Thomas comes over. He wraps his arms round my neck and we float in the water, kicking our legs out like we’re frogs.
‘Hi, Thomas,’ I say. We move around in circles.
‘Hi, Clare,’ he says. ‘Can I jump off your knee?’
We hold hands and he steps up onto my legs and I’m kind of sitting down in the water. ‘Ready, steady, go!’ I bounce my legs each time and hold his hands, and then I kick my legs and fire him off like I’m a diving board, and he jumps through the air with his knees together into the water and makes a pretty good bomb-splash.
When the sun is behind the clouds and it’s so cold that we’re shivering again, we all get out. We can’t run because the stones hurt so much, so we tiptoe over to our towels. Mummy pulls my hair back until it hurts, and squeezes it to get the water out, and then goes over to Thomas to help him dry himself. I go over to Daddy and he takes my towel off me and starts wiping me dry all over my back and my legs, and I stand hugging myself with my teeth chattering. Then I get my knickers and skirt and top and he puts the towel around my shoulders.
‘No one will see anything, don’t worry.’ He winks.
I smile at him because I know I can trust him. I put my top and skirt down on the stones and get my knickers, and put them the right way round and put one foot in the hole and then the other and pull them up. They stick to my legs on the way up because my hair is dripping and making my skin wet again. Then I put on my top and pull up my skirt.
‘Ready?’ says Daddy.
‘Ready,’ I announce.
He lifts the towel up and scrunches my hair in it. He never hurts as much as Mummy. Sometimes it feels like she’s going to rip my head off, she moves it about so much.
‘Are ye ready?’ shouts Uncle John.
‘Ready for what?’ Daddy asks.
‘For sausage and chips!’ Uncle John shouts.
‘Yaaaay!’ we all shout. I’m hungry and I love eating sausage and chips on the stony beach. I see a shell just by my flip-flop and I reach down and pick it up. I rub the sandy stuff off it and feel its ripples under my fingers. I put it in my pocket for the windowsill in my and Thomas’s room.
All good things come to an end. That’s what Mummy says. Why? Why do they have to come to an end? I ask her. Because they just do, she says. But I don’t think that’s fair. ‘We could just live here,’ I say to her.
‘No, Clare,’ she says. ‘We’ve been through this before. We live in London.’
‘But this is home!’ I say. Because it’s true. This is home.
‘No,’ she says, the way she does to say, You’re getting on my nerves and be careful, because you’ll get a clap around the back of the legs. ‘London is our home.’
‘But you always call here home. Always,’ I say. ‘Home home home. Here is home.’ I know I’m being loud and everyone can hear downstairs but I don’t care. ‘I want to stay here with Sooty and John and Sarah and Mary,’ I tell her. I cross my arms and stick one leg out, bent at the knee, to show her I mean business.
‘Enough of that, right now,’ she says.
I hold my arms across my chest and stare up at her. Her lips are closed tight together, so tight they have gone white and she looks mad, but I don’t care. She nearly died and my granny is dying, even though she thinks I don’t know, and her family are a shower of cunts and I don’t even want to go and stay with them at all, but now we have to. I just want to sit with Sooty and put my fingers through his warm, soft fluff, because I love him and I know he loves me and that makes me feel warm inside.
‘Enough of that,’ I say, putting on her accent. I know I’m pushing it.
She pinches me under the arm and twists my skin between her fingers until it hurts so much I cry out. I know it’s going to go purple, and it’s all her fault.
‘When you have learned to behave, you can come downstairs,’ she says in the voice that doesn’t belong to her. It’s the voice of the ugly monster that is horrible and nasty and hits you for no reason. She closes the door behind her.
I sneak downstairs. Everyone is in the back room. I tiptoe through the kitchen, out the door and round to the hayshed. I go in and there is Pretty Lady and all the fluff-balls. That’s what we call them. Pretty Lady wags her tail when she sees me and it goes thump, thump, thump against the floor, and Sooty wags his tail in the air, too. It moves so quick it looks like the windscreen wipers on Daddy’s car when it’s pouring rain and they go wish-wash, wish-wash, so he can see.
