The Closet of Savage Mementos (14 page)

Chapter Three

I
rang the doorbell but there was no answer. Struan had offered to make dinner for Robin and me that evening, but I thought I could corner him in the kitchen, or send Robin out for more wine, and tell Struan the news then. I was planking it. What was he going to say? What was
I
going to say? How the fuck did I even feel about it all?

There was no sign of either of them in the kitchen or sitting room, but I saw that their jackets were pegged in the hall, so I climbed the stairs. It was dull on the landing and I was about to turn on the light when I heard a low sound – moans and whispers. I stopped and listened; I could hear the wet slip of skin on skin. The noises were coming from the spare bedroom. I thought it might be Sam and her fella; I had never met him and I was curious to see him. But, no – they wouldn’t be in there while Robin was staying with Struan, surely.

I walked slowly to the doorway and looked into the gloom: there were two figures in the room. My eyes adjusted to the dim light and I saw Robin. His hands were gripping someone’s hips and he was moving against them. I tilted forward and saw the naked gleam of Struan’s back; his head was thrown forward and his hands were fastened onto the saddle of the exercise bike. He was grunting and it was laced with a deep, animal pleasure. I gasped and Robin looked up; his eyes were glazed and his lips slack. He saw me, smiled, then turned his face away.

I had a slow, idiotic awakening as I watched the two of them. Coupling. Doing what lovers do. My camera was around my neck and, for some reason beyond knowing, I put the viewfinder to my eye and shot.
Flash, flash, flash.
By the fourth flash they were pulling apart.

I turned away and went into Struan’s bedroom, walking like an automaton; I felt a caul slowly lift from my eyes. I stood by the shelf and picked up two paperweights, balancing them like a scales, one in each hand. I put them back and examined each and every weight on the shelf in turn. I peered into their teeming interiors: they held thistles, flowers, stars, droplets, milky swirls and colours of every kind. Their glass exteriors were smooth and cold. Such solid, magical things. They were sand once, I thought, lining them back up, though it was hard to believe.
Don’t build your life on sand.
I held the millefiori paperweight, its centre a riot of mosaics that reminded me of old fashioned sweets. I loved its flowering hexagons that were stacked like the land-bridge that once linked Ireland’s Causeway Coast and Staffa. I was fascinated by the way the glass magnified and shrank the flowers as I tilted the paperweight this way and that.

I picked up the plumbago egg – my favourite. I held my hands around it like a supplicant deep in prayer and pressed my nose and lips against it. Struan and Robin. Robin and Struan. I could hear them whispering fiercely in the next room; I could hear the rattle of belt buckles and the thump of feet emerging through trouser legs onto carpet. The fronds of seaweed inside the glass seemed to dance under my gaze; the rosy coral and the bubbles meandered and rose, like fizzing champagne. I popped the plumbago egg into my satchel, sat on Struan’s bed, and waited.

I heard footsteps retreat down the stairs and the front door banged; the brass knocker thumped then settled. Struan came into his room and sat beside me on the bed. Neither of us spoke. He lit a cigarette and I listened to him draw the smoke sharply into his lungs in three short blasts. We sat, not moving. Someone shouted out on Clanranald Street; cars drove by; the ferry to the Isles let its long, lonely blast.

I turned to look at Struan. ‘Well?’

‘I don’t want to finish this cigarette,’ Struan said, mesmerised it seemed by the ash that would fall any second, ‘because when I finish it, I think everything will have changed.’

‘Everything changed long before that cigarette.’ I stood up and went to the window. ‘He’s my brother, for fuck’s sake.’

‘There’s nothing I can say.’

‘You could try “I’m sorry”, Struan. Or, “I’m queer”. Or did that slip your mind somehow, ever since we met?’

‘I am sorry. Of course I’m sorry.’ He shouted the words at me.

‘Don’t raise your voice to me. I’m the one who should be ranting and raving.’ I turned to face him. ‘I feel like I’ve been reading a story where the beginning is missing. I feel like a fucking fool.’ I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes and rubbed; I looked over at him. ‘Are you gay?’

‘No!’ His denial fluttered between us, a bird searching for a place to rest. ‘I’m sorry, Lillis. Really, I am. You have to believe me.’ Struan came over to where I stood and put his hand on my sleeve.

‘Don’t touch me! He’s all over you.’ I pulled my arm away. ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t even look at you.’

I grabbed my satchel from the bed and, as I did, the paperweight I had taken rolled out and fell to the floor; it landed on the carpet with a thunk. We both stood, staring down at it. Struan bent, scooped it up and handed it to me. I put it back into my bag and left.

