The Translation of the Bones (14 page)

When they got back from the ducks, Mary-Margaret gave Shamso his pastry slice but Fidelma, who had just eaten a packet of Jaffa Cakes, wasn’t particularly hungry. We’ll save them for tea then, shall we? Mary-Margaret said. Both women watched Shamso eating. He picked up the cake with both hands and rammed it in the general direction of his mouth, leaving more around it than inside, as Mary-Margaret observed. Mrs. Abdi looked surprised to find him quite so sticky when she turned up to take him back. It might be an idea to give me some spare clothes for him, Mary-Margaret suggested, but Mrs. Abdi didn’t understand. Well, I suppose I could have a look in Oxfam next time I’m there, Mary-Margaret said. It gave her a shiver of pleasure to think of buying clothes for Shamso. Proper little shirts and trousers, not the mismatch of girls’ things he seemed to have. And undershirts. Sweet little warm white undershirts. She would clear out a drawer for him in her bedroom and fill it with a pile of neatly folded, washed and ironed clothes. And nappies? She hadn’t yet had charge of Shamso long enough to need to change one. But it couldn’t be that difficult, could it?

Now Shamso had gone and the women were alone. My hip is bad today, Fidelma said. Have you got any of that jelly stuff? Mary-Margaret asked. You said it helps?

Yes. I’ll rub some of it on later. Can’t be bothered now. Sausages?

And chips? And there’s the cakes. Also, look, wait. She went to the kitchen for the bottle of Irish Cream and gave it with a flourish to her mother.

What did you buy that for? Fidelma asked. We still have the whiskey.

It was on offer, Mary-Margaret said. She disliked the harsh taste of the whiskey, the way it made the skin feel rough all the way down your throat. This other kind of drink was softer. Have some, Ma.

I will, when I have the chips on. Fidelma used her walker to hoist herself out of her chair. Her legs were crampy. She had no need for shoes, only for slippers; even so her feet felt squashed. She sighed.

It was their agreement that Fidelma cooked and Mary-Margaret did the shopping. She was surprisingly good at it, Fidelma often thought, for a lass who could scarcely count, let alone add up. Well, maybe that was not quite fair. Of course Mary-Margaret could count, and read and write as well; it was just that she was slow, as she had always been; a struggler, she was, at school. Fidelma as a child had been much sharper. She sometimes wondered what she might have done, if she could have stayed at school. Maybe she would have been a writer. She always did like stories, words.

Fidelma shuffled to the kitchen. It had a window that faced the same way as the main room’s; lights were coming on quickly in the windows of the tower block opposite, one by one, it seemed, a ripple of lights, wimpling like sun on moving water. She put the oil on to heat. The bangers looked too much like bits of her own self for comfort. Clammy, bulging, mottled. She pushed the notion away. They’d be fine when they were done. She sipped the drink that Mary-Margaret poured her.

The women ate sitting at right angles to each other. Having dished the food onto plates, Fidelma left it in the kitchen and went back to her chair; it was easier to manage
if she didn’t have her hands full. Mary-Margaret brought her her plate when she had settled down, then she fetched her own.

They had the television on but this evening Mary-Margaret was chatty. She poured more of the Irish Cream into her glass. Later I’ll make tea, she said, but this is lovely; it’ll go down very nicely with the vanilla pastry slices.

It’s pretty, isn’t it, Ireland? Look at these fields, with the cows in them.

Fidelma laughed. There were no green fields around her when she was a girl. Only the stony hillside and the wild moorland; the sand and the endless sea. But there had been flowers, she remembered, on the hillside. Orchids, meadowsweet and harebells; the white harebells were rarer; finding one was supposed to bring you luck. Well, even if she had stumbled on a field of them, they would not have made a difference, she supposed. After the hillside, the dark streets of the town. Straight lines of sad gray houses, like a row of tombstones, hunched against the rain. And the home the sisters kept the saddest of them all. The biggest too, towering over all the others, blocking out what light there was in the narrow street.

Any day now Father O’Connor will be back, Mary-Margaret said, out of the blue. He said that he’d be back soon after Easter.

Fidelma said she had no concern with the whereabouts of the priest. After she spoke she wondered if that was true. He had been away a good six months now; it was just possible she missed him. Although she never asked him to, he turned up once a month or so; we’ve got to stick together, he would say, us exiles.

