Good Eggs

by Rebecca Hardiman

  “Did I ever tell you that’s what my mother used to call me?” says Sylvia.

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.” She sits perfectly still. “Yes.”

  Millie takes a breath and says, “Is this about the medical thing?”

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t help overhearing—are you sick? Sil? You can tell me.”

  Sylvia shakes her head no.

  Millie exhales. “Thank God. I felt sure—it sounded like you were talking to a doctor the other night… during dinner?”

  “I’m sorry. This is, like, totally unprofessional.” She wipes her sorrowful eyes with the back of her hand, flashing a tiny gray heart tattoo that she’d had done in San Juan or San Quentin, some bloody San. Sylvia sweeps the fluttering sleeves of her cotton tunic across her face. “I’m good. I’m fine.”

  “Maybe I can help?”

  Sylvia locks briefly into Millie’s gaze and then looks away. “I don’t think so.”

  “You can tell me, whatever it is?”

  She looks up at the ceiling, her hands balled into tight fists, which she actually shakes, and, in anguish, screams. “Aaaagh!”

  “What’s happened? You’re scaring me.”

  Sylvia’s face collapses into her hands. “That call you overheard? That wasn’t about me.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m not sick,” she says. “Sean is.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” says Millie, stunned and quite unprepared for such a revelation. “You can’t possibly mean your nephew, the healthiest-looking lad ever to be seen? But how could it be?”

  “I know, I know. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true.” Sylvia wipes her face, but tears continue to leak down it.

  “Sick how?”

  “He has a rare autoimmune disease. He’s had it for years and he’s been OK because it’s usually, like, dormant, but he’s had a few flare-ups over here.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “It’s his liver. Bad cells basically devour the good ones. The Irish doctors don’t have a clue.” She stops. “Sorry, no offense. You know I don’t mean it, but… It’s just so different over here. Like last week, he needed blood work but since it was a bank holiday weekend, there was no technician there until Tuesday.”

  “Some of our hospitals are only a fright. Where is he, which hospital? Beaumont?”

  Sylvia balks. “He’s been in and out of every one of them.”

  “Poor girl,” says Millie. “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

  Sylvia removes a minipacket of tissues from her bag and blows her nose.

  “I didn’t want to burden you.”

  Millie, with an eye to redemption in general, has a strong, uncharacteristic urge to solve this. She shakes her head back and forth, strokes the woman’s hand, and idly wonders if this is how to comfort someone. She can hardly remember, it’s been so long since her solace was required.

  “There’s nothing they can do? There must be something.”

  “That’s just it. There is,” says Sylvia. “That phone call… Apparently there’s some new treatment, it’s an experimental treatment. Stem cell.”

  “Oh, that’s something!”

  “Well, yes, but it’s—the whole situation’s impossible!” Sylvia throws her hands up. “It’s not even here, it’s in New York. Anyway, come on, I’ll stop being morbid. I’ll make us tea.”

  “Feck the tea. Why is it impossible? If there’s a treatment?”

  “He’d—we’d—have to go to New York,” Sylvia says. “There’s a hospital there, Columbia Presbyterian,” says Sylvia. “They specialize in treating this.”

  “That’s good news, right?”

  “It would be, if we could afford it. Well, the surgery—the worst part about it is—the hospital says they’ll do it for free because it’s some kind of cutting-edge thing—he’d be like their guinea pig—but we’d still need to get the airplane tickets and the hotel and the meals and all of that. It would cost thousands and thousands. I’ve been racking my brain for weeks now trying to figure out how to get us there. But it’s hopeless.”

  * * *

  After Sylvia leaves, Millie yanks up her aluminum garage door and quickly wrenches it back down, plunging herself into blackness. Her breath plumes into the tiny shed as she looks for a tool to address the frigid house situation, calling in a repairman being anathema, at least before she herself has tinkered with the radiators.

