As You Were

by Elaine Feeney

  ‘Maybe she’s busy?’ I said, attempting to console. ‘She’ll visit later. Try and sleep, lie down, they’ll be in with some tea soon, or try and rest maybe?’

  ‘You’re only a coward.’

  ‘OK, I’ll ring her for you this time, just this once, mind you.’

  I redialled the last number.

  Hello, Lohan, Lohan, Mary, answered the phone, rhyming off the number, and calling out her surname twice. Mary. Hello. Hello. Irascible. There was a brief and adequate conversation about medicines kept in the top drawer and Meals on Wheels for Tom, locking the top bolts of the gates and door, something about the large Yucca plant in the bathroom – its roots rotting from over-watering seemed to anger her, and trying to mind Tom’s hands when he opened the tins of dog food. I didn’t recommend a bra or knickers drop-off. I hung up. She wouldn’t be visiting. Everything was fine. Goodbye.

  ‘I’ve my husband at home, you see – Tom,’ Jane said, and giggled. ‘I’m his carer. Me, I care for him, I shouldn’t be in here at all, you know, with all I have going on, we’re two right old codgers.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a tough gig, Jane,’ I said.

  She trailed off.

  ‘He’s terribly forgetful . . .’

  Margaret Rose sensibly asked if she was getting the ­Carer’s Allowance but Jane screamed at her to mind her own business. Margaret Rose said she just thought it might help. Jane told me she was getting the allowance, but not to tell anyone, they’d take the eye out of your head that sort, as she dismissed Margaret Rose’s concern with hand swats and smirks. She got new curtains with last year’s Carer’s Allowance, she said. They were lovely. She couldn’t remember what room they were in, but they were yellow, same colour as her tenth birthday dress, when she had her first kiss. No. No. She can’t quite remember her name, but yes, she distinctly remembered her face. Her husband’s name was Tom. But she never wanted to marry Tom.

  ‘I’ve nine fine children. Mind you, they’re all away now. America, Australia, England and I’ve even one in Mexico. Mary didn’t go away though. She was always a good girl, Mary, but I often wished she went too because everyone needs to go. Everyone needs to get away. It would give me great peace if she went away . . .’ She didn’t finish.

  I wondered how a woman could grow nine children and end up here, without a bra or even a clean pair of knickers.

  ‘D’you know, you’re a lovely girl? That second girl I kissed went away, you know . . . Did I tell you I could smell St Thérèse of Lisieux. It’s her roses? They’re drifting in off the corridors. I just know he will, he’ll spare you with her help. I know it when I can smell this. It’s the roses, you see. It’s all in the roses.’

  She held my fingers in a newborn-baby grip. I closed my eyelids tight, unsure of where to look. I sat, deferential, as though in prayer. But I had no faith. My parents were devout Catholics. Father with Old Spice on his face, at mass on Sundays, not daring to ever sit far up the church or receive the host, a sinning man, but he was proud that he somehow knew this, like all good honest men; this was a good thing, he convinced me. An honest hard-working man that held his wife up by the throat like a raggy doll in our sun-filled kitchen to watch her dance. But that was just temper, everyone needed it. Temper. And sure, couldn’t one repent it? In the end. On the very last day. Judgement.

  I had sprayed some of my rose perfume behind my earlobes.

  Jane let go of me abruptly, dead-staring at me.

  ‘Who went away?’ Margaret Rose said.

  ‘Patrick. Hegarty.’

  ‘He’s only gone for a scan,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, good. I know Patrick Hegarty very well,’ she said, ‘and . . . I know his mother.’ She raised her eyes to heaven and held her hand to her mouth.

  Margaret Rose opened her eyes wide. ‘What, ya sure?’

  The sheets on Hegs’s bed were tossed. Unmade beds unnerve me. Molly had left without fixing it.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure, certain that I’d have killed his dirty ­rotten father.’

  Chapter 10

  ‘I settled on decapitation. Chopping his head off,’ Jane said, her face sweaty.

  ‘Jane!’ Margaret Rose screamed, and then laughed tentatively.

