* * *
The noise level inside the pub has lowered to the grumbling of a congregation waiting for mass to start, except for the screaming coming from behind the fish tank. The murmurs get louder and people turn around to look at me. A man I don’t recognize comes over and says, “She won’t get out of the coffin.”
They’re all staring at me, expecting a reaction. I walk toward the fish tank until I see Shirley standing at the bottom of the coffin in tears, screaming at Mam who is lying on top of James. Mam has splayed herself over James’s body and put the stiff fingers of his remaining hand in her hair. Her arms are wrapped around his waist and her head is on his chest. A thick stream of mascara is running down her face, staining his white shirt. The undertaker is holding onto her leg, the only bit of her that he can pry away from the body. He has a blank look on his face as though he is waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
I rush over and put my hand on the small of Mam’s back. I climb up onto the pool table and bend down. Mam’s muscles are flexed, keeping a firm grip on James. Her eyelids are closed but fluttering.
I lean into her ear and whisper, “Mam.” I feel her eyes open. Her body stiffens and I try again. “Come on now, we’ll get out of here and go home.” I put my arms around her waist and help her to sit up. Her legs are now spread either side of James’s crotch. She picks up the dead weight of James’s hand and brushes her lips against his knuckles. Billy gives me a hand to lift her out and down onto the floor. We each take an arm across the backs of our necks and shoulder her weight, making our way slowly through the pathway that has opened up in front of us.
Caterpillar
The morning after the wake, I find Mam curled up in an armchair in the sitting room with the pop-up edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on her lap. She doesn’t register the existence of anyone or anything beyond the pages of the book. She stays in that chair for weeks. She begins by quietly flicking through the world between her fingers, but as the days go on she settles on one page—the page with the caterpillar.
The food in the fridge starts to go off. I throw out tomatoes and blueberries with full-grown beards. The spuds in the back hall grow tentacles. Billy knows not to come in for dinner. He fucks off down to the pub and Shirley makes him sandwiches. He offers for me to join him. I eat the head off him. I’m milking more than ever. I pretend to be thick about it but it’s a relief to get out of the house.
It’s reading week in college. I feel guilty for not reading until I see photos of ski trips and people dining alfresco in Italian villas on Facebook. Xanthe is on a yoga retreat in Nepal. She keeps sending me photos of herself doing headstands and meditating on top of a mountain. I wonder who is taking the photos. She’s posting self-care and motivational quotes on her Instagram stories. I don’t tell her about James. It still doesn’t feel real. I don’t want to use his death as some sort of personal drama either.
She texts me:
Debs! Meditation has been such a game-changer for me. You should try doing it on the farm x
I message back:
I’ve been meditating on the farm for years. We call it milking cows.
I frighten Mam whenever I walk into the room. I try to establish my presence without making her jump. I exaggerate my movements and stomp around the place like I’m onstage. When that doesn’t work, I start to hum the theme tune to The Great Escape. I think it’s working until I realize she has stopped registering me altogether.
I make cups of tea and bring her cigarettes. I pour her a glass of white wine, hoping to coax her out of her trance, but she doesn’t touch it. People are still too awkward to ask after her, but I have my answer prepared for when enough time has passed. She’s managing, I’ll say, and it’ll be true. She’s managing to smoke cigarettes and tear strips of cardboard off a children’s pop-up book. She ripped the whole caterpillar off the page and shredded it into pieces that she still plays with in her lap, but at least she’s managing to do something.
I kneel down beside her to give her dinner, hoping to catch her eye, willing her to say something. She takes a drag of a cigarette and looks straight through me.
She exhales a cloud of smoke in my face. “Who are you?”
“Debbie, Mam. It’s Debbie.”
She shakes her head. “Who?”
* * *
I tell myself that I’ll call the doctor when she stops eating the carrot and potato I mash up with butter and milk for her. When she stops feeding herself, I tell myself that I’ll call when she stops swallowing the food. After she pisses herself, I go as far as dialing the number but I hang up before they answer. I have no words to tell them what’s wrong with her.
