Her diary was full of proof that being a mother didn’t take her mind off running the business. She was highly organised – the staff, the roster, deliveries, maintenance work to be carried out on the showers, somebody coming to look at why the mirrors were getting steamed up, a dehumidifier was needed. Things had been scribbled in by the children, they got into everything, it wasn’t Helen who wrote in the giant phone numbers, or the word Vagina, misspelled.
Unbelievable, the investor said.
Helen put her hand up to her mouth. She made a small gulping sound, then she threw up. A gush of thin vomit splashed across the accounts. There was no sick bowl. A tinted mush of toast and raspberry jam and tea spread out in cloudy smudges on the page. Mixed in with the mess of numbers, no mathematical logic, the totals began to dissolve.
The investor looked up thinking she’d got sick deliberately across the books to disguise them. The twin bridges of his eyebrows were up. He didn’t believe her puke. To him it was a clever twist to divert attention from the appalling trading balance, he recoiled with his elbow up for a shield.
Only when she apologised and put her hand on her belly, did he finally back off. There was an alarming sense of helplessness in the room when they realised she was pregnant. The lawyer ran out for a glass of water. The investor was no match for a coming baby – you should have told me, he said. He sighed at the futility of the day.
Helen’s friend, Martina, was waiting for him. She sat at one of the tables in the café reading the paper. Her espresso was long finished. The remains of a chocolate cake scribbled on a plate. She wore a scuffed blue leather jacket. Her T-shirt had the faded name of a rock band across the front. She wore canvas slippers, not designed for running away, her nails were painted black, her hair was tied up with rope.
She is from Kerry, a single mother. She has a boy a little younger than our girls. The father is Spanish, a building worker she met in London, Helen told me, he went to see the baby at the maternity hospital, then he disappeared, Martina came back to live in Dublin. She is a great singer. She once tried to make it in a band, getting a few gigs in London, not earning a lot.
Maurice Delaney sat down at Martina’s table, she didn’t get up. She made a clip-clop sound with her mouth. What children do to imitate horses. She put her hand on his arm, she made him laugh, they left in his car.
He was possibly a lot more like me than I was willing to admit. Apart from his shirts and his choice of music, the car he drove had a walnut dashboard, he may have had the same unstructured way of thinking, angry with himself for being so human, caught in a struggle between wanting and having, things you cannot own. He may have been misled into thinking this moment was positioning him at the centre of the world when it was really outside his control, he was lured into this hopeless scheme of existence with his eyes open.
The senseless set of financial records were left open on the desk in the office, a frightening representation of how false life can be. If you allowed yourself to think in that self-questioning way, everything turned to puke. It may have occurred to him that he had been shouting at Helen when he should have been thanking her for introducing him to her best friend. The business may have been sick, but it brought him great luck. Could he not count that as a dividend instead?
He is mad about Martina. She has no money, she works part time as a receptionist. The fact that she is a single mother gives him the feeling he can rescue her. He likes her eccentric clothes, the way she speaks to the taxi driver, the questions she asks the porter outside the Shelbourne Hotel. There is a husky trace of late nights in her voice. Over dinner, he orders the most expensive bottle of wine, she picks it up and drinks it by the neck. Her motherly calmness mixed in with her underground principles. She still goes to open-air rock concerts with her five-year-old boy on her shoulders, she still carries emergency food in her bag, sitting on a park bench to eat crackers and cheese, an apple sliced into small boats with a penknife.
Martina is a good listener. She brings out the rogue in him. He is happy to waste time and stand in front of the gates at Trinity College for the sake of being there, he loves the smell of the streets. He is unable to take his mind off her convent skin, the tattoo of a gecko on her left shoulder. Her smile reminds him that he only has one life, this chance of big love may not come around again.
Helen embraced the girls with furious affection. She let them feel her belly, she had cream doughnuts for them. We could not talk about what the investor said, we didn’t want them to hear, we were protecting them. Your anxieties will get into their dreams, Helen said to me whenever I was trying to be honest with them – let them be children.
We drove down to the small harbour and sat in the car having a ham sandwich, the cream doughnuts, drinks with straws, listening to a song on the radio that Helen remembered from being a child in Birmingham. The seagulls were lined up on the pier waiting. One of them landed on the bonnet of the car and the girls shrieked, he slid around on his yellow rubber feet and lifted off again.
Back home, we took our eyes off each other with work. Forced to stay apart in our worlds, making noise, drilling, sanding, putting on the washing machine. I heard her getting sick in the bathroom. I held her arm, but she waved me away – it’s all right, thanks. I found a way of hiding the speaker wires under the floorboards to prevent people tripping over them. My thoughts were routed along the heating pipes, with the wiring circuit, the flush-mounted sockets. It made me feel relevant, necessary, obsessed with straight lines.
We lived in a state of revision.
The girls sat at the table drawing pictures, the biscuit box with the colouring pens emptied out. Essie had the new baby arriving in a boat, Rosie had it coming from another planet, a pregnant spacecraft flying past the moon with the baby waving. They folded the pictures into an envelope and we posted it under the floorboards, a letter to the future.
