‘Don’t worry, she can’t hear me,’ I said, bored and examining the split ends of my dark brown hair. I pretended I wasn’t bothered but really my comments were causing my heart to beat wildly in my chest.
‘Of course she can hear you, child,’ Rosaleen half-scolded me while continuing to move about the room fixing things, wiping things, adjusting things.
‘You think?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you think, Mum? Will we be okay here?’
Mum looked up at me and smiled. ‘Of course we’ll be okay.’
I joined in on her second sentence, imitating Mum’s hauntingly chirpy voice, so that we spoke in perfect unison, which I think chilled Rosaleen. It definitely chilled me as we said, ‘It will all be okay.’
Rosaleen stopped dusting to watch me.
‘That’s right, Mum. It will all be okay.’ My voice trembled. I decided to go a step further. ‘And look at the elephant in the bedroom, isn’t that nice?’
Mum stared at the tree in the garden, the same small smile on her pink lips, ‘Yes. That’s nice.’
‘I thought you’d think so.’ I swallowed hard, trying not to cry as I looked to Rosaleen. I was supposed to feel satisfaction, but I didn’t, I just felt more lost. Up to that point it was all in my head that Mum wasn’t right. Now I’d proven it and I didn’t like it.
Perhaps now Mum would be sent to a therapist or a counsellor and get herself fixed so that we could start moving on with our chemical trail.
‘Your breakfast is on the table,’ Rosaleen simply said, turned her back on me, and left the room.
And that is how the Goodwin problems were always fixed. Fix them on the surface but don’t go to the root, always ignoring the elephant in the room. I think that morning was when I realised I’d grown up with an elephant in every room. It was practically our family pet.
CHAPTER FIVE
GrÈve
I took my time getting dressed, knowing that there was very little else I was going to be able to do that day. I stood shivering in the avocado-coloured bath as the hot water trickled down with all the power of baby drool, and I longed for my pink iridescent mosaic-tiled wet room with six power-shower jets and plasma in the wall.
By the time I had managed to wash out all of the shampoo—I couldn’t be bothered battling with conditioner—dried my hair and arrived downstairs for breakfast, Arthur was scraping the last of the food from his plate. I wondered if Rosaleen had told him about what happened in Mum’s bedroom. Perhaps not because if he was in anyway a decent brother, he’d be currently doing something about it. I don’t think tipping the base of a tea cup with his oversized nose was going to fix much.
‘Morning, Arthur,’ I said.
‘Morning,’ he said, into the bottom of his tea cup.
Rosaleen, the busy domestic bee, immediately jumped into action and came at me with giant oven gloves on her hands.
I lightly boxed each of her hands. She didn’t get the joke. Without a word, or a twitch, or a movement of any kind in Arthur’s face, I sensed he got it.
‘I’ll just have cereal, please, Rosaleen,’ I said, looking around. ‘I’ll get it, if you tell me where it is.’ I started opening the cupboards, trying to find the cereal, then had to take a step back when I came across a double cupboard filled from top to bottom with jars of honey. There must have been over a hundred jars.
‘Whoa.’ I stepped back from the opened cupboards. ‘Have you got, like, honey OCD?’
Rosaleen looked confused, but smiled and handed me a cup of tea. ‘Sit yourself down there, I’ll bring you your breakfast. Sister Ignatius gives the honey to me,’ she smiled.
Unfortunately I was taking a sip of tea when she said that and I choked on it as I started laughing. Tea came spurting out my nose. Arthur handed me a napkin, and looked at me with amusement.
‘You’ve a sister called Ignatius?’ I laughed loudly. ‘She’s totally got a man’s name. Is she a tranny?’ I shook my head, still giggling.
‘A tranny?’ Rosaleen asked, forehead crumpled.
I burst out laughing, then stopped abruptly when her smile immediately faded, she closed the kitchen cabinets and went to the aga for my breakfast. She placed a plate piled high with bacon, sausages, eggs, beans, pudding and mushrooms in the middle of the table. I hoped her sister Ignatius was going to join me for breakfast because there was no way I was going to finish this alone. Then she disappeared, flitted about behind me, and came back with a plate piled high with toast.