An exile. Well so she was, in every way.

Mary-Margaret went on watching
Emmerdale.
After a while she said, it’s a bit weird, how we call them Father. I never thought of that before. I mean, you’d call Father Diamond Father even though you’re older than him. Still, it would be even funnier if you called him Son! She laughed at her joke.

If he was the Pope, you’d have to call him Daddy, Fidelma said. Papa. That’s what the word means.

Mary-Margaret looked confused. I thought I would have to call him Holiness, she said. Your Holiness. Not Papa!

She tasted the word again. Papa. I wonder where Shamso’s papa is, she said. Or if he has one. But he must. I mean she is Mrs. Abdi. There has to be a Mr. Abdi too.

Well, I do hope so, Fidelma said. And her with all those kids.

Does it make a difference, having lots? So if you have loads of children you have to have a husband but if you have just one . . . ? she stopped. She topped up her glass and Fidelma’s and went to take the empty plates into the kitchen.

Fidelma sighed again. Mary-Margaret had been an incurious little girl, accepting all that she was told as gospel. I got you all by myself, Fidelma used to tell her and, later, when Mary-Margaret was too old for fairy tales of storks and changelings, she said her dad was dead. As, indeed, he might be, Fidelma told herself in mitigation of the lie; for all she knew, he might be dead.

Mary-Margaret came back with clean plates for the vanilla slices. They ate them in silence. Waves of sweetness on the tongue, thick white icing, yellow cream, the pastry yielding to the softness of its filling.

I used to think you were a blessed virgin, Mary-Margaret said suddenly. When I was a tiny child. She licked her fingers to pick up a flake of icing from her plate.

Fidelma started. Virgin? she said.

That would have made me a bit like Jesus, Mary-Margaret went on. Born without an earthly father. “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” You know. But that was before I understood about you being a widow. The poor widow and her mite.

I think the mite in that case was a coin, Fidelma said. Sweet Jesus, here she was, this great big lump of a girl, not all that far off now from being a middle-aged woman. Simple, she might be, but not that simple, surely? Couldn’t she put two and two together? She watched enough TV, for goodness sake. Fornication, adultery and incest, everywhere you looked. It was time, Fidelma thought, that Mary-Margaret faced facts.

I was never married, she said. So I am not a widow. You have to have been a wife first, and I was never that.

Mary-Margaret looked at her for a while. Then she smiled kindly. It doesn’t matter now, she said. It’s only a shame he died so young, before you could be married.

She was quiet after that, her attention seemingly held by the television. What about that tea you promised? Fidelma asked her when the program finished. I’m tired, Mary-Margaret said. I’ll make you a cup if you want one but I am off to bed.

When she had gone, Fidelma turned the television off and sat in darkness. Not for the first time she mourned the absence of a fire. If there were a fire, she would have something to stare at other than the window. She thought of the
hearth at home, the scent of it, kept burning night and day although smoored at night with ashes. Every morning her mother would scoop a shovelful of glowing embers from that fire to carry to the range in the next room, a dangerous load, the glint of it, the heat, the gold-vermilion. In this way the fire in the range was resurrected, the other sparking it to life with its dying embers in an everlasting rhythm, as if the two were kin, the open fire the parent of the fire that was pent up in its cast-iron casing. Fire spirits. Guardians of the house.

She missed them. For its brief warmth she struck a match and lit a cigarette. There was a place in her chest which the smoke rasped. This room, her casing, was a square box merely, lacking internal focus. There were a hundred and ten exactly like it in this tower—five on every story of the twenty-two. Think what chimneys they would have had to build, if they had put a fireplace in every flat—chutes deeper than the deepest wells, vertical black tunnels in which a lost child would be trapped forever.

The inside of her mouth felt as if it had been brushed with fat. She could taste the yellow filling of the cake. It had been kind of Mary-Margaret to buy them. They had never had all that much to say to one another—sometimes Fidelma thought they were less like mother and daughter than like prisoners serving out life sentences in a double cell—but of late the girl had seemed more than usually caught up in her own world.