Helen brought them upstairs to bed. They sat watching the evening coming across the sea. The lighthouse beaming softly into the bedroom, onto their faces, onto her belly. With their elbows on the windowsill, I heard them counting the seconds between each lighthouse beam. At my foldable desk downstairs, I tried to stop the circular pattern of failure and wrote down a description of the landscape under the floorboards, the safety beneath the room. The room light coming down in lines through the gaps, the pipes expanding, the wires pulsing, the foundations like huge hands holding. Nothing moving, only a spider crossing the letter with their handwriting.
Everything was down there, waiting quietly in the space between the floor and the ground, stored in the granite crust, in seams of quartz, in the water table, in the deep past at the centre of the earth.
It was the only way I could remove myself from this financial uncertainty. Immersing myself in memory. For a while each day, I stepped outside my life by writing down everything I remembered.
A house in Germany, four storeys high, the façade is brown, maybe grey, faces in the windows, somebody dropping a key down. The architecture is familiar to me. I know how many floors to the top, the smell of roast pork on the way up and a dog barking behind a door. A place I associate with my mother and father being happy, both in tears laughing at something.
The house is in the town my mother came from. Where we went to visit the aunt whose husband didn’t speak, he was in Russian captivity for eight years. When he was released in a small town on the east German border, there was a brass band on the platform to welcome him. He started an industry of bow ties in one of the rooms, we were told to pick one each. Another uncle who came back from the war and kept revising his life, over and over, wishing he could rewrite history, telling everyone how mistakes could be avoided, how to put oil on a bicycle chain, how to eat a sandwich. I thought of the aunt whose husband ended up in American captivity after a gunfight in which a bullet travelled like a high-speed mole through the ground beneath him. He once told me he could never forget the taste of soil, he picke
d up a piece of earth to sniff it.
I wrote down the story of the aunt living in the house below the castle in Salzburg, she got married to her husband by proxy, he stood saying yes in front of a senior officer in the Crimea, she said yes in the presence of a lawyer on the street where Mozart had lived. Her husband never came back, she got one letter, one visit back home, they had one daughter. After the war, people came to say they had seen him in captivity, she continued waiting for him.
Helen’s way of escaping the pressure is to call her mother in Canada. The phone is in the small breakfast room, next to the kitchen. She can sit down in a proper chair, with her feet up. There is a gas fire, the white element turns orange and blue while she tells her mother in Canada that everything is going great, business is thriving. The children are doing swimming lessons, and jazz dancing as well as ballet, art classes twice a week. She has been to the obstetrician, she’s feeling very well.
I hear her say that I knocked down the wall between the living room and the dining room, the house was full of dust for a while, a big yellow skip outside for weeks. All by himself, she says. It was not a load-bearing wall, I want her to add. It’s fortified with a steel lintel. So much space, she says. All one room now, even though it still has two doors side by side, you can take your pick, separate light switches for each part. She wants to know why houses were built with so many doors and small rooms, her mother says it was to contain the heat, people used to be terrified of draughts. And being overheard.
Listening to Helen talking to her mother, I can tell there is snow in Canada. It comes across the lake, her mother’s house is the first to get it, lake effect snow. The waves are frozen. Everything is white, the streets are deserted. The town is unrecognisable, the road signs are illegible, the courthouse is a solid block of ice at the centre of the square, trees with white arms up. A neighbour came to clear their drive, the sound of the shovel made the world seem like the inside of a fridge. The snowploughs are out, banks as high as houses, cars left submerged. They are spreading salt on the highways.
Her mother is the woman who looks at the frozen lake as she steps into her car. She drives through unfamiliar streets. She imagines streets that don’t connect, she is surprised to find herself passing by the ice rink. The spotlights and the country music playing over the loudspeakers, people skating anticlockwise like the traffic. Some of them are wearing coloured ski-suits, some of them have mastered skating backwards, they leave handwritten twirls on the surface.
She carries on, driving out onto the main highway, some cars have been left abandoned by the side of the road like white humps. She turns off onto one of the rural routes still covered in snow, white as a field, only the telegraph poles with lines like skipping ropes to guide her.
She wants an end to the argument.
There has been a fight. Nothing but silence between herself and her best friend Nessa. Have they come all this way to Canada just to avoid each other? Going to different hairdressers, circumventing each other in the shops, not waving, not talking, close as sisters, fighting like they were at home.
The rift came about when Nessa stopped paying her housekeeper from Jamaica, complaining about the ironing not being done correctly. The housekeeper went to Helen’s mother and asked her to intervene. Nessa came over to Helen’s mother and told her not to interfere. In a rage one afternoon, Nessa called the blue room Helen’s mother had brought over from Birmingham a heap of junk – tankards, really, only a farmer’s wife keeps tankards. Helen’s mother ended up telling her only true companion to bugger off.
Nothing cuts like a lost friendship.
