Good Eggs

by Rebecca Hardiman

  Aideen sinks onto Millie’s bed with a frustrated sigh, her brow creased, fidgeting hands. “Why wouldn’t he tell me he was sick?”

  “I don’t know, Aideen. Maybe he didn’t want you to worry. Would you not try ringing Sylvia? I’ve got her number here somewhere.”

  “Jesus, Gran,” Aideen says, brightening instantly. “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  Gran may have a distinct memory of taking down Sylvia’s number, but what Gran does not have is a distinct memory of where the fuck she put it. Ergo, Aideen commences, with her grandmother’s permission, to ransack Room 302. She riffles through Gran’s scant belongings, rummaging among institutional bedclothes and discovering various oddities, all in character—breadcrumbs, literally, a crusty hotel sleeping mask. Strangely enough, when she lifts up the mattress, Aideen spots a book of city bus maps.

  Meanwhile, Gran peels back the dividing curtain and starts narrating, in real time, to the creepy old lump in the next bed.

  “We’re knees deep into trying to find Sylvia’s phone number. My Peter always said I was better at losing things than finding them. Aideen’s determined, you see, because—can I tell Mrs. Jameson the whole story or hadn’t I better?”

  Gran really is cracked.

  Even here, the bureau reeks of Margate, that peculiar, coal-burning, salty seaweed stench that’s insinuated itself into every bit of clothing and odor-absorbing item Gran possesses, as if the ocean waves themselves lapped across her rooms for decades. Soon enough, Aideen reaches the final uninvestigated turf: a tiny plastic rubbish bin near the door. Here, too, she roots through Gran’s rejected unsavories: a richly waxy Q-tip, a browning apple core, and then lets the bin slide dejectedly through her fingers.

  “I think you must have thrown it out,” Aideen finally concedes.

  “She’ll ring again, not to worry. And I’ll tell her you want to speak with Sean. But listen, before you go, come here to me. You don’t have any cash on you, do you, love?”

  Aideen shrugs, takes out her phone, and retrieves from its case a folded up fiver. “That’s all I have. It’s yours.”

  Gran starts looking soppy. “You are an absolute—”

  “It’s fine. Just please, Gran, can you think of anywhere else that number might be?”

  “A gem. You know that? You are the most—”

  “What do you need it for anyway?”

  Gran drops her voice to a stage whisper. “This is coming off tomorrow.” She wiggles her sling and then winces. “You noticed my little stash?”

  “You mean the knife?”

  “Exactly, in case I need to defend myself.”

  “With a butter knife?”

  “As soon as I’ve got all my supplies together, I’m checking myself out of here. They’ve banned me from going into the lounge and I’m just sat in this room day after day and I’m fed up. And your dad won’t tell me when he plans to bring me home. I think I need his signature or God knows and I suspect he’s stuffed me in here for good.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “In any case, you won’t tell a soul, sure you won’t?”

  “I’m no snitch.” Aideen shakes her head solemnly but she’s humoring Gran with what is clearly a crackpot escape plan that will never come to pass. “I could probably get you more money but it wouldn’t be till next weekend.”

  “The Pirate’s Persuasion,” Gran’s mumbling. She goes over to a pile of paperbacks on her roommate’s bedside table and picks up each one and fans its pages until a scrap of paper feathers its way to the floor.

  “Et voilà!”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Gran beams. “Amn’t I getting a bit soft in the head, Aideen? I’d forgotten about this. I’ve been reading aloud to Mrs. Jameson. I have this idea that she may be taking in more than we think. You never know, do you? Doctors think they know everything.”

  But Aideen’s not listening; she’s snatching up the paper. Ten digits have been dashed out in Gran’s shaky hand and Aideen takes out her phone and immediately begins punching in the numbers.

  “I dial but you talk, OK?” she says, terror encroaching. Yet she feels certain that an explanation, a relief from her sadness and this awful limbo, is seconds away. Clarity is at hand. Her first attempts fail—there are international codes to be dealt with. But on the third try, after a brief lull, a long American ringtone sounds. Gesturing to Gran and readying herself, Aideen listens to two of these until she hears a click. And then:

  “The number you have reached is no longer in service. Please check your number and try your call again later.”