‘Oh, no, that’s okay. I don’t eat carbs,’ I said as politely as I could.
‘Carbs?’ Rosaleen asked.
‘Carbohydrates,’ I explained. ‘They bloat me.’
Arthur placed his cup on the saucer and looked out at me from under his bushy eyebrows.
‘Arthur, you don’t look anything like Mum at all.’
Rosaleen dropped a jar of honey on the floor tiles, which made me and Arthur jump and turn around. Surprisingly, it didn’t smash. Rosaleen, at top speed, continued on and placed jam, honey and marmalade before me and a plate of scones.
‘You’re a growing girl, you need your food.’
‘The only growing I want right now is here.’ I gestured at my 34B chest. ‘And unless I stuff my bra with black and white pudding, this breakfast isn’t going to make that happen.’
It was Arthur’s turn to choke on his tea. Not wanting to insult them any further, I took a slice of bacon, a sausage and a tomato.
‘Go on, have more,’ Rosaleen said, watching my plate.
I looked at Arthur in horror.
‘Give her time to eat that,’ Arthur said quietly, getting to his feet with his plates in his hands.
‘Leave that down.’ Rosaleen fussed around him, and I felt like grabbing a fly-swatter and attacking her. ‘You get on now to work.’
‘Arthur, does anybody work in the castle?’
‘The ruin?’ Rosaleen asked.
‘The castle,’ I responded, and immediately felt defensive of it. If we were going to start name-calling we may as well start with Mum. She was clearly a broken woman yet we weren’t referring to her as the ruin. She was still a woman. The castle was not as it had been, but it was still a castle. I have no idea where that belief had come from but it had arrived overnight and I knew from then on, I was never going to call it a ruin.
‘Why do you ask?’ Arthur said, slipping his arms into a lumberjack shirt and then putting on a padded vest over it.
‘I was taking a look around there yesterday and just thought I saw something. No big deal,’ I said quickly, eating and hoping that wouldn’t make them stop me from going there again.
‘Could have been a rat,’ Rosaleen said, looking at Arthur.
‘Wow, I really feel better now.’ I looked to Arthur for more but he was silent.
‘You shouldn’t go wandering about there on your own,’ Rosaleen said, pushing the plate of food closer to me.
‘Why?’
Neither of them said anything.
‘Right,’ I said, ignoring the breakfast. ‘That’s settled. It was a giant, human-sized rat. So if I can’t go there, what’s there to do around here?’ I asked.
There was silence. ‘In what way?’ Rosaleen finally asked, seeming afraid.
‘Like, for me to do. What is there? Are there shops? Clothes shops? Coffee shops? Anything nearby?’
‘Nearest town is fifteen minutes,’ Rosaleen replied.
‘Cool. I’ll walk there after breakfast. Work this off,’ I smiled, and bit into a sausage.
Rosaleen smiled happily and leaned her chin on her hand as she watched me.
‘So which way is it?’ I asked, swallowed the sausage and opened my mouth to show Rosaleen it was gone.
‘Which way is what?’ She got the hint and stopped watching.
‘The town. I go out the gates and turn left or right?’
‘Oh, no, you can’t walk it. It’s fifteen minutes in the car. Arthur will drive you. Where do you need to go?’
‘We
ll, nowhere in particular. I just wanted to have a look round.’
‘Arthur will drive you and collect you when you’re ready.’
‘How long will you be?’ Arthur asked, zipping up his vest.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, looking from one to the other, feeling frustrated.
‘Twenty minutes? An hour? If it’s a short time he can wait there for you,’ Rosaleen added.
‘I don’t know how long I’ll be. How can I? I don’t know what’s in the town, or what there is for me to do.’
They looked at me blankly.
‘I’ll just hop on a bus or something and come back when I’m ready.’
Rosaleen looked at Arthur nervously. ‘There’s no buses along this way.’
‘What?’ my jaw dropped. ‘How are you supposed to get anywhere?’
‘Drive,’ Arthur responded.
‘But I can’t drive.’
‘Arthur will drive you,’ Rosaleen repeated. ‘Or he’ll pick up whatever it is that you need. Have you anything in mind? Arthur will get it, won’t you, Arthur?’
