The Closet of Savage Mementos (16 page)

Chapter Six

A
black sheep and her fat-haunched lamb sit on a rise ahead of me, serene as the Madonna and child. Fog skirls across the river and the daffodils on the bank lie almost flat from the dew. Dónal and I used to call that daffodil rain – the tiny drops that cling to the petals, bright as glass beads. I pluck one of the flowers and push my nose deep into its yellow bell, then toss it away. I examine my hands. I like that they are getting older – pallid and mottled and bony. They are a replica of Verity’s hands; younger looking, but practically identical in shape and finger length and colour. I never knew that I wanted any part of me to be like any part of her, but I find I am pleased to see Verity’s hands at the end of my arms.

My car idles by the gate, the exhaust jetting a steady stream. I walk to the middle of the field and throw my hands skyward, to see if I can feel the mist on my palms. I don’t remember driving here.

Today is Malachy’s birthday. My April boy. He is twenty, the same age Dónal was when he died. Twenty. It is a lifetime. A long time. Dónal was an April baby. My two April boys.

Yesterday there was another earthquake in Japan; the news showed elderly people, keening and hunched over, their faces a wreck of confusion and fear. I watched the footage for hours. Yesterday, too, I saw a dead crow hung above the garage of my neighbour’s house, its torso a meaty patch. I could not figure out why it was there and I stood staring at it until Nessa woke in the pram. I rocked her back to sleep and continued to look at the bird.

I had seen a crow mobbing an eagle over the hills when out walking with Margaret in Kinlochbrack one day. She said the crow was protecting its nest, but I felt sorry for the eagle. I have always hated crows. The dead bird and the earthquake made me feel dark. Both of them are wrong things – things that should not happen, should not be seen or heard about.

Last night I had a déjà vu where Cormac took the place of Dónal in a long-ago conversation; it was like Dónal was in the room with me and I smiled at that thought.

‘Why are you smiling?’ Cormac said.

I was about to tell him but I swallowed it. I dread him knowing everything about me and I have a secondary dread that if he did know all, he wouldn’t like me.

Cormac is madly content since Nessa was born; he occupies a space outside of me – the two of them do. I see them as a distant little unit and I look at them as if from a height. Even through his worry about me and my odd moods, I sense Cormac’s deep satisfaction at being a father. Nothing I do or don’t do dulls his pleasure at finding himself a daddy. And why should it? I am happy for him, jealous of him, proud of his pride in our daughter. She is perfect beyond reason, a baby like no other baby. Every grunt, every bodily evacuation – from her mouth, from her bum – is up for discussion. Cormac can talk about Nessa forever and ever, amen, and probably will. And I listen. But I am the pretend mother, not perfectly attuned in the way I should be if I could do this right. If only I could get it
right.

Malachy is twenty. He arrived two weeks late; he was so well settled in my belly that it seemed he never wanted to come out. I wonder if he is unpunctual still. I wonder if he has my face, Struan’s skin; if his hair is dark or fair. I wonder if he thinks of me every day, the way I think of him. Surely I will be on his mind today of all days.

The trilling of birds makes me look around; the hedgerow skirting this field is made of whitethorn bushes that look like they have been dipped in flour. I look down at the grass. My toes are looped around a dandelion stem; the field is dotted with their golden crowns.

I think of Margaret who was a friend to me; Margaret the good mother; Margaret who wanted to know everything about my life. She was always analysing the reasons why people are the way they are; why they do the things they do. I learnt from her about the two sides we all possess: the public and the private, the show and the self. I let Margaret go too. I let everyone go in the end.

I know I cannot regain what is lost. Once I handed Malachy to the young Edinburgh midwife, I knew I would never get him back as he was at that moment. How could I? Even if I had returned to him after a week, to reclaim him for my own, he would have been different; a different baby to the baby I had left behind.

‘My feet are freezing,’ I say, and walk back to the gate and climb it. I stop to look at white lichen like splatters of liquid bird shit on the stone wall; I stand there examining the stones for ages. I get into my car and drive; the sun streaks through the window and warms my hair. I realise that I am three towns away from my hometown; I must have left the house at dawn.

