Her Mother's Daughter

by Alice Fitzgerald

  Daddy appears at the gate, looking behind him and waving goodbye, and I can see a strap in his hands. Sooty trots through the gate after him.

  They cross the road and I unlock my door and jump out, and so does Thomas, and we run to meet them and Thomas screams, ‘Sooty, Sooty, Sooty!’

  Sooty sees us and gallops towards us like a horse. He jumps on me and licks my face and then jumps on Thomas and he falls over, and he giggles, and I giggle, and I hug Sooty round the neck. His fur is soft and warm and I hug and kiss him and he barks and squeals. ‘Sooty, I love you so much,’ I whisper in his ear, and he hears me and he licks my face over and over and over again.

  CLARE

  10TH OCTOBER 1997

  Daddy opens the door, and me and Thomas run in. We’ve even got chicken and chips to celebrate. I feel as happy as when I’m on the swing in the playground in the park, when it gets to the highest bit and I could almost jump, but I don’t. That’s one of my favourite moments of my favourite things, ever. That, and when we were all happy a long time ago.

  Me and Thomas run through the hallway and then the kitchen, into the utility room.

  Daddy has Sooty by the lead, and Sooty is running after us, pulling Daddy along, and I can hear him puffing and panting. Sooty sounds like he’s choking, but he’s not really. He just does that to make Daddy let him go.

  Me and Thomas giggle. I get the key from behind the plant pot and open the back door.

  Daddy has the bag with the food in one hand, and the lead in another, and is red-faced and laughing when he bounces through the kitchen door.

  ‘Yippeeeeee!’ I shout, and then Thomas shouts just after me.

  ‘Ten minutes to play and then we’ll have dinner,’ Daddy says, unhooking Sooty’s lead from his collar.

  ‘Yaay!’ we shout together and run out the door.

  We run around the garden and Sooty runs after us, jumping up on us and licking our faces and making us scream with delight.

  It feels like we’re out there for just a minute when Daddy calls us and says it’s time to have dinner because it’s going cold. I wave to Thomas and we run in. Sooty trots in with us, running in between my legs and nearly tripping me up, then in between Thomas’s legs. I can tell he’s his happiest ever, to be at home with us again.

  We take our shoes off inside the back door and I point to the rag on the floor and make Sooty go and stand on it, but he thinks I’m playing and keeps coming to me to lick my finger. ‘Cheeky monkey,’ I tell him, and put my face down to his, so he can kiss me.

  He licks my ear and Thomas gets into a fit of laughter because he’ll have all my ear’s wax on his tongue.

  We go into the kitchen, where Daddy has taken the plastic boxes out of the carrier bag and put them on the table. There are only three sets.

  I look round and see a plastic bag on the counter. ‘Isn’t Mummy having dinner?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s not hungry,’ Daddy says. He’s smiling like everything’s okay, but I can tell it’s not the same smile as before, because his eyes aren’t smiling. When he is truly happy, they sparkle.

  I had forgotten about Mummy. It all comes crashing back and my smile freezes and my tummy feels empty.

  ‘Come on,’ says Daddy. ‘Wash up your hands and let’s gulp down this feast.’

  I help Thomas wash his hands and then I wash mine, and we sit down to eat.

  I open the yellow plastic box with the chicken burger inside and take a bite. It tastes good. I hold the burger in one hand and with the other I reach down and pinch my thigh to remind myself. I squeeze and roll the fat, so it doesn’t hurt too much, but just enough so that when I let go it will tingle. Instead of taking another bite straight away, I sit still and feel the tingle in my thigh fade. When it’s gone, I take another bite. Then I pinch my thigh again. I put the burger down and wait. Then I get a chip and dip it in ketchup and eat it, but it’s already cold and gone soggy, so I decide not to have any more. That way, I can have some more of my burger in a minute. I watch Daddy and Thomas eat theirs.

  ‘Not hungry?’ asks Daddy.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Don’t worry about Mummy,’ he says. ‘She’ll come round.’

