She glanced at my plate.
‘Tears,’ I explained. ‘I’m saving them all for when I need them. What if it was you in that ferry? I’d need reserves.’
Cara leaned her eyes on the heels of her hands. ‘You’re morbid,’ she snuffled.
‘Doesn’t everyone imagine these things?’ I asked. ‘When you hear a siren go by, don’t you wonder for a second if it might be the one you love?’
‘Well actually,’ said Cara, ‘I did used to look at every passing ambulance and think Mrs. Mew might be in it.’
I had learnt to wince so slightly that she didn’t notice it. ‘Exactly,’ I told her. ‘Fantasies ward off the evil day.’
But here I was with the evil day come upon me, and I couldn’t feel it. I stared at the newsreader as he chatted his way through a child-sized version of global warming. Right this minute I couldn’t care less, not about the planet, not about Cara. When would I start to produce all those tears I’d saved from ferry, motorway and plane disasters, from stories of infant heart transplants and letters to Gorbachev? My barrelfuls had obviously been mislaid in the back of some emotional warehouse. Maybe if I started I’d never stop till I filled the big house and drowned all who came in the door. ‘Cry it all out,’ we were told, as if grief was a simple toxin that could be converted into liquid and drained out of the body. Maybe I was saving the tears for some safer time, waiting for some delayed reaction that would bring them on as water spills in glittering strings from the roof of a bus shelter, ten minutes after the rain.
At five past five, halfway through a two-inch wedge of madeira cake and a cup of tea (Kate refused one), I decided to get around to ringing my mother. It was her afternoon off; I could have gone to see her, but I had conveniently forgotten till now. I couldn’t face one of those cosy, irritable afternoons over a pot of black tea. Cara came with me one time, and my mother handed her the wrong bowl by accident, so Cara put salt in her tea. She took one sip, then drank a whole glass of water, but never said a word about it till we got home.
I polished the back of the receiver with my sleeve. When did it break, the connection I once had with my mother? No, not broken exactly, a much more gradual attenuation. Not that I was ever the type who ran home and disgorged every detail of the day at school – we both liked our privacies – but we used to be close. As a child I sat for hours on end at the scuffed kitchen table, reading or drawing ballerinas or just staring at the whorls on my fingers, while my mother hurried in and out. Sometimes we wouldn’t say a word for hours, wouldn’t need to.
No doubt Jo was right that I should get around to coming out to my mother, as I crawled into my fourth decade, but I couldn’t bear to try it right now. I could just imagine picking up the phone: ‘Hey, Mammy, how’s tricks? What have I been up to? Oh, nothing much, just the funeral of that lover of mine I never got around to talking to you about. Ah, you know her, my housemate, you met her a couple of times, remember. Yeah, lover, that’s the word, or one of them. Yes, I know you thought I wasn’t that kind of girl but that’s one of the things you thought wrong about.’
I took three deep breaths, holding them for a count of ten each, and dialled. I intended to say the bare minimum about the funeral. But I didn’t even manage that. From the moment my mother picked up the phone, my voice slipped automatically into the usual gear. A little work, a little weather, a little gossip about Gavin’s new posh girlfriend, a little more weather. After the usual apology for not having rung over the last few weeks, I offered to drive over to her shop tomorrow after Immac and take her out for coffee and meringues. Lies of omission, lies of blandness, lies of not bothering, what difference did a few more make?
She’d been watching the wildlife, she said, something about red pandas. I listened not to what the words meant but to the sound of them, the comforting pattern of hisses and vibrations. But all at once I needed to know something about this woman before she disappeared too. ‘Mammy,’ I broke in, ‘I was just wondering, what were you doing when you went into labour with me?’
Her voice trailed off. ‘What sort of a question is that?’
‘I’ve always been meaning to ask.’ Grace came down the stairs in a gallop, then froze on the bottom.
‘Let’s see now,’ she said. ‘I think I was taking the car in for a service, the mechanic was giving me cheek…No, that was the other time, with your brother.’
I waited for a few seconds, reaching over to scratch the cat’s skull, then asked, ‘And how long were you in labour?’
