, Eoin had changed her nappy for the first time. He had never thought to wonder what the baby’s genitals would be like – not while he waited for her birth. Not when she came out slimy and writhing and was handed to him in a towel. He hadn’t thought to prepare himself for anything more shocking than odour and mess, but the baby vagina terrified him – a tense swell and no hint of hair and that strange runnel like a well-healed scar. He thought how a man’s penis would measure the torso of his tiny daughter; destroy the complex and tiny intricacies that she was made from. It was a relief, somehow, when he read some years later that baby girls are all sealed up; that no man could manage it, even if he wanted to, though why that fact could offer any kind of comfort was unclear to him.
In the first week of Sharon’s life he came home from work to find Pam chopping onions in the kitchen. Slicing so easily like that through crisp layers of bulb, the knife had made him keenly aware of the thin blub and skin that covered his daughter’s little chest – the blisters of unsprouted nipples, the tilt of her ribs, and inside her a mystery of movement and blood that chance had set going. He ran immediately to their bedroom, bent into the Moses basket and put his face to the sleeping child until he was sure that the neat parcel of her was all intact, all the organs in their place, the breath moving in and out of her the way it should. Pam had followed him to the door, the knife still in her hand, and it had taken all his strength to keep the images at bay. He had only a blind fear of the harm that could come to their child – the ease with which she could be destroyed, if some madness should send the knife into the tiny chambers, the dark mechanics of her heart.
He had trouble believing in her at first – a pinprick trill on the ultrasound, a belly-swell, a bloody squelch, a cry, and here a whole person looking back at him. He had been shocked and awed by her birth; too shocked, perhaps, too humbled to feel anything as intimate as love for the child. That had come a few days afterwards; her little body resting lengthways on his forearm, her head in his palm. He held her while Pam took a shower. He knew something then that would underpin every concern or joy that came with being her father; the palpable density of her skull in his hand; the secret vibrations of all her cells, and the detail – the specifics of each ear curve and chin fold and the way that one finger lifted senselessly away from her little fi
sts, pivoting blindly.
Eoin had learned to drive later than other men. He was already twenty, which had seemed, at the time, like a shameful thing. His daughter was three months old when he got his licence. Once, on a Saturday morning, he had taken a driving lesson with her in the back, to soothe her to sleep while Pam slept off a difficult night. He had been robbed of a thrill, he thought, for he could never enjoy the speed, the latent danger of it. He was never at ease when he drove. It was the image of Sharon that plagued him – not of Sharon, but of her absence; a vague blot of shadow concealing his daughter’s face. Nothing more detailed than that. Whether she was in the car with him or not: when he took a corner a little too hurriedly, when he cut into the fast lane, late for a meeting, his daughter’s face was there at his shoulder, obscured by some wound that his recklessness might make.
It was only months after her death that he realized that the fear had gone – the thing had happened, the threat that had anchored his daily life. In the end it had nothing to do with his driving.
It was a violence inside her – a mutiny of her own body – that killed Sharon. She fell in school one afternoon from a heart attack. The hospital said it was probably anorexia, but that did not seem plausible to Eoin. People don’t have heart attacks at seventeen, just because they have lost some weight. Pam had said something about Sharon not eating properly – maybe once or twice she had said it, but Sharon had looked fine to him – bright-eyed, energetic, and she was doing well at school. They decided to let things lie until after the Leaving Cert; they decided that together. When that stress was gone, perhaps Sharon would get her appetite back. That is probably what would have happened, if the heart attack had waited.
They sent the GP to the house to persuade Eoin of their diagnosis, but by then he knew it was simpler than that anyway – the mysterious pulsing that had started in his wife had stopped. The organs were no longer in their places, doing the things they should, the lungs no longer filled.
She hadn’t been accepted into art college. That had really upset her; it was the one thing she wanted from life – to be an artist. It was Eoin who had gone to collect her portfolio and – he couldn’t help it – he had told them what he thought of them. Her art teacher, too, had failed to see Sharon’s real talent. It was something Pam didn’t quite understand either, because Sharon wasn’t good at art the way some more diligent children were – it was more like a special eye she had, a way of feeling things. Once, when Sharon was only ten, Eoin had bought a painting from one of the students who came door-to-door. It was a painting of a grey cat that Pam called mawkish. It cost quite a lot and Pam was angry, because only that morning Eoin had chastised her with the credit-card bill in his hand, yellow highlighter through all the unnecessary purchases she had made that month. ‘But she is an artist, Pam,’ he had said, and he didn’t know himself what he meant by that, except that there was something about his daughter that could be moved by things, and in the cat’s eyes, the slant of its head, he thought he saw something that might move her.
When they had gone to those museums in Vienna, Eoin and Pam were, for the most part, bored. The first one they went to had a tiny picture of a witchlike woman holding a womb with a dark foetus curled in it. He and Pam had looked at each other and shrugged, while Sharon stood in awe. In the next room, there was a huge painting of two men, naked, sitting side by side on their bottoms with their legs bent. Beside it was a matching portrait of two women – or two portraits of the same woman – with suspicious shadows beneath their naked bottoms. Sharon stood and wept. Standing beside her, Eoin began to see what was moving her – in the gaze of the women, and the gaze of the men, there was a childlike openness, a baffled understanding opening a chink to the terrible absurdity of matter.