Stairs
I mistake the throbbing in my eardrums for my own pulse until I get out of bed. The steady rhythm is getting louder. It’s coming from the landing. My head goes numb. All I want to do is to get back under my duvet to muffle it out, but the beats are already inside me. The stretches of silence between them are getting longer. Every time I think they have stopped, another one comes.
I open my bedroom door and creep out onto the landing. Mam is lying in a heap at the end of the stairs. Her hair is splayed across the bottom step. She lifts up her head, her eyes lost in the rhythm of what she is doing, her gritted teeth looking like broken headstones, chipped and yellow, sinking in a marsh of blood. She lowers her eyes to make sure that her teeth are in line with the ridge of the second step. The ruins of her mouth brace themselves for the collision and she sends them crashing down.
I make it down the stairs in time to stop her from doing it again. I wrap my arms around her head and lift her chin toward me. Her lips are pushed inside out, tender, blue-veined and bloody like raw fish, one front tooth chipped, the other dislodged completely, leaving an angry hole in her gum. Tears leak from bare eyelids. She has run out of lashes and brows to pull out, but she jerks a hand up and rips strands of hair from her scalp. I wrestle her arm away and stroke her hand. There is a bald patch at the crown of her head—soft and vulnerable like the fontanelle of a baby. The pinholes of her scalp look up at me. I don’t know what to do.
The stench of sweat hits the back of my throat. I drag her off the floor and bring her up the stairs. I’m trying to carry her weight on my back, but she won’t hold on to me. I keep losing my balance. She slumps against the wall and I push her up the side of the wall to keep her there, but I’m not strong enough. She keeps falling.
* * *
Eventually, we reach the bathroom. I sit her down and prop her up against the side of the bath. Her head lolls to one side and rolls down to her chest. I peel her trousers off to find crusts of menstrual blood in her crotch, hanging in clumps of her pubic hair, baked dry and flaking off in cinders. I cut the tufts of hair off with a nail scissors and gather them up to put in the bin. She keeps spitting out the tissue that’s stanching the blood in her mouth. More blood is coming from her nose now. She flinches when I try to touch it.
When the ambulance comes, the polite men start asking questions. I tell them that she fell down the stairs. I don’t care that they don’t believe me, or that they speak to Mam directly as if she cares about what is happening to her.
“She can’t hear you,” I tell them.
They shine a light in her eyes like they do in films. “How long has she been like this?” they ask.
“Bleeding?”
“Unresponsive,” they say.
“I don’t know . . . a while?”
“A few hours?” they ask.
I shake my head. “Around two weeks?”
* * *
“She fell down the stairs,” I say.
“You saw her falling down the stairs?”
“Yes,” I lie.
“And nobody else was at home.”
“No.”
“Your dad?”
“He isn’t around.”
“It’s just you and your mother at home?”
“Yes. My uncle lives near us.”
“O
K, and where was he—”
“He was out milking the cows. Look, she’s had a tough time recently. A close friend passed away. She’s grieving.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks.”
“Who?” Mam says.
* * *
It feels like we’ve been found out. They want to assign me a social worker but their hands are tied when I tell them I’m eighteen. It’s OK, I reassure them. My uncle is at home. I won’t be on my own. They tell me it’s not my job to look after my mother.
I clutch the foil blanket one of the ambulance men put around my shoulders. When he first gave it to me I thought it was laughably unnecessary. I hadn’t escaped a burning building or run a marathon. I’m grateful for it, now.
I don’t know what time it is. I’m confused when it appears to be sunny outside. I feel jet-lagged, like we’ve been traveling for a long time.
Billy rushes into the hospital foyer as I am getting chocolate out of the vending machine.
“Are you OK?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is she?”
