The Closet of Savage Mementos (15 page)

‘When were you talking to Cormac?’

‘I rang him a while ago.’

‘At work? Even I’m not allowed to ring him at work.’ I throw off the quilt and she tells me to lie down. ‘Rest, sweetheart. Feed Nessa now, then I’ll take her and you get some sleep.’

‘I don’t want to sleep. I have things to get on with.’

‘I’m telling you to rest and that’s that.’ Verity pulls the quilt up to my neck and mock strangles me with it. ‘Feed your daughter then
go asleep
!’

She leaves again and I look at the framed embroidery of a peacock that sits over the mantelpiece. My Granny King had stitched the peacock – the most glamorous of birds – and managed to make it so disgustingly gloomy that it depresses me to even look at it. Verity barely mentions her mother and when she does it is with stiff words. Granny King – who died when I was very young – was, according to Verity, ‘chilly’.

I picture my granny, an ancient version of me, of my mother, head bent low over embroidery silks, placing stitch after drab stitch into the sombre cloth, fashioning the peacock, like someone decorating a shroud.

When I told Verity I was pregnant with the baby I later miscarried, she was in a bad way. Her house was a shambles and she was acting maudlin and hopeless, letting herself and all around her fall into decay. Robin rang to ask me to try to sort it out.

‘I can’t face it anymore,’ he said.

‘Maybe she’ll just drink herself to death; do us all a favour,’ I said.

I knelt on her floor, a filthy cloth between my rubber-gloved fingers, scrubbing at unnameable stains. Verity was perched on the sofa, watching my attempts to right the mess.

‘You missed a bit,’ she said, and cackled.

‘The drinking has to stop,’ I said, ‘for once and for all.’

‘How dare you preach at me. What are you – perfect?’ Verity leaned over and poked my shoulder with one finger. Her eyes were crackle-glazed.

‘I never said I was perfect; this has nothing to do with me. You’re killing yourself and you know it.’ The bleach smell was making my stomach toss back on itself; I covered my mouth and nose with one hand. ‘Things go wrong when you drink, you know that.’

‘For your information, I haven’t had a drink since Friday.’ She pinched her mouth into an ‘o’, let her hands fall into her lap and stared at me. ‘I woke up in a pool of piss on Friday morning, if you must know, and it shook me.’ She looked at her hands. ‘Even I saw that I’d gone backwards by about five years. That I’m regressing even as I age.’ She smiled. ‘The unfortunate thing is, sweetheart, my sorrows have learnt to swim – as someone once said – so drowning them isn’t going to work anymore. Believe me, if I could knock their babbling heads under a vat of wine or vodka, I would.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’ve come to that conclusion. You’re a nicer person without drink.’

Verity sniffed. ‘There’s something hard inside you, Lillis Yourell. Something cold and hard.’ As always she was resisting. Resisting the idea of a sober life; resisting the notion of herself as a decent person. ‘I hate getting old,’ she said. ‘Such a gradual disillusioning; all the young desires end up looking silly and hopeless. It’s sad but true.’

I got up from the floor and sat on the sofa beside her. My head was dizzy-heavy and I felt tired; I took off the rubber gloves and held my mother’s hand. I wanted to do something to help her – my eternal desire. I thought I could cheer her up with my news.

‘Mam, I want to tell you something.’ I looked at her. ‘I think I might be pregnant. In fact, I know I am.’

She smiled – a wicked curve of the lips – but her eyes remained fish-dead. ‘Well, bully for you.’ She snorted and snatched her hand away. ‘You needn’t think I’m going to mind it.’

She never apologised to me for her reaction to that pregnancy but, when I was expecting Nessa, she tried hard to be gentle and kind. And she tries still.

Chapter Five

I
n late November, Margaret came from Kinlochbrack to visit me in Glasgow. She sat in my bedsit, trying to look like she was impressed with the place, but she held herself away from everything. I was glad Charlie was not with her; I didn’t want to deal with watching her change his nappy, feed and cosset him – I dreaded his very babyness. I made tea and we sat beside the window, looking down at the street.

‘You could be a maternity model from a magazine, pet; that dress cleaving to your bump like clingfilm,’ Margaret said.