A few months after Sharon’s death, Eoin did something very selfish. He ‘went AWOL’ – that’s what Pam called it. He had been back at work a week. One day, instead of going in, he drove to the airport. As soon as he arrived in Vienna, the practical nonsense of the whole thing became real; the cold of the city, the fact that he had no luggage and nowhere to stay. He lay awake fully clothed in a hostel that night and came back the next day. It was he who had wept then, standing in front of those paintings, not because they moved him, but because he could not find the thing his daughter had once seen there.
*
‘Clara, my darling,’ said the groom, taking his wife’s hand, coaxing her to her feet. ‘You have made me the happiest man in the world. Thank you for agreeing to be my wife!’
Clara stood small beside her husband now, peering shyly from the frame of her veil. There was a rumpus of clapping and whooping as the couple kissed. Beyond Pam’s profile, the big-faced woman was crying into a napkin. Her purple hat had finally shifted on her head, showing a nest of fine metal pins beneath.
Eoin turned to Pam. ‘I was just thinking – what happened to the crocuses?’
‘To the crocuses?’
‘Remember we used to have loads of crocuses at the back of the garden, all around the plum tree?’
‘The little yellow and blue flowers?’
‘Purply blue sort of. And white.’
‘They’re still there, Eoin. We still have them.’
‘Pam, I’m thinking I’ll go and get the painting. I’ll put it in the car. We can ask Clara over for tea maybe, after her honeymoon, give her the painting then. Or we could give it to her on Sharon’s anniversary, maybe.’
*
After the dessert came coffee and a plate of cigars for each table.
The waiter lowered the tray tenderly, as though there was something sensitive and alive in the leathery cocoons. Eoin picked one up and sniffed it. He twirled it between his fingers, and glanced at the large man two tables up, satisfied to see the low-slung eyes dance back at him with mockery. Eoin smiled, and the man nodded doggedly as though responding to a joke he already knew.
Steve Mahon spoke over a microphone. ‘The good staff of the Lough Cairn hotel have agreed to serve the cigars,’ he said. ‘But we have to smoke them outside. There are heaters out on the patio...’
A violet bridesmaid – Reuben’s mother – folded onto her husband’s knee.
‘Are they only for the men?’ she asked.
‘You can have mine,’ said Eoin. ‘I’ve no interest in cigars.’
‘You two go on outside. We’ll keep an eye on Reuben,’ Pam said.
*
Eoin closed the door behind him. Relieved by the cool quietude, he pressed his back to the embossed wallpaper and slid to the floor. The room smelled of new carpet.
His had been one of the first gifts on the table, but now there was a pile of boxes wrapped professionally in ivory and silver and steely sheens of blue. He would recognize his gift – it was just a small rectangle. He had used some wrapping paper left over from his nephew’s marriage. There were wedding bells on it, or maybe wedding rings, outlined in meagre streaks of glitter. Drink-logged and aching, Eoin laid his head on his knees. He could sleep now. He could stay here and sleep. It was only the thought of Pam, left all alone with the infant and the purple-hatted woman, that hauled him up on his feet to begin his search.
The couple had received many sets of glasses. Through the flimsy cardboard, Eoin could feel the swing of fragile hollows as he moved them box by box to the floor. Sealed envelopes slid about between the gifts. He made a stack of them at one corner of the table. He lifted a shallow, broad box – a cutlery set, thought Eoin, and from the dense weight he guessed silver. He thought of the bright knives lying muffled in rows of cherry-black velvet, fork tines and spoon bellies curving into each other’s backs, each held in its private slot. He and Pam had received silver cutlery for their wedding too.
His gift was under what might have been a vase. The heavy cube had been plonked right down on top of the little picture. He pushed it off with deliberate carelessness, toppling it on its side and causing a champagne bottle to thud to the floor. The tag was missing from his gift, and as he lifted it
he felt the crunch of smashed glass beneath the bubble wrap.
When he heard someone enter the room his mouth fell open, but no explanation came. It was little Clara. She smiled when she saw him – a big smile that made sinews of her cheeks – sliding her meagre figure in through the gap she had opened. She had her veil in her hand. ‘Hi,’ she said, shoving the door closed with her back. Without the veil her head looked too large for her neck. He saw that her ears still stuck out. He had forgotten about that. She looked at the gift in his hand. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘But it’s... it broke, so I’ll fix it. I’ll give it to you another time.’
She put her hand on his arm. There were patches of sandy make-up on her face, brown-blue pits beneath her eyes.
‘Congratulations, Clara,’ he said.
Then her bony arms were around his middle. She clung to him, a cool shoulder pushed up against his cheek. He put one hand on her back. With the other, he held the picture. He could feel the knobbly discs of her spine. Her breath fluttered in her throat. Was she crying?