‘Can you get me a bowl of warm water too?’ Vera says, examining Iris’s knee through the rip in her jumpsuit.
The water that comes out of the tap has a brownish tinge.
‘I’m gonna need some ice cubes too, love,’ Vera says.
‘Do you have ice cubes?’ I ask. I can’t see a freezer in the kitchen.
‘In the top of the fridge, lovie. Can’t make a martini-slushy without ’em, can I?’
The fridge light doesn’t come on when I open the door, but even in the dark, it’s clear that it hasn’t been the beneficiary of warm, sudsy water in quite some time. I fight a sudden and not uncommon urge to remove the cans of lager, the Easi Singles, the two slices of processed ham on a plate, their edges curling, and scrub the living daylights out of the thing.
I find the ice cubes, wrap them in a cleanish towel, and hand them to Vera who tells Iris to hold it against the bump on her head. The fact that Iris does what she is told is more worrying than the bump on her head.
Now, Vera is examining Iris’s knee, which is an angry red. She peers through a magnifying glass and uses tweezers to remove the threads of grey industrial carpet from the Hippodrome embedded in the abrasion. She dips a piece of cotton wool into the warm water. She dabs it along the cut on Iris’s knee, in slow, careful movements.
Iris succumbs to the mothering. For that is what it is. It is innate. We tend to our young. It is like a memory of a song. No matter how long it’s been since you heard it, you still remember the lyrics. The music. You can still sing along to it.
‘This might sting a little,’ she tells Iris, pouring TCP on a fresh piece of cotton wool. Iris doesn’t reply. She looks far away. Like she’s not even here.
‘You ’ave a few too many, lovie?’ Vera says, cutting a length of bandage with a shaky hand and a pair of rusty scissors. I try not to think about tetanus.
‘Not that I’m judging, mind,’ she continues as if Iris has responded. ‘I’m no stranger to havin’ the odd tipple meself, eh?’ She cackles, pats Iris on the arm, then kneels on the carpet beside Iris’s feet. The movement generates a symphony of clicking bones that is painful to hear. ‘How’s your ankle?’ Vera asks her daughter. Iris shrugs.
‘I’m just gonna see if you can move it, all right?’
Vera lifts the ankle in her skeletal hands, palpates it. ‘It’s funny,’ she says. ‘I used to fancy myself as a nurse when I was a kid.’ She packs ice cubes around Iris’s ankle, wraps it in a frayed towel, and sets it gently on one of the two white plastic chairs.
‘Iris is a nurse,’ I cut in.
Vera looks up at her daughter. ‘Is ya?’
Iris nods.
‘Well now, that’s something to be, that is,’ says Vera. When she smiles, I see Iris in her face. In her smile.
I hear a noise down the corridor and jerk my head around. I’d forgotten about Dad. And Coco Chanel.
‘Your old man’s takin’ his time,’ says Vera.
I stand up. ‘Is it okay if I go and check on him?’
‘’Course, lovie, you must make yourself at home!’
I hesitate.
Vera looks at me. ‘You all right, sweetheart?’
‘Oh. Yes. I am. It’s just … I was wondering if Coco Chanel is—’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I’m not sorry.
‘She was sixteen,’ Vera says. ‘And that’s human years, mind.’
‘Oh, that’s a … that’s a good … for a dog, I mean.’
‘That’s what people say, all right.’
‘When did she … pass?’
‘Last year,’ Vera says. She looks at the dog basket and smiles as if Coco Chanel is still in residence.
‘You must miss her.’
‘You get used to things.’
I look at Iris. ‘I’ll be back in a tick,’ I say.
I walk down the corridor that doesn’t seem as shadowy now that I know where Coco Chanel is. Or where she isn’t, I should say.
‘Dad?’ I call through the bathroom door, but there is no answer. I push the door open and look inside, but the room is empty. The toilet has a flush chain that would be quaint were it not for the rust. The mirror over the mustard-yellow sink is spattered with black spots. There is a way to remove these but I cannot for the life of me recall it. The door at the end of the corridor leads into Vera’s bedroom. It resembles Kate’s bedroom before Kate moved to Galway. Crumpled clothes pitched on the floor and piled on a chair, and a dressing table besieged with lotions and potions and make-up brushes and palettes of eyeshadows and bottles of nail varnish standing in long lines, like they are waiting their turn.