Every day I walked up the Byres Road, past the side street that held Pearl’s pink house. The lights were usually on and I imagined her inside, in thrall to the television and the news it spat out to feed her. My heart would palpate in case Struan’s car sat outside his mother’s house; I never saw it there and that was both relief and disappointment to me.

I had a tiny bedsit in a Victorian redbrick off the Great Western Road. I worked lunchtimes in an equally tiny café called The Bonny Bird, mostly cutting sandwiches – endless square-sausage pieces with pickle, or thick cuts of ham dolloped with mustard. The bonny bird was an ugly silver parrot who could say ‘Hello there’ in different accents. His cage stood in the corner by the window and he climbed in and out, shitting on the floor underneath, screeking his hellos and burbling away to himself like a lunatic. He seemed to me like a health and safety inspector’s dream but, for whatever reason, he – and the café – endured.

William, my boss, was an easy man. His wife Mary often sat in the café, her chair pushed back from the table, her palms curled over the high plum of her belly and a satisfied set to her face. She had the cushioned, ignorant look of the newly rich.

When my boss first introduced his wife to me I said, ‘It’s like an old ballad, where there’s a William there’s a Mary.’ I laughed and William tittered politely, but Mary just looked at me, closing her hands on top of her bump as if she were the only pregnant woman in Scotland. I hadn’t yet begun to show.

Over those months I spent most of my spare time lying on my bed. I read a lot and thought a lot, trying to figure things out. I went to the cinema often. I window-shopped around Sauchiehall Street. I knit a hat and blanket for the baby, clicking my needles feverishly into the night when I should have been sleeping. I was desperate to have the finished garments so I could look at them, hold them, fold and re-fold them. I made both in blue and green, for the baby’s Scottish and Irish parts.

I was bloated with grief, though I wouldn’t have named it that way then; grief to my mind was coupled with death, with memories of Dónal. This was a new kind of loss. My thoughts would slip back to Struan and Robin and I would try to sort it out in my head. Who had made the first move? Had they kissed? Did either of them even consider me? Who was to blame – Robin or Struan? They weren’t drunk – it was early afternoon – had they smoked something? Taken something? It all left me confused and enraged, so I didn’t let myself linger over it. I packed it away as something too sordid and hurtful to dwell on for long. And I found it hard to look forward, too; nothing seemed to fit in my life anymore, there was barely a place even for myself.

I would lie on my bed, reading the slim baby book I borrowed over and over from the library, marvelling at the author’s pictures of herself, pregnant and giving birth. She was unafraid of her own nakedness in what seemed to me an untamed way. Her neat bump and long, wine-dark nipples offended me and made me impatient with her. If I had been asked, I couldn’t have said why.

I wrote to Verity and told her things hadn’t worked out with Struan and that I had moved to Glasgow to see how I might get on there. She didn’t mention in her letters back if Robin had said anything about what had happened between him and Struan, and I didn’t ask. She told me to be kind to myself. Robin didn’t write.

I met the woman from the adoption agency several times and she encouraged me to choose prospective parents from her file, but I declined.

‘You pick the best ones,’ I said, and she gave me a look that I couldn’t read.

She talked to me about having access to the adoptive family through photos and letters, but I said I didn’t want anything like that. She asked if the father’s name would go on the birth certificate and I hummed and hawed and eventually said it would. Then I said it wouldn’t. Then I said it would.

At work, when it became obvious that I was pregnant, William installed a high stool behind the sandwich bar without comment and I cut the bread there every afternoon. He offered me early maternity leave, but I worked on and on until the baby’s due date and past it. When I was a week overdue, I left The Bonny Bird for the final time.

On my last day, I had lunch in the café with William and Mary. Over William’s shoulder, I watched the retreating behind of a young mother, wide and beautiful in linen trousers. She had a baby in her arms and a toddler at her shins; the toddler was pulling at her, making some demand. The mother slapped his hand but, instantly remorseful, she bent low and kissed his face. He sobbed a little, nodded and pouted his lips while his mother consoled him. I thought I heard Mary snap her fingers to get back my attention, but she mustn’t have because, when I looked, her arms were still tucked across each other. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she had.

‘Will your chap be with you at the birth?’ she said, rocking her baby’s pram violently with one hand.

‘Ah no. He’s squeamish.’

‘Just as well. Men are terrible at a birth; William was utterly useless, I had to tell him to leave.
He
was upsetting
me
.’ She barked a laugh. ‘What hospital?’

‘The Queen Mother.’

