Wildest of All

by P. K . Lynch

  Dear Jude, so terribly sorry to hear your sad news.

  You must be devastated, Jude. Thinking of you and the little one.

  We were so shocked to hear of Peter’s passing. Keeping you in our prayers.

  What a wonderful man he was. I’m sure you will miss him greatly.

  Hoping you find comfort in the arms of your family at this tragic time.

  But there was no comfort to be found within the family. Jude was disturbed by the cards propped up everywhere. Seeing them only made her think of birthdays, or babies being born. Even the flowers were wholly inappropriate and better suited for weddings. Perhaps she might give them to a hospital or old folks’ home, but before she finished that thought another came fast upon it – the certain knowledge she wouldn’t take them anywhere, they’d lie exactly where they were until they turned brown and dropped their petals and the sharp tang of decay scented the air. Her apathy turned to self-loathing and she took to her room to hide her awfulness from the world.

  Cigarette smoke curled beneath the gap between Jude’s door and the carpet. It crept downstairs and reminded Sissy she wasn’t alone. On the occasions Jude made it out of her room, they accepted each other’s presence in silence, and took a sofa each, watching game shows or soaps, Jude brushing her hair absent-mindedly, peeling tufts from her brush, burning them like tiny hay bales in her ashtray, creating a smell no one thought to mention or open a window for. They lived on take away food: Italian Monday, Chinese Tuesday, chip shop Wednesday, Indian Thursday, KFC Friday, and so it rolled. The lasagnes and casseroles brought round by friends and neighbours went into the freezer and were forgotten. Defrosting anything was unthinkable, turning a dial on the oven impossible. Tinfoil boxes gathered by the back door, the bin overflowed, junk mail and bills piled up along the skirting in the hallway, and the phone went unanswered, causing the red light to blink angrily. In the darkness of the long nights, Jude crept down the stairs and pressed the play button over and over again, simply to hear Peter’s voice telling her to leave a message. Sissy, lying awake in bed, stared at her bedroom ceiling. If she looked away, something might collapse.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Sheer Goodness of Children

  Anne’s tiredness was a thick cloak with weights stitched into the lining. Every person she knew was a drain on her. There was literally no one she couldn’t worry about. Her two remaining children oozed misery, but what could she do? Over the years, they’d built up a resistance to her methods of helping. And even in death, her eldest remained a source of anxiety. Sissy had said enough to raise her suspicions about her son’s faith, or lack thereof, and now Anne was compelled to take the bus every day to attend Mass at the cathedral, where she prayed that Peter’s soul would be freed from Purgatory and ascend into the arms of the Lord. But when would she know her prayers had been answered? Lord, forgive me. I don’t wish to seem ungrateful. The fear of stopping too soon, and also the guilt at not having noticed her son had strayed from the path, spurred her on. Soon she was praying on the bus, on the short walk between the bus stop and the cathedral, and the whole way home and half way down her second cup of tea.

  Anne wasn’t as fond of the cathedral Mass as she was her Sunday service at St Martin’s. Too many tourists and not enough familiar faces. Even the priest gave no indication that he recognised her after so many trips, and what with the effort required to take the bus in and out of town on a daily basis, the whole experience was proving to be a rather unsatisfactory one. Shocked by this realisation, she bowed her head and began muttering decades of the rosary in an attempt to chase the illegal thought away before it counted – a Catholic version of the child’s five-second rule.

  Out of the Cathedral, into the mizzling rain, she kept her beads in hand. At the bus stop she stared fixedly up the street and prayed until the bus came. She showed her pass without otherwise acknowledging the driver, took the first available seat and resumed her prayers. She tried not to think of how she failed to lose herself in the service, but as the bus trundled away from the Cathedral her sense of anxiety only deepened.