I smoothed my dress over the egg of my belly, as if doing that might rub it away. The size of my stomach alarmed me most days.

‘Have you seen Struan?’ I said.

‘Once or twice. He’s cut up.’

‘Well, he should have thought of that before, you know, having sex with my brother.’

‘He’s really sorry, Lillis. He seems depressed; very down. He’s been neglecting the inn.’

I shrugged. ‘Am I supposed to care?’

‘Lillis, Sam came to see me.’ Margaret put her hand on my arm.

‘Sam?’

‘Have you heard from her at all?’ she asked.

‘Me? How or why would I have contact with Sam? I can’t stand her.’

‘It seems she was in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago and she spotted you on Sauchiehall Street. Lillis, she knows you’re pregnant.’

‘Oh fuck. Has she told him?’

‘That’s what I don’t know. She came to see me, to suss me out I suppose, but I didn’t say a thing. I mean, I neither confirmed nor denied. I said she’d have to ask you.’

‘Jesus, is there any way she’d say nothing to Struan? There isn’t, is there? She’s always been a horrible little shit. She’ll love this.’

Margaret sips her tea. ‘Lillis, you need to keep yourself stress free, for the baby. Don’t dwell on it.’ She shakes her head. ‘But you know Sam. She’s squibby – liable to go off at any moment.’

‘You think she’ll tell him?’

Margaret grimaced. ‘Can
you
see her keeping her powder dry on this?’

I spent Christmas in Glasgow with Margaret, Gordon and Charlie. We stayed with Gordon’s elderly father, who was confused about exactly who I was.

‘Ah,’ he said, a couple of times, ‘you’re Margaret’s sister. I see.’

He was a congenial old man and I enjoyed the few days in his large house. We ate and chatted; dozed and played Scrabble. All the while I tried to ignore Charlie, who was too real, too present, too baby-like altogether. I observed the care that Margaret and Gordon took with him – everything was about Charlie – and curled myself away from it.

Two weeks after Malachy was born, I returned to Dublin. I watched the clouds below the aeroplane prancing like poodles, top to tail. Nothing would settle inside me and I was tired, so outrageously tired. A beautiful young man sat beside me on the plane, he was chiselled like a sports star from head to toe, and I had a mad urge to grab him and kiss his mouth. I didn’t want to kiss him – not really – I just felt fit to explode; I was like a grenade with a wonky fuse.

Verity and Robin met me at the airport and I sat in the back of the car, taciturn and close-mouthed, all the way home. Neither of them spoke much either. I caught Verity looking at me in the rear-view, over and over, as if she had something she wanted to say to me, but couldn’t get the words out.

Just like when Dónal died, I was pulled tight between forgetting and remembering. Any sense of myself as a competent human being, with things to do and achieve, had left me. I was a rag doll, floppy and useless. I signed on the dole and stayed in Verity’s; I slept during the day, for hours and hours, and drifted through the weeks, doing little. I unscrewed the mirror from the dressing table in my old bedroom and put it against the wall, so I wouldn’t have to face myself. Everything seemed pointless, even absurd. Why should I shower every day? Why should I eat proper food? Why should I care about getting a job, or socialising, or about anything at all? I woke up each morning without myself, glum with the realisation that I had to get through another day.

The after-blood seeped from me less and less and, as it waned, I wanted it back. Its smell was potent – meaty and ancient. That blood smell, for me, encapsulated the almost ten months I had carried Malachy. It took seven weeks and four days to dry up. Sometimes it felt like I had never given birth at all but, when I lay in the bath, my hands were drawn to the slack pouch of my stomach and the dark line that stretched up it. When the line and the pink stretch marks began to fade, I felt their loss.

Verity was always nearby; she would look at me for long moments as if wanting to scold me; sometimes she did.

‘You’re a malcontent, Lillis. Like me,’ she said one afternoon, exasperated when I wouldn’t get out of bed. ‘Nothing pleases you. You wanted to come home. Now you’re here but you won’t do anything. Get up. Go out. You can’t spend your life sleeping your brains to train oil.’

