Make Yourself at Home

by Ciara Geraghty

  She refused to think about Rita. How she had collapsed on the beach. How she was going to die. The things Marianne had said to her. The unsayable things.

  Instead, she thought about the Jeep and how it must still make all the sounds that it had made that first time. When she had driven it on her own. The near-death rattle, the crash of the gears, the groan of the engine when she accelerated. But she didn’t seem to hear them any more.

  She stopped at the deli in Skerries for a double espresso. The waitress smiled at Marianne when she walked in, as if she knew her, which she most certainly did not although it was true to say that Marianne had been in a few times since her exile to Ancaire. The waitress was a bright-eyed young woman with a perky high ponytail and a picture of a unicorn on her sweatshirt above the word ‘Believe’.

  ‘Good morning, Marianne,’ the waitress said. Instead of asking how she knew her name, Marianne said, ‘Good morning,’ and took a seat.

  On the draining board behind the counter, heads of lettuces with the muck still clinging to their stalks.

  It was like a signature.

  Patrick had been here.

  She was early picking up the Get-Well-Sooners but they did not seem to notice or, if they did, they did not seem to mind. From the snatches of their conversation that Marianne overheard when she clambered out of her head and zoned back in, it seemed clear that they were unaware of the events of yesterday and expected nothing less than Rita, in her usual swashbuckling form, when they arrived at Ancaire.

  If she wasn’t going to be there, she would have let them know. Wouldn’t she?

  ‘You’re looking a little flushed, sweetie,’ said Bartholomew, peering at Marianne through the rear-view mirror. He leaned through the gap in the front seats and clamped one of his massive, fleshy hands across Marianne’s forehead.

  ‘I hope you’re not coming down with something contagious,’ said Freddy fearfully, pulling the neck of his jumper over his nose and pressing himself against the back seat. ‘My immune system is lower than usual since I had the flu.’

  Bartholomew glared at him. ‘You had a sniffle. You couldn’t even call it a cold.’

  Bartholomew returned his attention to Marianne, now feeling her neck with the pads of his fingers. ‘Your glands are not swollen and your temperature is within the normal range,’ he told her authoritatively, releasing her from his careful ministrations. ‘It’s probably just the heartache. It’s worse than glandular fever, the way it takes an age to clear up.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Marianne.

  ‘You shouldn’t bottle things up, dearie,’ Ethel said in a rush of unsolicited advice. ‘Those pent-up feelings are not going to do your innards any favours.’

  ‘I don’t have any pent-up feelings,’ said Marianne.

  ‘Feelings are over-rated,’ said Shirley in a bored voice.

  ‘You do have feelings,’ said Bartholomew, patting Marianne’s shoulder. He sounded so sure of himself that Marianne found herself curious. ‘How do you know?’ she asked.

  Freddy unpeeled himself from the back seat and pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘Did you cry at the end of Toy Story 3?’ he asked Marianne.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Freddy, slapping the back of her seat. ‘There you go. You do have feelings.’

  ‘Can we please stop talking about feelings now?’ said Shirley.

  When Marianne drove through the gates of Ancaire, up the avenue, she scanned the front of the house but there was no sign of Rita, who, on the days she didn’t accompany Marianne in the Jeep, positioned herself at the front door, waving wildly and calling, ‘Coo-ee!’ and ‘Heidy-ho!’ and other such exclamations.

  Marianne herded the Get-Well-Sooners into the drawing room. ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she told them. ‘Rita will be with you in a minute.’

  But the kitchen was as empty as it had been earlier. The kettle was warm and there was a plate scattered with toast crumbs in the sink. Also a cup with no lipstick on the rim. Aunt Pearl must have had her breakfast and then left for mass. Was there a chance that Rita had gone with her? No. Absolutely out of the question. No matter how bad things were, Rita would not darken the door of the local churches. Vultures, she called them. Picking at the bones of people’s fears.

  Marianne took the stairs two at a time and strode down the corridor to her mother’s bedroom, stopped outside.

