and made do with high-fives
and the occasional cuddle.
I have never been kissed.
Bloody
Red splodges on the lino.
Smudged fingerprints smeared on the doors.
Marla?
She is slumped in the hallway,
hand over her nose,
face sticky with blood.
The press in the kitchen came at me, she says.
A poltergeist for all I know.
I need an ambulance.
My heart pumps hard.
How will I explain to a paramedic who I am
and why I found her?
Will they assume I did something awful?
Marla won’t remember what happened.
Let me look.
I press her head to feel for bumps.
Her hair is matted with dried blood.
Can you stand up?
I don’t feel magical.
I might need a doctor.
I get her to a chair.
I’ll run you a bath, I say.
A bath will be a distraction.
Eggshells
Marla is watchful,
glancing at me now and again
as though waiting for me to speak.
I stay quiet,
not wanting to make her mad
or confused
or throw me out again.
I have left stepping on eggshells
for stepping on eggshells.
With one difference.
Marla hasn’t hurt me.
When the Sun Comes Out
I arrange a tray
and take it into the garden,
where Marla and I sit in our coats
nibbling on buns and sipping lemonade.
It’s a weedy mess out here, she says.
Mammy’s usually so good at keeping up with the garden.
Let’s tidy it, I suggest.
Marla lifts a glass to her lips.
We can plant anything we want.
Let’s get some sunflower seeds!
Or we could grow vegetables.
How about cabbage?
Dad would disapprove.
He’d think it was
bullshit
to grow your own food.
Yes. Let’s try cabbage, I say.
Clearing Up
Marla wears a sunhat and too-big gardening gloves.
She starts by weeding the patio
but can’t bend for long,
goes inside for water.
I cover myself over in her old nightie and get busy
picking pieces of broken glass from the grass,
stones from dead flower beds.
I can’t see much progress
even after a couple of hours
but Marla is smiling.
It’s lovely this garden, isn’t it? It’s lovely.
I’m not sure she can remember what it was before
but she seems to know what it is now
and is happy.
Which is the main thing.
What Is Left Over
Peggy leaves food covered in foil
for each evening meal.
Usually
Marla wanders into the kitchen and
eats straight from the carton.
But tonight she forgets
so I serve her food
on a tray
with a glass of orange juice
diluted down with a little water.
Marla doesn’t ask where the
food has come from
and when finished,
passes the tray to me like I’m a waiter,
like I have always been there.
Thank you.
She doesn’t eat much,
leaves potatoes on her plate
that look too good to waste.
I eat what is left over.
Mercy
I made jacket potatoes with tuna-sweetcorn.
Dad curled his nose
like I’d piled the plate
with dirty underwear.
You can’t even get the easy stuff right, he said.
I try, I told him.
He raised his hand at this retort
then changed his mind.
You make it very hard to love you,
you know,
Allie.
At times he could be merciful.
Love
If you could learn to be loveable
like you can learn to play the piano
or conjugate verbs,
my report would read:
Must try harder.
Washing-Up
When I went to the loo,
Dad started on the washing-up.
He’d scraped the cold potato into the bin
and was scrubbing the pan clean.
I can do that, I said.
He smiled.
Nah. It’s my turn.
And, hey, the dinner was fine.
I’m just a grump.
I didn’t reply.
I set to drying the plates,
asking myself if his changed mood
meant I was loveable after all.
Rolling Smokes
I boil the kettle while Lucy rolls joints
and explains how her ex
has landed a TV commercial for zits.
No way I’d get back with him now.
Well cringe!
Kate’s welcome to him.
She laughs and I copy her,
pouring milk into steaming mugs.
I laugh
not because I see what’s funny
but because
I do not want to be alone.
I must try harder.
Scabby
The burn itches.
A scab is forming.
I pick at its
crumbly, crusty
edges
until it stings.
Allowed
Marla is sitting on the stairs
in her raincoat.
Hood up,
mouth down.
What’s happening? I ask.
I’m not allowed out.
I mean, is it prison I’m in or what?
Who put up that sign?
I feel like bloody Oscar Wilde
without the hat.
Or the talent.
I don’t know, I say,
glad the sign is there and Marla
knew to stay put.
Why don’t we go to the corner shop
for some sweets? I suggest,
handing Marla her handbag.
She smiles at the front door,
points at the A4 printed sign on it.
And I’m taking that down.
IMPORTANT: DO NOT GO OUT ALONE.
CALL PEGGY IF YOU NEED ANYTHING.
We leave the house.
And we leave the sign.
Conkers
Marla stops, stoops,
picks a chestnut from the path.
I love the feel of them.
It’s a shame the season ends so quickly,
isn’t it?
Before you know where you are
they wrinkle up and go all wrong.
Like people, I suppose.
She pockets her find.
I reach down,
curl my fingers around
a flat-edged conker,
then find another, and another,
collect until my pockets bulge.
I like them too, I admit,
but Marla is already ahead of me
at the crossing.
I run to catch up,
to stop her stepping into the road.
She looks surprised to see me at her side.
Hello again, she says.
Now isn’t it nice to be together like this?
Stinging Nettles
The conkers fell,
crashing to the ground and shaking off their
tough-on-the-outside
,
velvety-on-the-inside
shells.
I begged Kelly-Anne to walk with me to the park
so I could gather a bagful
and take them to school
to boast about I-don’t-know-what.
Dad stood up from the couch. I’ll come for some air.
Kelly-Anne beamed;
it was before
he started treating her really badly,
and I was probably pleased too.
Dad never went anywhere with us
unless it was somehow about him –
a trip to Homebase for paint
or the Chinese for dinner.
It was drizzling at Downhills Park.
You could spot the chestnut trees easily,
brown-leaved against a sky of still greens.