  Seeing as she’s here, Millie decides to perch on her little step stool and fire up a celebratory smoke. The cigarette tastes at once chemical and repulsive, but she smokes through this, sucks in another drag, and another, and begins to relax, letting her mind circle pleasantly back to the moment when she handed Sylvia—coerced her into, more like—a check. Sylvia’s relief and gratitude were infectious; Millie was near tears herself. €30,000 are her pennies for a rainy day. Sylvia has turned out to be her rainy day. The American had rejected it again and again, firming Millie’s resolve that Sylvia, and Sean, deserved it. It was what ought to be done. In the end, Sylvia would only accept the check as a loan. She’d even penned an IOU on the spot, at Millie’s kitchen table, and both had signed it.

  Millie looks through the garage window, smokes, thinks of Sean waking up a healthy boy in hospital, and then the eccentric anorexic, Maureen McMahon around the corner, who, in a few hours, will be pushing her toddler’s pram right past Margate. How the devil she’d gotten pregnant with two hockey sticks for legs and a handful of raisins for her daily breakfast (Millie has heard on good account) is an enigma. Still, the two of them are a delicious daily jolt of youth on this otherwise elderly stretch of road with its shriveled up fruit and veg. A few doors down, the O’Leary sisters, Finola and Mary, are a pile of withered aubergines. Noel Crowning, the creepy bachelor solicitor who lives in one of the new bungalows, with his dry lips and dripping nose, is a limp, dirty spud. And what about Millie Gogarty? She considers. “A date,” she announces to the garage. “Shriveled, but with meat left on it still.”

  When she returns to the house and first smells smoke, Millie brings her reeking fingers confusedly to her nose and then sets about prying valves open and shut in the sitting and dining rooms, until she reaches the kitchen.

  Inside, she is greeted by a hazy veil of smoke that clouds her vision. The oven is an inferno, flames at least two feet high, smoke ballooning wildly from its mouth, so much of it, and the stench of hot grease overwhelming. No alarm has warned her, yet her kitchen is, quite clearly, on fire.

  Millie cries out and backs away, shuts the door and stands for a horrified, paralyzing second. Not enough time to call for help; if she doesn’t put it out now, the whole room—the house even—could go up. She runs to the hot press, snatches a pile of towels and hurtles herself back into the kitchen, trying to cover the flames. But the towels do nothing; it’s as if she threw a teaspoon of water at a bonfire. Water. She turns to the sink, dodging flames and beginning to cough.

  Frantically, Millie soaks the rest of the pile under the tap. She hears sizzling as she whacks the drenched towels at the oven and the cabinets around it, which are starting to catch. It’s working, it looks as if it’s working. Millie steps closer toward the oven, so that the right-hand sleeve of her polyester robe instantly ignites. So focused is she, Millie doesn’t even notice this turn of events until the burning reaches her skin.

  26

  Aideen scrolls past Clean-Cut’s newest single, an original, “Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby,” and selects the Cramps from Sean’s latest tunes. Her ear tends to reject most of his choices—harsh, kinetic, furious—but she pays attention to the lyrics. After carefully applying Brigid’s mascara, she packs her things for the weekend in a borrowed duffel. She’ll win no cool points with Sean if she’s carrying the flash bag her mother had gifted her, all gold links and quilted stitching, big as a pizza pie. Mum had meant well, but it was galaxies off Aideen’s current style radar.

  For the other boarder
s in Fair House, this hour, just past four o’clock on a Friday, is the singular weekly high point, set giddily free, as they are, from their day-to-grinding-day institutionalized existence. Her roommates Abigail and Faye, often to be found bickering about the luxuriance of a certain mare’s mane or the length of its tail, are the last of this room to have left to catch their train bound for Kildare where they groom their Irish cobs or jump over ditches and fences on their show ponies. These small clashes are, in fact, rather funny and, though Brigid finds them dull, Aideen is growing to quite like both girls.

  Without notice, the dorm room door blasts open, slamming against the mint-hued cinder block wall.

  “Fucking wanker!”

  It’s Brigid, crying furiously and stomping toward her in maroon Docs recently acquired in Temple Bar and dark opaque tights thick as a hotel tablecloth. Aideen knows Brigid’s moods—her friend arrives at fury and good humor at breakneck speeds—but weepy like this, girly upset with evidence of pain quite plain on her face, this is new.

  “What’s happened?”