In the centre of the room, an enormous double bed, and in the centre of the bed is my father, fully dressed and fast asleep.
This is not good for many reasons. The first one that comes to mind is his night-time tablet. I haven’t given it to him. I don’t have it. All his medication is in the Airbnb. I don’t know what the tablet does. Or what it prevents. I move towards the bed, picking clothes off the floor as I go. Folding them. Setting them in a neat pile on the chair. Occupational hazard, I suppose.
‘Dad?’ I sit on the edge of the bed, poke my finger against the hard plate of his chest. There’s not a pick on him.
He doesn’t stir. He is laid out on his back, stiff and still.
He could be dead.
Dead in Vera’s bed.
I’ll have to explain to the authorities how we came to be here. Where we’ve been. Where we’re going. I’ll probably be arrested and I won’t be able to organise the repatriation of Dad’s body home, and even if I can, the cost will be exorbitant and I haven’t taken out travel insurance and I’m positive there’s not enough money in my running away from home account to cover it, and even if there was, the fact would remain that he’s dead and that it’s all my fault because I shouldn’t have brought him with me. I shouldn’t have come in the first place.
Dad grunts and shifts and I jump, clipping my ankle off the leg of the bed and it smarts and I welcome the pain because it’s so much better than the alternative.
Now I see the rise and fall of his chest. He sleeps on his back with his hands tucked behind his head, as if he is sunbathing on a grassy bank. Without the anxiety and fearfulness that patrol his face by day, he looks like himself. The before version.
He is asleep. In Vera’s bed. But not dead.
Anna tells me I’m one of the greatest catastrophic thinkers she’s ever met.
When I return to the sitting room, Vera is throwing everything back into the Tesco bag.
‘Where’s the old geezer?’ she asks. Iris is still staring at the blank television screen.
‘I’m really sorry, Vera but he got into your bed. He’s fast asleep.’
‘Best leave him where he is,’ says Vera. ‘You don’t wanna go waking up old people when they’re having forty winks.’
‘Well, no but—’
‘You can stop ’ere tonight. Iris can kip in my bed too, she looks like she could do with forty winks an’ all. There’s a blow-up mattress under the bed you could ’ave, Terry. I got it for Coco when she got poorly. So she could stretch out a bit better.’
I have no idea what to say without seeming rude. Iris will know what to say. Iris will stand up and declare the idea nonsensical. She will march down to Vera’s bedroom and rouse Dad. Lift him out of the bed if she has to and manhandle him down the narrow, dark stairwell, onto the pavement outside, where she will whistle for a cab which will materialise instantly.
Iris does stand up, as I predicted. But the movement is a slow, careful one, as if she is unsure of her body’s capacity to bear her weight. She moves towards Vera’s bedroom. She is going to take Vera up on her offer. Suddenly the Airbnb seems like the homiest, cosiest place in the world. How could I ever have thought it sterile?
‘But what about you?’ I say to Vera.
She nods at the armchair. ‘I’ll kip here,’ she says.
‘Yo
u can’t,’ I say. ‘You take the blow-up mattress, I’ll sleep in the armchair.’
Vera shakes her head. ‘Nah. The mattress reminds me too much of Coco. Still got her sweet doggy smell. You’ll see.’
I am distracted by Iris, who stumbles. I move towards her, but it is Vera who reaches her. It is Vera who hooks Iris’s hand around her neck, Vera who slips her arm around Iris’s waist. And when Vera says, ‘Lean on me, lovie,’ Iris does.
Big, brash Iris leans on the scrawny collection of bones that is her mother and somehow, Vera manages to support her daughter down the corridor, into her bedroom. I follow in their wake.
When they reach the room, Iris does not rouse Dad and manhandle him out of the room and down the narrow, dark stairwell. Instead, she sits on the edge of her mother’s bed and kicks off her silver sandals, unwinds the silvery-grey wrap from around her shoulders.
‘Iris?’ Vera whispers as she tackles one tiny button at a time down the front of her daughter’s jumpsuit. The material must be a comfort against her stiff fingers. The marshmallow softness of it. Iris stares at the top of her mother’s head, perhaps noticing the pale pink patches of scalp, where hair used to grow.