  She tapped the door with the tips of her fingers. ‘Rita?’

  From behind the door, there was no sound. Marianne knocked again, with her knuckles this time. A sharp rap.

  ‘Rita?’ Her voice was loud this time. Clear.

  There was no answer. Marianne wrapped her hand around the door handle. Gripped it. Her mouth was dry. She yanked the handle down and pushed open the door. The room was in darkness.

  ‘Rita?’

  Marianne snapped on the light, blinking in the sudden brightness. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been in her mother’s room. Not for years. It hadn’t changed. The same wallpaper with its print of pink cabbage roses, faded now where the light had worn it away, swollen with damp around the window. The same square rug with its long tassels stretching across the floorboards, now more of a beige than the canary yellow Marianne remembered. She stepped inside. Rita’s dresses were everywhere, draped over the backs of chairs, thrown over the top of the stand-alone mirror, pitched across the arm of the ancient chaise longue in the window. Those were the lucky ones. Other dresses lay where they had fallen, in crumpled heaps on the floor. The dressing table was strewn with make-up, bottles of nail polish, hairbrushes and combs and two jewellery boxes, both open and leaking beads and baubles. The room smelled of paint and perfume. Marianne could taste it.

  The bed was on the other side of the room: an ancient four-poster, with moth-eaten damask draped across the posts, piled high with blankets and an eiderdown.

  The wall behind the bed was covered in so many framed photographs, the wallpaper was no longer visible.

  All of the photographs were of Flo and Marianne.

  Marianne sitting solemnly on the couch in the sitting room, surrounded by cushions. In her arms, Flo. Brand-new Flo, barely visible through the cocoon of cotton swaddling her.

  The two of them at the water’s edge, jumping over the waves. Marianne could see how tightly she held Flo’s hand, the white grip of it.

  Gap-toothed Flo on a makeshift stage in the garden, tap-dancing and singing ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’. Her party piece.

  Flo on Marianne’s shoulders at the fairground, her arms outstretched in a sort of V for victory and her mouth open wide like she was shouting something. Cheering it. A candy floss in one hand, a wisp of it stuck to her face. Swing boats behind them. Marianne hadn’t let her go on them. ‘You might fall out,’ she had said, and Flo had sulked but only for a minute. She was awful at sulking. She couldn’t sustain it.

  There were lots of other photographs. Every photograph that Marianne remembered being taken was here.

  On the wall at the end of the bed was a painting. Marianne and Flo, sitting on the edge of the cliff at Ancaire, looking out to sea, with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

  Rita had painted it in bright pastels, so that it seemed like something out of a fairy tale. A fairy tale with a happy ending.

  Even though she couldn’t see their faces, Marianne knew that Flo’s thumb was in her mouth. She could tell by the tired slump of Flo’s head against Marianne’s shoulder.

  She sucked her thumb when she was tired. Marianne had forgotten that.

  She pulled the eiderdown back, folded it neatly along the base of the bed. She picked the dresses up off the floor, lay them over the arm of the chair, then sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping and sighing beneath her weight. Rita could do with a new mattress, Marianne thought before she remembered.

  The tallboy was in her line of vision now, a great slab of solid wood, listing to one side where one of the feet had buckled, some of i
ts brass handles missing. Rita’s clothes – scarves and tights, in the main – gathered in the space where the drawers were supposed to close, spilled down the side, hung there like they were hanging on for dear life.

  Marianne looked around the room again, as if there was a chance she might have missed Rita. That she might be here yet.

  She pulled her mobile from her pocket, checked it for missed calls. There was none. She dialled Rita’s number and listened to her phone ring and ring. Then Rita’s voice. ‘Hello, darlings, thanks for calling. Please don’t leave a message because I always forget to check my voicemail. And it’s not an age thing, I’ve always been absent-minded, you know that. Why don’t you text me instead? Or even better, call in! We can have tea.’