  “That’s strange,” says Gran.

  “Shit,” says Aideen.

  34

  Kevin is still in the act of knocking when the door swings open to reveal Mick’s mum, Maeve, a lit, extra long lady’s cigarette in one hand, remote control in the other, tsking and frowning, head shaking unhappily to and fro.

  “Well, well, well.”

  “Hello, Maeve.”

  “Mick’s inside.” She sprays a column of smoke from a pair of fleshy lips in his general direction and turns, leaving the door just ajar enough for Kevin to squeeze through. “You’re on the sofa.”

  Which is exactly where Kevin spends the next few days. By night, he and Mick eat greasy takeaway and sit by the gas fire drinking cans of lager and talking shite. Maeve rolls in and out, fog-like, through the cramped and cluttered rooms. She appears to have an unhealthy addiction to playing online hearts, huddled over her computer screen or mobile in all corners of the bungalow. Kevin wakes on the velveteen sofa with a sore lower back, and after enjoying a long and satisfying morning piss, goes straight back to it, clicking on the telly or his laptop and overtly staving off any thought of—or plan for—the future. He tries to ring Gerard, but his son seems always to be out. He misses the nights coming up to Gerard’s Leaving—quizzing his son on World War II, Sean O’Casey, the importance of tourism to the Irish economy. As for the others, Kevin had decided not to contact them, out of respect for Grace, but he finds himself pining for their company. He quits browsing the job websites. He starts playing hearts online.

  Each morning, when his friend heads out for work, Kevin feels terribly low, a foundling left behind on enemy turf. It reminds him of a time when he’d been under the weather as a schoolboy and his mother had had some important plan and so dropped him at a friend’s house for the day. He’d woken up later on the woman’s sofa to discover with a poignant hit of shame that he’d vomited tiny piles of sick into craters all over his blanket. He’d experienced an almost physical yearning for his mum then, to be home.

  At Mick’s mum’s place, Kevin spends an inordinate amount of time listening for Maeve’s footsteps in order to avoid being alone with her. The house is small enough that he has quickly learned to decipher her whereabouts—the particular creak of her bedroom door as she frequently labors to and from the toilet, the irritable closing of the curtains after dinner, the shuffling into the kitchen for rasher sandwiches and tea.

  On the fifth morning, just after Mick leaves for work, Kevin heads for the kettle, believing Maeve to have gone to the salon up the road where she’s something of a legend, tinting and trimming the middle-aged set while trading in the valuable currency of local gossip. So he’s surprised to find her sitting at the table without her laptop, no virtual hearts this morning, only a packet of Benson & Hedges and a box of matches and a filthy ashtray he can smell from the door.

  “Oh, I thought you’d left,” he says. “Cup of tea?”

  “See that sink?” Maeve says, a stubby, nicotine-stained finger aimed toward a horde of plates and cups. “The washing-up liquid’s just there. If you’re planning on staying here another minute, you’d want to stop taking the piss.”

  “Sorry, yes of course. I’ve not been—”

  “And you’ll pitch in on the rent. Mick won’t tell you that but I’m not shy. And I’m not an idiot. Let’s start for now with one hundred fifty.”

 
Kevin mentally calculates the contents of his wallet—twenty-three quid, give or take.

  “I think I know what’s happened in your house, Kevin.”

  “I don’t think that’s any—”

  “Four kids and all,” she says coolly and sparks up another fag. “You know, Mick’s dad did the very same thing.”

  “It’s not the same thing.” Kevin knows the sordid tale—everyone does—though Mick’s never broached the subject.

  “Moved in with a young one when Mick was just sixteen months. I was pregnant with Deirdre at the time. They haven’t seen their father in, oh, twelve years. That’s not what you want, is it?”

  “Of course that’s not what I want. She’s kicked me out.”

  “If I were you, I’d do some soul-searching instead of sulking about licking my wounds.” She stares at him and then almost smiles. “I’ll take that tea now.”