  On the empty seat beside her, someone had left a newspaper. The words jumped off the page: Explosion in Reports of Historical Sex Offences. She tutted and averted her eyes; all these people these days, all their complaining. She didn’t understand the modern desire to make such a song and dance about everything. In her day, they just got on with it. Threading the brown beads through her fingers brought no peace. ‘Lord help me,’ she whispered

  Her tailbone seemed to want to drill through the hard plastic back of her seat. Pain shot up her spine, spread through her pelvis, beneath her ribs. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. One of the few benefits of being a woman: the acquired ability to breathe through pain. The ride was bumpy. At one point the driver hit a pothole and the bus shook so violently Anne was forced to grab the pole by her seat.

  ‘That’s it,’ she announced to the largely empty bus. She pressed the button and alighted at the next stop. It took a moment to get her bearings, but actually she hadn’t travelled far at all. The city was in full swing around her: couriers, police cars, shoppers, taxis, delivery trucks. She felt out of place. The chill air and drizzling rain wrapped itself around her, and slid down the collar of her coat, causing her to shiver.

  ‘Out the way, Granny,’ a harsh voice said. Unsure of which direction she should move in, Anne stepped uselessly on the spot as a young woman with a cigarette in her hand swerved a buggy around her. She watched her hurry off, a long straggle of bleached hair, a blur of neon trainers, shoulders hunching over the top of the pram as she pushed into the wind.

  ‘Excuse me, excuse me!’ Anne called, but a bus pulled alongside her, all whining brakes and loud splashes in the roadside water. The woman and her baby disappeared around the corner.

  Anne loved children. She especially loved babies. Always had. Even as a teen she’d loved to babysit for any of the neighbours. She’d always thought it was just the sheer goodness of babies that she loved so much, but she’d come to understand it was also their vulnerability. Their complete and utter reliance on whoever was there. Their trust. When a baby looked at you, he saw someone on whom his life depended, and what was so marvellous about it was that he never for a moment doubted you’d be there for him. She always thought of babies as male, even before Peter was born. When it looked for a while that she and Patrick might not have their own family, she’d experienced a kind of madness. Yes, it was a madness, she thought. She could admit it now the years had passed and Patrick was no longer with her.

  She took the underground, amazed at how little it had changed in all that time. Even the dusty carriage smell was familiar. The people had changed of course. Strange-looking girls with heavy make-up and huge black art folders. Tall skinny boys (men, she supposed) wearing oversized coats and reading thick books. Patrick had been tall and skinny. Funny to think what he might have looked like if this had been his time. Funny to think they most likely would never have married at all, their children never existed. What a world. Such pain she could have avoided. But such joys too, she corrected herself.

  Back on the street, the grey had been temporarily banished by a weak sun. The wet pavement gleamed almost enough to blind her. She leaned against a wall while she gathered herself together. It was years since she’d been in this part of town. She had a vague idea that Danny lived somewhere close by. Perhaps she could prevail on him to take her home later. Her tummy was beginning to ache and the idea of another bus ride today was too much.

  She pushed off from the wall and headed in the direction of Kelvingrove Park. She couldn’t think where else she’d be guaranteed to find what she was looking for. Ignoring the Big Issue seller (but making a promise to herself to buy a copy later), she put one foot after the other, wandered over the bridge into the gardens, admired the imposing red sandstone buildings, and marvelled again at how unchanged everything was. To think, while she was running the shop, bringing up children and all the rest of it,
to think that this was still here, still as it was, thoroughly unchanged, while she… she had changed so much, almost beyond recognition. But didn’t everyone do that?, she thought. Isn’t that just life? What life might have been. She shook her head. There was no point in these thoughts. There never had been any point. She stopped and looked up at the university, almost a confrontation. Despite herself, she laughed. It was still there. Not just the building, but the envy, the resentment, the desire. Oh well. At least she knew she was still alive.

  An overweight girl in a hi-vis jacket overtook her.

  ‘Come along boys and girls,’ she trilled. ‘Nearly there.’