Arthur snot-snorted.
‘What is it you need?’ Rosaleen asked eagerly, leaning forward.
‘Tampons,’ I spat out, feeling so frustrated now.
I just don’t know why I do it.
Well, I do know. They were both annoying me. I was used to so much freedom at home, not the Spanish Inquisition. I was used to coming and going whenever I pleased, at my own pace, for however long I liked. Even my own parents never asked me so many questions.
They were quiet.
I shoved another bit of sausage into my mouth.
Rosaleen fiddled with the doily underneath the scones. Arthur was hovering near the door waiting with baited breath to hear whether he was being sent out on a tampon run or not. I felt it was my duty to clear the air.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, calming down. ‘I’ll have a look around here today. Maybe I’ll go tomorrow.’ Something to look forward to.
‘I’ll be off then.’ Arthur nodded to Rosaleen.
She jumped up out of her chair as though a finger had poked up through the straw. ‘Don’t forget your flask.’ She hurried about the kitchen as though there was a time bomb. ‘Here you go.’ She handed him a flask and a lunchbox.
I couldn’t help but smile, watching that. It should have been weird, her treating him like a child going off to school, but it wasn’t. It was nice.
‘Do you want some of this for your lunchbox?’ I asked, pointing at the plate of food before me. ‘There’s no way in the world I’m going to eat it.’
I meant that comment to be nice. I meant that I couldn’t eat it because of the quantity, not because of the taste, but it came out wrong. Or it came out right but was taken up wrong. I don’t know. Anyway, I didn’t want to waste the food. I wanted to share it with Arthur for his cute little lunchbox, but it was as though I’d punched Rosaleen in the stomach again.
‘Ara go on, I’ll have some of it so,’ Arthur said, and I felt like he was saying it just to make Rosaleen happy.
Rosaleen’s cheeks pinked as she fussed around in a drawer for another Tupperware box.
‘It’s really lovely, Rosaleen, honestly, but I just don’t eat this much breakfast usually.’ I couldn’t believe such an issue was being made of the breakfast.
‘Of course, of course,’ she nodded emphatically as though she was so stupid not to have known this. She scooped it up and put it into the little plastic tub. And then Arthur was gone.
While I was still sitting at the table trying to get through the three thousand slices of toast that could easily have been used to rebuild the castle, Rosaleen collected the tray from Mum’s room. The food hadn’t been touched. Head down, Rosaleen brought it straight to the bin and started scraping it into a bag. After the earlier scene, I knew this would have hurt her.
‘We’re just not breakfast people,’ I explained, as gently as I could. ‘Mum usually grabs a breakfast bar and an espresso in the morning.’
Rosaleen straightened up and turned around, ears alert to food talk. ‘A breakfast bar?’
‘You know, one of those bars made of cereal and raisins and yoghurt and things.’
‘Like this?’ She showed me a bowl of cereal and raisins and a little bowl of yoghurt.
‘Yes, but…in a bar.’
‘But what’s the difference?’
‘Well, you bite into the bar.’
Rosaleen frowned.
‘It’s faster. You can eat it on the go.’ I tried to explain further. ‘While you’re driving to work or running out the door, you know?’
‘But what kind of breakfast is that at all? A bar in a car?’
I tried so hard not to laugh at that. ‘It’s just, you know, to…save time in the morning.’
She looked at me like I’d ten heads, then went quiet as she cleaned the kitchen.
‘What do you think of Mum?’ I asked after a long silence.
Rosaleen kept cleaning the counters with her back to me.
‘Rosaleen? What do you think about the way my mum’s behaving?’
‘She’s grieving, child,’ she said quickly.
‘I don’t think that’s the proper way to grieve, do you? Thinking an elephant is in the room?’
‘Ah, she didn’t hear you right,’ she said lightly.’ Her head is elsewhere, is all.’
‘It’s in cuckoo land, is where,’ I mumbled.