  35

  Millie’s idea—to ditch this kip—is short on details, but the thought of it excites her and planning it has added shape and purpose to her dull days. She’s been steadily contributing items to her stash, including a bottle of Imodium (in the unlikely event that the shits befall her en route), a couple of Ambien, and four pale blue oblong pills (these lifted, in a moment of wanton recklessness, from the sloppily monitored meds cabinet). They’re antidepressants or antianxiety tablets—it hardly matters which. She will either A) scrape together enough money for a taxi; B) figure out which bus routes she’d need (not exactly practical though since she’ll have to leave under cover of dark and there are so few night buses); C) hitchhike (dodgy, but not to be unconditionally ruled out); or D) walk, the least pleasant scheme of all, Margate being some distance away, a trek that will require additional sustenance, and water. Her load would be that much heavier.

  “I have a preemptive confession to make,” Millie says, addressing the curtain between the two beds of Room 302. “Are you a religious woman, I wonder? Of all the things in church I always hated, and there are plenty, there was nothing more terrifying than confession. Ridiculous, when you think of it, isn’t it? Kneeling in a pitch-black box revealing all your sins to a man who acts as if he never sins. Maybe if it were a woman, maybe a female priest…” She sighs. “Ah well. I’m skint at the moment, you see, and I believe you’d help me if you could. The minute I’m home, I’ll send you a check.”

  But when Millie draws back the curtain, Mrs. Jameson’s bed is empty. Alone, for the first time, in Room 302, she ponders the disconcerting implications: A family visit? Unprecedented. A medical issue? Possible. She hears a distant shuffled movement of feet beyond the door and, without further angst, approaches her roommate’s standard-issue chest of drawers and finds, at the back corner of the middle one, an embroidered coin purse she’d already discovered yesterday but had chickened out on pillaging.

  She takes the only cash within it—€45, which is enough—and pushes the call button.

  * * *

  It’s been days since Aideen’s most unsettling visit, a time fraught with doubts and the rejiggering of narrative puzzle pieces. For one thing, Millie can’t understand why Sylvia would be so difficult to track down. After trying the American number twice more, neither Gogarty could plausibly deny that one of two statements was true: Millie had written down the wrong digits, or Sylvia had given a false number.

  It was all very strange. Or deeply rotten. Or innocent and explicable. Each time Millie turns over the suspicious bits—the sudden frenzied momentum of departure or the fact that Sean, the more she thinks of it, never looked sick, quite robust, if anything—she arrives at the character of Sylvia herself: attentive and good and giving if mysterious, unknowable but, sure, aren’t we all? Who does Millie know and who, other than Kevin, say, and Peter in his grave, knows her?

  Aideen had compiled a list of Manhattan hospitals—more than twenty on that narrow island, as it turns out. Not a single one currently has a patient by the name of Sean Gilmore. But then, Millie reasons, Americans are famously tightfisted about information—it’s not as if the hospital is going to give out, willy-nilly, the whereabouts or status of a private patient. Maybe in Ireland, depending on who you get on the other end, some chatty nurse who might know your neighbor’s sister-in-law’s cousin, but not in America. So it’s possible that Sylvia’s story sticks.

  She pushes the call button a second, third, fourth time. Is nobody coming?

  When the doubts resurface, a most awful nervous fluttering in her gut occurs, but Millie comforts herself with her trump card, in the form of that IOU somewhere in Margate. How many times has Millie’s fate, or anyone’s, hung upon a scrap of paper? Even if Sylvia had signed it in bad faith, which Millie can hardly believe, why, she has somewhere in her possession a document that she could legally put forth, if need be.

  “There you are,” says Millie to the girl, Martha, who finally enters. “Where is my roommate? Is she alright?”

  Millie knows the answer by Martha’s solemn face.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you, Mrs. Gogarty, but Mrs. Jameson died in the night,” the girl says, laying a wispy Christian hand on Millie’s shoulder. “You were fond of her, I know. Poor soul, but God love her. She’s with him now, God bless. She’s been suffering a long time now, as you know.”

