My Sister's Child

by Caroline Finnerty

  Her legs were aching. They had walked and walked. She felt every pebble through the thin soles of her rubber-soled shoes and they were starting to hurt her now. The road seemed never-ending.

  “I’m tired, Mum.”

  “We’re nearly there now.”

  She had said that three times already and they weren’t.

  “Where are we going, Mum?”

  “The beach.”

  “But I don’t have my swimming togs with me.”

  “It’s too cold to go swimming today, Isla.”

  “Then why are we going there?”

  “To see the sea. I need to see the sea.”

  “When we see the sea do we have to walk all the way back again?”

  “No, Isla.”

  She said it so wearily that it frightened Isla and she didn’t dare ask her again.

  A song came into her head then, a rhyme that Jo had taught her, “A sailor went to sea, sea, sea to see what he could see, see, see but all that he could see, see, see was the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea!”

  She started singing it out loud as they walked “A sailor went to sea, sea, sea . . .” She found if she sang it loudly enough she couldn’t feel the pain in her legs or the stones pushing against the soles of her shoes.

  Eventually a hotel came into view and her mum said that they were nearly there. She believed her that time because she had said it without Isla having to complain first. They walked down a steep slope and were on the beach. The salty air hit her nostrils. She liked that smell, she decided.

  Isla had seen the tower and started to make her way across the dunes to climb up towards it. She ran around its circumference, still singing her song, until her head started to spin. She had to stop running and stand still for a moment to let it settle. When it eventually stopped, she saw her mum was wading far into the water fully dressed. What was she doing?

  Isla climbed down from the tower and made her way over the rocks and onto the beach towards her. She started calling out to her but her words were lost on the wind. Her mother kept on walking deeper into the water. Then a woman ran over and went into the water after her mum – she reached her quicker than Isla. She talked to her mum for a minute and then she took off her coat and put it over her mum’s shoulders, even though the woman’s cardigan underneath had loads of tiny little holes but it was meant to be like that. She guided her mother out of the water and back onto the sand. Then she was following the woman and her mum into the hotel. The woman sat her mum down at a table in the corner overlooking the car park and then ordered a pot of tea for her and a scone with marmalade for Isla. She had got a coffee for herself. Isla wanted jam because she didn’t like marmalade. She didn’t like the bits of orange peel and she told her that but the woman ignored her and kept on talking softly to her mother. They sat there for ages, her mother and this woman talking very quietly. Isla couldn’t hear what they were saying and she started to get restless, fidgety.

  She went up to the bar and ran her fingers back and forth along the brass rail that was running along the front of the bar until it was covered in her greasy fingerprints and she got bored of doing that too. Then she started climbing up the stairs and bouncing back down each step again on her bum. She picked up all the salt and sugar sachets and tidied them up into their little white ceramic bowls. The people at the tables around them changed over several times. The barman smiled at her and asked if she wanted a mineral. She had nodded that she did and he gestured to a barstool and she climbed up on to it. He lined up three glass bottles along the bar in front of her.

  “We have Cidona, Fanta or TK Red Lemonade? Which one would you like?”

  She couldn’t decide, so she did a dip like she saw Jo doing sometimes with the other girls on the road. “Dip, dip,” she pointed her index finger, “eeeny meeny, miney moe . . .” Her finger landed on the Fanta and she drank her fizzy orange through a straw, delighted with herself. They rarely had minerals at home and she couldn’t wait to tell Jo when she saw her later.

  Then the woman from the beach came up and said that her dad was in the car park and he was going to drive her and her mum home. Isla looked out at the dusky night and saw the glare of his yellow headlights through the window. They were the same colour as her fizzy orange.

  Her mother was sent away to a psychiatric unit after that and their dad had to take time off work to mind them. Isla remembered talking to him about it once and he had said that “she wasn’t well in the head”, that her “nerves” were at her – that was the word people used to use for someone who was suffering with mental illness back then. Heaven forbid you should use the correct term.

  Isla could remember going to visit her at the home but she was frightened by the behaviour of some of the patients. She and Jo would follow their father through the reception area, which led into a large communal living room. She could still remember the knot of anxiety as it closed around her chest and the way her heart would start to race as soon as she went through the door. They would have to pass some of the other residents, sitting in armchairs, to reach their mother’s room down the end of the corridor.

  “I know what you’re doing! Don’t think I don’t! I know what you’re at!” one man kept shouting at them whenever they walked past.

  Their dad would hurry them along and tell them not to take any notice of him, that he didn’t know what he was saying, but she would cling to her father until they were past him. She would have just started to calm down again by the time they reached her mother’s room. Going into that room would cause her to be even more frightened because their mum barely seemed to notice them. Isla could still see her room now: it was rectangular in shape with a single bed, a wardrobe, a wash-hand basin and a window overlooking the car park. The walls were painted a sickly peach colour: it was the same colour as the ‘bittersweet’ in her Crayola crayons at home. One week their dad brought photos of them all but, when they had gone back to see her the following Sunday, they were all still lying in a pile on the top of her locker. They hadn’t even been moved so he placed them around the room on her locker and windowsill and on the shelves but she just said, “You forgot to bring one of David”.