I sprinted.
I foraged.
My bag filled quickly with the
chocolatey brown globes,
but I was greedy for more
and more
and more,
crawled my way beneath briars to trawl.
I didn’t see the stinging nettles,
didn’t notice the blanket of them
or that my hands, knees and legs tingled,
until it was too late,
until my body was covered in their toxins
and I was scratching, scratching,
spotting uncased chestnuts but too sore
to collect them.
Oh, you poor thing, said Kelly-Anne,
kneading my hands with dock leaves.
Dad was grinning.
Even I spotted the nettles.
You’re too old to be collecting conkers anyway.
I was eleven.
At twelve
I didn’t bother
collecting conkers come September,
and when I was thirteen I told
anyone who flaunted theirs
how stupid and babyish they were
until they hid their treasure
or threw them away entirely.
Babyish
Dad badgered me to
grow up
hurry up
shut up
stop being a baby
stop whining
stop moaning
act my age
act like an adult
quit the crocodile tears,
as though
being a child was a serious problem
and something I could remedy.
Carol and Lee
I was little when
Dad decided he was in love
with someone called Carol
and invited her to live in our house
with her son.
So Carol and Lee
stayed with Dad and me
for a few months.
At first it was easy.
Carol liked baking.
Lee was quiet.
Then Carol quit with the buns and
took to shouting at Lee until he cried.
He was older than I was –
eight maybe –
and hated when I saw him tearful,
hit me to make me unnotice.
It’s your stupid fault, he said.
She didn’t want a daughter.
She doesn’t like you.
I watched Carol.
It wasn’t hard to see that Lee was right.
She never tucked me in at night
or washed my uniform for school.
She scowled at me
and at Dad too sometimes,
until one day they were gone –
Carol and Lee –
and Dad and I carried on as usual,
pretending no one was missing.
Pretending we were happy alone.
Loss
It wasn’t like that when Kelly-Anne dumped us.
We couldn’t pretend she had never existed
because we were so charged up on her.
I didn’t believe Dad could get meaner but he did.
It was grief. I get it.
Like how he never got over Mum.
But was it my fault everyone left?
Can Dad’s life really have been all my fault?
Sometimes I Forget
Sometimes I forget I was born to an actual mother
with wide arms and a smile.
Sometimes I feel so grimy
I can’t believe anyone ever longed for me enough
to tear herself open
to give me breath.
Sometimes I think all I am is how he made me
feel:
sunken,
small,
better off
gone.
Sometimes Kelly-Anne told me I wasn’t to blame.
She said, Shit happens, Allie,
but not much else
because we didn’t talk about Mum in my house,
as though exposing the past
could make stuff
worse than it was.
We nudged the truth out of the way with our elbows
and waded through heavy silence.
Until the noise came.
Which it always did.
A tornado of anger and insults,
a one-man performance that left me in turtlenecks
for a week.
Sometimes I forget I was born to an actual mother
who loved me enough to knit a jumper
the colour of Lucozade,
arms like baby carrots.
But she left too soon and never finished it.
She left as soon as I arrived.
She left because I arrived.
A Father Too
Sometimes I forgot my father was the way he was
and I smiled when I saw him,
when he gave me dinner money
or nodded at good grades.
Some Sundays when my father roasted chicken
I’d forget whatever had happened on Saturday night
or think it hadn’t been him at all,
that I’d made a mistake in my remembering.
Sometimes I held on to the nice things because the horrible
seemed impossible.
Sometimes I forgot my father was the way he was
and that’s why I loved him.
I Did Not Kill My Mother Immediately
It was hours after I arrived that she died.
Mum carried me home in a hospital blanket,
a cocooned caterpillar in her arms,
barely clinging to life.
She opened all the Babygros we’d been given
and lay me in a new cot to sleep.
She watched me,
and cooed, amazed by her achievement.
I slept.
Soundly.
But when my eyes opened,
Mum was gone.
And she never returned,
though I squealed like a
banshee.
She was in an ambulance,
or back on a hospital ward,
doctors doing their best to stop her
disappearing.
Dad sent in a neighbour to stem the crying.
But when he returned from St Bart’s the next day,
ashen and alone,
a wife down, a newborn heavier,
he chose to place every sorrow
in his heart on my head
and looked at me thinking:
You did this …
Dad never realised that hers was the skin I needed,
the smell and the taste.
Dad never realised that I loved my mother
from the
inside out,
before I’d ever known her face,
and that while he might find another wife,
I would never
ever
get another mother.
Are You My Daughter?
Are you my daughter?
Marla is standing in the hallway,
staring at the wedding band on her fourth finger.
Sometimes I forget, she says.
I’m a gobshite.
I couldn’t even tell you what day it is.
Is it Friday?
No, I say. It’s Monday.
How do you know?
Umm. Because tomorrow is Tuesday.
She rolls her eyes.
I turn on the bathroom light.
And I’m not your daughter.
I’m Toffee.
Do you need anything? I ask.
She blinks slowly,
and rubs her hip.
To sleep. I just need a good old sleep.
It is three o’clock in the afternoon.
Giant Rock Dummy
Lucy buys us both a giant red rock dummy
from a kiosk on the seafront,
unwrapping hers and licking the end of it.
That’s your sugar fix for the month, I say.
Shh, baby, shh.
She laughs,
unwraps mine,
pushes the dummy
all the way into my mouth
so I am completely gagged.
Do you have a boyfriend? Lucy asks.
I shake my head no.
Yeah, I guessed that.
You totally read as a virgin.
I keep the dummy in my mouth
much longer than is necessary.
It stops me saying the wrong thing –
telling Lucy the ways
in which
I can read her too.
Toffee Page 6