  ‘This is no laughing matter, Margaret Rose,’ Jane said, remembering her double-barrel name. ‘First, I’d wash my hands in lavender soap like I do when a cow is calving, cleans them from infection and it’s great for it gets the smell of afterbirth off your hands.’

  ‘Oh, now, Jane, that’s a dreadful thing ta be saying,’ Margaret Rose said. She lifted herself from the top of the bed to the bottom, and sat there.

  ‘But you see, you’re not a farming woman. Besides, I have often thought about how,’ Jane went on, ignoring Margaret Rose, ‘but I couldn’t lay my hand on anything that would have done it cleanly, quickly, and to be honest, really, I don’t think I have it in me, to kill a person. Do you think that’s something you’re born with?’

  She looked at us both.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Agree,’ Margaret Rose added.

  ‘Well, maybe then it was a, what do you call it, a dream, a . . .’

  ‘Fantasy,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Fantastic . . . so to save me the stress of hacking at him, maybe I could have bought an axe.’

  ‘Jesus, fuck,’ I said. My stomach began to throb, and the sides of my face to flush. There was pressure between my thighs.

  ‘I have a good swing. But I’d never find him. I didn’t even know what he looked like. If I’d even one lousy Polaroid to go on, but New York City is a big place, plenty murdered there, isn’t it a shame we don’t have a telly here?’ she said, throwing her arms towards the window, where a TV would naturally plonk itself. ‘Great shows on the box from there, we’d have a great time, us girls,’ she smiled, and weight settled on the back of Jane’s shoulders as she dropped them slowly.

  ‘Ah, don’t worry, I wouldn’t have dared do it,’ she said. ‘It’d be impossible to get a good swing on an axe in New York, it’s so full up with people. People everywhere. Maybe I’d use a gun.’

  Her eyes stared at the ceiling’s mould and up at the sickly tiles that sneezed on us each time the wind would lift one up and down. She clattered her false teeth into a pink froth in her mouth like one of those reduction things they whisk up and place over poached eggs and asparagus with a silver spoon on a fancy cooking programme.

  ‘I know exactly what’s up with Patrick. Poor boy. I could fix him, but it’s too late, it was too late the day he was born. He’s pretending not to recognise me,’ Jane said. ‘You see, I pretend I don’t recognise him too . . . you know the way . . .’

  ‘I think you should lie back into your own bed, Jane, get some rest, and leave it so – you’re very tired and we’re all drained and maybe if you slept?’ I said. ‘Then Mary will be in.’ I closed my eyes. I had pain everywhere. Throbbing. 10. Ten. Pressure. Stinging. Flushing. Pulsating.

  ‘She might come in today, and relax you, they could give you something to help you sleep? Do you take a sleeper?’ I said, arching my back forward to take the pressure off.

  But there was no talking to Jane.

  ‘I’d never find him. You understand this, don’t you?’ She was flustered now with an anxious energy. We both nodded silently. She quieted down a little then, and began buttering and marmalading a wheatened cracker from her nightstand, and crunched down on the thick chunks of pale yellow butter and blobs of orange-rind marmalade heaped on it. Her thoughts were uncontrollable like daft pups. ‘Would you care for one, dear?’ she said, as she coughed, the crumbs going against her breath, coughing again. She offered me nibbles on the palm of her hand.

  ‘I’m grand, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘I think you should tell us out that story, Jane,’ Margaret Rose said. Eager.

  I shot Margaret Rose a look.

  ‘I’ll put a sliver of marmalade on it, first for you.’ Jane wasn’t giving up. ‘If we can’t picnic outside on the lovely lawn, t
his will have to do.’ I’d eat her concoction, and Margaret Rose would eat it too, poorly, out of one side of her mouth and perhaps bite her numbed cheek a couple more times. ‘Come now, have one, maybe they’d wet some tea for us, isn’t this nice?’ Then, as though she’d been struck hard, or wound up, she began. ‘I taught Claire Hegarty.’ Bingo. ‘Ever since she was a little girl, y’know?’

  I licked the sticky mess off my fingers.

  ‘Oh, really, Jane? No, I didn’t know, I don’t know her very well at all, his daughter,’ I said.

