by Ross, Orna
Part One: Starburst
|ˈSTÄRˌBƏRST|[NOUN]
a pattern of lines or rays radiating from a central object or source of light
an explosion producing such an effect.
a period of intense activity in a galaxy, involving the formation of stars.
*
Shando put his head around our bedroom door, his eyes drawn immediately to my mother's manuscript, the pages scattered across our bed. "How far have you got?"
"Just to the arrest."
He nods at me, solemn and distant as a priest. "The beginning will be hardest."
"You do know it's a sham?"
"Star..."
"It's got more holes than a fishing net. It keeps contradicting itself."
"Honey, how can you say that after just one chapter?"
"You'd expect her to have included my homecoming that day, wouldn't you?"
"Homecoming? What day?" He looks at me, blank. Or is he doing that thing he does, where he withdraws from what's happening into his own little private place?
"Christmas. Eve. 1989." I am trying to keep my tone even and reasonable but it comes out tense and irritated. That day, husband dear. The one that almost destroyed us all."There's loads about that. And about you, Star. That's why you need to read it."
"You know it begins with a letter from her --"
"Yes, yes," he interrupts, not wanting me to say "her boyfriend", not in the tone of voice I'm using anyway. "I know it's hard, hon, but you'll be glad when you've done it, trust me."
"She says she's beginning with her father's journals. But she doesn't."
He shrugs, as I knew he would. That's what twenty years of marriage creates out of your great love affair: familiarity and irritation.
I'm being unfair, it's been a tough week for us all. Wake up, is what I want to say. Can't you see what she's doing? But, as usual, words fail me. Words were her tool; they never come out right for me.
"I think you could do with a nap now," he says, in his husband-knows-best way. "Don't you? Read a bit more later on?"
I just let the silence grow until neither of us knows what to do with it.
"Take it in small bites, y'know?"
"I don't have to read it at all, Shan."
"Star..."
"I don't."
She's brainwashed you, I want to scream. Only I'm not sure enough. Doubt drags the words back down, unsaid.
"Look, I'm going to take the kids out for an hour," he says, "so you can get some sleep. You'll feel better after a nap."
He makes his escape, unable to bear me a moment longer. I don't blame him. If I could escape myself right now, I would too.
I'd recognized the manuscript the minute Mags Halloran, Mom's solicitor, extracted it from her stack of deeds and testaments. The reading of the will was our last death-duty before we could return to daily life and we'd braced ourselves for this meeting with Mags, who was standing foursquare, at the head of the table, as we walked into the dining room. She waited till Shando and I took our seats before sitting herself and then moving smartly through the will, like she was working a shopping list.
Blackberry Lodge, and most of Mom's money, to me: tick.
Trust fund for each grandchild: tick.
Bequest to Pauline, her oldest friend: tick.
Donation to the Right To Die Society: tick.
Just when it looked like we were done, she reached into her pile of papers and produced this it. This script: six-hundred-plus tattered and benighted pages held together by two criss-crossed pink elastics. I recognised it immediately. Blue Mercy. Everything in the room -- husband, lawyer, furniture, fire -- faded as Mags nudged it across the polished table towards me.
I passed it back.
Thanks for the money, Mom, it will help the people we're here to help. But no thanks to the manuscript. If I was going to read it, I'd have taken it from you that last day in Laragh. If I didn't then, when you plunked it into my lap, and gripped my arm, and turned your big supplicating eyes on me, what made you think I'll succumb now?
"It's your story too." That was what she'd said. She sat so erect on the bench, her legs angled to one side. Old and ill and frail but somehow still lovely, grey hair highlighted to a crisp ash-blonde. She wore it long. Too long, some would say, for her age. Usually pinned into a coil at her crown but at that moment folded over one shoulder, falling in a curtain over the place where her breast used to be.