Because people keep throwing this ‘grieving’ comment at me, as if I was born yesterday and never knew that it was difficult to lose a person you spent every day of your life with for the past twenty years, I’ve since read up a lot on grief. What I’ve learned is that there’s no proper way to grieve, no wrong or right way. I don’t know if I agree with that. I think Mum’s grief is the wrong way. The word grief comes from the old French word grÈve which means heavy burden. The idea is that grief weighs you down with sorrow and all the other emotions. I feel that way: heavier, like I have to drag myself around, everything is an effort, is dark and crap. It’s as though my head is continually filled with thoughts I’d never had before, which gives me a headache. But Mum…?
Mum seems lighter. Grief doesn’t seem to be weighing her down at all. Instead, it feels like she’s flying away, like she’s halfway in the air and nobody else cares or notices, and I’m the only one standing beneath her, at her ankles, trying to pull her back down.
CHAPTER SIX
The Bus of Books
The kitchen had been cleared and cleaned; scrubbed to within an inch of its life, and the only thing left that wasn’t stacked away on a shelf somewhere was me.
I had never seen a woman clean with such vigour, with such purpose, as if her life depended on it. Rosaleen rolled up her sleeves and sweated, biceps and triceps astonishingly well formed, as she scrubbed, wiping away every trace of life having ever existed in the place. So I sat watching her in fascination, and I admit with a hint of patronising pity too, at the unnecessary act of such intense polishing and cleaning.
She left the house carrying a parcel of freshly baked brown bread that smelled so good it sent my taste buds and my already full stomach into spasms. I watched her from the front living-room window power-walking across the road, not an inch of femininity about her, to the bungalow. I waited by the window, intrigued to see who would answer the door, but she went round the back and spoiled my fun.
I took the opportunity to wander around the house without Rosaleen breathing down my neck and explaining the history behind everything I laid my eyes on as she’d done all morning.
‘Oh, that’s the cabinet. Oak, it is. A tree came down hard one winter, thunder and lightning, we’d no electricity for days. Arthur couldn’t rescue it—the tree that is, not the electricity; we got that back.’ Nervous giggle. ‘He made that cabinet out of it. Great for storing things in.’
‘That could be a good little business for Arthur.’
‘Oh no,’ Rosaleen looked at me as though I’d just bla
sphemed. ‘It’s a hobby, not a money-making scheme.’
‘It’s not a scheme, it’s a business. There’s nothing wrong with that,’ I explained.
Rosaleen tut-tutted at this.
Hearing myself, I sounded like my dad, and even though I had always hated this about him—his desire to turn everything into a business—it gave me a nice warm feeling. As a child if I brought home paintings from school he’d think I could suddenly be an artist, but only an artist who could demand millions for my works. If I argued a point strongly, I was suddenly a lawyer, but only a lawyer who demanded hundreds per hour. I had a good singing voice and suddenly I was going to record in his friend’s studio and be the next big thing. It wasn’t just me he did that with, it was everything around him. For him life was full of opportunities, and I don’t think that was necessarily a bad thing, but I think he wanted to grab them for all the wrong reasons. He wasn’t passionate about art, he didn’t care about lawyers helping people, he didn’t even care about my singing voice. It was all for more money. And so I suppose it was fitting that it was the loss of all his money that killed him in the end. The pills and the whisky were just the nails in the coffin.
‘Is it that photo you’ve got your eye on?’ Rosaleen would continue as my eyes roamed the room. ‘He took that when we visited the Giant’s Causeway. It rained the entire day and we got a puncture on the way up.’
And on she went.
‘I see you’re looking at the curtains. They need a bit of a clean. I’ll take them down tomorrow and do them. I bought the fabric from a woman doing door-to-door. I never usually but she was a foreign woman, hadn’t much English, or money, and had all this fabric. I like the flower in it. I think it matches the cushion there, what do you think? I’ve lots left in the garage down the back.’
Then I looked to the garage down the back and she’d say, ‘Arthur built that himself. Wasn’t here when I moved in.’
It struck me as odd phrasing. When I moved in. ‘Who lived here before?’
Rosaleen looked at me then, with those wide curious eyes she’d previously reserved for when I was eating. She didn’t say anything. She does that a lot, at the most random times. Dropping in and out of our conversations with looks and pauses as though she loses signal on her brain connection.