  Margaret Rose grimaced. It was nice being alone, the three of us, without Claire, easier to chat, though we were conscious of Shane, nodding at him sometimes, and fussing when the students came in and out, telling them that they should wet his lips, or close the window near him, for it was not nice for him to be in a draught.

  ‘Ah, no, you don’t, sure why would you? Well, Miss Claire was a pupil of mine . . .’

  ‘No way?’ I said.

  ‘And tough as nails. I’d give her velvety stamps in her copybook, you know, to tell her she did well . . . she loved to be told she did very well. Preferred being told she did the best, and even then she’d ask, “Am I the best?” It was difficult to disagree with her. She liked stars in her spellings notebook, her maths, Irish verbs, music. Everything was always in order, except that awful walk.’

  ‘Ah, ya,’ Margaret Rose agreed, ‘noticed that . . . very flat-footed.’

  ‘Yes, yes, very much so,’ Jane replied. ‘Well, she’d wear cerise-pink ribbons tied high up on her head and when she knew an answer, which was all of the time, you see, she’d put her arm up straight over her head in the air and keep it there, like one of those swimmers, paused.’ Jane mimed the action, holding her own hand high above her head, then thrusting her arm backwards, she continued, ‘She could hold it there all day long, sometimes I’d just leave her be. I’d let her sit and hold her hand up all day long.’

  Alex texted.

  I ignored it.

  Jane took a long breath, snapping one of the crackers in half, but didn’t bring it to her mouth. ‘Really she must be just like her grandfather, the one I want to kill, you see, because I don’t know where she got the brains from,’ Jane sighed, ‘and the rudeness. And you know, another thing, she always knew the correct answer. Miss Claire Hegarty. Miss. Miss. MISS. Hand up, shaking it now, so impatient to tell me everything she knew, I knew it all already, she didn’t need to try so hard. So I’d strike her.’

  Margaret Rose took a sharp in-breath and shut her eyes tight.

  ‘Don’t be so critical, you –’ she whipped around and pointed at Margaret Rose – ‘I couldn’t allow her just to plough on forward and pass everyone out, you know what they say about too much praise? Besides, it’d have done her no good. All that praise.’ Jane spoke quietly now, not wanting anyone to hear. ‘We’d better be quiet and not pretend a thing, or we’ll never get out, they’ll never let us home, and we’ll have no tea outside later.’

  The Hegartys never acknowledged Jane. And in turn she had kept an iron fist of silence on her story. The wind was blowing up outside, but the rain was lifting and the late-afternoon sun was showing itself. Leaves billowed and big seagulls cawed out, landing on the crumbled balcony edge and flying off, startled by the banging windows.

  ‘Her hair was braided so very tightly, you see,’ Jane said, making a tiny O out of her thumb and forefinger. ‘And let me tell you, ladies, it was not Claire’s mother who did that to her hair. You see . . . she did it to herself. The child. That tightly to herself . . . that it almost stopped the blood . . . but she had to be just perfect.’

  ‘I always liked putting my girls in plaits. Kept it neat,’ Margaret Rose said.

  My sons. Barbers. Six weeks. Short back and sides. No razor. I’d go get a coffee and leave them in the place with music videos, scantily clad women, men with tight chinos swaggering, narrow combs in blue liquid with pretty teeth, lift-up seat for the smallest as he eyed himself furtively in the mirror.

  ‘Ah, I have you now, I have you,’ Jane shrieked at Margaret Rose, scanning her up and down. ‘Well, aren’t you the right one, and you named after the princess, the bitch, the whore one, went off with the photographer, Margaret Rose Windsor, that’s you, right? Wonder what ma’am would think of that?’

  Margaret Rose laughed, ‘Ouch. But ya, yar correct.’

  ‘In fact, there is no way in this wide earthly world that Claire’s mother would give a damn as to what her hair was like,’ Jane said, going back to her tale and raising her tone now. ‘Claire Hegarty’s mother didn’t plait her hair. She put plaits in model dolls, mind you. But she was never going to touch a hair on the head of her own child. It seemed there was just something about her.’

  Margaret Rose shot me one high eyebrow. I reciprocated.