I pass a church and the door is open. I check the rear-view and do a speedy reverse. Another car swerves and beeps; the driver is outraged. He bunches his fist at me and I look away. I park the car. This is not my kind of church: it is a square box, full of natural light. A woman walks back and forth across the altar, foostering with flowers and candles; she half-genuflects each time she walks past the tabernacle, a speedy nod to holiness, to what is right. I look for the Virgin statue and find her in an alcove. She is no more than a curved oblong of granite; her halo is part of her headdress and her feet stand on a stone moon. I am disappointed. What comfort can be had from this aloof lump of rock? How can I appeal to a featureless face? I pick up a handful of votives and throw them at the statue.

‘You’re a fake,’ I shout, grabbing more candles from the stand and tossing them at the Virgin’s head.

‘Hey! Hey, you. Get out. You can’t do that. Get out of here!’ The woman from the altar barrels down the aisle towards me.

‘Just fuck off,’ I say, throwing the rest of the votives at her feet.

‘I’m warning you. Out of here this instant, you pup.’

I sing along to the radio all the way home in the car; the DJ is playing songs I know – eighties songs – and I whack the steering wheel in time and laugh when I get the words right. When I turn into Beechlawn Avenue, Cormac is standing in the doorway of our house, jiggling Nessa in his arms.

‘Where were you?’ he says.

‘Nowhere.’

‘Are you all right? I was worried, Lillis. And Nessa is hungry.’

I haul the baby from his arms. ‘Learn to cope,’ I shout. ‘I won’t always be here, you know.’

I plonk myself onto the sofa and let the baby feed. She guzzles and I feel my breast deflate as she nurses; the other breast, swollen and hard, leaks milk onto my nightie.

‘You went out in your night things again,’ Cormac says.

I look down at myself. My nightdress is stained; my feet are dirty and red with cold. ‘I must have.’ I pluck at the skirt of the nightie. ‘It’s like something you’d see in an asylum, isn’t it?’

‘Lillis, you’re not coping. You need to go and talk to someone. Please?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Do, won’t you? Ring the GP or something. Look, I’m sorry, but I have to go to work now. I’m two hours late already.’ He bends down and kisses my cheek. He kisses Nessa. ‘A package arrived to Verity’s for you. She brought it over. It’s there.’

I look at the package sitting on the dresser, a brown papered, boxy thing. So, they have been at it again; gathering together to discuss me. Shifty little meetings when I am out of the house. I lift Nessa to the other breast and close my eyes. I hear the front door shut and the whirr of Cormac’s bike as he sets off.

My brain is like a colander; only one thing fits in it at a time and I have to strain that away before something else can take its place. But, no, that’s not really it at all. My head is too full of things – Malachy, Nessa, motherhood, time, Cormac, housework, my
real
work and getting back to it – but I am not able to concentrate on any one thing. So it all soups together until I am breathless with confusion; mired in some muddy place that makes no sense to me. My mind cannot seem to get a grip on anything relevant and the minutes, hours, even the days steal past so that I don’t notice them going. I am topsy-turvy.

When Malachy was born I lost one self, but there was no new self to replace the old me. I wasn’t a mother to anyone – my family didn’t know I had given birth; no one around me knew. So I shed one Lillis but couldn’t fit inside the new one, because Lillis the Mother didn’t exist. Now she does exist – I am a mother in front of the world – but I feel like a fraud. I am supposed to be delighted and serene, but I feel at odds with myself and irritable. There is no quiet time, no thinking time. There is just baby time.

I have been trying to unravel the facts of my life in Scotland all those years ago, but maybe that is a mistake. Maybe I should leave it wefted in the unweaveable mass it has formed inside me.

Nessa cries – she doesn’t cry often – but I can’t put up with it. I beg her to stop; I shout at her; I agitate the pram. She wails. Then I feel guilty; she doesn’t know she is upsetting me. I look at her indignant red face; she is asking for something and I have little to give. Sometimes I do not want to feed her. Sometimes I don’t even want to be near her; I want peace and silence; a place to be by myself.

‘Please stop crying. Shush, Nessa, shush. Baba, be quiet. Come on, my head hurts. I’m tired. Shush. Come on, shush.’ I bang the hood of the pram with my palm. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, just shut up.’

Nessa stops and sucks a deep breath, her face is a lavender rumple and she lets an almighty shriek. Now I have frightened her; I’ve scared an eight-week-old baby and I feel like the worst mother in history. I lift her rigid, screeching body from the pram, put her over my shoulder and walk the sitting room, up and down, until she is calm enough to feed. I sit on the sofa and watch her eyes roll as she suckles; I feel the distress hiccups bouncing through her tiny frame. She settles and, with her, I settle a bit too.