I did get up and I did go out. I met up with Robin’s friend Fidelma for drinks. We sat in a city pub in dull silence. While avoiding me himself, Robin had somehow coaxed Fidelma into meeting me and, no more than myself, she clearly didn’t want to be there. I asked how her café was doing and she told me it was going fine, but she didn’t ask about Scotland or Struan or my future plans. I couldn’t have talked about any of it anyway. I got drunk, sliding pints of lager into my throat like milk. The bar and its occupants became swimmy and I felt cantankerous and wrong.

‘Why did you agree to meet, Fidelma?’ I asked.

‘Robin thinks we both need cheering up.’

I snorted. ‘Robin knows fuck all about what I want. Why do you need cheering up?’

Fidelma agitated her hair with both hands and looked at the floor. ‘I’ve been really low, totally all over the place.’ She leaned forward and glanced around. ‘I had an abortion a few weeks ago,’ she whispered.

I couldn’t even open my mouth to speak after she said it. I stood up from the table and left the pub, leaving Fidelma calling after me.

*

Malachy and Dónal are like twin ghosts; they swing together through my head and when one of them taps the wire of memory, it reverberates, then pulls taut and threatens to snap. I wake from dreams and think that I am still immersed in the dream-world, where everyone is together and growing older and all is well. The divide between my dream-life and my day is so ill-drawn that, one of these mornings, I am afraid I am going to blurt everything inside me to Cormac when I wake.

He has been urging me to join a mother and baby group, to meet other new mammies, but I am afraid I will be years older than all of them, so I wiggle out of it. I arrange to meet Robin for coffee just to get out of the house. I leave Nessa with Cormac. Though I fret about being away from the baby, I feel light as I take the bus into town, free for a while from her needs. I sit on the top deck of the bus and enjoy the swing up the quays, past the Luas, tinkling its way to Saggart, past the brewery and the barracks, past the bridges that bracelet the Liffey, each one named for a different man; past the green stretch of the river itself, named for a woman. My bus mates are either plugged into music or shouting into mobile phones; the graffiti on the ceiling is the same as it ever was: ‘Macker ’n’ Jean 4eva’; ‘Ballyers are snots’; ‘Jim Murphy is selling his wife Dolores’.

The boys on the bus occupy a seat each. The girls huddle together; they all have the same messy up-styles and heavy make-up along with matching tribal tattoos on their necks. I put my hand to my own nape, where the quaver sits, forever hidden under my hair. It is nice, I think, to sit on the bus, looking around, my mind emptying.

Town is quiet, most people are tucked up in their offices or busy after the school run. The quays reek of fried onions and the smell makes me momentarily hungry. I cross the Ha’penny Bridge and trot up to meet Robin outside a pub on Drury Street; he is already drinking coffee, sitting in the cordoned-off area on the footpath. He orders tea for me and asks how I am.

‘I’m grand. Weary. But happy to be out and about.’

‘You’re bored out of your tree – I can tell.’ He sucks on his cigarette, smirking. ‘I’ll never, ever understand why you married Cormac Spain. You’re like peaches and
fake
cream. Polar fucking opposites.’

‘I love him. He’s a good man,’ I say quietly.

‘Don’t make me puke. Since when have you liked
good
men? Jesus, you need a smack.’ He swipes at the air with his cigarette and grins.

‘Well, what I certainly didn’t need was another quixotic arsehole like Struan Torrance.’

Struan’s is not a name that is mentioned between Robin and me; he may as well never have existed as far as discussing him is concerned. What happened cleaved a gorge through us; we have never resumed the closeness we once had. Robin being Robin – and a true son of Verity – acted as if nothing had occurred. But it wasn’t like that for me, it couldn’t be. And so I pulled back from Robin and created a distance between us that he has not dared to breach. Or maybe by
his
actions he established the distance. Whatever the truth of it, we remain wary of each other. But, when we meet, we carry on in our own way, ignoring the past, and not looking down into the chasm. It is a case of whatever you say, say nothing, which has always been the Yourell solution to Yourell problems. He ignores Struan’s name now, just as I knew he would. It doesn’t suit Robin to talk about the past.

‘Your downfall, Lillis, is you never know how to say no.’

‘That’s not true. Maybe when I was younger, but not now.’