Even convicts forced to live as partners in a box six foot by ten must have their secrets. Even if, on the surface, everything was known—each fart, each breath, each mouthful—still no one could make them share the spaces in their heads.
Fidelma knew Mary-Margaret’s routines, her likes, her dislikes, but she had small insight into her mind. And Mary-Margaret had still less understanding of Fidelma’s. But no one does, Fidelma thought. No one ever has. Since the early days of childhood, her life had been lived in secrecy and silence, in the private places of her soul, where there was safety, freedom, the infinity of the open sky, the glistening strand, the raging sea. And just as well, these days, when there was nowhere else that she could go, for this fireless room was really nothing other than the grave.

Secrecy and silence. She thought back to the getting of Mary-Margaret, the twilit times, coupling quickly in his curragh, beached, always with an ear to footsteps on the sand. The smell of salt and fish on him, the taste of salt, and scales like sequins, lodged like fairy coinage underneath his nails. Sticking to her afterward, as if by loving him she might turn into a mackerel or a mermaid, pink flesh quickening to pearl and gray and silver, gleaming in the ripples of the dark.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, Almighty God, the sheer beauty of the thing. How his eyes closed and he gasped, how she hungered and she tightened for him in her secret place, like a creature of the rock pools, an anemone, clinging onto her desire. It was hunger, no other word for it, hunger that you did not know that you could feel until you’d felt it—and then, well then, it never left you. Ah the way a woman aches inside and wants him deeper and, oh God, the helpless shiver when she has him and the shattering delight, spreading out in circles, halos, as if the core of her were liquid and he the stone thrown in it.

Oh God. He was so beautiful, that boy. Beautiful. And already married. By the age of eighteen he was a married
man, by the age of nineteen the father of a . . . Ah stop. What was he to do about it? He had simply been there when she went back to the old place for the last time that last summer, a boy she’d known, friends with her big brother, they had all walked to school together over the flaggy places, all the children of the strand. Their bare feet in the summer sinking into warm bog water, meadowsweet and clover. He was there when she came back but only as the stunted trees were there, and the sheepfolds or the heaps of stone. A part of the surroundings, not to be remarked on, that boy who had always been there, until one night he looked at her and suddenly she’d seen him and his eyes as gray as winter sea.

There’d been others since, Lord knows, and not for love but money, most of those. Can there be a more unpleasing smell than dirty money? Their fingers stank of grubby tenners and fistfuls of dull copper; the same reek on their trousers, their flies all stained and greasy. Tongues thick with smoke and lies. She’d do what she had to, except she would not kiss them. Suck it, bitch. The stink of public toilets, stale clothes, like the stink of jumble sales, and she’d known those too, God knows.

Fidelma closed her eyes. All those long and weary years. And the times of freshness so far away and few. His scent of cold salt water. Peat smoke in his hair and on his clothes, not the city smoke of pubs and coal and desperation. Her face against his shoulder, the thick wool he was wearing, she breathed in peat smoke and salt water. The taste of his mouth as clean as grass, so sweet his kissing, and his mouth on hers and signals sent through every vein and every nerve. Both bodies craving, meeting, crying, shaking like two birds tumbled in a storm after the great joy they had
shared. The way he gasped, a breath indrawn, a sob almost, the way he closed his eyes.

What happened to him in the end? She would never know. The summer she was there by the seashore with him was the last summer, and the first since she’d been sent away, with Bridget, Maeve and Mary, to the city. Their mother had struggled on awhile, with the younger children: Deirdre, Siobhan and baby Ronan. For the first few years she made the journey to the city every six months or so to see her elder daughters; later she could not afford it. By then Siobhan had joined the others and Deirdre gone to an aunt in Sligo; that last summer there was only Ronan left. Seven years old, he was, that summer. And, all of a sudden, without a word of warning, Mammy took up with a fellow visiting from Toronto, and went back with him when his visit ended, taking Ronan. Promises there were, of course, of airfares and of money, but they never came. And besides, by that time, Fidelma was a mother herself, or about to be.

She must have asked herself a thousand times if she had made the right choice then. And a thousand times supplied the answer. That there was no choice. The boy with the wintry eyes was spoken for already. The Sisters of Unmercy, in their winged veils like crows, would have swooped on the newborn baby as if she were fresh carrion if Fidelma had not shooed them all away. Why had she not handed them the child? God knows. Because the child had not chosen to be born, perhaps? Because of the pleasure in her making? Because there had been love as well as winter in the boy’s gray eyes. Because the mite was small and so defenseless and there had been no one else in like need of Fidelma.