“This way,” I say, walking back to the ward. “You might get a shock when you see her. She knocked out two teeth and chipped two more. She’s broken her nose and has something called an orbital fracture.”
“A broken eye socket?” he asks.
“I think so.”
“What happened?”
“She walloped her head against the stairs. Repeatedly.”
“What? Why?”
“How would I know? Mam hasn’t talked to me in weeks, Billy. She won’t talk to the doctors. I doubt she even knows what’s going on.”
I let that piece of information sink in, feeling a mixture of superiority and guilt. We reach the ward and walk around the curtain that has been pulled around Mam’s bed. It’s hard to tell if she is awake. A cast covers her nose. There are prune crinkles underneath her eyes. The left one is swollen shut.
“They’re letting her out,” I say.
“Like this?”
“They say she can recover at home.”
“She’s a fucking vegetable.”
“Apparently she’s showing all the vital signs.”
Billy is sitting in a chair with his head in his hands. He sits up and sighs. “OK,” he says, as though trying to convince himself. “OK.”
* * *
I spend two days at home dressing Mam, feeding her and putting her to bed. Billy bursts in the back door while I’m putting her on the toilet. He sees me holding her by the waist, struggling with the zip of her jeans. He grabs the keys of the car.
“Come on,” he says. “We can’t go on like this.”
* * *
We spend thirteen hours back in A&E waiting to see a doctor. The triage nurse is initially concerned, until we tell her we’ve already been to the hospital and they discharged her.
* * *
Mam stares into space while the doctor reels off a list of options, most of which are unsuitable for the state she is in. A mindfulness class is his most bizarre suggestion. Billy and I exchange glances.
“Unfortunately, the waiting list for inpatient treatment without private health insurance is insane.” He says the word with no irony.
“And with insurance? If I insure her straightaway?”
“Well, there’s no guarantee, but she would certainly have a better chance.”
“Leave it with me.” Billy shakes the doctor’s hand like he sold him a herd of cattle.
Hotel World
They call Billy saying they have a bed for Mam. He accepts the news as though he has landed a last-minute hotel reservation.
“Great, OK. Thanks a million. Thank you.” He gives me a thumbs up.
I have her bags packed, ready to go. We’ve been waiting for this call for days. Every time Billy came near the back door, I had to stop myself from running out and begging him to ring them again.
Billy gets off the phone. “Debs, I’ll drop her up. There’s no need for you to come. I’ll manage on my own.”
“I want to see the place.”
He sighs. “OK.”
* * *
On the way up in the car, I keep opening and closing my eyes to make sure I’m not dreaming. My belly has wound itself into a tight fist, like it’s trying to hold on to reality. When I close my eyes I’m at home in the smell of cow-shite and shite-talk on the radio. I open them and rain warps the city outside the window. Heuston station flies past and I’m proud of myself for recognizing it, clinging to it as a landmark of sanity.
* * *
Everyone knows St. Pats. It’s the place where alcoholics and anorexics go to surrender. I was expecting it to be out in the suburbs but it’s a red-bricked building, smack-bang in the middle of Dublin.
“It was Jonathan Swift’s idea,” I say to Billy as he’s pulling in.
“What?”
“This place. When he died he left money to build it.”
“The fella who wrote Gulliver’s Travels?”
“Yeah and A Modest Proposal—the one about eating children.”
“Your grandfather had a great expression for when he was hungry. He’d say, ‘I’d eat a child’s arse through a steel chair.’”
“Lovely,” I say.
* * *
The rain hits Mam’s face as we’re getting her out of the car. For a moment I think the tiny splashes of water will instigate a miracle. She shivers with the cold, but isn’t able to stand on her feet. Billy and I go on either side of her and walk her to the front door.
They get Mam a wheelchair, but we get the impression they think she doesn’t need it. As a nurse settles her into the seat she turns and winks at Billy. “I’ll have her walking by the end of the week.”
