All That I Leave Behind
Alison Walsh works in book publishing and literary journalism. She is the author of the bestselling memoir
In My Mother’s Shoes. All That I Leave Behind
is her first novel.
First published in 2015 by Hachette Books Ireland
Copyright © Alison Walsh 2015
The right of Alison Walsh to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters and places in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious. All events and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real life or real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 147 3612815
“Norman Mailer, The Art of Fiction No. 32,” interview by Steven Marcus, originally published in The Paris Review, Issue 31, Winter - Spring 1964. Copyright © 1964 The Paris Review, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC
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To Colm
‘It made me decide there’s no clear boundary between experience and imagination’
Norman Mailer,
Paris Review
Michelle
T
here’s
no bougainvillea where I come from. There are no snakes or lizards, no sun that sits high in the sky, a hot orange ball; there’s none of the dry red earth that coats my toes, that gets into every crevice, the fine lines around my eyes. Sometimes, I’ve found it in my underwear when I’ve taken my bra or knickers off to wash. After thirty years in this place, I think it must be inside me, lining my insides, a thin layer around my heart
.
Where I come from, the earth is a thick, rich brown, the grass a vivid green and the barley a silver grey, swaying in the fields, and everywhere there is water, rushing over pebbles in a stream, pushing slowly between the reeds in the long bluey-brown of the canal that stretches on into the horizon. There are no mud huts, but two-storey farmhouses which have seen better days or modern bungalows with PVC windows, neat baskets of flowers hanging up outside the porch
.
There’s a house by the canal that I always wanted, from the moment I saw it, when I first came to Monasterard. I’d point it out to John-Joe when we went on one of our long walks, the way we always did at the beginning, when we had nothing else to distract us, when the life we’d chosen hadn’t begun to pull us apart, the dog sniffing around ahead of us, rooting in the grass at the edge of a field for the sniff of a pheasant
.
‘
That’s the one I want,’ I said to him as we both stood on the bank and peered over the hedge at its collapsing roof, the grey whitewash almost worn away from the pebble-dashed front, a raggy lace curtain hanging in one of the windows
.
‘
You must be cracked.’ He laughed, scratching his head, his eyes scanning the rusting tractor sinking down into the mud in the front yard. He had that country suspicion of ‘home’ as an affectation – of doing places up, extending them, rummaging through bric-a-brac stalls in markets in search of treasure. Homes were where you slept and ate and watched television, as far as John-Joe was concerned. But he indulged my daydream, placing a heavy arm on my shoulder as we both gazed at the house, his handsome face alert, amused. ‘Anything for you, my love.’ He smiled and, shaking his head, urged the dog on with a whistle
.
Anything for me. How funny it seemed later – ‘funny odd, not funny ha-ha’, as Mary-Pat used to say – that there was a point when John-Joe would have done anything for me, for the girl he loved. Before what happened happened
.
How often I think of it these days, that house, that place. When I first came here, months passed when I hardly thought of it at all. I pushed it out of my mind because I had other things to think about, things that made me feel as if my heart was being pulled out through my ribs. But then that was my punishment: to have left them – Mary-Pat, June, Pius and my little Rosie – and yet brought them with me in my heart, where I could never let them go
.
Now, after I use the small amount of water that remains at the bottom of the tin bowl to splash that blessed dust off my face, grumbling to myself because I can still feel the dry grit of it on my skin, after I lie down on the hard, narrow bed like an old nun, I can see it in my mind’s eye: the way the roof sags, the faded green paint on the front door. Why does the house call me back? Why does it haunt my dreams? I rail against
it, knowing all the time why. Because it’s everything I once wanted for my husband and family, the life I had planned for myself. The life that I never really had
.