  The second time she tried to do it was when she was back home and their dad had taken them off to the beach one day. “We’ll give your mum a rest,” he had said and Jo and Isla giddily ran up the stairs to grab their swimming togs. They’d had a great day jumping over the waves and poking at crabs with sticks. When the sun started to go down for the evening, they climbed back over the dunes and their dad bought them an ice cream from a shop with netted buckets and spades hanging outside. They sat outside on a wooden picnic bench eating their ice creams and watching the sun set in an apricot sky. Then when they were finished, the three of them piled back into the car with sand stuck to their clothes and lining the creases of their bodies.

  The first thing they saw when they arrived home and went into the kitchen was that the tap was running and there was orangey-red blood smeared all along the kitchen sink. It was watery just like they had been painting and were in the middle of washing out their brushes. It was only when they rounded the corner that they saw their mum lying slumped on the floor. Their dad had shouted at Jo to dial 999 so she ran out to the hallway and Isla ran after her because she didn’t want to be left in that room with her mum. Jo had picked up the receiver and put a shaking finger in the hole for nine and pulled it around to dial the number. It seemed like an eternity as they waited for the panel to return each time to dial the next number before finally it connected. Isla was crying so loudly that Jo had to tell her to be quiet because she couldn’t hear the operator. Then the man on the phone asked her for directions and she wasn’t sure how to get to their house so she had called their dad and he shouted at her “Just give it to me for the love of God!” He grabbed the receiver out of her hand and directed them to their house. Isla had known that he didn’t mean it – he never shouted at them usually – but he was just as panicked as they were.
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  The ambulance came and all the neighbours gathered in the street, gawking at the scene as their mother’s trolley was loaded into the back, but nobody said anything to them. Their dad went off in the ambulance with her and Jo declined the offers from Mrs Peabody and Mrs McGuirk to come over to their houses for tea. She led Isla back inside and turned on the TV for her. He-Man was on and Isla watched that while Jo cleaned up the kitchen.

  Their dad came home after midnight and said that they’d saved her. That she was doing okay but she would need to stay in the hospital for a few days. Jo couldn’t look him in the eye. That night she cuddled Isla even closer in her bed.

  Isla’s bare legs touched her older sister’s and she felt her ribcage lift and fall gently behind her as she breathed.

  “Why did she do it?” she asked Jo.

  “Because she doesn’t want to be here. She doesn’t want to be with us,” Jo had replied.

  Isla hardly closed her eyes that night because every time that she did she saw their mum and the colour red.

  It was her third time lucky that she finally succeeded. It had been quite peaceful actually, compared to the times before it. Well, as peaceful as it can be when your mum takes her own life. Their dad had found her slumped down in the bath on Good Friday when they came back from the Stations of the Cross in the church. Isla had come into the bathroom after him and saw that her hair was fanned out in the water around her. An empty bottle of vodka lay on the floor beside the tub. He had screamed at her to get out then. The doctors said she would have gone quickly, probably in her sleep.

  After she died Isla had felt a strange mixture of overwhelming sadness for the mother that she hadn’t ever really got to know but also relief. She was ashamed to say it but she was relieved that she no longer had to carry around the constant weight of wondering whether it was them or her? It just seemed like none of them could get near to her, not even their dad. She often found herself wondering if she really hated them all that much. When she was alive, when the girls in school were talking about their mothers, Isla would get a knot of anxiety deep inside of her because she felt embarrassed by the pathetic relationship that she had with hers. Isla never asked friends over to her house because she didn’t want anyone to see how crazy her mum was. At least now whenever someone asked her about her mother she could say that she passed away and they never wanted to know any more. They were too afraid of upsetting her, so the conversation came to a swift end. It drew a neat line under it.

  She knew that Jo’s feelings were a lot more complicated, however, probably because she was the elder of the two of them. Jo was still very angry with their mother. She couldn’t imagine how awful losing David must have been for her mum but she had people who needed her – it wasn’t just her decision to make – the decision to exit the here and now because her grief was overpowering. It wasn’t her right to abdicate from her life. As a mother herself, Jo didn’t know how her mother could rationalise it in her head that it was okay to do something like that. Did she need to leave those imprints on her living children’s minds for the rest of their lives?

  In some ways Isla thought it was probably harder for Jo than it was for her because she had memories of a different mother. Isla only knew the woman she had been continually locking horns with from a very young age but Jo said that the one before David died was caring and loving and she had to deal with wondering where she had gone to. She was left trying to reconcile two versions of the same person, like a plate that had been smashed in two and the pieces never quite fitted back together again. When David died it was like someone had pulled the rug out from underneath their whole family, leaving a mess of broken fragments behind. Isla used to go and visit her grave but she hadn’t been in years. She imagined it overgrown with weeds and the headstone thick with moss.

