“We wanted to see if they could fly.”
“I remember seeing you from my kitchen window throwing my Lady Bracknell up in the air. I felt like slapping you into next week.”
“Why didn’t you give out to me?” I ask, feeling myself blush.
“You were one of my piano students. I didn’t want to scare you away.”
“The poor things were terrified of us.”
“I know! Sure you tormented them so much that they stopped laying eggs.”
“What?”
“And then the teacher rang me to ask if she could bring the class to see the hens. I had to run to the shop and buy eggs to put under them.”
“I remember that! They didn’t lay those eggs at all?”
“Not one. And the little heads on you running around like butter wouldn’t melt checking underneath their shaking feathers and shouting, ‘Another one, another one!’”
“They were popping them out like vending machines!”
“Except they weren’t!” She laughs. “It was all an act.”
“Ha!”
“It was pure and utter madness. Me bursting into the shop to buy a dozen eggs in time for you all to come around. The eggs weren’t even under the hens that long. They were still cold from the refrigerator.”
“Thank you so much for doing that for us,” I tell her. “And I’m sorry again.”
“You were only a child,” she says. “And you turned out OK.”
* * *
Audrey gives me a carton of eggs when I’m leaving. “You can come back tomorrow and finish the bathroom, if you like.”
“I will.”
“I’ll give you a dustpan and brush and you can use that to sweep the shower. You dug up most of the grouting yesterday.”
“Oh God. Sorry.”
“I would have smashed a mirror if I were you. If I’d known the day you had, I wouldn’t have made you clean the bathroom.”
“No worries,” I say, taking my jacket from the radiator. “Do you think it will ever stop snowing?”
“Who knows? They were saying on the radio it’s the worst snow in twenty-five years.”
“It was minus twelve degrees in Donegal yesterday.”
“Jesus.” She opens the front door for me.
“Thank you for everything.”
“No problem. Listen, do me a favor?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to talk to Billy today.”
“He won’t talk to me,” I say.
“It doesn’t have to be a heavy conversation. Just, pop in and check on him. I’d say he could do with the company.”
“I wouldn’t know what to say to him though.”
“Talk about the weather.”
I look at her.
“I’m serious,” she says. “We’re Irish.”
“Starting a conversation with Billy about the weather is like talking to Met Éireann.”
“That’s even better. He’ll be in his element.”
I grunt.
“Promise you’ll try?”
She doesn’t close the door until I say, “OK.”
Snowflakes
The caravan door is locked so I go to the broken window. I push in the sheet of corrugated galvanized steel that Billy has put inside to keep out the world, the cold, and me. It clangs against the piano and I squirm my way in. It’s like stepping into a mausoleum. The cheery décor of Billy’s bric-a-brac only adds to the eeriness. He’s in bed facing the wall, either asleep or ignoring me.
I give myself orders. Check that he’s still breathing. Boil the kettle. Fill the hot water bottles and wrap them in tea towels. Put one at his feet; rest his hands on the other. Go to his wardrobe and take out a pile of sleeping bags. Open the zips of their cocoons and put them over him. Go back into the house and bring out two electric heaters. I try to drag the second one through the garden by the lead but its wheels won’t budge in the snow. There aren’t enough plugs in the caravan so I bring out an extension lead and a bag of supplies.
Open up the laptop. Go to Spotify. Play “The Pilgrim” by The Gloaming. Twist on the gas oven. Crack one of Audrey’s eggs into a bowl. Olive oil, honey, and buttermilk. Whisk. Sieve flour into white mountain peaks. Wholemeal, baking soda, salt, sunflower, and pumpkin seeds. Pumpkin—a Polish girl on the train’s favorite English word. When I overheard her tell her friend, it made my day. The dry ingredients in the bowl look like the inside of a colosseum. I flood it and work the sticky mixture with my fingers, watch as it falls in slow motion into the tin.
Close the oven door. It smells warm already. Open up an Internet tab. Google “weather” and descend into the vortex, ready to arm myself with information.