Downstairs, in my living room, there's a fire flickering in the grate. I can go down right now and toss this in and watch it burn. End of story, hers and mine. What a relief that would be. I gather the pages up, their whiteness stark against our black double-duvet cover. I tap the edges to line them up, sideways, lengthways, pull them back into order, snap their pink elastic bands around them.
When I'd refused to take it from Mags this morning, Shando had put his hand on my arm, much as Mom had done in Laragh. "Honey, don't you think --?" he started to say, but then stopped when he saw my face.
As well he might.
Mags knew enough to stay silent too. So there we sat, three capable adults clueless about what to do next, gagged by memories, and awkwardness, and respect for the dead.
It was the events of Christmas 1989, of course, that were swirling in the silence. Christmas Eve, the day of Granddad's going. One of those days that you spend the rest of your life trying to forget. Why stir it up? And how can I be expected to read Mom's letters from him?
Dearest Mercy, I'm leaving this on our bed...
What kind of mother would want to make her daughter read such things?
Through the bedroom window, a glint from beyond the trees catches my attention: the lake. A wave of claustrophobia stifles my breath, my heart seems to flutter up and catch in my throat. Yes, I'll take it down to the lake. Down there I'll know what to do.
They have a saying in this adopted country of mine: when sorrow sours your milk, it's time to make cheese. A very Irish way of saying: count your blessings. So that's what I do as I go downstairs. Yes, my mother has jumped up out of her coffin, waving her manuscript like a traffic warden with a ticket. Yes, my husband has leapt to defend her and her justifications, making me wonder, again, what he really thinks about what happened back then. And yes, her passing has stirred up Granddad's, showing us that it isn't over as we've liked to pretend for so long, but all too easily resurrected to stalk our days again. But it is also true that the same husband is kind and faithful, that we are as happy as can be expected in this lovely home we've created together, where we run our lovely business, and raise our two lovely, long-awaited, children.
And that outside the window is our lovely garden among lovely grounds, five acres stretching towards the wilds of Wicklow, the loveliest county in Ireland.
Lovely, lovely, lovely, cheese, cheese, cheese.
In the porch, I stop to put on my boots. The higgledy-piggledy porch is my favorite room in the house, with its shoes, large and small. Our walking boots and trainers. Our coats and umbrellas. Our backpacks and shopping bags. All the ordinary paraphernalia of country life, of family life, looks almost holy to me this afternoon in the steely winter light.
The door clicks shut behind me. It's chilly out, and a small gust of wind whips up. Leaves from a pile in the corner swirl into it, dancing around each other, as if enjoying their freedom, oblivious to the fact that they are half dead. Above, a few cling to the almost-bare branches. Their doomed tenacity makes me want to cry. When they fall, as they surely will, does that mean all their efforts to hold for so long were wasted?
Christmas Eve 1989. My mother opened the front door of Doolough Lodge and, on seeing me there, rubbed her eyes in feigned amazement. Fury slapped against my ribs, knocking away all the good
intentions I'd nursed on the plane across the Atlantic.
It wasn't surprise that had Mom acting like she was in one of her lousy plays. I was expected. What she was trying to do was hide the reflex response that kicked in whenever we met again after a time apart. That slide of her eyeballs away from the sight of me, the conscious tugging of them back.
Oh, she tried her hardest to hide it, and she just couldn't help it, but whenever my mother looked at me, what she saw first was my fat. My excess flesh was her shame. Public evidence of her failure to win Greatest Mother of All Time Award.
"Hello to you too, Mom," I said.
"Oh darling, I'm so...Come in, come in." she reached for my backpack, but I held it.
"Wait," I said. "He's not here, is he?"
"No." Another flicker of those flickering eyes.
"Mom?"
"No, no. I told you."
She reached for the bag again and this time I let her, followed her into the hall.
"Mom, just because I've come...this doesn't negate anything I said the day she left... Every word of that still stands."
"Okay, darling. I understand. But can I just say that--"
"Is it something new, something she haven't said already?"