  “Oh no,” says Millie, suddenly feeling as if she’s been awake for days. She looks at Mrs. Jameson’s bed, the imprint of her friend still discernible upon it. Any poor sod could have been lying in that bed; tomorrow a new poor sod will be. These losses, she thinks, will be her undoing. Her next thought: I’m after robbing a dead woman.

  Martha stands rubbing Millie’s shoulder, which makes Millie want to thwack her.

  “Did you know her when she was… better?” says Millie.

  “Oh I did, yes. She was here a long time.”

  “Was she lovely? I have a feeling she was lovely, a sort of gentle, maternal type.”

  “You must be joking!” Martha laughs. “She thought she was the Queen of Sheba, always giving out to everyone about the ‘service,’ like we were her bleedin’ maids. She used to be very wealthy, that’s the word anyway, used to the finer things in life. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, I don’t, but the truth is Mrs. Jameson was a right pain in the hole.”

  * * *

  By the time Martha checks in on her later, Millie’s made up her mind.

  “Time to go down for supper, Mrs. Gogarty,” she says. “You ready?”

  Millie’s ready alright: she’ll milk this place tomorrow for breakfast, lunch, and tea, but then she’ll be on her bike. So to speak.

  36

  At breakfast—porridge, like a vat of wet concrete with floating currants that resemble gerbil turds—Brigid slams her tray down on their usual table in an isolated corner of the dining hall, the hem of her uniform drifting mid-shin and trailing a loose thread.

  “The bitch,” she says.

  Brigid’s tray is, as ever, piled with food: four greasy plugs of sausage, two fried eggs, a bowl of dry Corn Flakes. Belying her skinniness, Brigid is a massive eater, and has even arranged a covert deal with Mrs. Brown, the sweet, oily-faced kitchen lady, to hold back extra desserts for herself and Aideen whenever rhubarb crumble’s on the menu.

  “What’s happened?” says Aideen.

  “She’s watching us.” Brigid looks directly at a scowling Bleekland and boldly waves at her with a smarmy smile.

  “Don’t make it worse,” says Aideen.

  “I don’t give a shite.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She was snooping around my bed again, found my ciggies. She’s ringing Dad today.”

  “Oh no.”

  “She loves humiliating me.”

  “Come on,” says Aideen. “We’ve got double science.”

  Fifth-year biology students are currently dissecting worms and frogs. Aideen, disinclined to delve voluntarily into a carcass, prefers the role of observer and note-taker—in life, too—while Brigid happily wields a disposable s
calpel, prodding into the surprisingly bright yellow entrails of a flattened, splayed garden frog that did nothing to offend anyone, other than emitting a sharp waft of formaldehyde. Brigid tells Aideen that, though she’s been barred from signing out, she’s sneaking off to meet her pizza bloke after school and Aideen must provide cover.

  “Right, so if that witch comes looking for me what’ll you say?” says Brigid.

  “That you’re in the shitter?”

  “For two hours!”

  The girls laugh but the thought of staving off the formidable Bleekland scares Aideen.

  “Ladies, if you’re bored, I’m happy to assign additional classwork,” says Mr. Reilly from his desk at the front.

  The girls return to the specimen, which strikes Aideen as woeful: to be slaughtered and have your carcass stretched on a glass slide and your bits poked around by a pack of grossed-out girls. When Mr. Reilly steps into the hallway, Brigid reaches for a bottle of fish eyeballs and slips it into Aideen’s bag.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve just had the most brilliant idea.”

  37

  If there’s anything to be said for an involuntary stay in a nursing home, it’s that one acquires the overrated virtue of patience. Millie and her fellow residents are good at waiting. They’re waiting for a meal that never fails to resemble the previous one, in appearance and flavor; or for the humiliating help that’s sometimes required in the toilet; or for pills and water; or for someone to pass the time with. Millie’s final act of waiting here is upon her. Bandages removed, Aideen’s borrowed rucksack at the ready, she’s waiting for the lights throughout the third floor to click off, which they eventually do at half past ten. When all grows quiet, she picks up the bedside telephone.

  “I’d like to book a taxi,” Millie whispers.

  “Can’t hear you, love.” Gruff voice, a real Dub, her favorite kind.