The Closet of Savage Mementos (17 page)

It was near midnight when we left the lodge and joined the other people who were hoping for a view of the aurora. We were upbeat – the clouds had lifted. Our guide marched us down to the seashore; I waddled behind the group and Margaret slowed to keep me company.

She stopped and grabbed my arm. ‘Jesus,’ she said.

‘Oh, my God.’

We stared ahead; Scrabster lighthouse flashed in the distance. Strung between it and Dunnet Head was a sweep of lime-jelly sky. Golden beams shot vertically up through the green and the whole band of light shimmied and swayed.

We stood and gawped and Margaret’s hand shook where she gripped me. Gordon came back to us, pushing Charlie’s buggy at speed, and there were tears dripping from his eyes.

‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ he said, and let such a wild laugh that Charlie leapt in his sleep. ‘Will I wake him, Margaret, to show him? Come on, let’s get him up.’

‘Better not.’ She wiped the tears from Gordon’s cheeks and kissed him.

Gordon moved to stand on my right and Margaret was on my left and they both linked me. We stared up at the bouncing lights; the sky above them was navy and specked with the silver of more stars than I had ever seen in one night. Our guide talked about the solar wind and excited photons but we just stood there, Gordon crying, and Margaret and me letting squeaks of excitement. Margaret handed Gordon a tissue and she whispered to me that it had been his life’s ambition to see the aurora borealis. We stayed there for ages, gazing upwards, our eyes roving greedily over the colours, the flitting movements, the absolute magic of it. I lifted my camera and took a whole roll of film of the lit-up sky.

I soon got tired of standing; I had that late-pregnancy ache between my legs – the one that feels like the baby might topple out any second because of the fierce downward pressure. I said I would return to the lodge but they wouldn’t let me go alone, so we trooped back together. As we walked Margaret put her hand on my bump. I saw her glance at Gordon and he nodded.

‘Lillis, we need to talk to you about your baby.’

‘Oh, yeah, what about it?’ I wanted her to take her hand from my stomach; I didn’t like the acquisitive way she let it lie there.

‘If you’re determined to go through with the adoption, why give the baby to strangers?’

‘What do you mean?’ I could guess exactly what she meant, but I needed to stall her from going any further; I didn’t want to hear what she was about to say.

‘Gordon and I have been talking and we feel we could give the baby a good home. A good life.’

Something white-hot ran through me and pinched at my brain; my head seemed to disconnect from my body. ‘No. That’s not possible,’ I said, lifting her hand from my belly.

‘Maybe you could think about it, hen,’ Gordon said, his eyes puffy from crying. ‘Think about it tonight and we’ll talk in the morning. Or soon.’ Like Margaret, he had a way of looking at you that always seemed reproachful.

‘I made my decision months ago, Gordon. I’ve signed forms and everything.’

‘But nothing is set in stone until you sign the final papers,’ Margaret said. ‘We would welcome your little one as surely as we welcomed Charlie into our lives.’

I wanted to bite her; I wanted to prick their cosy superiority with a viciously appropriate barb. But nothing would come.

‘My baby won’t be brought up in Kinlochbrack,’ I said finally, forcing the words through my teeth. ‘How can you even ask me this?’

I kept pace with them back to the lodge, though I wanted to storm ahead. I couldn’t look at them and my face ached. I felt drained and deflated, and I needed to climb into my bed and block them, and their request, out. But when I got into bed I couldn’t sleep; I lay awake for hours, feeling angrier and angrier with Margaret and Gordon. How dare they mess with my life? How dare they presume to know what was best for my baby or for me? After what Struan had done, how could they even think of raising my child with him living only a street away?

The next day, they dropped me to Inverness in their car. I stared dully at the passing scenery as we drove south; another fly-by of starlings moved in a huge chatter across the sky, but I couldn’t muster much interest in their plummet and flurry. Our goodbyes were subdued on the train-station platform. I didn’t see Margaret again until after Malachy was born and she never again mentioned the subject of taking my baby for her own.

The last month that I was pregnant with Malachy, I spent hours tracking his movements under my skin; the triangular hump of an elbow or knee would travel liquidly – a shark fin through water – and I watched it like a spectator sport.

‘Would you look at that?’ I’d say, to no one at all.

In the ninth month, I would lie on my side on my bed and it sometimes felt like the baby was scratching the inside of my bump, trying to claw its way to the light by any means.
Let me out, let me out.

‘Stop that,’ I said. Or, ‘Ouch, that hurt!’ but the scraping continued.

Sometimes the movements got so wild that I would have to stop whatever I was doing and hold onto something solid; I winced and waited for the kicking to pass. I christened that jiggery-pokery. I sang ‘Jiggery-pokery, jiggery-pokery’ to my bump to the tune of ‘Drops of Brandy’, hoping it would make it stop.

