We used to have a wooden sign that hung on the wall of our entrance. Billy made it for my seventh birthday. I really wanted a horse but Mam said I wasn’t allowed. I got to name the house instead, which definitely wasn’t a thing. Billy made it into a thing because it didn’t cost any money. I called it what I was going to name my horse: Saoirse, after the rush of freedom I imagined I would get from galloping down the hill and into our yard.
The name lasted for a few months until a car crashed into our garden in the middle of the night. It was a blue car with a raised spoiler on the back that swung off on impact and hurtled over our hedge. It was going too fast down the hill and slipped on a patch of black ice on the bend, spinning out of control and smacking straight into the sign that read SAOIRSE. A nineteen-year-old boy died. Sometimes, for his anniversary, his family leaves a bouquet of white lilies at the wall of our entrance. We watch them wither away in their dirty plastic wrapping.
The night the car crashed into our wall, I had a dream. I was a boy in the dream and I was driving a car. I can’t remember much about the dream itself but I remember how it ended. I didn’t see the sharp bend at the bottom of the hill until the last second. I locked hard and then I felt the ice underneath the tires and it was graceful, really. And then a beautiful thought went through my head. The world spun me around like the way a woman unexpectedly makes you twirl on the dance floor and you feel a little silly, a bit emasculated really, but it doesn’t matter because it’s only a bit of craic and you think she might fancy you anyway . . .
Mam says that I woke up screaming before we heard the car crash into the wall. I was inconsolable. It was my fault that the boy died. He had hurtled his way into my head and I had stopped him from going to heaven. He was in too many pieces, like the wreckage of his car that we kept finding in the garden. I kept bursting into tears. I would howl out in bed. Mam tried her best to comfort me.
I started going out to the caravan at night. One time, Billy lost his patience with me. I told him that I couldn’t sleep because the boy was still inside me. He slapped me across the face so hard that, even now, I’m not sure it happened. “That car crash had nothing to do with you,” he shouted, and then, with his face in his hands, he told me that he wasn’t angry with me. He was angry with my mother.
We never replaced the SAOIRSE sign. Billy forgot about it and I didn’t dare remind him. There are still nights that I sit up in bed too afraid to go to sleep, waiting for the next car, the next ghost to crash-land into our garden on their way to oblivion.
Slut Stings
I look outside the kitchen window and see my mother in our back garden completely naked dancing in a bunch of nettles. Their stalks reach up to her chest like a crowd of palm leaves waving in adoration. Her spine twists and the tops of her shoulders take it in turns to kiss the space underneath her chin. Her hands trace half-moon circles around her as though she’s wading through water. It doesn’t look like she’s getting stung at all until she moves out of the bush and it becomes apparent that she has set herself on fire.
By the time the lads come in for dinner, she has made herself bleed from scratching the stings. Billy pretends not to notice. Once, when he was drunk, he called them slut stings.
When Mam hands James his dinner, he reaches out and strokes the red rash with white bumps splashed across her skin.
“What happened to you?” he asks.
“I got stung by some nettles.”
“Some? You’re stung all over. Did you fall into them?”
“No, I jumped.”
“What?”
Mam assures him that she stung herself on purpose.
“Why on earth would you want to do that?”
“There is serotonin in them. That’s why they sting—they’re natural needles that inject you with a happy chemical. It’s good for you.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah.”
James considers this for a moment and then nods. “Fair enough.”
“Jim-bob will happily dive headfirst into a bed of nettles with you, Maeve,” Billy says without looking up from peeling his potato.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that now.”
“I can think of better ways of doing drugs,” Billy says.
“The two Ps, Billy: pleasure and pain. There’s a reason why they are paired together,” James says.
“Only in his case it’s two Hs: hammered and hungover,” Mam adds.
It really isn’t that funny but James’s laugh makes the table shake.
“As we all know, there are as many types of alcoholics as there are stars in the sky and I’m glad I’m the social kind. Others have enough serotonin to be staying in and downing bottles of wine in bed—”
“Jesus Billy, take it easy. It was only a joke,” James says.
“Well, sometimes a joke is the most serious thing you can say.”
That’s how dinnertime is. Mam and James versus Billy and me. Always the same teams, picked before we sit down to eat.
* * *
I could never fathom the idea that my mother gave birth to me. It seems much more likely that I rose up from the slurry pit like some sort of hellish Venus, or that I came out of the arse-end of a cow. It would make sense if James was my dad because he loves Mam, but he was only six when I was born. James was stitched into his John Deere overalls when he came out of the womb and was born into a family without any land. He was a sixteen-year-old pulling pints in his mother’s pub when Grandad passed away. Billy asked James to come work for us. He turned out to be a godsend, milking cows, fixing fences, and pulling calves at all hours of the night. And Mam, who was devastated after her father died, perked up whenever he was around.
James is only six years older than me. He was the first face I imagined into the pillow I kissed at night. I used to make poor attempts to hide from him when he came in for breakfast in the morning. There were limited places to hide in the kitchen. My legs stuck out when I wrapped myself in the curtains and there were only so many times I could go underneath the table and try to avoid touching his legs and feet, squealing when a big hairy arm swooped under the table to grab me. I once tried hiding in the coat stand in the back hall, but it was too far away from the kitchen and he forgot to find me.