‘You just need a good night’s sleep, my girl,’ Vera whispers, pulling the material down Iris’s legs, easing it past her feet. I see a mole on Iris’s thigh. Dark brown, slightly raised. She won’t have done a thing about it.
Now Iris sits on the edge of the bed in her bra and knickers, shivering in spite of the stuffy heat of the room.
Vera rummages through a chest of drawers in the corner, dropping various bras and scarves on the floor until she finds a T-shirt with a picture of Tom Jones’ face on the front and the word Sexbomb printed below it. She pulls it over Iris’s head.
‘Now,’ she says. ‘You’re all set.’ She reaches behind Iris and does her best to plump the thin, worn pillow there. She puts her hands on Iris’s shoulders, pushes her gently back, picks up her feet and swivels them onto the bed, covering them with a blanket that she pulls up to Iris’s face and tucks under her chin. ‘There,’ she says.
Iris looks exhausted. Her skin is pale and taut across the bones of her face, her lips dry and almost bloodless. The whites of her startling green eyes are yellowed, like the pages of the girls’ old copybooks that I keep in the attic.
Vera leans down to pick up Iris’s jumpsuit, drapes it across her arm. She puts her hand on Iris’s head. ‘Get some kip, there’s a good girl. You’ll be right as rain in the morning.’
Vera sounds like my mother, who was a great believer in a good night’s sleep. In tomorrow being a new day.
‘You don’t mind sleeping with that old geezer, do you?’ Vera asks, nodding towards Dad.
Iris shakes her head and doesn’t say anything inappropriate, like Dad having to go on top because she doesn’t have the energy.
Instead, she says, in a soft, barely-there voice, ‘Why did you never say you were sorry?’
For a moment, there is no sound in the room. Anxiety flares inside me.
Vera stands up. ‘I never deserved forgiveness. So I never asked for none.’
Her tone is matter-of-fact, but she looks away from Iris as she says it. When Iris sighs, her eyes close, the lids coming down slowly, like shop shutters at the end of the day.
13
NEVER DRIVE IF YOU ARE FIGHTING SLEEP.
At home, when I can’t sleep, I roam the house, touching all the dear, familiar things. I make camomile tea. I wrap myself in a blanket and rock on my chair, and the night passes.
Sometimes I even enjoy the sleeplessness, the house sighing and creaking around me like a familiar voice that only I can hear.
Through the floorboards of Vera’s flat, I hear doors banging, people shouting, a dog barking. Outside, the rumble of traffic. My mind fastens on these nocturnal drivers and I wonder who they are and where they’re going at this hour? When there is a lull in the traffic, my mind is dragged back inside. There is a stale heaviness to the air that bears down on me, almost mocks me.
This is what you get. When you interfere.
Every time I shift on the blow-up mattress, I hear the hiss of air escaping so that, by the time the pale light of dawn glances against the window, it is pretty much flat as a pancake.
Vera was right. Coco Chanel was one pungent dog.
I sit up. Dad snores his light, delicate snores. Mam said he snored like a little old lady.
You couldn’t say that about Vera.
Dad’s hair, still thick albeit ash-grey now, falls across his eyes. He could do with a haircut.
Beside him, Iris. She looks so peaceful when she’s asleep. As though she’s dreaming about the sound of the sea. She loves the sea. Swimming in it, walking beside it, looking at it. She loves the way the colours shift and change, the way the water moves across the surface, gentle and ferocious and restless and still. She says it’s like being inside a painting. How can someone like that come up with a plan like this?
A flicker of movement behind Iris’s eyelids. My mouth is suddenly dry and all the counter-arguments I came up with during the night disappear. Maybe she’ll sleep on. It’s only seven o’clock. But Iris’s eyelids flutter and I see the dark length of her eyelashes lift and fall. I arrange my face to appear relaxed yet resolute.
‘Do you have toothache?’ Iris asks, squinting at me.
‘No.’ I sit up. ‘I just wanted to tell you that there’s no need to worry. What happened last night, well, it won’t happen again. I’m not going to ring any other family members. Or anyone. At all. Ever. I promise.’