"I want to say sorry, Star."
"No. No sorries. No tears either, if you don't mind. And no more explanations."
"But --"
"Mom, I mean it. What good does it do any of us that you're sorry?"
She flinched. "I understand," she said, but I could see she'd be off again, first chance she got. She wouldn't be able to help yourself.
It doesn't matter, I told myself. None of that matters. I'm here for a different reason.
She led the way down the hallway, towards the kitchen. It was strange to be in Granddad's house again. Its old-house smell came back to me from my previous visit, now overlaid with the tang of disinfectant.
"How is he?" I asked.
"A bit low today. It's great you're here."
Last time, Granddad ran us out of the place, telling us never to come back, but she spoke like I was an ordinary granddaughter on a loving sick-call. Oh, that desire of hers to play happy families.
In the kitchen, she put on the kettle and sat down opposite me. Before it was even boiling, she'd started again. "Oh, Star, I do need you to know how deeply sorry I am. I never, never ex--"
"You're unbelievable, Mom. What did I just say out in the hall?"
"But if we don't –"
I held up my hand. "Do you want me to go? Because I will."
"All right, all right... Calm down."
She got herself busy with cups and tea bags while I took off my coat and searched in the pocket for cigarettes. As I shook one from the box, I heard myself let a sigh so long and so deep it sounded like the last breath I'd ever take.
She turned. "Oh, darling, how are you? Can I ask you that? Are you okay?"
So I told her, my hands shaking.
"No, Mom, I am not 'okay'. I'm livid. I want to bulldoze houses and cut down trees. I want to set fire to all the fields and dump poison into all the rivers. I want to hurt everybody, everybody, in the whole wide world and see if that makes me feel any better."
"Oh, honey..."
"Don't worry, I won't do it. I'll just plod on. But inside I'm seething." she looked at me, stricken. "Seeing as you asked."
We sat in silence for the rest of the tea, then she took me in to see Granddad, into that horrible sickroom, with its horrible smell of death. And he was a death's head, grey and skull-eyed, above an emaciated body. And charming as ever. On seeing me, he said: "Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in."
The words he'd used the first time he met me, four years before. Did he know this? It was impossible to tell what my grandfather knew about anything.
"Is she..." Cough. Cough. He broke into a splutter as he raised himself onto the pillows. "Is she about to take herself off, or what?"
"What are you talking about, Daddy?" she said, and whispered to me: "Don't mind him. He doesn't know what he's saying."
I wasn't fooled. I saw the blush that had come flying up her face.
"I'm not sure what you mean, Granddad," I said out loud to him.
"Her boyfriend's done a runner, don't you know."
"Boyfriend?"
I almost enjoyed watching her squirm. I'd known it but I still couldn't believe it. She'd had him here. Here. After all that had happened.
"Yeah. A long streak (he pronounced it 'strake') of a yoke with a baldy head."
She cast her eyes skywards, like he was talking nonsense, but she knew I knew. So much for sorry.
"What are you on about, Daddy?" she said again, in the same false voice. "It's time for your meds."
"Shocking it is, the way she throws herself at him and he young enough to be her..." But another burst of coughing seized Granddad's old-man frame, giving her the chance to fuss about him and break the tension.
When he came out of it, he said, "I'm the great burden, of course. Well, I never asked her to play Florence Nightingale, so I didn't." Cough. "I never asked you neither." Cough. "Well able...to look after myself. Always was."
"Shouldn't you be resting, Granddad?" I said.
"Rest, is it? Oh that's what you'd all like to see." Cough, cough, cough. "Me... going... to my rest..."
"Oh, Daddy, stop that old nonsense."
I went over to stand by his pillow. "She's poisoning me," he said to me, his bony finger jabbing the air. "You'll be my witness now if I go early." Cough. "You make sure you tell the world."