  Brigid throws her rucksack onto her bed—the two girls now sleep next to each other after Aideen, sensitive, by experience, to the potential of hurt feelings, had delicately negotiated a swap. Now Brigid removes a half-smoked fag, stinking and flaccid, from her jeans pocket. “I go to sign out, right? Bag’s all packed. And that bitch comes in—”

  “Bleekland?”

  Brigid nods and sticks the smoke between her lips and fumbles with agitated fingers inside her jacket for a light. She moves toward the large window crank.

  “Are you insane?”

  “I don’t care,” Brigid says, but then crosses the room and braces a full laundry hamper against the door.

  “You’ll be expelled!”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Seriously?”

  Brigid lights up, blows a series of perfect “O’s” into the chill air, though most of the smoke clouds right back into the room.

  “So I’m signing out and she puts her finger where I’m writing and says to stop. And I’m like, what the fuck? It turns out—can you believe this?” With her denim shirtsleeve, Brigid roughly wipes fresh, furious tears away. “So my dad’s phoned up and told them I’m not allowed to leave. I’m grounded.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I said. I said, ‘No, I have permission to go this weekend. It’s been three weeks.’ I mean—I’m supposed to meet Brian tonight at The Tiny Trickle. I have to go.” Aideen has yet to meet Brian, Brigid’s new nineteen-year-old pizza deliverer/drug-dealer boyfriend, but she’s been raving about how hilarious it is to get high with him, how you laugh about obvious shit until you nearly piss yourself and then, three minutes later, you don’t have the foggiest idea what was so funny. This had all sounded, to Aideen, a bit daft.

  “Put that out, OK?” Aideen watches a long tube of wobbly ash dangle worryingly over the windowsill from the crooked tip of her friend’s Silk Cut Purple.

  “So my dad, such a fucking wanker, he told the school that I can’t come home till Easter!”

  The ash drops and scatters. Aideen approaches, blows it away, thinks of her own father, who is beyond annoying half the time, but never cruel.

  “But why?”

  “Probably so he can bring all his models home to screw.” Brigid’s photographer father—dark and chiseled and worldly, a jaunty cap covering squinting eyes, from the one picture Aideen’s seen—and her mother separated when she was a baby, and he has full, if dubious, custody.

  “And he doesn’t even have the balls to tell me himself; this is coming from that sadistical piece of shit.”

  “Can’t you call him?”

  “He’s already on a plane to LA for some big event. And anyway, he’s not going to change his mind. He never changes his mind.”

  Aideen can think of nothing helpful to say.

  Brigid spies Aideen’s duffel. “You’re meeting him now?”

  Aware that her imminent joy will further upset Brigid, Aideen nods somberly.

  “Well then go. You’ll miss your bus.”

  * * *

  Town is crackling. Against darkening skies and the omnipresent threat of rain, shopfronts and windows are lit up. Aideen stops, listens to the rhythmic clicking of heels on ancient pavement, peals of laughter, bursts of chatter, roars of buses, car brakes, hawkers peddling fruit and brollies and knock-off Coach wallets. She pulls out her knit gloves from AllSaints, bulky and rocker-chic, Gerard’s Christmas gift to her, and passes pubs whose windows already sweat with the late-afternoon crowds gathering inside, end-of-the-workweek celebrations gaining momentum. When a door to one of these opens, she hears a snatch of Mum’s favorite band, the Waterboys. I wandered out in the world for years / while you just stayed in your room. Dublin revelry is underway. Ladies and gents, please!

  Now a sizable hen party moves en masse toward Aideen. The bride-to-be, in a white hoodie, THIS BITCH Is GETTING HITCHED spelled in rhinestones studded across it, is being smacked on the head with a quite large and pearly pink inflatable penis. Her mates, a loud group of twentysomething bottle-blond British babes, already blotto, make their way merrily through the streets, taunting solo men in their path in false posh accents: “You, kind sir! Won’t you take off your trousers, sir!”