‘Oh, God, they’re butchers in there. Butchers! My friend had to get a hundred stitches; her womb went septic. Why don’t you travel to Edinburgh and go private? That’s what we did.’

‘Not everyone can afford what we can, Mary,’ William said, quietly.

‘Well, if it’s a girl, let me know, Lillis. I have tons of clothes,’ Mary said.

‘I have all I need.’ Seeing she was annoyed, I added, ‘I will, thanks, I’ll let you know.’

I watched her pluck the salad garnish from William’s plate and eat it while he sat on, eyes ahead. There was a taut silence between us and I finished my sandwich quickly and got up to leave. William wrapped me in an awkward hug. He stuffed an envelope into my hand and told me to take care. I was grateful for the money; I was living, by then, on the clippings of tin, as Granny King used to say.

Looking back, I see a gossamer quality to those months – a suspension of life while life burgeoned inside me. I had removed myself from myself, as much as from the worlds I had occupied up until then: home and Kinlochbrack. Glasgow was a crevice I slid into and I stayed wedged in there until it was time to come out.

Chapter Four

S
ometimes I feel the pull of my former self – the unwary girl who thought the bad, the odd and the difficult things happened only to other people. I fall backwards in my mind to the time before Dónal died, but it is hard to conjure the person I was then or what she was about. And it doesn’t matter. My life is made up of all that has taken place and hard things happened before Dónal’s death too.

Cormac and I have come to tidy Dónal’s grave for his birthday; Treasa, their mother, would normally take care of it but she hasn’t been herself since Mr Spain died. Desiccated snowdrops stand in the built-in vase beneath the headstone, and weeds hem the outside borders of the plot. It is a dry, bright morning and, though I am tired, the fresh air makes me feel lively. Sucking air greedily into my nose, I welcome the small surge of energy being outdoors brings. I kneel on a plastic square and pull knotgrass and shepherd’s purse from the soil; their shallow roots make them come away easy. Cormac gently scrubs the gravestone with the soft bristle brush that his mother keeps for that purpose. I can hear teenagers shout and laugh on the crazy golf course across the fence.

Nessa sleeps in her pram beside us as we work; it is the same pram that both Dónal and Cormac were pushed around in as babies. I get up from my knees to check on her. She is bundled tight like an Eskimo – in coat, hat, mittens, baby-nest and quilt. I push up the hood of the pram.

‘Leave it down,’ Cormac says, ‘she needs a little sun on her face.’

‘She might get burnt.’

‘There isn’t much strength in an April sun.’

‘Still.’

I leave the hood up and go back to weeding, but I am on high alert, thinking I hear the baby snuffle and stir. In the house, I have to have her in the same room as me always – downstairs in her pram, upstairs in the Moses basket. I came in from a quick trip to the supermarket one day and she wasn’t where I had left her. My heart slipped up to my throat and lodged there; I thought I would choke.

‘Where is she?’ I shouted at Cormac, racing from room to room.

‘Up in our bedroom.’

‘On her
own
?’

‘I have the monitor on,’ he called after me as I ran up the stairs. She was fine, of course, but I simply cannot let her out of my sight.

Cormac soaks his brush in water and continues to clean Dónal’s headstone; the shush of the bristles is soothing.

‘The stonecutter is doing my da’s inscription next week,’ he says. ‘There’s not much space for it; Dónal is taking up too much room as usual.’ He lets a short laugh. ‘You know, we should buy a plot.’

I shiver. ‘Don’t say that. It’s morbid.’

‘It’s reality, Lillis. The plots in the new extension are nearly sold out, I heard.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘My ma told me.’

I can hear fossicking noises from the pram. I get up and look in at Nessa; she is trying to get her fingers into her mouth. ‘She’s hungry.’

‘Go on home and feed her, I’ll finish up here.’

I take the bunch of bluebells I picked from our garden for Dónal out of the pram’s under-tray and hand them to Cormac, then I push the squeaking pram through the hush of the graveyard. The wheels’ controlled bouncing lulls Nessa back to sleep. The pathways are narrow and the place is deserted; I look at each grave that I pass – some are rich with statues of angels and photographs of the dead, others are nothing more than an iron cross with dates. One grave says, ‘Here lies Loman Nulty, a gentle man’, and I wonder if that was Mr Nulty who was our school caretaker. I speed past the graves holding children with their teddies and candles. Beyond the stone wall, motorists lightly tap their car horns, greeting their dead as they drive by. The sun drenches the yews that line the perimeter wall, making the trees seem less sinister for a while as they sway under the light. I count seven crazy golf balls dotted on the pathway like giant gobstoppers and wonder if the gravediggers toss them back over the wall before funerals are let in.