Again, she tried to get me to join her in an eye-roll. "Star, would you hand me across that vial of pills. Thank you. Now Daddy, here you are...come on now, sit up."
"I can do it --" Cough. "-- myself."
But, at the same time as he was throwing out the defiant words, he was letting her place the two tablets between his lips, and swallowing them down, docile as a child. As she settled him back on his pillow, and tidied the locker and straightened the bedclothes, his eyes rolled closed.
"He'll be all right now for a while," she whispered. "Do you want to come through for lunch?"
"No," I said. "No. I think I'll stay here with Granddad for a bit."
Put that in your book Mom, why don't you?
I cross the yard, heading up the back pathway through the trees. Doolough Mountain oversees me. Behind her, further in the distance, the ring of Wicklow hills with their impossible Irish names: Ballinedin, Cloughernagh, Carrrigasleggaun, Lugnaquilla.
I walk the straight path towards the lake. Before there was a house here, there was this lake and these woods and the wild Wicklow hills. It wouldn't take much for them to take over again, to swallow up our house and land again. They're ready to do it, if we let off for the smallest while our cutting and trimming and weeding and feeding the plants we want over the ones we don't. Nature. It doesn't need us at all, but how we crave it.
That's what brings all the people, the hikers and bikers, the day trippers and weekenders, out here to Doolough, and Laragh, and Glendalough. The sound of a different kind of silence to that in their bedrooms and kitchens.
At the lake, I put the manuscript on the ground, kneel on it and lean in to see my reflection in the murky water. I look old today, older than I am. In this posture, gravity pulls my jowls and chins forward. She was beautiful, I am not. Was that the fullness of our story?
She never lost her looks. Most Irish people do, develop in age the distinctive features the English like to call "potato-head". Not my mother. I think of her that last day in Laragh. She had only twelve weeks left to live, but she was lovely as ever in a new, fragile way.
Knowing she was dying, as we did by then, I'd organized a day out together with the kids at Glendalough. Grandmother, mother, children. Picnic lunch. Gentle tour of the monastic ruins. Soft stroll through the woodlands. All of which we enjoyed. And then, my coup de grace, I thought. A visit to the churchyard at Laragh, where they've installed a sculpture, a bron
ze tribute to the story of St Kevin, the saint who settled this site. A saint so attuned to the spirit of the place that one morning, as he held out his hand in prayer, a blackbird laid her eggs in his palm and he continued to hold his hand up and out for her, still and steady, all through the nesting season until her chicks were hatched and reared.
We settled on a bench in front of the sculpture, while the children clambered over it and I read the bronze plaque inscribed with a poem about Kevin and the blackbird. It wasn't by Yeats, but the other guy who looks like a farmer. Even I could tell it was good, the way it asked us to imagine being Kevin, being able to submit your body to the needs of a bird. It moved me, so I was able to ignore Mom when she told me I should learn it off by heart.
"Poems have to become like the marrow in our bones to be appreciated", she pronounced. All my life, she'd said things like this. I let it go, and then was glad I had when I heard her murmuring the line to herself, "It's all imagined, anyway."
That was why I'd brought her here, why I'd thought she'd like it. That was her favorite word, always: imagine.
Mom, I thought we were happy, watching the kids, enjoying the sunny day with the small breeze on our faces. For five whole minutes, I thought we were united, by this gesture of mine, the bringing of us both there, to the village where Dad was born and raised, to the spot where we'd run into such trouble before, back in those awful days of 1989. I thought you got it. I thought we were enjoying a seemingly small but actually enormous great reward for having managed to make a life together that worked, despite all.
But no. You couldn't let it be what it was. You had to pull the script out of your knapsack and park it on my lap, ruining everything.
I told you again, straight up, as I'd told you so often before: "I'm never going to read it, Mom."
"You must," you said, putting your hand on my arm, giving me a yearning stare. And then: "It's your story too."
I must. How had you never learned that was the worst possible way to get me to do anything?