  Later, when I’m in bed, I’m woken up by shouting. There are Mummy’s shrieks, and then there are roars. I don’t know who they belong to at first. I’m not sure if they are Mummy’s or Daddy’s. Daddy never roars. But after a moment of squeezing my eyes shut and concentrating really hard, I can tell they belong to Daddy.

  I sit up and listen.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ he shouts. Then there are mumbles and then, ‘I will not live like this.’

  Daddy never shouts at Mummy. It must be serious. He’s been at home more lately, which is good because we see less of Mummy. That means I don’t have to worry whether she’s going to be good, or bad, or really good, or really bad.

  ‘You won’t live like this?’ she says. ‘That dog has me driven demented, and you go and get him back? I am the one rearing your children; you barely see them for five minutes and, as soon as you walk in the door, it’s as if I didn’t exist. A few days off and it’s you making the demands! Ha!’

  JOSEPHINE

  15TH OCTOBER 1997

  There goes the click of the front door and the key in the double lock. How strange that he should double-lock the door with me in the house. Has he forgotten altogether I’m here? The diesel engine chugs to life and he drives off down the road. Clare will be complaining of feeling sick by the time they get to the traffic lights. The house is quiet, at last, but for the incessant barking of that filthy mongrel in the garden. My body is heavy as a corpse. My head is foggy. Some peace and quiet is all I ask for. Is it too much?

  The cheek of him. Going and getting it back. Bringing that dirty, diseased thing back into my house; and it crawling with fleas. Scratching itself and sniffing itself between the legs. Its stools alive with maggots.

  They have him twisted round their little fingers, the two of them. Daddy, this, Daddy, that. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.

  I can’t stand it – its barks and squeals and wheezing, pretending it’s being choked, just to get my attention. All day it’s at it. Clawing for a piece of me, like the rest of them. There will be none of me left. They brought it back to spite me. For it to taunt me. Playing games, like all of them. I thought I was rid of it all, but I’m not. I never was. I’m surrounded by them. Cunts, the lot of them.

  I pull the covers around me. I close my eyes and drift off to the school gates. I’m waiting for them. Clare appears swinging her book-bag, then Thomas. I wave. They don’t see me. Then they smile their big toothy grins and start running through the groups of other school children, their book-bags swinging, swinging, and they run all the way into their father’s arms.

  He kneels down and kisses them and they squeal with the tickle of his beard.

  I turn and walk down the road, my breasts leaking milk, as if I gave birth to them the other day. My babies. I wake up crying, my chest going with the sobs. I go to the dresser and pour into the glass the brandy that’s left in the bottle and drink it.

  There it is. The barking. Bow-wow, bow-wow. My father would have put a boot in it long ago. My father. My daddy. He was no angel, but he wasn’t what I thought he was. All those years I thought it was the divil and his wife. I didn’t realize it was the divil and her husband.

  I choke on the brandy, on my tears. Good girl. You’re a good girl, Josephine. All I wanted was for my mother to love me. You deserve life, Josephine. Get out there and eat the world up. You show them. Jealous, she was. Twisted – twisted to the core with jealousy. That her husband didn’t love her, that he was as miserable and angry as she was, that she was stuck there in that house, washing and cooking and cleaning and rearing. Jealous, too, that her own mother loved me more than she loved her. Granny knew that she wasn’t deserving of love.

  I’ve had enough. I pound the mattress with my clenched fists. I won’t stand for it for one more second. Being taken for
a fool, used up and spat out. I sit up, breathless, my head spinning. I put on my dressing gown and go downstairs.

  The disease-ridden animal knows I’m in the kitchen. It scratches and whines. It clambers furiously at the door as if it were digging a hole in the ground.

  I try to think. What will I do? How will I get away from them all, from myself, from this house that’s falling in on my chest? My head is throbbing to bursting point. I put on the kettle for a cup of coffee, get a mug out and see an envelope in the middle of the kitchen table. Michael will have left it there.

  I don’t know the writing. I get a knife from the drawer and cut it open. Inside there is a thin slip of paper. It contains a short note:

  Dear Josephine,

  I’m writing to let you know that Mammy died peacefully in her sleep on 3rd September, and her funeral took place three days later. I am sorry things didn’t go smoother when you were here. For what it’s worth, so was she. I wish you all the best.