My mother gave a little sigh. ‘Couldn’t tell you, pet. Not too long.’
‘No?’
‘But quite a while.’
I held in my exasperation as I watched Grace toe his way upstairs again. ‘What was the worst moment, then?’
‘I don’t remember.’ Her voice was beginning to stiffen. ‘Why would you want to dwell on such things?’
‘How could you not remember the worst moment?’
‘I had other things on my mind,’ she told me, ‘like pushing a great lump of a baby out of myself. I had no time to keep notes.’
I could tell I was annoying her but something drove me on. ‘What was it like, though? Is it true the pain’s like passing a whole melon through your bowels?’
‘I wouldn’t know, Pen,’ she said. ‘On the rare occasions when I can afford melon, I cut it in slices.’
I laughed under my breath. ‘Fair enough.’
‘You have a terrible negative attitude. Just wait till it happens to you, then you won’t be so interested in remembering.’
‘That’ll be the day.’
There was a pause. Was Mammy going to fall into maternal stereotype and start nagging me about reproduction, now of all times? But her voice was soft, like a chamois leather rubbing the phone line. ‘You don’t sound like yourself.’
‘So who do I sound like?’
‘Ah, if you’re going to start acting the maggot now I’ll go back to the pandas.’
‘Do that thing.’ I said goodbye gently and put down the phone.
But what I couldn’t tell was, was my mother reluctant to tell me about the birth because I was the baby, because I was what had hurt her? Or had she honestly forgotten?
I knew that normal people did not remember much, except in indexed summaries, with the odd spotlit detail. Whereas I was cursed with a good memory, or rather a big one. At points of crisis I tended to live in many times at once. The pictures rushed at me like anxious pets, especially when I was tired. Cara used to hate it when I’d quote her; she never could remember conversations in enough detail for her to tell if I had got it right. She often begged me to learn to forget, to let things flow. But the way I saw it, what use was it to run towards the future if your purse was slit and everything you gathered fell out on the road?
My hand, I noticed, was still clutching the phone. I released my grip and walked into the kitchen. I couldn’t decide where to sit. The problem with living so long in one house was that every corner of it was silted up with memories.
Cara also claimed that I must have made things up, because it was not possible to remember entire conversations in such detail. On that point she may have been right. But the lines that came into my head did have their own authenticity; they were things that she or I would have been likely to say in a given situation, or perhaps did say in another conversation. It did not offend me that my stories might not be exactly true, so long as they rang true. Once when I was small my mother asked what I’d been up to all morning. ‘Dressing up,’ I said. When she found that the dressing-up trunk was locked, she was troubled. I was never able to explain that the dressing-up I would have liked to do, if the trunk had been open, was in its own way more real than whatever I happened to have been really doing, which I was hard put to remember anyway since it was much less interesting. Sometimes I thought the truth could only be got at like the hill on the other side of the looking-glass, by walking in the opposite direction and talking aloud to distract yourself.
&nb
sp; Cara and I knew too much about each other, after a few years, to tell the perfect truth all the time; you couldn’t go naked for so long without itching for some clothes. She asked me once, did I trust her? I gave her the most precise answer I could think of: that I didn’t trust her not to lie or do me harm, because she had done both before, but that I did keep choosing to trust myself in her hands.
I meandered around the kitchen with nothing to do. The slice of madeira I had been eating when I decided to ring my mother had my bite marks in it; I threw it away. Grace’s bowl looked rather nasty in this heat; I breathed through my mouth as I scraped it out, washed it under the hot tap, and added half a can of fresh catfood. I listened out for the faraway squeaks and crashes of his progress through the house, but heard nothing.
Who could I talk to? I stood by the phone, hoisting my shoulders then letting them drop. It only made me more aware of their stiffness. I was removing a hair from the back of the receiver when the phone convulsed under my hand. I jolted in fright, then lifted it.
Under pressure Robbie sounded very Glasgow. He didn’t recognize my grunt. ‘I wonder could I speak to, to Penelope?’
On any other week I would have faked a BBC housekeeper-style voice and asked him to hold the line while I fetched young Miss O’Grady. Instead I said, ‘Hey, Robbie. It’s always Pen. Do you let anyone call you Robert?’