I sit down and all the pups climb onto my lap and Pretty Lady licks my face. I hold Sooty against my chest and I cry into his fur. It’s not fair.
The metal door opens and the hayshed lights up and I jump. There’s nowhere to hide. I can’t climb up the hay and there’s nothing to hide behind.
Uncle John walks in. ‘Well, well, well,’ he says.
I sniffle and wipe my eyes with my free hand.
‘Look what we have here.’
I cry more, because now I’m going to get in big trouble because I shouldn’t even be in here, and Mummy is going to pull my knickers down and slap me on the bum over and over again.
He walks over to me and kneels down.
‘Sorry, Uncle John,’ I say, through the shakes in my chest.
‘Oh, don’t you worry, munchkin,’ he says, reaching out and drying the tear on my cheek.
That makes me smile, and then I cry even more.
‘Easy, easy,’ he says, and he puts his arm round me and I lean into his chest, careful not to squish Sooty or his brothers and sisters.
‘I don’t want to go!’ I cry. ‘I want to stay here with you.’
‘Well, unfortunately in this world we can’t always get what we want,’ he says.
‘But why?’ I ask him out loud. Why can’t we stay here, where Mummy is happy and Daddy and me and Thomas can play all day and be with everyone we love. And with Sooty.
I sob into his shirt, which smells of hay and cows and a bit of poo. ‘I can’t leave Sooty.’
Sooty is as upset as me, and whines to show us. I lift him up and look into his big brown eyes; he licks my face.
‘What will poor Sooty do without me?’
Uncle John rubs my shoulder and makes tutting noises, which are supposed to make me stop crying, but I can’t. ‘He’ll survive.’
‘And what about me?’
‘You’ll survive, too.’
‘But I love him, Uncle John.’
‘You love him, do you?’
I nod.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he says, shaking his head.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask him.
‘What am I going to say to your mother?’
‘Please don’t tell her you saw me.’
‘Shush.’ He rubs my cheeks and smooths my hair down. ‘What am I going to tell your mother when I say I couldn’t help myself – that Sooty would be lost without you, and he just has to go with you. Besides, I have more pups than I know what to do with.’
I gasp in all the air I can and turn and look at him. ‘Really?’
He smiles down at me and nods.
‘You’ll convince her?’
‘I’ll do my best, darlin’,’ he says in an American accent.
I wrap my arms around his neck. ‘Thank you, Uncle John, thank you, thank you, thank you,’ I shriek.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he says, smiling.
JOSEPHINE
3RD JUNE, 1997
Clare is doing her homework at the kitchen table and Thomas is drawing, pretending he has his own. He loves to copy his older sister. I’m making dinner. It’s Friday night and the house is quiet, but for the steam screaming quietly out of the pressure cooker and the scribble of their pencils. I pour myself a glass of wine. There’s no sign of Michael. He’s usually home by now. I go into the back room and put on a record. The kids come in and we have a dance in front of the fireplace.
When the song ends, the two rascals throw themselves on the sofa, hot and breathless. I put on another record and get my wine and te
ll them they are allowed a glass of lemonade and a biscuit while we wait. I wonder where he is and what’s keeping him. Hot anger begins to bubble.
Clare and Thomas run out to the kitchen and I hear the fizz of the lemonade hiss when the lid is turned and the crackle of it when it hits the glass, and the top of the biscuit pot being taken off and put on again. In they come, bounding with excitement and flushed in the cheeks. We get up and dance to the rest of the song, and with my free hand I twirl Thomas around, then Clare. I finish my wine and put the glass down, and twirl them both at the same time.
The dinner in the pot will be ruined. The vegetables overdone, the lamb hard as rubber. By God, he’ll get it when he comes in.
The phone goes and Clare gets up and runs to get it, even though she’s been told not to answer the phone.
I go out to the kitchen and push the button on the pressure cooker, then carry it to the sink and put it under cold water.