I love James in a Disney prince kind of way. I am used to separating the fantasy of him from the reality. James isn’t bothered by the reputation that precedes my mother. He doesn’t care about the whispers and nudges down the pub when he goes home with her at closing time to spend the night in her bed.
Their age-gap isn’t as obvious as it should be because Mam looks young for her age and James looks older. Billy says that James went through puberty in an afternoon. It’s true. One moment he was a boy and the next he was a grown man. He’s six foot seven and captain of the local hurling team. We go to all of his matches and watch the sliotar fall from the sky into his outstretched hand like a gift from God.
* * *
I never knew who my father was but I think I know where I was conceived. There is a Stone Age passage tomb in one of our fields—a national monument with a sign from the government warning that defacement of the area is punishable by law. It’s a place where teenagers go to drink cans. There is a sign on the way into the field that reads: KEY AVAILABLE FROM MR. WILLIAM WHITE. TURN LEFT AT CROSS, FIRST CARAVAN ON THE LEFT. Billy is the local historian who gives the occasional archaeological enthusiast a guided tour of the mound. The trusted keeper of the keys, he often leaves the gate open.
There are two stone steps that mark the entrance from the road and a path to the mound itself, which is fenced off from the rest of the field. The neat dome of grass swells up from the earth. A heavy metal door leads into the passage tomb where crushed cans and the occasional condom wrapper adorn the ancient burial ground. Names are etched into the sacred stones, the curvatures of Suck my dick immaculately carved alongside megalithic zigzags and spiral inscriptions.
The monument is called Fourknocks, which comes from two Irish
words, fuair meaning cold and cnoic meaning hills. My mother has been absorbed into the folklore of Fourknocks. In the summer of 1990, the passage tomb was where boys went to lose their virginity. Mam’s only stipulation was that she would not have sex with the same boy twice. Nobody mentions the stories around me but they know that I know them. Billy, the local historian, told me.
Tabernacle
My mother has been asleep for most of her life. Mornings lie beyond her realm of existence. Her alarm goes off at midday. It plays “Downtown” by Petula Clark on repeat. She wakes up in time to make dinner for the lads at two o’clock. After dinner, she goes back to bed. Today is Sunday, the only day of the week that Mam needs to wake up early for ten o’clock mass.
I put the blade of the butterknife into the lock and twist until I hear the click. The door creaks open. Petula Clark’s voice is released into the rest of the house. I turn off the alarm and watch Mam come groaning back to reality.
“Morning,” I say.
“Morning.”
“Will I get your coffee?”
“Yes please.”
I’ve learned that making Mam coffee is the most effective way to make sure she doesn’t go back to sleep. By the time I come back with a mug of Maxwell House, she is sitting at her desk wrapped in her writing blanket.
* * *
Mam sits down at her desk to record last night’s dream in an old school copybook. She uses blue pens and gets upset if she can’t find one. Mam has been writing a book about dreams since before I was born. She tells people that she’s a writer, but she’s never been published. She has no interest in submitting to journals or competitions, which is probably a good thing.
We call Mam’s bedroom the Tabernacle because the door is painted gold and she locks it with a key like the one the priest uses at mass. Mam would be happy enough to let the entire world fall down around her as long as she had her own space. The Tabernacle could be an art installation or a dressing room in an underground theater. Sometimes, I jimmy the lock open while she is asleep just to look at it.
Walking into that room is like stepping into the middle of a pop-up book. She rips out pages from books and sticks them to her bedroom walls. Leaves upon leaves of paper make a collage of poems, novels, and philosophy books—all of them about dreams. She places them side by side as if she’s trying to link clues.
The sheets are stuck together with masking tape. It’s satisfying to peel the sheets away from each other. They make a sound like lips smacking together before opening, somewhat reluctantly. Lift a flap of paper and another layer of dream lies underneath. Pull open the cover page to one of John Field’s nocturnes and the entire manuscript tumbles out of the wall.
A mobile of tin shells inscribed with spirals hangs suspended from the ceiling by braids of hair. The shells have a celestial gleam. I expect them to jingle when I touch them but instead they make a disappointing rattle like a beautiful woman with a horrible voice.
Mam keeps a faded biscuit tin filled with postcards and clippings of paintings from art magazines under her bed alongside a crate of mini-bottles of white wine that James regularly swipes for her from his mother’s pub. A small blue skull made of lapis lazuli sits on her windowsill. A navy lamp stands on the dresser at the foot of her bed like a fat lady with a wide-brimmed hat. Its light casts Mam’s shadow across the wall—her elongated silhouette reaching out to cradle a sleeping body that is just out of reach.
Mam rarely ventures outside the house, except to go to mass, the supermarket, or the social welfare office. Billy makes sure that she draws the dole every week. He calls it her arts grant. He’s in charge of Mam’s bank account. We’ve learned the hard way that giving Mam access to money causes carnage. Billy drives her food shopping once a week and stays in the car while she shops. There are days when she’ll come back to the car with a smoothie and a doughnut and no groceries at all and he has to send her back in.