‘Only my grandmother.’ His voice trailed off.
Robbie was one of those workmates that you think of as a friend but can’t call by that name in case they only think of you as a workmate.
‘I’m really sorry, hen.’ He left tiny pauses between the traditional words, as if trying to find their elasticity again.
‘Did Sister Dominic make a general announcement?’
‘Just to staff, on Monday.’ Robbie cleared his throat. ‘I don’t mean I’m sorry about that, but. I mean yes of course I’m sorry about…Ciara, wasn’t it?’
We could both hear the past tense swallow the verb.
‘Cara.’
‘Cara, sorry. No, but what I’m really sorry about is that I haven’t rung till now.’
‘Oh well. Doesn’t matter.’
‘It does. To me. See, I’m a bit squeamish that way; I just never know what to say in these situations.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘I can’t believe you asked me to ring you on Monday and I’ve left it till now. I mentioned it to Sheila, and she said to get on the phone this minute.’
‘Really,’ I told him wearily, ‘it’s fine.’
‘No, but, it was the same with my uncle last year. His second wife died of cancer and I couldn’t bring myself to send so much as a Christmas card.’
‘I doubt he noticed one missing card.’
‘Still.’ After a long minute, Robbie asked, ‘So what was it like, today?’ almost brightly.
‘Suppose I’ve had worse.’
‘Like?’
‘Time I stubbed my toe on the wall in a ballet exam.’
Robbie made an uncomfortable grunt of sympathy. I realized that we had no way of getting through a conversation without wisecracking; it was our common dialect. I hadn’t stubbed my toe, anyway, that was an invention; I’d actually got my first period in the ballet exam, but that was a word I’d been brought up not to say in front of men.
The strained politeness came back into his vowels. ‘Were you and your housemate close? Was she, like, an old friend?’
‘Mmm.’ I didn’t trust my mouth to open.
‘Can’t think of anything to say that isn’t totally trite,’ added Robbie after a minute.
‘There isn’t anything.’
‘Well listen, I’m afraid I have to go now.’ His voice coiled up again. ‘I can hear Sheila revving the car, and I have to ask her to get some toilet paper. So when are you back to the grindstone?’
‘Tomorrow. Meet me for coffee after, at the Pâtisserie?’
‘Sure, any excuse for a bun. Bye now, hen, take care.’
In the next few minutes I got a lot done. I trimmed chicken breasts, washed and chopped courgettes and peppers. I was upstairs giving my bedroom a bit of a tidy when it happened. As I was straightening out the quilt, the back of my hand brushed against something soft coiled behind the bed leg like a hibernating animal. Cara’s white knickers, half the size of mine. I sat on the edge of the bed and uncurled them. A faint smile of yellow marked the tired cotton. I couched the cloth to my face, and breathed it in, the faint unmistakable smell of the live woman who must have dropped her clothes beside this bed (as she tiptoed her way through the doorway, in hushed laughter or lust or fatigue, I couldn’t remember which) not three weeks ago. The tiny scent mocked the box, the funeral, the official story. It felt rather like the time I was standing on a chair to change a light-bulb when an electric shock stopped my breath and slammed me on to the floor.
I could hear hysteria gathering now, like a storm outside the window. I put the milky cotton between my lips and bit down on it. I pushed in another fold of cotton and another and another till I was fully gagged. I breathed through my nose, with difficulty. The quilt came up to meet my cheek as I slumped over.
It seemed days later when I sat up and pulled out the cotton; it tugged at the insides of my cheeks. I straightened the duvet again and tucked the crumpled knickers under the pillow. My eye fell on the jar of sleeping pills; I walked straight downstairs and put it back in Mr. Wall’s bathroom cupboard. I didn’t want to have to keep making the decision not to up-end the whole jar into my mouth. As I passed the kitchen door I could see yellow and red and orange peppers curling on the chopping-board, but there was no time for them now. Back in the bedroom I was cold as mud. I put my dressing-gown on over my clothes, then girded on Cara’s outsized blue velvet one which she had left over my wardrobe door. I waited for hysteria to overwhelm me, but nothing happened.