Robin tosses his head, dismissing what I have said – a Verity move. He blows smoke at me which he knows I hate. ‘So, what’s your sex life like then, since baby? Is Cormac an animal?’

‘Shut up. As if I’d tell you.’ I bat the smoke away with one hand.

‘I see; it’s crap.’

I put down my cup and look at Robin. ‘Why do gay men constantly bang on about sex? What’s that all about?’ He laughs. ‘No seriously, tell me, I want to know. I mean, you all have jobs and homes, you go to films, to the pub; there’s gay marriage to think about, politics, the recession, et cetera et cetera. Why is sex the
only
topic of conversation allowed?’

‘Probably because we don’t get any.’ He takes my fingers in his. ‘And just so you know, I don’t give a fuck about marriage. It’s not even vaguely relevant to me.’ He flicks his ash onto the ground. ‘I hate all that smug stuff that married people carry on with, like they’re the only people on the planet. It’s a look on their faces. You have it, even though you’re miserable.’

‘Oh, God, Robin, give it a rest. What is wrong with you today?’

‘Nothing.’

This is how Robin operates when I am down: attack, attack, attack. He cannot stand when I am not lively, or going along with him in his banter. Like my father, he does not tolerate tears and bad humour. Anthony would leave the room if either Verity or myself cried when he lived with us. Or he would sit in grumpy silence until we calmed down.

We drink our drinks and sit without speaking. The forced gaiety of a group of girls near us bothers me. They are holding cigarettes between manicured fingers and they screech over each other, rather than talk; their eyes are insincere and troubled, and I find I cannot stop staring at them. One of them glances at me, then looks away. The whole group goes quiet and then they all laugh. They are clearly laughing at me.

‘Fucking cows,’ I say.

‘Lillis, they’re only kids.’

‘Well, I can’t be dealing with them. With anyone.’ I drain my teacup and rise. ‘Come on, let’s go for a window-shop on Grafton Street.’

Robin sighs and finishes his coffee. He takes my arm and shuffles along beside me down Castle Market. ‘Cheer up, Charlie,’ he says, something Verity used to sing to us when we were little.

‘I’m grand,’ I say, and even I can hear the strain in my voice.

I get the bus back home; it stops on Wood Quay and the driver calls out the bus number. I look at the bus stop to see why he has done that and there is a blind woman standing there. She nods, smiles and rolls her eyes; it gives her a curiously calm look and, for a moment, I envy her. The doors sigh shut and we drive on.

I trail my hand along the bushes that are as snug as huts in front of every garden on Beechlawn Avenue. I put my key in the lock and, when the door opens, the quietness of the house assails me. I wander through the rooms and find them all empty. A small fur of panic coats the inside of my mouth but I tamp it down. Nessa is OK; she is with Cormac. Nothing can go wrong; he is not going to let her out of his sight.

I lie on the sofa and doze; I sleep for a while and wake suddenly with a clear memory of Margaret, staring at me across the tiny table where I ate my meals in my Glasgow bedsit, an angry set to her face. Margaret’s eyebrows had a high arch which made her look constantly quizzical. It suited her because she was an inquisitive woman; not nosey, exactly, because that would imply a certain snoopiness. No, Margaret was just terribly interested in other people’s lives and she shared the minutiae of her own in forensic detail. I knew everything about her family and far too much about her and Gordon’s sex life, because she would muse aloud about it for hours at a time.

Margaret was disappointed with me because I was giving the baby up for adoption; it gnawed at her maternal self and she struggled not to mention it all the time. She also could not approve of the fact that I refused to tell Struan that I was pregnant but, at the same time, she seemed to understand that my hurt was huge and raw.

‘In time,’ she said, more than once, meaning that she was sure I would contact Struan eventually and tell him. But I never did. Months turned to years somehow and Struan slipped from the image I nurtured of the baby and me. He didn’t seem part of it, that bubble of time where I carried and delivered our son. I thought – think – of Malachy daily but Struan rarely.

Margaret was particularly annoyed with me that day in my bedsit in Glasgow because she had asked if Struan could write to me and I said I did not want to hear from him. Ever. She didn’t answer my refusal but she stared at me across my table as if I was the worst kind of brat she had ever encountered. In fairness, I probably was.