  When Isla and Greg got back into the car afterwards, she felt exhausted. Greg seemed to sense her need to be quiet so he flicked on the radio and they listened to some eighties easy-listening station the whole way home. Eventually he pulled up on the path beside her flat. He silenced the engine and turned towards her.

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Isla? I’m so sorry – the last thing I wanted to do was upset you. I would never have brought you there if I had known . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” she sighed. “I’ll be fine. Just sometimes it sneaks up on you, y’know?”

  “Well, I’m always here for you if you need me – you know that, don’t you?”

  “Will you come up for a cuppa?”

  “Sure, I’d like that.”

  She opened the door and he followed her upstairs.

  “You can take off your coat, you know,” she said eventually.

  “Sorry, I’m not used to being in your place.” He laughed nervously before taking it off and putting it over the back of the sofa. They had always gone back to his place. “It’s nice here, Isla,” he said, looking around the walls. “It’s very you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s creative, homely.”

  She made the tea and they fell silent for a while, clasping their mugs, until Greg spoke.

  “So did you make any headway with your sister?”

  She shook her head. “I was over there again. She isn’t going to change her mind. I think I underestimated her feelings about it all. I think she has left all of that in the past, back when Réiltín was conceived. I suppose to her it was all done and dusted so when I went and asked her for the embryo she was in total shock.”

  “Well, maybe she just needs some time to come around to the idea?” Greg asked hopefully.

  “You should have seen her reaction. I really don’t think she’ll ever change her mind.”

  “You never know – she might in time. Don’t give up hope.”

  “I don’t know . . . maybe I should just try to accept it. I did give up any rights I had to the embryo when I donated it so maybe I should have expected this. I just never thought back then that I would be in this position.”

  “Of course you didn’t. Look, why don’t you take legal advice? Maybe you have more rights than you think?”

  Isla exhaled wearily. “I just couldn’t face going down that road. I don’t want to get into a battle with my own sister – plus, as I told you, she’s a lawyer and I wouldn’t stand a chance against her. I just wish she would help me.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t come down to legal rights and contracts and what have you. I know it’s not the most conventional of requests but she should want to help you, like you helped her. I’m so sorry, Isla. I feel so bad for you.”

  “Hey, I’ll be fine – you know me.” She forced a smile on her face that she didn’t feel on the inside.

  “I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”

  They fell quiet for a while until Isla spoke again.

  “Greg, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately . . . I was just wondering . . .”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I think you’re right. I think it’s time I started taking control of my life instead of just floating along and seeing where I end up. Maybe if I had done it years ago, I would be a mother by now.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? Everything always seems a bit easier in hindsight.”

  She paused for a moment. “I have a big favour to ask you and feel free to say no if you want to –”

  “Go on?”

  “Well, I was thinking . . . maybe . . . well . . . maybe you could teach me?”

  “What? Teach you how to read?”

  She nodded. “I mean only if you want to . . .”

  “Yeah . . . sure . . . okay, Isla, I think we could do that.” His mouth broke into a wide grin.

  Chapter 26

  Feelings

  In the café Isla and Greg had just got over the coffee-to-go rush and the lunchtime sandwich queues, and things were just starting to settle down to the slower afternoon pace that they always welcomed after a hectic morning. They were a person short as Jamie was sick
so Michelle couldn’t come in to work and Fran was on holidays so he couldn’t cover for her. They had worked busily all day without much time to chat.

  Suddenly the door swung open, taken by a gust, and Réiltín marched in through it. Her blue hair dye had faded from its earlier electric shade to a softer baby-blue colour. She was wearing her school uniform but her tie was missing. She walked up to the counter where Isla was cleaning the salad trays.

  “I want to know what’s going on between you and Mum,” she demanded of Isla.

  “Well, hello to you too!” Isla said.

  “I’m serious, Isla. I want to know what’s going on!”

  “Do you want a hot chocolate? I was just going to make myself one.” She turned to Greg. “Can you hold the fort for a few minutes?”

  “Work away!”

  She took her time making two steaming mugs of cocoa. She was buying herself time to think about the best way to handle the conversation with Réiltín. She made sure to add plenty of mini-marshmallows into Réiltín’s mug before sitting down at a table in the corner with her.

  “I know there’s something going on between you and Mum and you think I don’t notice but I do. So are you going to tell me why you’ve been avoiding us?”

  “I’m not avoiding you.” Which was technically true.

  “I know you’re making up excuses not to have to see Mum. You practically used to live in our house and now you hardly come at all.”

  “I have been over but you were out at the time.”

  “I want to know what’s going on. Stop lying to me, Isla. Please, it’s bad enough that Mum and Dad treat me like a child constantly but please don’t you do it too. Now tell me what’s going on.”

  “There is nothing going on. Everything is fine – you don’t need to worry about anything.”

  “I know there is something, Isla. You haven’t been over to the house in ages and then when you did come you were fighting with Mum. Then Dad and Mum are barely talking even though they pretend to be whenever I’m there –”