  Love, your sister, Siobhan

  My hands shake. I’m left reeling. Sorry things didn’t go smoother. For what it’s worth, so was she. They don’t sound sorry. They don’t sound like they care. If they did, they would pick up the phone, but no, they stay away. Now she’s gone, I want to ring her up and tell her exactly what I think of her. Now she’s gone, she’s freed from her guilt, if she had any.

  Died peacefully. What difference does it make to me? May she rot in the ground.

  The kettle boils and the steam wets the wall beside it. I pour the water in on top of the coffee granules, add milk and sugar. I take a sip. It burns my mouth. I fire the mug at the kitchen door and watch the hot brown coffee splash over the door, the walls. It trickles down over the skirting board and onto the linoleum with diamonds in it.

  There is the screaming. It’s off again.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’

  I go through the kitchen to the utility room and open the door. In it gallops, on top of me. I scream for it to get down, and it sees the coffee and runs in and starts licking it up, its tail wagging madly. Blood mixes with the coffee, from where it has cut its paws on the broken mug. I shoo it away and it goes off to its rag in the corner and licks its bloody paws.

  I will ring him, that’s what I’ll do. I will ring him and ask him if he was in on it all. If he knew, too, like the other two did, or if he even knew on the night itself. Sure, where would he think Patrick had gone? I make a new coffee and light a cigarette and go into the sitting room to dial the number. After two long rings of the international dialling tone, I hang up. My heart is popping in my chest. I ring again and hang up. I’ll taunt him and drive him as mad as they have me. He’ll think his beloved is back from the dead.

  Take it easy, Josephine. Breathe, breathe. Jane would tell me to breathe, to think through the breaths. She would tell me to write it all down. To write it in a letter, even if I didn’t intend to send it. I get out the notepad and pen and begin to write. My hand is slow and the writing comes in wobbly scrawls.

  The dog has come into the sitting room and is gnawing at the leg of the coffee table. It has made a trail of coffee and blood all the way through the room. I scream at it but it doesn’t stop. It eats away at the expensive mahogany wood. I kick it with my slipper and it snaps at my foot, with its mouth curled around its sharp teeth. The dirty mongrel bastard. It got its teeth into my foot. I check for blood, but it didn’t break the skin, though it has left purple marks from its teeth. That’s it. On top of everything else, it’s dangerous. It could snap at one of the children’s faces.

  I tap my leg as if I’m going to play with it, and get its lead from behind the kitchen door. It follows me, its tail wagging. I open the front door and walk down the path in my dressing gown, not caring if anyone sees me. I pull open the gate and turn left, and off it bounds down the road.

  I turn, close the gate and go inside.

  CLARE

  15TH OCTOBER 1997

  After school, Daddy drops us off and says he has to go on some errands for a couple of hours. He will be home shortly. He lets us in the front door, and me and Thomas both kiss him on his stubbly cheeks and watch as he closes the door behind him.

  We run straight to the kitchen. I open the door to the utility room. Sooty’s not there. I open the back door. Sooty’s not there, either. I call him – Sooty, Sooty Sooty! – and walk out to the garden. Thomas is behind me. We walk back inside, holding hands. ‘He must be inside,’ I tell Thomas, in my adult I-know-everything voice.

  Just when I’m going to step into the kitchen, something catches my eye. I tell Thomas to go and look in the back room, and when he has gone into the kitchen, I turn round. Sooty’s rag is on the floor in a pile. On the top corner, poking out, is a splash of red, like paint when Daddy’s decorating. But we don’t have any red walls. I pick up the rag and hold it with both hands. It’s covered in dark-red paint and Sooty’s black hairs.

  Everything goes fuzzy and suddenly I’m burning hot. I remember the story Mummy told me, about Granny having a baby that died, and them burying it beside the graveyard. After that, I had dreams of babies dangling in the limbo-air, dripping with blood. I can see them now: half-babies, half-Sooty, and they are drip, drip, dripping blood all over Sooty’s rag.

  Hot liquid runs down my legs, warming me. I fall into it, and it is comforting, after my face hits the hard floor of the utility room.