At the cinema, if the film I was watching became explosive or loud, the baby jumped about in time, making me feel giddy and restless. I often left before the end of the film, the baby’s kicks driving me to crave forward motion for myself. I would walk and walk – slowly and deliberately putting in the miles – knowing that it could bring on labour. I was impatient to be out the other side of the pregnancy; to be free of the wriggling, moving mass under my skin.

Nessa never kicked ferociously like Malachy did; she lay low inside me like a resting trout and sometimes I worried that she was not really there. I used to tap on my belly to wake her up. And Cormac sang to her, kneeling on the floor in front of me, his hands cupped around my gym-ball stomach as if he might suddenly jump on it and roll away. Unlike Malachy, Nessa did her forty weeks of growing with a stealthy ease.

I took photographs of my bump which, at the end, seemed to start at each hip and spread hugely, both out and around. It needed to be big to contain all of Malachy, who was a hefty baby. Later, I stashed those photos in a brown envelope in my knicker drawer in my mother’s house, with the pictures of Malachy and the one the midwife took of me holding him. I thought that Verity had gone through them once – they seemed mixed up – but I couldn’t be sure.

My skin looks grainy in the pictures and the triangle of moles that used to cluster around my belly button is spread out, gone awry. If you didn’t know what you were looking at you might not guess that it was an expectant mother’s stomach, raw with stretch marks. I wasn’t half as interested in my changing body on Nessa; I was so terrified of losing her that I created a distance between me and the pregnancy. But I was busier too – with work, with loving Cormac, with watching out for my mother and her mayhem. When Verity became especially twitchy and blunt, I knew a fresh disaster was about to unfold, and some of it was to do with my impending motherhood, I was sure. I began to believe that she was jealous. She would talk about how easy women had it, not like in her day. And she would give me parenting advice which usually went along the lines of her hoping I had a boy because girls were ‘little bitches’.

‘Not everyone feels the way you do about being a mother,’ I said to her once.

‘People don’t admit it,’ she said.

‘Admit what?’

‘I don’t know...ambivalence.’

‘Plenty of parents adore their kids.’

‘And you think you’ll be one of them?’ She snorted and laughed into my face. It was that laugh that offended me the most.

Chapter Seven

M
y GP recommends that I go away.

‘Can you afford a holiday?’ she asks.

‘Yes. But even the idea of it makes me feel tired. All that airport nonsense.’

She smiles. ‘A change is as good as a rest, as they say.’

‘I might go somewhere. I’ll speak to Cormac, see what he thinks.’

I look up at the Spire, probing at the clouds like a giant silver finger. All it needs is a thimble, I think, slowing to toss back my head for a better view.

Verity shades her eyes and looks skywards too. ‘So bloody beautiful. There’s hope for man yet, Lillis, when he can produce something as gobsmacking as that.’

She is molly-coddling me, on Cormac’s instruction. We have come into town to shop but we don’t know what to do with each other and there is nothing I want to buy. We are standing at the top of Henry Street like two lost children. We turn and walk up O’Connell Street, looking for a coffee shop. By the time we have passed Dr Quirkey’s Good Time Emporium – surely, I think, the most disheartening place in Dublin – I realise we have gone too far. I take Verity’s arm and we cross the street to the Kylemore Café. A homeless man sits on the traffic island, his face ripe with improbable bulges, his head nodding into sleep or, maybe, sobering awake. He is wearing a green cap with the slogan, ‘Today I am Irish, tomorrow I’ll be hungover!’ It makes me want to weep. By the time we sit down with our coffee and cakes, I am seething with some unfathomable anger and I long to be alone. We carry on in silence, slicing éclairs into bite-sized lumps and stirring sugar into our lattés. I watch two schoolgirls in green and scarlet uniforms grimace at each other through their braces, while they poke at lettuce leaves and slivers of chicken.

I turn to Verity. ‘It pains us to spend time together like this, so why do we bother?’

‘Lillis, I’m making an effort for you. I’m here, amn’t I?’

‘I don’t particularly want you to be here.
I
don’t want to be here; I’d rather be at home, asleep.’

‘You can’t spend your life in bed.’ She licks cream from her finger and leans forward. ‘We are alike, you know, me and you.’

‘Alike and unalike.’ I grunt. ‘And I know for a fact that you don’t relish the
you
that you see in
me
.’ I toss my napkin over the remains of my cake. ‘The GP says I should go away for a few days. She thinks I have a touch of PND.’

‘In my day, we just got on with it.’

‘See, this is exactly why I don’t want to be around you.’

‘Well, maybe you should go away; it might be good. Would you go on your own?’

It bugs me when she turns like this, suddenly reasonable and calm as a cow.

‘Yes.’

She looks doubtful. ‘Cormac and myself could manage Nessa between us, I suppose. Treasa Spain might take her for a few hours, if she can drag herself out of her pit long enough.’

There is no point in reminding Verity that Treasa is grieving for her husband; she has no sympathy for anyone, even though she is a wallower herself, over the smallest thing.

‘The newspaper is doing a feature on the Scottish Highlands. I’ve got the gig for the photos.’