It occurs to me that I might be like Verity – exasperation was her fallback position, her natural state as a parent. Everything Robin and I did irritated her. She roared at us from one end of the day to the other:
Get out of my sight. Go out and play. Get off me. Leave me alone. Fuck off out of here and leave me be!
She struck us for the smallest of misdeeds, with her fist, with the wooden spoon, with whatever paintbrush or scalpel she had in her hand. Verity held the neglect she learned as a daughter to her heart and carried it forward to her own parenting.

I do not want to be the mother that Verity was to me.

*

When I was seven months pregnant with Malachy, Margaret invited me north for a few days. Not to Kinlochbrack but to Thurso. I took the train, changed at Perth, and met Margaret, Gordon and Charlie at Inverness. They stood on the station platform, their faces wide with welcome.

Curdled clouds hung above us as we drove north; Gordon leaned over the steering wheel to get a better view of the sky and cursed. Margaret gave out to him for using bad language in front of Charlie and me. Then she strained her own face upwards.

‘It’s not looking promising, right enough,’ she said.

On the road outside Brora an empty hearse bowled past us, its driver dressed in green tweed. We stopped at both Golspie and Helmsdale so I could pee, which I apologised for over and over; I was forgiven with equal effusion. It felt like the baby was using my bladder as a pillow. I was utterly exhausted by the journey – it took a whole day to get to Thurso from Glasgow – but I was delighted to be away from the city and The Bonny Bird. Margaret and Gordon were in great form and Charlie slept in his baby seat beside me in the back of the car.

I watched a swoop of starlings flitter and dip like one huge bird as we drove; hundreds of black arrowheads, plunging and flocking before their nightly roost. We passed croft after empty croft, snugged under withered thatch, and the odd tourist coach full of grey heads, heading south.

We stayed in The Pentland Lodge and Margaret came to my room to tell me they had a surprise for me. My heart dropped to my boots in case this surprise involved Struan, but I knew by her manic grin that she had something cheerful planned.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Tell me, Margaret!’

She laughed and clasped her hands. ‘We’re going to see the Northern Lights.’

‘Really? I don’t believe it.’ Struan had talked more than once about showing me the lights.

‘We’ll let you get your rest tonight, pet, and tomorrow night we’ll go and see what we can see.’

We spent the next day lolling around the lodge. I was quite happy to sit with my feet up on the sofa in Margaret and Gordon’s room, drinking tea, and watching Charlie arrange his farm animals on the blue tartan carpet. He was shy with me to start but soon he would gander past me with his eyes turned up, making sure I watched his prancing and play. He held animals aloft for me to name and I grabbed at them, saying ‘Mine!’ to make him laugh. We hooted animal noises together and I sang ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ again and again. He never tired of doing the same things and his parents indulged him in that always.

Margaret called Charlie ‘The Baby’ but to me he was now a child, or a toddler at least. The only baby in the picture, as far as I was concerned, was the one making a broad paunch of my middle. Gordon had endless nicknames for Charlie – The Charlster; Chappy Chops; Muck Boy; and, weirdly, Wee Egg – so that half the time I didn’t know who he was talking about. They were unassailable, Margaret, Gordon and Charlie, but I don’t think I felt jealous; I had discounted myself as a parent and so what they were – their tight little trio – didn’t seem to tally with what I was doing at all.

Gordon lay on their bed and read from the tourist brochure: ‘ “The Northern Lights are known in Scots Gaelic as ‘
fir chlis
’, which means ‘nimble men’ or ‘merry dancers’.” How about that?’

‘That’s you and Charlie. You are the
fir chlis
,’ I said.

Gordon jumped off the bed and took Charlie’s hands in his; he danced him around the room. ‘Look, we’re the Northern Lights! Look, Mummy, look! Can you see us, Lillis?’

Charlie threw his head back and pushed out a forced, throaty laugh – one of his new tricks. Margaret shook her head and smiled, quietly thrilled with the antics of her husband and son. She got up and the three of them jigged around the room before flopping onto the carpet to set up Charlie’s farm properly. I started to nod off – their voices became as thick as velvet around my ears – so I went to my own room to lie down. As soon as my head hit the pillow, the baby started to writhe inside me. I rubbed at my stomach to try to calm the poking limbs, but the jostle and whirl went on and on.