  CLARE

  15TH OCTOBER 1997

  ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Forgive my mummy, for what she has done, to our dear and beloved Sooty.’

  I get on my hands and knees and dig up the earth that’s loose around the bushes. Thomas kneels down next to me and does his best to dig up the dirt, even though he’s crying so hard.

  When we’ve made a hole big enough, I open my rucksack and take out Sooty’s rag with red paint-blood on it. It’s already folded nicely. I lay it down in the hole carefully.

  I stand up and pull Thomas towards me; put my arm around his shoulder.

  I cough to clear my throat, the way Father Feathers does. We could go and get him, his house is nearby, but he would ask where our mother is and make us go and get her.

  ‘Clare, why are we here?’ Thomas asks in his smallest voice. His shoulders are shaking and his cheeks are shiny with tears. He has mud all over his arms and legs.

  I look round.

  A woman is walking nearby, looking at us. I stare at her with my worst eyes until she looks away.

  ‘Because this is Sooty’s favourite place,’ I say.

  ‘How do you know?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Because whenever we walked to school and then home, we used to have the most fun here, ever,’ I tell him.

  ‘But,’ Thomas sniffs, ‘how do we know Sooty isn’t hiding?’

  I think of a funeral we once went to, and what Father Feathers said. He talked about wings spreading and birds flying. ‘Because Sooty has spread his wings and flown the nest,’ I tell him. I don’t tell him about the half-babies, half-Sooties floating around in my mind.

  I kneel down. Thomas kneels down, too. Together we put the earth on top of the rag until it’s covered.

  When I stand up, I wipe my knees. Blood begins to drip from where a stone was digging into my knee.

  ‘Clare!’ Thomas says in his whiny voice that Mummy tells him off for. ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘We’re laying Sooty to rest.’

  ‘But he’s not even here.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Things don’t always have to be there to make them more real.’

  I don’t know if he understands or not, but he stands quietly beside me, looking at the grave. I don’t know if I understand, either.

  A breeze whispers through the trees and raindrops begin to fall. Daddy always says it’s good when it rains. The water clears the air and feeds the flowers, and the birds have baths. I tell Thomas I’ll race him home, and we run down the hill, the rain pelting against us, mixing with th
e tears on my face.

  JOSEPHINE

  18TH OCTOBER 1997

  I realize that I am all alone in this world. I always have been, and I always will be. It used to be that Michael and my children linked me to the earth, put my feet on the ground and gave me a sense of place. Now not even they can ground me. They drive me to oblivion, to a dark place in my head that I am screaming to get out of.

  I take a photograph off the wall. It’s of me when I was a little girl. I’m standing out in the fields by the stream. I have a tummy full of blueberries and a dress on. It was the day I made my communion and I took Granny to my favourite place. I rub the dust off the glass with my sleeve and look closer at my smiling little face. I was happy then. I take another picture off the wall, this time of my two little darlings in the park, holding buttercups up to their chins. Two white squares gape from the wall like holes. I wonder if they’ll know which ones are gone. I wonder if they’ll notice I am gone. I hope they do and I hope they don’t. Hope, hope, hope. I hope there is a better future awaiting them, and awaiting me, even if we can’t be together in it.

  I pick up the pen and write the date carefully in the top right-hand corner. About three-quarters of the way down the page I begin:

  Dear Michael, and my beloved Clare and Thomas,

  Michael, do you remember our first dance? I do. It was a good dance. I’m sorry I didn’t succeed at being the girl from that dance. God knows I tried.

  My darlings, Clare and Thomas, I have not been very well and I have to go away to get better. I hope you can forgive me, and that one day you understand. I hope one day you can remember our dances, too. Please know that I will miss you both and think of you every day, and that leaving you is like leaving a piece of myself. I love you both very, very much.

  Mummy xxx

  My eyes are dry, my tears spent. I have water running through my veins instead of blood. I am cold. I fold the letter in half and put it in an envelope. I leave it on the kitchen table, propped against the salt. I wonder what they had for dinner yesterday. What they’ll have tonight. Michael will have to learn how to cook. He will help them do their homework. No doubt he will be better at it than I was. He’ll know the answers.