The white landscape is meaningless. She drives through the snow to visit her friend, this can be repaired like a marriage. She intends to walk straight into Nessa’s country house and demand a drink, they will laugh it off. She picks up speed to get over the railway crossing, but the car hesitates. On the tracks, the wheels begin to spin, no forward, no reverse.
She steps out and leaves the door open.
There is a house nearby, some dogs barking. She is not a walker, better at entering rooms. A trail has been dug out from the road to the house, but it’s half covered in snow again. She moves sideways, hands out, her shoes sliding on the hardened ice. She stops to call out. The dogs come running, black and barking, not along the track but directly across the snow bank, swimming and snapping, saliva flung across their backs. She is a piece of immaculate fur, unable to run away.
The owner comes out pulling on his parka. He calls the dogs back. She points to the car on the tracks with the pink exhaust fumes.
Got to get my boots on, he says. Got to get my mitts on, got to get the Klondike.
Two planks under his arm, he has done this before, he knows by the sound of the hooter how far away the train is. He takes off one glove to show her the missing finger. He has a friend who lost his foot, another friend who coughed up his frozen larynx. He begins digging, gets her to hold the un-planed wood in her thin burgundy gloves. His breath is an engine. He frees the wheels and kicks in the planks, tells her to get back into the car – you got no hat, lady.
She drives away and hears the train hooting behind her. Her face is a mask when she gets home, her eyebrows white, her blonde hair a crystal gauze. She reaches the house and parks the car in the drive. The snow has begun to fall again. She remains motionless at the wheel, staring ahead, unable to open the door and go inside.
Her thoughts are frozen. She is trapped in the life she once had back in Birmingham, before coming to this winter in Canada. She remembers the city of happiness, the city of her best years, the city of singing and joking and not being mean with the drink and shoes thrown into the fire and brothers chasing each other across the lawn at night and no harm done. The city of great friendship, before Nessa went to live in this town by the lake in Ontario and everything slipped into memory. The city of great times became the city of unbearable loneliness, the city of fog coming up the stairs and people at the door with leaflets, campaigning to keep England for the English, warning about immigrants moving into the neighbourhood, she had to deny she was Irish – always say you’re from London.
Was that the reason for leaving? For deciding to take her ready-made family away and follow her friend into the future as though they could not live apart. And now, here they are, living within shouting distance across the snow and the landscape so quiet.
Behind her, after she went to live in Canada, it became the city of blood. The city of interiors ripped out of pubs. The city of young people crying and calling for help. The city of people counting children and people phoning each other throughout the night, days later, weeks later, reading the names of the dead published in the papers. The first of the bombs went off in a bar she had seen many times on the way into the city on the bus, young people going in dressed in the latest clothes, bell-bottom trousers, high boots, fur-lined jackets. Many of them were trapped underneath girders which had collapsed with the force of the blast, some had their clothes burned from their bodies. A warning had been given in advance of the explosion, but it came too late. The second bomb went off ten minutes later in a pub the police had just begun to clear, it had been placed at the bottom of the stairs, next to the entrance. Some of those killed were thrown through a brick wall, they were said to have been stacked on top of each other. Survivors spoke of a deafening silence, before the crying started, before people came to help and the rescue services arrived. Twenty-one people were killed that night and one hundred and eighty people injured.
It was a time of great distance in the world.
She left messages, notes pinned up by the public phone in the house where Helen lived in London at the time – call your mother. She checked the newspapers, some of the names were Irish, some of the faces seemed familiar, they could have been us. She saw the images on TV, the injured being carried away, the blood so black in the photographs.
By now, the snow has already cover
ed the windscreen. She gets out of the car and walks up the steps onto the porch. The heat inside the house makes her cry. She stands in the hall as though she cannot recognise the surroundings, has she made some mistake, has she got the wrong house, the wrong country, the wrong family around her? They bring her into the kitchen. They prise her shoes off one after the other like pieces of porcelain. They peel off her thin leather gloves, blowing warm family breath across her burgundy hands. They put her sitting a few feet away from the stove, staring into the flames, she is so cold she cannot speak. They leave her coat on. They bring the glass of brandy up to her mouth, just a drop or two across her lips.
There was a man sitting in a car outside the house. The girls had been asking what he was doing out there all day, staring ahead in a dream, not even the radio on, looking up at the windows of the house every now and then. What was he waiting for and why was I refusing to answer the door?
I was upstairs reading a book about the first people of Australia, the routes they had mapped out across the bare landscape in songs. You might think there was nothing to recognise but they knew every individual rock, every bone, every dead snakeskin, the black marks of previous fires. They could sing their way along a list of signs full of ancient memory on the ground and I thought it was similar for the people I knew in the shadow language, out in the west of Ireland, every rock had a story, they could speak their way home.
Helen was on the phone, laughing. Her mother was telling her funny things about Canada. Listening to her made me forget there was a man outside on the street waiting for me. Her voice seemed to physically pick the house up and relocate us all to Canada. It filled me with optimism. It made me believe there was a way out of all this.
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