  A crocodile of children ambled past. Anne viewed them in bemusement, all chained up to each other, attached to some plastic contraption running down the centre of their group. She’d never seen anything like it. There was maybe a dozen of them, ranging in age from two to four, and they followed their leader without hesitation, each completely lost in their own experience. This was what she had come for.

  She could hardly bear to walk so slowly, but she had to. Twelve little children so compelling in their variety. The confident leaders, the reticent listeners, the special one who was completely at ease with himself and showed no interest in the others. The nursery workers didn’t even notice, so engrossed were they in their own conversations. She doubted they noticed anything, but then one of them held open the gate to the play area for her to enter, so she supposed they had at least a modicum of awareness. Her feet were beginning to ache and so she sat down on the nearest bench, not noticing the wetness soaking through her skirt and jacket. One by one, the children were set free and they swarmed the play area with an infectious energy, climbing various wooden structures, digging in the bark laid beneath the apparatus, investigating drips, cracks and graffiti with the same gusto as they approached the slide and swings. Gusto, she smiled. There was a word. Peter definitely had gusto.

  A tear trickled down her cheek and she bristled with annoyance. It often happened these days, especially in the cold. Today she was feeling particularly choked up. She leaned over and wiggled a hand into her coat pocket. Her rosary beads came out entangled with a crumpled old tissue and some indigestion tablets. She took one and closed her eyes to stem the tears. Squeals of laughter made her smile in spite of herself. She couldn’t resist looking.

  She loved children so much. It wasn’t just their trust, or their goodness, she realised. It was their potential. Their ability to be anything. She loved this time, this stage, this little window before life got its hands on them and turned them spoiled and rotten. This little stage when you had to do everything you could to tie them to you, before they got old and turned away from you, even if that meant being a bit tough with them. It was for their own good. She’d been lucky she’d had three. Three little humans to play off against each other. She’d long thought that was the key to her success – the discovery that even if a child doesn’t care about pleasing you, they’ll always want to pip their siblings. So a little word here, a calculated compliment there… whatever it took to get them striving. By and large, it had been a successful strategy. She regretted none of it.

  Later, standing at the mouth of Danny’s close, she looked up and steeled herself for the four-storey climb. She remained appalled by the disintegration of her son’s private life. First, the divorce. The only consolation was that Danny hadn’t instigated it. Anne still felt a bloom of anger whenever she thought of her ex-daughter-in-law – one of those tall, beautiful women of privilege with no idea of anything outside their soft, pampered world. The type of woman who thinks nothing of uprooting children and keeping them from their father, a fine father, in this instance. The problem today was everybody wanted everything. The house, the family, the job. No sacrifice. Really, Lauren should have cut back at work. Not that Anne was comfortable coming to that conclusion. She was aware of women’s rights and all that, in fact, she’d barely been typical for her time herself. But, really, once children are in the frame, someone has to be prepared to step back, and in that relationship no one had been, least of all Danny, who had watched his older brother do exactly that.

  This was one area Anne almost thought she might have played differently. If she hadn’t been so scathing of Peter’s decision, Danny might have compromised more with Lauren. It was a sneaking, almost-thought, that frequently tried to breach the walls of Anne’s subconscious, but by and large it was kept in check by her penchant for busyness. Another motto: the devil finds work for idle hands.

  She entered the close and gripped the hand rail and began to pull herself up the grey stone stairs, her head full of memories of when the tenements were slums, when twelve people lived in a room and a kitchen, when several families shared an outside toilet, and the rats had the run of everything.

  It was a close like this she’d been left at after her mother died in childbirth. The baby had died too, so there was no one left to blame. Men couldn’t be expected to look after a family on their own so the two younger boys were put into a home and the eldest joined up. She never saw her brothers again, though she heard years later that one of them had made it to Canada. She’d never been able to verify it.

  As she passed the first-floor doors, a child’s plastic trike on the landing caught her eye. It was ludicrous anyone would choose to bring a family up in a place like this when a house with a garden could be found for a fraction of the cost elsewhere. A house with a garden was all anyone wanted in her day.