I can’t hear what she’s saying, but I can hear her chat away. She must be talking to a friend from school. I go to the door of the sitting room and listen. She’s telling whoever it is how old she is, and how old Thomas is. My heart goes. It’s someone from beyond. She turns to look at me and panic takes over and I wave my hands wildly for her to say I’m not home, I’m upstairs, she can’t find me. ‘No,’ she says, ‘she’s doing her nails right now.’
I could kill the little madam. I get the bottle and my glass and run to snatch the phone off her. I tell Clare to take herself and her brother upstairs to play, and I take a deep breath and say in my telephone voice, ‘Hello, who’s that?’
There’s a pause on the other end. I watch the children walk out, and gesture for Clare to close the door behind them.
‘Hello, Josephine.’ The voice is distant, Irish. ‘It’s your sister Siobhan here.’
If I was standing in front of a mirror I know my face would be white, gaunt, aged in an instant. ‘Hello, Siobhan, how are you?’ How simple it is to ask that, even though a lifetime has passed between us. The years weigh on me, now that I have her on the phone. Why didn’t we do it before? Why haven’t I picked up the phone once over the years? I wonder what kind of a woman she is. Then I wonder what kind of a woman I am.
‘Grand, now. And yourself?’
I take a sip of wine. My hands are shaking. ‘Great,’ I say.
‘I just spoke to your eldest one, Clare. She sounds like a lovely little girl.’
‘She is, now, she is,’ I say. ‘Do you have any yourself?’
‘I do, a little boy called Dermot. He’s five.’
‘Lovely. They’re terrors, aren’t they?’ I laugh. I am filling in. Filling in for years gone by.
And how are you, Siobhan – I mean really? I’m sorry for leaving you, Siobhan, but things were so difficult for me. You see, what happened… something terrible happened… and I tried to tell Mammy but she forbade me from speaking of it again, and I never knew who it was… but I think it might have been Daddy. He didn’t do anything to you, did he?
I’ve missed you, I have thought of you so many times over the years.
I asked Bernadette to watch out for you. Did she? I’ve stayed away because I was scared.
Of what?
Of being called a whore, of humiliation, of being ridiculed. It’s easier to forget when there is distance.
I run through it all in my head, the words hopping off my lips. ‘So… how’s Bernadette?’ I ask. The rest is locked in my throat.
I was raped, Siobhan.
I’ve never said those words before. I don’t think I’ve even thought them.
‘Oh, sure she went to Dublin and married. She has her mother heartbroken. Anyway,’ Siobhan says, as if to say, Enough of this small talk. ‘The reason I’m calling is because Mammy is sick.’ She takes a deep breath. I take a gulp of wine.
‘She’s dying, Josephine, and she wants to see you.’
The news winds me, the way Thomas is winded when Clare is running after him and he falls on his chest and can’t breathe and the tears stream from his stunned eyes. I clear my throat. Take a sip of wine. ‘I see.’ I am sitting on the chair, but I would like to get down on the carpeted floor and lean back against the hard, cold wall. The life I have worked so hard to build is drained out of me in seconds, as if through a drip that’s taking instead of giving. I picture my mother on her deathbed; me, a little girl, giving her tea from the cup. Sean, a baby, in the basket. ‘Good girl,’ she says, her voice thin and raspy. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ I ask.
‘Her kidneys are failing, she has pneumonia. She has been unwell for some time.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘No, you wouldn’t, would you?’ A rhetorical question. I can’t work out if she’s being sarcastic, or simply honest.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I say. ‘The holidays are coming up…’
‘All right, so. Do you want my number?’
I tell her I’ll get a pen and paper. My mind is blank and I can’t think where they’ll be. I get a piece of paper from the kitchen table and one of the colouring pencils that Thomas was drawing with. I note it down.
‘Take care, now, bye.’ She puts the phone down first and I sit for a couple of minutes, listening to the dead tone. I won’t go. I shake my head. I said I’d never go back.