Mass remains the only occasion Mam makes an effort to be normal. Grandad was very religious. When he was alive, we all used to kneel down in the sitting room to say the rosary every night. He was also extremely proud. He liked his family to look well at mass, so Mam has come to associate religion with style. She already has her outfit picked for this morning’s mass. She will have a shower and spend at least an hour and a half getting ready.
Before her shower, Mam goes outside in her bare feet. She takes careful, deliberate steps through the grass like she’s stepping onto a stage. Then she closes her eyes, puts her hands by her side with her palms facing outward, and gathers long, slow breaths into her lungs—inhaling fresh whiffs of reality and exhaling her own mystery.
Aisling
I used to sleep in the Tabernacle with Mam. After the nine o’clock news, Grandad sent us up to bed. We changed into our pajamas and brushed our teeth. I wasn’t tall enough to reach the sink so I spat my toothpaste into the toilet bowl.
We turned the bed into a tent by pulling the blankets up over Mam’s head. She used to read me a pop-up book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I loved Alice. The white apron that went over her blue dress showed off her tiny waist. When I pointed to her on the page, my finger was fatter than her. She looked like a Disney princess.
When Alice saw the white rabbit, Mam made bunny ears out of her fingers and threw a rabbit shadow on the wall. It flickered in the lamplight like magic cast by an old film projector. My least favorite page was the last one, when the adventure ends and Alice wakes up on the bank beside her sister. I peeled off the back page to expose the cardboard underneath.
Mam’s reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would eventually veer off course. This usually happened when she read Alice’s worry: “I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is: ‘Who in the world am I?’”
“Alice is not herself because she has disappeared,” Mam explained. “When Alice falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, she falls out of herself. It happens to us all. When we fall asleep, we fall out of ourselves.”
I was never sure if this was a good or bad thing. The way Mam described the dreams reminded me of trying to follow Billy’s hand when he pointed to a star.
“That’s Orion’s belt,” he’d say. I’d look up at the sky solemnly, seeing nothing but mulling over the phrase Orion’s belt. I never saw Orion or his belt but the mystery was enough. It was better.
The mystery of the dreams was enough for me too. I tried to follow Mam’s logic but she let go of my hand along the way.
* * *
Mam used to tell me a bedtime story about a speck of dust called Aisling who didn’t believe in snow. Every night when Aisling fell asleep, cold water came and turned her into a snowflake. When morning arrived and the sun came out, Aisling melted back into dust before she woke up, completely unaware that she had changed into the thing that she didn’t believe in in her sleep. She felt something cold tugging at her, but the memory was numb and frozen over. She dismissed it as a fragment of a dream.
Mam ended the story by running to the freezer in the utility room. I followed her downstairs in my pajamas, my bare feet slapping the linoleum floor. The chest of the freezer hinged open like a coffin and smoke rose up like mist. We scraped our fingernails along the side to gather snow. Mam told me that we would need a microscope to see the snowflakes properly, even though they were right under our noses.
“Like the way Billy needs a telescope to see the stars?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Except it’s the opposite. The telescope helps us see things that are far away by bringing them closer. The microscope helps us to see things that we can’t see properly because we are too close to them. It creates distance between us. Perspective.”
“Would Aisling believe in snow if she had a microscope?” I asked.
Mam thought about that, and then told me another story, about the first man to
photograph snowflakes. “They called him the Snowflake Man. He caught snowflakes on black velvet and photographed them with a microscope attached to a camera lens. He was able to capture the image of the snow crystals’ structure before they melted. But a photograph is not the real thing.” And then she said, very seriously, “There is no way to catch a snowflake. And I haven’t met anyone who is able to catch a dream.”
Cover Girl
I can go a whole day in the city without talking to anyone. I frequently disappear on the train, in the Arts Block, on the streets of Dublin. I sit alone in lectures. I go as far as getting coffee from a vending machine to avoid interacting with people. After spending my first couple of days trying and failing to find friends, it feels better now that I’ve made a conscious decision not to talk to anybody at all.
I constantly need to pee so I spend half the day scoping out toilets to squat in and take a break. The bathroom is where I go to recharge, let myself cry, and pull myself together just enough to define my edges so I seem solid on the outside. My shoulders ache from carrying my backpack. I spray deodorant on sticky, sweaty armpits and between my boobs while reading graffiti on the walls. Most of them are anonymous cries for help. I feel this thrust of responsibility thrown onto me by the cubicle. A scribble on the toilet dispenser threatens suicide. There are other less urgent musings: Is it weird that I don’t enjoy sex? Underneath is written: Tighten your cervix and relax girl! I wonder how that works.
On my way out of the toilets, I bump into a girl coming in. She throws out a lively “Sorry!” before bumbling past me. The force of the collision has scared me. I feel so insubstantial that I imagine myself easily being knocked out of my body and into hers.
“Wait, Debbie!”
It’s Xanthe. I didn’t recognize her without the yellow raincoat.
“Hi!”
“Are you free for a coffee?”
Snowflake Page 3