There’s just so . . . much of it.
Close the laptop again and put frying pan on hob. Turn on the gas. Sausages spit. Rashers hiss. Pat the grease off them with kitchen roll, towel them dry like children coming out of a swimming pool. Crack more eggs. Yolk wobbles, white spreads and crimps crispy around the edges. When it’s ready, lift the fried egg out of the pan. Gently.
* * *
I shake his shoulder.
“Billy.”
Nothing. I sit down on the bed and try to balance his breakfast tray on my lap. I inspect the fry arranged on a china plate from the good press.
I try again. “Billy.”
A seismic fart rips through the mattress.
“Jesus Christ.” I cover my nose. “You scumbag.”
He rolls over in the bed. “Is this for me?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You don’t have to eat it.”
He sniffs. “What’s that smell?”
“Your Guinness farts.”
“No, nicer.”
“It’s bread.”
“Oh,” he says, sitting up. “Thanks.”
I hand over the tray. He looks sheepish. “Listen, Debs, I didn’t mean . . .”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.
He looks at the plate of food. “This is lovely.”
“You don’t have to act so surprised.”
“Well I am. Listen, what time is it?”
“Dooley is coming in to milk with Mark. I already rang him.”
He looks at me.
“I told him you were hungover.”
“I’m grand.”
“You’re not well.”
“I’m grand.”
“I’m going to book you in to see the doctor.”
“Who, Skeletor?” he says through a mouthful of egg.
Our local GP is so thin that we all suspect that she is anorexic. “She might just be naturally thin.”
“She’s death warmed up. I’m not going to see a bag of bones. She can’t even look after herself.”
“Well, I’m booking you in anyway.”
“Fire away.”
He eats the rest of his breakfast in silence. I open the laptop and Google the name that popped into my head. I find what I’m looking for and turn the screen around to Billy.
He reaches out and takes the laptop from me. I take his plate and leave him to flick through the gallery of snowflakes.
“Where did you come across these?” he asks.
“There was a guy selling prints of them in George’s Street Arcade. I took his business card.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“They look like glass, don’t they?”
“Half a century ago, we landed on the moon. We can edit genes and clone sheep, but we still don’t know how snowflakes grow. They’re perfect.” He closes the laptop and looks out the window.
“I remember when you were born. You were so perfect I didn’t feel fit to look at you. It was the happiest day of my life. And I didn’t expect it. I didn’t see it coming, not a bit of it. I was too busy being thick with Maeve for getting herself pregnant. And then there you were. A tiny, pink miracle. And so perfect. I didn’t want the world to ruin you.”
“Well, now it has.”
“I didn’t mean what I said,” he
says.
“You can’t control what happens to me, Billy.”
“I know that.”
“I don’t think you do. You’ve been white-knuckling it for such a long time. You’re always trying to make sure that Mam’s OK and that I’m OK, but you forget yourself.”
“Ah that’s bullshit, Debs.”
“It’s not bullshit. You live in this crappy caravan with barely any heating and drink yourself silly. Why don’t you look after yourself?”
“Because I killed my mammy.” He says it in a small voice.
“That was an accident.”
“I’ve spent all of my life trying to fix it . . . but I knew that I wasn’t fixing anything. I was just waiting for another accident to happen.”
I wrap my arms around him and let him cry. His sobs shake the bed and shake me. He cries until my clothes are wet with his tears. When he wipes his eyes with the tissue I give him, I see a little boy who wanted to help his mammy to fall asleep.
The Curiosity Cabinet
Audrey is a diligent notetaker. She scribbles away while I tell her how it went with Billy. I stop talking and she scribbles some more before she stops and looks up at me looking at her.
“I have to take notes because otherwise I forget. I would like my memory to be more of a hoarder but it insists on throwing things away.”
I want to ask her why she thinks making notes about my interactions with Billy will help in any way.