I push the pram up and over the long swirl of the flyover bridge that joins the two sides of the motorway, then walk along Beechlawn Avenue. Once inside the house, I settle into the sofa with the baby. The starfish of her hand against my breast is possessive and content, and her sucking is voracious. It pleases me that I am keeping her alive; me alone.

I am bone-weary and I fall into a half-sleep. My nights are disturbed not just by the baby but by my brain which click-clacks along like an overloaded train, rarely giving me a rest. I dream of babies who won’t feed from me; babies who can talk; I dream that I am heavily pregnant but my stomach is malleable like bread dough. In this dream I am walking with the pram but when I bend over to fix Nessa’s blanket she is not there; I let go of the handle in shock and the pram speeds away from me, of its own volition, and I cannot move. I dream that I am on Shore Street in Kinlochbrack, looking out on the loch; there is a child with me but I can’t see his face. I know that he is Malachy. Something shifts and I dream that Cormac comes back from the graveyard and yanks Nessa from my arms – suddenly she is back with me! Cormac grabbing her makes the baby yelp and me scream.

Then Cormac is standing over me, returned for real. I fight my way to wakefulness and go to speak, but Malachy sits continuously on my tongue today and I have to bite him back before he falls out in front of Cormac. The ‘M’ of his name starts but I bury it in time and say, ‘You’re back.’

I shift Nessa’s head; her mouth is thrown open like a yawning kitten’s, wide and pink.

‘Why don’t you take her up to bed, get some sleep?’

‘I won’t be able to nod off tonight if I do that.’

‘You’re not sleeping anyway.’

‘Maybe I could get some pills to help me?’

‘I don’t think you can take anything like that when you’re breastfeeding.’

‘No, probably not.’

‘My poor tired dormouse.’

Dormouse was what he used to call me when I was able to sleep anywhere: in the car, on a bus, at the cinema. ‘You could nap on a mantelpiece,’ Cormac would say. Now I listen to the dawn chorus each morning and keep an almost satisfied account of the fact that I know the choir of birds starts up earlier every day.

Cormac leaves for work and I haul myself from bed and change the baby’s nappy on the chest of drawers by the window. The pout between her legs is so tiny and perfect; I wipe her and think that I wouldn’t know what to do with a baby boy. How do you wipe clean all that
they
have?

I have been obsessing about paedophiles – the radio news is full of them – and it frightens me to think of Nessa being abducted, like that little girl who was on holiday in Portugal and has never been found. I try hard to bundle these thoughts under better ones but they resurface, especially at night, and I weep into my pillow for fear of what could happen. I pull on Nessa’s babygro and tell her she is the best girl.

‘Aren’t you my girl? My best girl? You are. You are. You’re my only one.’

In the kitchen the fridge whirrs; its pitch gets higher and higher until it sounds like it will take off and burst through the ceiling and then the roof, like some mad rocket. The noise of it makes me want to scream and I leave my breakfast uneaten so that I can get away from it. I pull on boots, put a coat over my nightdress and bundle Nessa into her pram. The park is a couple of miles away but I crave to be there in the vast quietness and green. I push the pram past the terrace where my piano teacher lived; she probably still lives there – the house’s name is unchanged on the fanlight, ‘Saint Jude’. The patron saint of hopeless cases. I was hopeless at learning piano so that was a fit, I think. I pass the playground where a fat red-haired girl is slumped on a swing. I want to call out to her, ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ but she looks so abject that I can’t bring myself to speak. She swings desultorily and stares ahead. I pass the Used Cars for Cash garage with its tired bunting and defeated salesman, perched in the window like a dummy, staring out at the world.

The park’s high wall makes a secret place of it. I go through the gate and feel calmer at the sight of all the grass that slopes away from me on both sides of the pathway. I hope a deer might come sniffing out from among the trees, like happened last time. It was a young deer with a red tag in one ear, separated from the herd – a maverick or loner. I watched for ages as it nosed about the ground, unconcerned by anything. No deer appears and I walk on.

There is a man sitting on my bench. I can usually time it so there is hardly anyone in the park but today there is a man on my bench. He looks forlorn, but I am irritated with him for taking my spot. I idle past, hoping he will move, but he sits on. I stop and lift my head to listen to the shush-hush of the horse chestnuts, newly in leaf. A pigeon leaps from a branch and bustles onto a lower one.

‘Do you want to sit down?’ a voice says. I look over at the man. ‘I don’t bite.’