  She’d been placed with a woman called Auntie Margaret. It wasn’t immediately clear to Anne that there was no actual blood between them. Margaret had a daughter of her own, born out of wedlock, and so her entire existence was dependent on the benevolence of the local priest from whom the wider community took their social cues. Father Murphy was a regular caller to the flat.

  ‘You’re being good girls now, aren’t you?’ he’d say, in his Irish accent, and he wasn’t just talking to the children when he said it.

  Anne enjoyed his visits, sensing his sympathy for her situation, which, after all, was not of her doing, and at least she hadn’t been born a bastard like Nettie – a truth which, in the absence of a mother of her own, she held onto and nursed.

  One of the doors on the second floor had a selection of plants outside it, which looked nice enough, but again begged the question: why live without a garden? Why surround yourself with stone and concrete if what you truly desired was freedom and nature?

  She was quite breathless by the time she rounded the corner and pulled herself up to the third floor. Her back and feet were sore, and her indigestion was playing up again. She used all of it as a spur. She could stop when she reached Danny’s door, and not before.

  At last she reached the fourth floor and, of course, he wasn’t home. It was a Tuesday afternoon, after all. What had she been thinking? Still, she was here now. Going all the way back down was unthinkable. She reached into her handbag and pulled out the gadget Peter had bought as a joke, but which she secretly found to be invaluable. It was a telescopic walking stick that turned into a chair. Ingenious really. No one in her family had seen her use it and that’s how she liked it. It was safe enough to use it here. She’d have four flights of warning footsteps in which to tuck it back into her bag. She took an indigestion tablet and settled down to wait.

  Sometime later, a hand touched her shoulder.

  ‘Mum! Is everything okay? What are you doing here?’

  Uncomfortable as she’d become, she’d still managed to doze off. Annoyed, she held her hand out and Danny helped her to stand. She pushed down on his arm, letting out a small groan as she straightened up.

  ‘Have you seen my new toy? Very clever.’ she said casually, as she folded it back into its miniature state.

  ‘Mum, you’re shivering. Let’s get you inside. How long have you been waiting?’

  She couldn’t miss the faint annoyance in his tone, which was hardly fair. She hadn’t known he wouldn’t be here.

  ‘I wanted
to see you. There was no point going home after Mass this morning only to come all the way back out.’

  ‘You’ve been here since this morning?’

  ‘No, no. I had an afternoon… some lunch, you know, and then… I must say I thought you’d be here earlier.’

  ‘I went for a couple of drinks after work.’

  ‘On a Tuesday? All right for some.’

  He opened the door and dived through. She watched as he scanned the flat for incriminating items and wondered how bad it could be. Then, remembering he was an adult and his elderly mother had sat outside his front door waiting on him for hours, he turned back around with an expression of relief.

  ‘Give us your coat, Ma,’ he said. She hung her handbag over the end of a radiator and began to unbutton her jacket, eyes already making a sweep of the place. He went behind her to close the door.

  ‘I thought you had a cleaner,’ she said.

  ‘I do,’ he replied, blinking in that surprised way he used to as a child when he thought he was in trouble.

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘There’s a smell.’

  ‘Really?’

  Anne wafted the air around her face like a perfumer trying to analyse a scent. If Lauren had been there, she would have called the display ‘theatrical’. There were at least some benefits to the separation.

  ‘Sorry, Ma. I’ll open a window.’

  ‘Are you trying to kill me? Let me warm up first.’

  He sighed and took her coat, though he asked if she wouldn’t like to hold onto it while she was warming up, but no, she wouldn’t. She would, however, like a cup of tea, if it weren’t too much trouble.

  ‘And what about food, Ma? It must be a while since you’ve eaten.’

  ‘Maybe a biscuit, son. I don’t have much of an appetite these days.’