“Well, he won’t go to the doctor,” I continue. “I booked him an appointment and told him I’d make him go but it’s not going to happen.”
“He seemed to like the snowflakes though.”
“Yeah, that was jammy.”
“I think you could be on to something.” She stands up from the armchair and goes over to her drinks cabinet. She pulls a bottle of wine out of the cubbyhole and hands it to me. The bottle is empty, except for a tiny model of a grand piano with sheet music and a lady with silver hair.
“Oh my God!” I say. “It’s you!”
“Yes. I have a lot of time on my hands.”
I stand up and go over to the cabinet and pull out more bottles. Each bottle is filled with something different—another tiny, silver-haired woman sitting in her armchair knitting, a miniature Leonard Cohen poem on an easel, tiny ice-skaters twirling in a winter wonderland. Some of the bottles are filled to the brim with feathers, daisies, butterflies, and seashells.
“They’re amazing,” I say.
“When I gave up drinking, I missed my drinks cabinet. I missed the ritual of taking out a bottle of wine, uncorking, and pouring myself a glass. The relief of it. I emptied the cabinet but I was so sad whenever I looked at it. It was like looking at an upright coffin. So I took a Ship-in-a-Bottle evening class in town, along with other old folk. I never liked boats, so I decided to put in things I liked instead. I call it my curiosity cabinet.”
“I love it,” I say, inspecting the different bottles.
“I have to argue with the voice in my head that says I’m pathetic and reminds me it would be an awful lot easier to use the cabinet for its intended purpose. Drinking allowed me to feel sorry for myself. To go easy on myself. I had a hard time trying to relax without a glass or bottle of wine. I’m still trying. But drinking didn’t make me feel alive, not really. It made me mellow, or bitchy, or giddy, or numb. I drank so much I didn’t have the attention span to concentrate on anything.”
She takes out a bottle of a model father and daughter pointing to a bird in a tree.
“My mother passed away when I was ten. When we visited Mam in the graveyard, a robin would come and perch itself on the headstone. Sometimes, Dad brought me bird watching. Whenever I’d see a robin, I’d say, look there’s Mammy.”
“That’s lovely.”
“Dad had Alzheimer’s for years before he died. He wasn’t himself, in the end. I’m terrified of going the same way. Losing my memory. My mind. But even if I do, at least someone can open this cabinet and show me the things I love, and who I used to be.”
I nod vigorously, not knowing what else to do or say.
* * *
“I think you might be on to something with Billy and the snowflakes,” Audrey says. “Don’t be afraid to learn more about them. A shared curiosity is very useful.”
Dandelion
Xanthe said that we shouldn’t message too much. She would prefer to talk face-to-face. She’s left her apartment door on the latch. I knock on the open door and squeeze into the narrow hall. I have to climb across her bicycle like it’s a gangly bouncer who doesn’t want to let me in. The indoor plants that she got before Christmas are wilting. There’s a weird smell coming from the kitchen.
She’s sitting up in bed, wrapped in a sheet of imperial yellow Egyptian cotton, the folds of fabric falling like an Oscars dress. I recognize it from the website she ordered it from when we were in a lecture on Virginia Woolf. She has a spot on her chin, and greasy hair. It’s the first time that I’ve seen her with a misbehaving fringe.
“Hi,” I say.
I sit down on the edge of the bed. “Is Orla still in Clare?” I ask.
“She’s not coming back,” Xanthe says.
“Oh. Why?”
“She dropped out.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, it turns out that she was pretty miserable here. She hated it. Found it hard to make friends.”
“I feel bad,” I mumble.
“What would you have done differently?” she scoffs.
“Nothing probably.”
There are bowls of cereal on the floor. I recognize the buckwheat flakes with almond milk. It’s the only kind of cereal that Xanthe allows herself to eat. One has been overturned. The beige mush has thrown up and dried into the carpet.
“How’s—”
“We broke up last week.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I told him that I wasn’t over Griff, which is at least a little bit true. And I’ll never be good enough for Griff, unless I grow some testicles and a third leg.”