And then, because I can do nothing else, I pull the tattered paperback copy of
Gone with the Wind
out from under my pillow, the one that I bought in a flea market in Bray because it had a still from the film on it, Vivien Leigh’s feline, pixie face staring out at me, unknowable; it fascinates me, that face, the idea that it can be a mask, can betray nothing of what’s inside. If only I could have been more like Vivien Leigh. I turn to page 547, to where Scarlett comes back after the battle of Atlanta, and I think about Junie and wonder if she’s reading my mother’s copy, the huge, heavy hardback that I used to love to read. I wonder if she’s found it in the place where I left it for her, and where I left the other things: my plan for the French garden for Pius, because I know how much he loves the garden – he belongs there, just as I do. For Mary-Pat, I left a shell – a perfect whorl of silver and black. We found it on the beach that day we went to Carnsore, that day when my whole life just fell away from me. She made me promise that we’d go back, but we never did. I wonder if she has? For Rosie, I left my ring with the purple stone, the one that John-Joe’s friend had made for me, a thick band of silver with a lump of amethyst set into it, rough, but beautiful, a symbol of everything I thought we meant to each other. I hope it brings her better luck than it did me
.
I tucked them into a battered trunk that I’d found in the attic, a huge black thing with big bands of wood set into it that, when I opened it, released a scent of mothballs and foreign travel. The kids used to like rummaging around in the attic, amongst all the debris that John-Joe’s brother had left behind: the stuffed trout mounted on a mahogany frame, the box of racing programmes from Cheltenham, the collection of men’s hats stored in a battered suitcase, which the girls used to make Pius try on, marching him around the attic, giving each other orders, their footsteps hammering on the ceiling above me as I lay on the bed, my head propped up on a pillow so that I could see the silver ribbon of the canal from my window, could feel that I was part of it, not inside in the prison I’d made for myself. I left them there, because I hoped that, sooner or later, the children would come across them, and because it’s the one place where John-Joe never strayed
.
I didn’t leave a note, because no note would explain to them why I’d left them. No words could ever cover it. Maybe I was fooling myself a little, too, telling myself that, sure, I’d be seeing them again before they’d even have time to miss me. They’d all climb onto the train in Mullingar, piling the old suitcases and bags around them, and when they got off in Heuston Station, they’d stand on the platform for a minute, lost, until they’d catch sight of me, arms open, and they’d run towards me
.
How many times have I replayed that scene in my head over the years. Even though, deep down, I probably knew that it would never happen. It just took time for me to understand, and when I did, the pain was so terrible I thought it would kill me. But even though what I did that day cost me everything, I knew that I had no other choice
.
I pick up the paperback and open it and that’s when the photo falls out. And every time I see it, it’s as if it is for the first time. The feeling is physical, like a punch to the stomach, making me wheezy, short of breath. I clutch my hand to my throat and feel the tears hot beneath my eyelids
.
They are sitting in line on an old ladder, which Pius has transformed into a boat, paddling with a sweeping brush and a mop at either end. Mary-Pat first, her hair in ringlets, her thighs dimpling under her tartan dress: my happy, plump little girl, with her tea sets and her dolls. Then June, in Mary-Pat’s hand-me-down jeans, that watchful look on her face, the one that made me feel that she knew more than she should. Pius is at the end, a half-mad grin on his face, a gap where his two front teeth should be. He’d either done, or was about to do, something naughty. It used to drive John-Joe mad, and the madder he got, the more poor Pius misbehaved. My poor, bold Pius
.
Rosie is tucked in front of him, the way she always was, a little doll in a crochet dress, her thumb in her mouth, her hair a vivid flame of red. How I loved my Rosie. It just shows you, family is family, no matter what. I shouldn’t have loved her as much as I did. I should have nursed that chip of ice in my heart: the rage against her father should, by rights, have been hers to carry. But instead I loved her more – in truth, more than the others. That’s a mother’s secret, isn’t it? We say we love them all equally, but there’s always one, isn’t there? To me, it was Rosie, because I needed her. Because she, of all people, could save me from John-Joe and what we were doing to each other
.