Iris grins. ‘I can’t believe you rang her. Did she not chew you up and spit you out on the phone?’
‘Well, I … I just took her by surprise. But she still came. To the Hippodrome, I mean. She wanted to see you.’
Iris shakes her head, but her grin remains. ‘She’s a scourge, isn’t she?’
‘I wouldn’t quite say …’
Iris grips the edge of the windowsill and pulls herself up. Her hand slips and she falls back. I force myself not to help as she tries again. Instead, I cast about for my handbag, root around inside it.
‘Okay,’ Iris says when she is sitting up straight. ‘I will give you fifty euros if you can think of one nice thing to say about her.’
‘Oh, right, let me see.’
It seems vital that I come up with something. Anything. Because while it is true that Vera is indeed a scourge, she is also a mother. And I believe that she is well aware of her deficiencies in this capacity.
Perhaps I feel sorry for her. Or maybe I believe that it is my duty – as a member of the same tribe – to display some solidarity.
THINK.
Then I see it. Iris’s silk jumpsuit. Folded neatly and laid across the top of the storage heater. I lean towards it and pick it up. ‘Vera’s washed it out,’ I say. I examine the knee and see that the tear has been … well, ‘mended’ might be a little strong. While Vera has used green thread, it’s a different shade of green, which clashes against the beautiful jade of the silk. Also, she has employed a running stitch instead of a slip stitch. But still. It is something nice. I show it to Iris, who has the grace to look shocked. She touches the bandage on her forehead. The swelling appears to have subsided. She looks at me, and I brace myself. This is the moment she will tell me that she no longer needs my help.
She opens her mouth, but then looks towards the bedroom door, a quizzical expression on her face. ‘I smell rashers,’ she says.
‘Me too,’ I say.
‘Must be coming from the flat downstairs.’
‘No, I think it’s coming from the kitchen.’
‘Vera doesn’t cook.’
‘Maybe she does now.’
Iris shakes her head. ‘People like Vera don’t change. Besides, there’s no hob or oven in the kitchen.’
Iris lifts her legs out of bed, bends and straightens her bandaged knee. ‘Good as new,’ she says.
‘Your ankle’s still swollen.’ I
keep my tone offhand. ‘I think you should take it easy today.’
‘My boat to Calais leaves this evening,’ Iris says. She matches my tone but speaks louder than she needs to. And with emphasis. My boat.
I pretend not to notice. ‘We could always get one tomorrow,’ I say. ‘It’s just one more day.’ The subtle switch from first person singular to plural. We. The casual reference to ‘one more day’. As if there are lots of days.
Iris doesn’t respond to my suggestion. Instead, she nods towards Dad. ‘You should take him home, Terry. All this traipsing around can’t be good for him.’
This is her trump card. Dad – and most dementia sufferers – like to be in their own place, even if that place is an overheated nursing home at the back of a sprawling business park near the airport, with a soundtrack of traffic and a persistent smell of shepherd’s pie.
‘And it’s not good for your marriage,’ she adds. ‘I’m willing to bet Brendan is not in favour of you being here with me.’
‘He’s fine about it. He understands.’ I push my hands under the fur coat that Vera lent me as a duvet last night. Cross my fingers. I don’t even know what Brendan’s stance on euthanasia is. Isn’t that something I should be aware of? After all these years?
‘I know you think you can change my mind,’ Iris says.
‘I don’t.’ I do.
‘Because I won’t change my mind.’
‘I know.’ But she will. I’ll persuade her. I’ll find out how to be persuasive.
I can see Iris studying my face, trying to gauge the sincerity of my replies. I pretend I don’t notice, keep my face impassive, concentrate on getting the last of the air out of the blow-up mattress.
‘You could face prosecution,’ Iris says. She leans towards me. ‘You could go to gaol.’
I wave the idea away as if I am swatting at a fly. As if I’m not terrified at the prospect. ‘I’m coming with you,’ I hear myself say. ‘As we agreed.’
Iris doesn’t say anything for a bit. I think she’s relenting, but then she rallies with a sudden, ‘This is something I need to do on my own.’
‘Well you can’t, so tough tits,’ I say.
Rules of the Road Page 11