He must know this is my bench; his invitation is a way to apologise to me. My chest swells. I wheel the pram over, put the brake on and sit. The floral end of my nightdress sticks out the bottom of my coat. All around the man’s feet are pistachio shells, they are like fawn-coloured beetles, scurrying about. I look away, to the fresh leaves on the trees, their thick trunks.

‘And how are you this fine morning?’ the man says.

I stare at him. Why does he keep speaking to me? I ruffle the end of my nightie with my feet. ‘I’m OK,’ I say, stiffly.

‘Isn’t it grand to get a bit of fresh air?’

‘It is.’

‘The park is a great amenity. For the kids. For us all.’ He smiles. ‘Hah?’

‘Yes, it’s lovely.’

He toes the pistachio shells with his shoe. ‘Isn’t it great to be young? It’s well for you.’

I smile tightly. ‘Mmm,’ I say. Is forty young, I wonder? It doesn’t feel like it to me.

‘Can I look in at your babby?’ He is already rising from the bench.

‘No, no, no.’ I leap up, kick off the brake and grab the pram’s handle. ‘No. Keep away from her.’ I shove the pram along the path, away from him.

‘You fucking bitch,’ he shouts after me. ‘Bitch!’

I try to calm the histrionics that rise in my neck; I glance behind and he is on his feet, staring after me but he doesn’t move to follow me. I push the pram quickly towards the gate and exit gratefully onto Chapelizod Road. I fumble for my handbag under the pram’s apron but it is not there. I go to a phone box, thinking I can reverse the charges to Cormac at work and he will come and get us. But the receiver has been cut from the cord. The phone box stinks of piss, which makes me feel like throwing up, which in turn makes me light-headed. I stumble out, hang on to the pram and lurch forward.

I head for Verity’s. Sometimes I rehearse things to talk about when I am on my way to her house, to get on her right side and ease my way into her mood, but not today. I can barely get up the road and my mind is loaded down enough without trying to prepare myself for my mother. Verity looks bothered when she answers the door, she hates anyone to call unexpectedly, but something about me makes her soften.

‘Come in, come in,’ she says, waving her hands and hurrying me into the hall as if she is afraid someone else might steal in through the door behind me. I bounce the pram over the threshold. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Nothing happened.’ Tears drop onto my coat and I see them as if they are coming from someone else’s eyes. ‘Oh, Mam.’

She leaves the pram in the sitting room, helps me out of my coat and guides me up the stairs, where she puts me into her bed; I can smell her on the pillow.

‘Try to sleep now.’

She leaves and I hear her slow clop on the stairs, then the ting that means she has lifted the receiver of the telephone in the hall. I listen to her murmur into the phone. I look at the wooden slats that make-up the ceiling; their deep honey colour is mesmerising and they lift a little of the darkness. None of the rooms are quite right in this house and they never have been. Curtains are sloppily hung; light fittings are crude and ancient, liable to electrocute you if you don’t know each switch’s knack. There is too much furniture: a dining table lives on the landing, saddled with five or six tablecloths and a pile of books; there is a wardrobe in the bathroom, skulking like an unwelcome guest behind the door.

My childhood home sits in the bowl of a valley; the slopes and the old, old sycamores and oaks cause long shadows, but there is another thing too – something created by Verity and Anthony, a dim oppression that hung over us always as a family. We weren’t ordinary like our neighbours and, while I craved that as a child, I disdained it too. Verity and Anthony fought endlessly and with passion, then they would stay in bed for a day, making up, and Robin and I were allowed in to their room to witness how happy they were.
See
, their wrapped-together bodies beamed,
no more screaming! No more slapping! No more dish-smashing! All is well.
And, yes, it was a relief that the house was quiet, but things remained dark and we tiptoed around, trying to find ways to be good. Anthony took what little light there was with him when he left and we had to guide our mother from then on.

After a while Verity comes into the room again and snuggles Nessa into the bed beside me. The baby is still sleeping, her lips making sucking motions, then falling open to reveal the curl of her tongue, like a conch shell behind her gums. Nessa is the best thing that has ever happened to me, I think. I slip my finger into her fat little fist.

Verity sits on the bed. ‘Babies are
real
work. They turn your life upside down and it’s a high-wire act just getting through the day.’

‘I’m tired, Mam. Exhausted, that’s all. My head is fuddled.’

‘That’s to be expected. But is it anything more than that?’

‘No.’

‘Motherhood is immutable, Lillis. It’s there and it’s there and it’s there. Nothing changes that. But you can get help.’

‘Why are you saying that?’

‘You seem distracted. Distraught even. Cormac says you’re pacing the house at night. And you went out in your nightdress today, Lillis.’