  Aideen steps onto Grafton Street, whose pulse is visceral and contagious. Whenever she’s in town, Aideen ditches her torpid Millburn gait and picks up the pace. Mum used to bring her here on a Saturday, just the two of them, for a film and a burger and chips after. It’s so unlike Dalkey, where no location—not even the remotest cliff, the loneliest dirt path in the middle of fucking nowhere—is safe from discovery. She once came upon her postman eating his lunch beneath a private cluster of conifers in Dillon’s Park, gazing out at the craggy, wild beauty of Dalkey Island.

  “Hiya Aideen,” he’d said, surprised that she stood gawping at him. “Care for a crisp?”

  When she reaches Bewley’s, she leans, breezily, she hopes, against its shopfront window, inhaling rich blasts of arabica with every swinging open of the grand, glass-encased doors. She watches her fellow citizens pass, meet up, say hello, go inside. She tries to look bored.

  At 4:40, Aideen allows herself to look furtively up toward Stephens Green and down toward Trinity. The place is, as always, a madhouse and she wonders if she ought to go in and get them a table. But the plan—confirmed this morning—is to meet in this very spot.

  At 4:48, she distracts herself by studying a nearby couple. They’re young—eighteen maybe—and as soon as the guy approaches, he snogs his girlfriend. A long snog in the sober daylight. Aideen watches as he hands her a small shopping bag and she peers in and squeals.

  At 4:59, she sends Sean a text message. You still coming?

  At 5:55, Aideen leaves the café and allows herself to be dolefully swept up by the throngs. She makes her way to the Dart station, where she buys a ticket and a packet of Monster Munch and then, going back to the newsagents, ten Silk Cut Purple and a box of matches. She doesn’t even know why. Mostly because fuck it. She smokes two cigarettes as she waits and then boards the train bound for Dalkey.

  27

  With care, Kevin situates his mother, her right arm bandaged and cradled in a gauzy sling, in the passenger seat of his obscene minivan, yet another wanton display of the Gogartys’ culpability in global overpopulation, as his mother has so often and with superior glee reminded him. But not today. Today, as mother and son coast down the wet roads of Dublin en route to Rossdale Home, she is furiously mute.

  “It’s just until the burn heals,” Kevin had said in various verbal brews all through the preparing and packing—“stopgap,” “a couple of weeks,” “a temporary measure.” The previous evening, the two had spent long, dismal hours in the grimmest emergency ward he’d ever encountered, crawling as it was with scarlet-faced alcoholics, bruised, bloody, reeling, mumbling to imaginary foes, and one tiny middle-aged woman, her swollen left eye the color of a smeared suns
et, weeping into her hands.

  Mrs. Gogarty must have her wound dressed daily, the on-call doctor had explained, she was to rest and be minded. Kevin had been deeply shaken to discover his mother rocking on the carpet of her blackened kitchen, clutching her scalded arm and coughing. It was as close to death as he’d ever allowed himself to think of her. In his terror, and without premeditation, he’d held her very carefully, his poor Mum, so as not to brush her injury, and brought a glass of water to her lips and then guided her into his car.

  “You’ll be back in Margate in no time,” he says to her now, finessing the lever which, in theory, activates the windshield wipers. But they move too erratically and slowly to sweep the fierce rain clear and the road blurs. “Spying on the neighbors and losing your keys.”

  Silence.

  “Did we remember your toilet bag?”

  Silence.

  “Reading glasses?”

  Kevin spots his old schoolmate Tommy O’Dwyer blowing on a cup of takeaway coffee, pulled up alongside a curb outside the chippie, yakking away on his mobile. Kevin waves, then returns to his calamity.

  “You’ll be well looked after at Rossdale,” he says. Which is true. From what he’s gathered, Rossdale, staffed by experienced and caring professionals, is a reputable home (so long as you disregard that unfortunate tabloid tale some years back when a pregnant nurse’s assistant and a randy, diabetic codger with hairy ears were discovered humping in the front pew of the home’s makeshift chapel). Her wound will be tended to, pain meds doled out, meals cooked. And frankly, it’s not the worst way to introduce what might become a necessary eventuality.

  “Why can’t I just stay at yours? You wouldn’t even need to be home.”

  Since the fire, his mother’s eyes seem to have sunk impossibly deeper into the bottomless, shadowy crags of her once patrician face. Now they’re like two slick, dark pebbles sinking helplessly into quicksand.