“I’m not sure it works that way.” I spot Lorelai and Rory frozen in an embrace on her laptop. “What season are you on?” I ask.
“I’m on the season where I realize they’re narcissistic pieces of shit. Both of them.”
“OK.” I breathe out.
“My mother doesn’t ring me,” she says. “I’m always the one who calls her. So I stopped calling her to see if she’d notice. We haven’t spoken for a week and a half now. Nothing. Not a message to ask if I’m still alive.”
“I’m sure she’s just busy.”
“And my dad—he’s never called me. If he rang there would have to be something seriously wrong. I don’t even know what we’d talk about. It would be so awkward.”
“I imagine it would be the same with me and Billy.”
“It’s not the same. I have no relationship with my dad outside of the direct debit that goes from his bank account into mine every month.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” I say.
“I got a tattoo last week. I wanted to get something that would mean something.” She turns around and pulls her hair to the side to show off an upside-down dandelion—the stalk growing from the nape of her neck and bending toward her left shoulder. “Remember the story you told me about going outside to the caravan and paying for Billy’s bedtime stories with dandelions?” she says, turning around. “Look at the things on my shoulder, the seeds that are blowing away.”
I inspect the blobs of black that sweep across her shoulder. “Cool.”
“They’re supposed to be snowflakes.”
“Look, I didn’t mean to call you a snowflake,” I say.
“What do you think of it, though? Honestly.”
“It’s lovely.”
“You can’t lie for shit,” she says.
“I mean, the reason you got it creeps me out a bit.”
“We’re not getting into this again. I didn’t get the tattoo because I fancy Billy. I
t’s just . . . not everyone gets to grow up guided by a magical uncle who plays with you and tells you stories, OK?”
“Yeah, but getting a tattoo that symbolizes my childhood?”
“You don’t own dandelions, Debbie. Get over yourself. Not everything is about you.”
“I don’t think it is!”
“Really? I’m pretty sure my whole relationship with my ex-boyfriend was about you too.”
“Fuck you, Xanthe,” I say, getting up from the bed. “I don’t fucking need any of this.”
I trip over the bicycle on my way out. “And FUCK THIS FUCKING BICYCLE,” I shout and slam the door.
Gloria
The more I clean Audrey Keane’s bathroom, the more there is to clean. I’m getting at the tops of the skirting board with a toothbrush. The radio is playing through one of the retro speakers that Audrey has around the house. I wish we had those kinds of speakers at home. I’m always uncomfortable leaving the kitchen when the radio is on. I feel bad that it’s rambling away to an empty room. I’m also afraid I’m missing out on something, like the voices will say something interesting, or bitch about me when I’m out of earshot.
Desert Island Discs is on. It must be a podcast. Billy assures me that we don’t get BBC around here, unless you’re a Protestant and can mentally tune into the airwaves. I smile at the voice of Kirsty Young. She’s Billy’s ideal woman, and the reason he caved in to listening to the BBC on the laptop in the first place. He figured if the Scottish could infiltrate the BBC, then so could we. I walked in on him knocking great craic out of the Seamus Heaney episode, shushing me and laughing away to the thought of Seamus Heaney stomping around his desert island in a pair of yellow Doc Martens.
Kirsty’s dulcet tones introduce her guest, Gloria Steinem, whom I’ve only vaguely heard of. I like her name. One of my favorite words is glorious. I like the way it feels in my mouth.
The first record Gloria Steinem chooses is Mam’s morning song—“Downtown” by Petula Clark. Her father was a dreamer. He had a caravan and they moved around a lot. Kirsty coaxes her into talking about how her mother used to be a badass journalist, but had a nervous breakdown and spent time in a sanatorium. Much of Gloria’s childhood was spent looking after her mother, who was often off in a dream world, talking to unseen voices. And then Kirsty reminds Gloria that she once said that she was living out the unlived life of her mother.
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