‘You’re going back to work already?’ Verity leans across the table and starts to pick hairs from my jacket, but I push her hand away. ‘When I was newly married women didn’t run away from their children the way they do now.’

‘It’s one small job. I’ll see how it goes.’

‘Scotland. It might be nice to go back.’ She eyeballs me. ‘Will it?’

‘Maybe.’

The package is heavy. Inside the brown paper there is a white box. I snip the tape holding the lid down with my nail scissors and take out the bubble-wrapped object inside. As I undo the plastic wrapping, I realise what it is and my gut liquefies. I stumble backwards and sit on the bed; I lift it out of the bubble-wrap, then hold it up to look at it through the light from the window. It is the plumbago egg. My insides start to fizz and pop and I barely make the bathroom where diarrhoea jets from me like water. I hold the paperweight and sit on the toilet, hugging it to my chest. I lift it to my lips and kiss the cold glass.

Cormac picks up the plumbago egg from my dressing table.

‘That’s gorgeous. Where did it come from?’ He holds it to his face and wraps his two hands around it. ‘God, it’s lovely – it looks like there’s a jelly fish swimming in it.’

‘It was in the package that arrived the other day.’

‘Oh? Who sent it?’

‘I don’t know.’

Cormac puts down the paperweight. ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’ He sits on the end of the bed.

‘Well, I do know. Someone from Scotland sent it.’

‘Is it to do with the article for the newspaper?’

‘Yeah. That’s it.’

The television hums. I am watching the royal wedding from my bed; Cormac has provided tea, toast and orange juice, and Nessa sleeps obligingly between our two pillows. The camera settles on the queen; throughout the ceremony she can barely muster a smile, certainly not a genuine one. For once I identify with the woman; for once I feel I am much like her: a bag of misery.

‘I wish I was going with you,’ Cormac says, easing himself onto the bed so as not to wake the baby. ‘I’d love to see the Highlands.’

‘It’s work; I won’t have time to do anything fun.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Next time, OK?’

Cormac lifts my fingers to his lips and kisses them. ‘It reminds me of our wedding,’ he says, indicating the TV. We sit hand in hand watching the gorgeous young bride, looking outrageously relaxed, as she steps into her new life.

Nessa is offended by the bottle. She wraps her tongue and lips around the silicone teat and tries to suck it into shape but it doesn’t work; she wails in frustration. Cormac rocks her and I perch opposite him, at the kitchen table, watching.

‘Maybe I should put her to the breast.’

‘Give her a chance; she’ll get there.’ He croons into Nessa’s face and rubs her cheek with his pinkie. He drips some of the milk into her sobbing mouth and she falters, stops. He eases the bottle between her lips again and she suckles, grunting and stop-starting to let us know she is not pleased, but she feeds on. ‘Now,’ Cormac says, smiling at me. ‘Off you go.’

I have been expressing for weeks, building up a store of milk for my few days away, and today I am going back to the office for the first time. Only for a couple of hours, to discuss the Scotland piece with the editor of the travel section; to see what she wants. I, naturally, have some ideas of my own.

The fridge shivers as if it is trying to shake off something. I flutter a bit, wondering if I should stay at home with Nessa. I am so used to being manacled to the house and the baby that I don’t like leaving. I don’t want to leave.

‘You’ll be OK?’ I ask.

‘We’re grand. Look at her – she’s guzzling.’

‘Well, if you’re sure.’ I watch Nessa’s eyes rolling back in her head like they do when she is feeding from my breast and I can’t help feeling a little betrayed. I slip my arms into my jacket and kiss them both: Cormac on the head, Nessa on her cheek. ‘See you later,’ I say, and pull the front door gently behind me.

At my desk, I take the slip of paper that came with the paperweight from my purse. It is a small piece torn from something bigger; the blue-inked digits are clearly a phone number. I google it but nothing comes up. I google the area code and get back a list of musical names: Auchterarder, Blackford, Comrie, Crieff, Dunning, Madderty, Muthill, St Fillans.

I say them aloud, tasting each one in turn, ‘
Auchterarder. Blackford. Comrie. Crieff. Dunning. Madderty. Muthill. St Fillans
.’

To my ears, Madderty and Muthill sound made up. I type the names into the search engine one at a time and read about each town. All of them are in Perthshire. Auchterarder is the ‘Lang Toon’ because of its mile-and-a-half-long high street; its website is bordered with thistleheads, making it look quaint, like a site that was fashioned before websites existed. Comrie, I find out, lies directly on the Highland Line. St Fillans is a tiny village on a loch. I pour over the images of Dunning, where a saint once killed a dragon, and imagine Malachy learning all about the legend as a boy at school. There is a bowling green there and low mountains fence in the village; a lot of the photographs are of huge snowfall on streets, on cars, on mountains.

So Malachy lives in Perthshire. Somewhere in Perthshire. I toy with the telephone number, then put it back into my purse.