I sat on the edge of the bed and shivered. Shivering keeps you warm, I remembered. Then I realized that it didn’t matter, so I loosened my muscles and relaxed into being cold. When I shut my eyes, the grey swallowed my head.
It was a couple of hours later – or so I guessed – when I heard a step outside my door. My body cringed. One foot leaped out as if to jam the door shut, but nobody tried to open it. Nobody even knocked. I could have been dead in my bed for all the Walls knew or cared. I listened out, ready to bawl ‘Leave me alone,’ but nobody came. I supposed they wanted to be tactful and not intrude on my grief. At that particular cliché my mouth curled up at one end. Egocentric as ever, PenInsula; doesn’t it occur to you that her sister and father have enough on their plates without worrying about you? Another pair of feet went by. I wondered who had made dinner. I was surprised no one had knocked on the door to offer me the traditional cup of tea. Not that I wanted tea; what I wanted was to call ‘No thanks’ in such a cracked tone that they would blush to have thought tea would be any help.
Then all these theatricals fell away and I was hit by a sense of loss so sharp that I doubled up under it and pressed my face into the duvet. If this was grief, it felt more like acute appendicitis than anything else in my experience.
Much later, when the light from the window had slid down the wallpaper and faded out, I found my hand between my legs. It was simply pressing down, willing me to sleep. It occurred to me that it would only ever be my hand, now. How dull; never again the pale elongated hand with the freckles on the back of the knuckles, clumsiness dissolving in certainty. Oh, Cara, what long fingers you’ve got! All the better to fill you with, my dear. What bothered me now was the thought of those fingers beginning to putrefy in the cemetery. Dead fingers inside me, so cold I couldn’t heat them up. (‘Let’s find somewhere cosy to put them,’ I used to joke on winter nights, ‘I guarantee they’ll get warm.’) The image took away any lust my body might have mustered, so I pulled away my hand and slid it under the pillow.
After another hour or so, when it was fully dark, I dragged my legs inside the duvet. I thought I heard Grace scratching at th
e door, but I might have been dozing already. I was hungry, but the warmth overcame it, and I slept.
My dream started as the comforting fantasy I invented to get me to sleep when I was small. I had added the details one by one over the years, so although I had not thought about it for a long time, the images came easily to my mind.
I begin about thirty feet from the gingerbread house, walking towards it through the dark glade. Its walls are padded, the crusts at the corners shining. The window-frames and leading are of dark toffee; the glass is barley sugar. The roof is made of brandy snaps, dripping occasionally on to the grass. The door, made of a single sheet of thick black chocolate with ornamental knob and letterbox in white – they didn’t have white chocolate in medieval times but my subconscious has obviously caught up with the nineties – is a little ajar. I pause outside. I don’t eat anything, but I stroke the wall and taste the trace of treacle on my finger.
I push the door wide enough to let me in. It is almost dark; the only light from outside is coloured by the barley sugar and further dimmed by curtains of soft swinging caramel. I am not sure what to expect. Will she come in from the wood as a wrinkled hag or a young apprentice with pink cheeks? Will she reappear in animal form on the liquorice hearthrug? I pull back a chair – nut crackle, polished to a woody sheen, only slightly sticky. On the table I find a tiny box, chocolate with mint edging, precise and virginal as the first chocolate on Easter Sunday. In it there is a match made of burnt toffee; when I strike it, it turns blue. Its light reveals a candle made of glistening nougat, white with cherries embedded. I light and lift it.
I start to notice webs in the corner: spun sugar? No, just cobwebs. Some of the window leading is cracked and dented. A nut in the brittle I am sitting on is crumbling to dust. I nibble the corner of the chocolate box, but it has a whiff of mould. How long has this cottage been standing empty? Maybe she hasn’t been here in years. Maybe one day she never came back from the woods. How am I to be fought, taught, held in thrall, if the cottage is empty?
I reach out to bang on the wall, but my hand goes right through gingerbread softened to slime. Horror comes soundless from my mouth. I claw my way out, the roof caving in behind me. The wood is utterly dark.