  ‘She’s a lovely woman though, you know?’ Jane said, invitingly.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Patrick’s wife, gentle, could never understand why she didn’t take to Claire, and in the end Claire did everything for herself and her father. At first, little Claire began asking my year’s plan, and said she loved maths, but all I could think of was Ann . . .’ Jane said and sighed. ‘I was years teaching at this stage and let me tell you, there were few put it up to me as Claire did, not at all like the older brother and older sister.’

  ‘Really? He has more children?’ Margaret Rose said, surprised.

  ‘Oh, yes. Two. Joan’s in Saudi for years, teaching, and John married a lovely woman from Colorado and they set up a music shop. John loved music but he was tone deaf, I used to have to ask him to mime in the choir, only move your mouth, good boy, John.’

  Lucid.

  ‘Would you like a chocolate?’ Margaret Rose said, and shoved a box shaped like a blue coffin towards us both in turn, rattling around a few red-wrapped ones. A lone orange one held Jane’s attention. She jumped up, reached in and fished it out.

  ‘No, no, ah sure, I’ll take this orange one, is it a hard one? Oh, wait, Jesus no, no, it is not, it’s soft,’ she said, grimacing and bruising it with her fingers first, then opening it, and placing the cracked chocolate volcano on her tongue to melt like Jesus, the syrup dripping into her throat. Cu. GU. Cu. GU.

  ‘But who’s Ann? Did they have another daughter?’ Margaret Rose asked.

  ‘No, no. Ann Hegarty was the most beautiful woman,’ Jane replied.

  ‘Hegs’s wife?’

  ‘No, no, no, not his wife at all, his mother!’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘You knew his mother?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said and blessed herself. ‘She was born on July fourth, six days before myself and that was trouble. Independence Day, see, wild as a March hare, and the first chance she got she left for New York.’ As Jane spoke her eyes darted towards the ceiling, as though she were bringing up files. The past wasn’t difficult. The present impossible.

  ‘Ah, so many left,’ Margaret Rose said, sadly.

  ‘Ah, they did sure, nothing for many really, but to get away. We’d all grown up together. They were the next house over from us. Ah, they were lovely times really, we were mostly left to ourselves . . . head to the beach. I loved school, but Ann, well, you see, Ann hated it, always trying to take me away from learning. She was wild. We loved going out off on the bikes, especially to go as far as Roundstone. Do ye know the lovely beach, Dog’s Bay? Ann loved to swim.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, ya, so beautiful out there, isolated,’ Margaret Rose said, twisting open a red foil paper by pulling it with both her hands like a Christmas cracker, ‘but I never gets in the water, freezing.’

  We all agreed.

  ‘There’s never enough sun to heat the water,’ Jane said. ‘We did what was asked of us at home. I loved the books, and Ann loved the music. She played guitar. She’d sit in on her bed for hours just strumming it, while I’d lie there, listening.’ Jane made an odd noise and began to lift her shoulders up and down and again.

>   ‘You OK, Jane?’ I said. ‘Jane?’

  She paused, sat still, eyes frozen fixed straight ahead of her, her right foot going around and around in a fast circular motion. Margaret Rose glanced fast at me, unnerved, ‘Jane, ya were saying, the guitar and Ann, lying on the bed . . . remember . . .’

  ‘Ah, yes. I can see the guitar, and I can hear her, laughing, but I can’t rightly remember her face. Oh, damn this, she keeps floating off . . .’ She put her head in her hands. ‘It’s no use, I can’t see her, damn it, damn it . . .’ she said, getting agitated.

  ‘It’s OK, Jane,’ I said, ‘take your time, maybe have a sleep? She’ll come back.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  I was just about to close my eyes, breathe through my own pain, when Jane lurched forward again, energised. ‘Oh, now, the guitar, yes, well, you see, she learned of an old Martin guitar brought back from the States by an uncle who used to live in Chicago,’ she said, ‘and I cannot, for the life of me, cannot, remember the uncle’s name.’ She was unnervingly specific at times, her bright eyes ablaze with another time; recalling people seemed to give her memory a welcome distinction. ‘Ah, yes, the uncle said he was friends with Dick McPartland,’ she said.

  There was something about the odd specifics that was upsetting.