The doorknob turns and the children start to come in, but I shout at them that I’m still on the phone. I just need a minute, that’s all. I turn the stem of the wine glass between shaky fingers. My head is reeling. I put on a record and whack up the volume to drown out my thoughts. I sing along to the tune, swaying my arms in the air. Then I open the door and the two of them are sitting at the kitchen table, drawing. Such good children, both of them. I kiss each of them on the head, and that’s when I hear the tap running on the pressure cooker. ‘Clare, didn’t it occur to you to turn the tap off?’ I shout. I can’t help it. I go and turn it off and put the pot back on the hob. It’ll be like vomit. And still no sign of Michael.
The music booms out and I tell the children to pack up their things, that we’re going to treat ourselves to a takeaway.
They jump up and down and run to me in the middle of the kitchen and wrap their arms around my waist.
I bend down and look into their beautiful, big, innocent eyes. ‘Sorry for shouting,’ I tell them. ‘Mummy was stressed.’
Just then there’s the sound of the key in the door and it slamming shut.
Off they run, full-speed. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! They shout and squeal and jump up and down, clapping their hands.
I watch, still bending down in the middle of the kitchen floor, as Michael scoops them up into his arms and kisses them until they giggle.
My cheeks tingle with humiliation. Ungrateful little bastards.
Everything is undone. I am undone.
I won’t go, I won’t go. I say it to myself over and over again, making myself believe it. I am at war with myself. I am bloodied, broken, my limbs are twisted. But something in me knows I will go.
I make the arrangements, go shopping for clothes and presents. But it’s as if I am looking on from the outside, watching myself do it all. My head hurts. Clare and Thomas scream and squeal and thump about upstairs. They have my nerves hanging out of my sleeves. Worn bare. They have no idea how lucky they are. Running wild in the house, with all the toys they could wish for.
Silence! I shout. It’s all I can do not to tear myself up into shreds.
I wake them up in the morning; get them washed and dressed. Take them to school. Go shopping. Do the washing. Hang the clothes out. Pick them up. Sit them down, for Clare to do her homework. Make the dinner. A zombie; a zombie servant. Slaving all day after them, my life spent on them, only for them to go running to their father. Is this what I have become? A zombie servant at war with herself, counting down the days before she meets her maker?
Brandy helps. Michael, with his incessant questions, doesn’t. Talk to me, Josephine. What’s wrong, Josephine? What’s wrong with you?
For God’s sake, woman. He doesn’t understand. How could he? On top of everything, I’ve lied to him. He wouldn’t believe another word I said, if I were to tell him the truth. Anyway, he’s growing tired of me, I can tell. Losing energy, and patience. He told me. Working, working. Working for the family, the breadwinner. How nice to have a title calling you the winner. Wouldn’t I like to be the winner? All I won was a bloated body with a wardrobe full of dresses it can’t fit into, and two screaming demons that suck the life out of me – just like everyone has always sucked the life out of me.
I sit at the kitchen table and sip my brandy. I sneak upstairs into the children’s room and wake Clare. She is sleepy and warm and when I ask if she’d like a hot chocolate, she says yes. I knew she would. I carry her downstairs and sit her down and make her hot chocolate with milk and stir it until it’s high with froth, the way she likes it.
‘You’re so lucky, Clare,’ I tell her.
‘I know, Mummy,’ she says, sipping her chocolate, with her feet tucked up under her bottom.
I tell her stories – stories to show her how lucky she is. How I would have loved to have everything she has, everything I have given her.
On one of the last Saturdays before we’re due to go, we shop for clothes and go out for dinner, the four of us. I go along with it for appearance’s sake. Appearances for Michael, appearances for the children. Hunky-dory. Tickety-boo. When we get home I put on music. That way, we keep the party going and we keep drinking and I can hide from myself. I’m drunk and Michael’s spinning me round and we’re spinning, spinning. I’m spinning through the years and through the prayers and through the sins and through the pain.
Clare has been scratching her head all night and I can’t stand to look at her for one more second. She’s like a mangy dog. ‘They’re back again,’ I tell Michael.
‘What do you mean?’ he says; not a clue, as usual.
‘You know what I mean,’ I tell him, sick of telling him everything. ‘Riddled – riddled, she is. Her head’s crawling with them. How are we going to take her to meet my mother and father like this?’
Her Mother's Daughter Page 14