We drop Mam’s stuff in her room and the nurse gives us a tour of the place. We walk into bright rooms. A chair seems to assert its purpleness. The tables are undeniably blue. Everywhere I look, I see circles rather than ovals. Squares triumph over rectangles. The whole place reminds me of being encouraged to color in between the lines in primary school.
We’re shown the music room and the art room. There’s a library. The nurse seems optimistic about the chances of Mam using the gym.
“These are just some of the things that we will be getting up to,” she says.
I like how she uses the royal we when referring to Mam. It suits her.
* * *
Before we know it, we’re leaving Mam to settle in, abandoning her to this simplistic space. I wait until Billy leaves before I root around in her suitcase for the queen conch. I’m not sure if I remembered to pack it but now it seems crucial. I grope around the clothes until I feel the coldness of it—the odd, twisted bowl of bone.
I hold the conch up to Mam’s ear. There’s no change in her eyes. I put the shell in one palm and put her other hand over it. I feel like I’m trying to coax a bird to protect an egg that is not her own, silently pleading with her to adopt this delicate, alien hope.
Technical Love
I’m on Xanthe’s couch, watching the credits to Lost in Translation roll down her laptop screen. She said it was her favorite film and I’d never seen it so we stuck it on. And it was just yer man from Ghostbusters and Scarlett Johansson hanging around Tokyo, trying not to be bored. And now it’s over. I feel stupid for expecting something to happen. Xanthe is explaining why she thinks the director is a genius. I don’t think I know the name of any film director apart from Steven Spielberg.
“You didn’t like it,” she says.
“I did!” I protest, but she knows I’m lying. She kept on looking at me during what she thought were the best parts, monitoring my reactions.
She cleans under her fingernails, collecting the grime under the corner of her index nail and flicking it away. “It’s the kind of film you need to watch on your own.”
I’m stung. She’s supposed to be making me feel better. I have been scheduled into her week as the grieving friend in need. I finally told her ab
out James and her desire to be a good friend immediately kicked up a few gears. I notice the time allotted to me on the planner above her desk—she’s crossed out volunteering with Vincent de Paul and yoga to spend time watching movies and making me tea. She sprayed lavender mist on the couch to help me relax. She’s even given me something called a care package. It’s a shoebox filled with bath stuff, tissues, scented candles, and chocolate that I know she won’t help me eat. She never eats. She pretends that her stomach is dodgy or blames food allergies but I’ve figured her out. I flicked through a tiny yellow Moleskine on her desk while she was in the bathroom and saw the list of foods with all the calories she had eaten that day.
40g porridge with water 149
Half a grapefruit 52
Rice cake 35
100g soy yogurt with honey 81
Superfood salad 203
Tea with oat milk 22
WASHED TEETH.
TOTAL: 542
I thanked her awkwardly for the care package. I haven’t even told her about Mam. I’m supposed to be grieving James, but it still hasn’t sunk in that he’s gone. If I force myself to think about him, I don’t feel anything at all.
Xanthe has done more with the apartment since I saw it last. During her latest shopping rampage, she bought the entire contents of an indoor plant shop.
“It’s embarrassing how many there are, really,” she says. “I saw a post on Instagram about the easiest indoor plants to keep and clicked into it and it spiraled from there. I spent so much I got free delivery.”
She introduces them to me like they are members of a newly acquired family.
Her eyelids are painted yellow and bold strokes of black liner frame her lashes. She’s wearing a yellow silk kimono that matches the fresh sunflowers in her bathroom.
I saw a bank statement on her kitchen table. She has five thousand euro in her bank account. I can’t remember the last time my bank account was out of overdraft. Billy pays me three hundred euro a month by direct debit. Before I started college, I thought it was loads.
* * *
We decide to watch an episode of Gilmore Girls. A pop-up ad comes on, the type you have to watch for five seconds before you’re allowed to skip to your show.
Snowflake Page 11