  Downstairs, in the drawing room, Marianne cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention but they were arguing over the jam tarts. Both Bartholomew and Freddy wanted the raspberry one, which Shirley was holding on a plate over her head while Ethel tried to tempt them with the lemon curd ones, of which there were plenty.

  ‘I just don’t know why Rita insists on making so many lemon ones,’ said Bartholomew, sulky as a teenager, when Ethel had finally persuaded them into their seats by promising to cut the raspberry one in half. But when Shirley lowered the plate, only crumbs remained and Shirley’s cheeks were bulging.

  ‘Okay listen, everybody, I need to tell you something,’ said Marianne, moving to the top of the room.

  ‘What about our tart?’ said Bartholomew and Freddy in unison, which caused them to turn to each other and grin like schoolboys.

  ‘I ate it,’ Shirley told them, poking the last of it from her teeth with her finger, which she then sucked noisily.

  Freddy shook his head. ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,’ he said, closing his eyes.

  ‘That’s AA,’ said Shirley snippily.

  ‘So?’ said Freddy, setting his hands on his hips. ‘I can still say it. If I want to.’ He took a step back so he was no longer within swiping distance of her.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ said Ethel, peering at Marianne over the top of her spectacles. ‘You’re very quiet today.’

  ‘She’s usually quiet,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Aren’t you, Marnie?’

  ‘That’s because she can’t get a word in with you two spouting off,’ said Shirley, pointing at Bartholemew and Freddy.

  ‘It’s rude to point,’ said Freddy. ‘But I do agree that it’s difficult to make oneself heard with Mister Boombox over there.’ Before Bartholomew could come up with a stinging retort, Ethel, taking her usual seat by the window through which the morning sun spilled, said, ‘Where’s Rita?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Marianne.

  ‘What?’ said Shirley, suspiciously.

  ‘Rita,’ said Marianne. ‘I … I don’t know where she is.’ All of a sudden, she had their attention.

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ said Bartholomew, as if Marianne did know. As if Marianne had hidden her somewhere.

  ‘I just … I don’t know.’

  ‘But she always tells us if she’s not going to be here for our meetings,’ said Freddy, his eyes widening behind the small, round lenses of his glasses.

  ‘What did she say before she left?’ asked Bartholomew.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Marianne again. ‘I mean, she didn’t say anything. Not to me, anyway. I haven’t seen her since yesterday.’

  ‘But she must have said something,’ said Freddy, his narrow face pinched with concern. ‘To somebody. Patrick. She would have told Patrick where she was going. Patrick will know.’

  ‘Patrick’s out,’ said Marianne. ‘And Pearl’s gone to mass. Rita is … well, I don’t know where Rita is.’

  ‘This is most out of character,’ said Ethel, worrying at her lip with her oversized dentures.

  Marianne found herself rubbing Ethel’s arm. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘She probably just had an errand to run and forgot about the meeting.’

  The others withered her with a look, then turned to each other, mumbling and shaking their heads.

  ‘What?’ said Marianne.

  ‘You haven’t got a clue,’ said Shirley baldly. ‘No offence.’

  ‘It’s just …’ Ethel began, sitting up in her chair, ‘what Shirley means is, that for non-alcoholics like you,’ she gestured to Marianne with one of her tiny hands and her gentle smile, ‘it’s difficult to understand the importance of the meetings, you see?’ She peered at Marianne through her bifocals.

  Marianne nodded. Shirley was right. She didn’t have a clue. About anything. Anything to do with other humans. With relationships. With interacting with the world. It was all too confusing, too much, too hard.

  She started to cry.

  Marianne rarely cried. For starters, she looked awful when she cried, her eyes red and her face streaked with tears.

  Also, she was much too tall. Tall people looked awkward when they cried, like a bull trying to pick its way through a china shop. Crying was for children and small adults. Big adults could only get away with crying if they did it silently.

  Marianne was a noisy crier. Mostly because she was a wet crier and had to blow her nose regularly, and it sounded like a foghorn when she blew her nose. Then there was the attention she attracted between her height and the red eyes and the swollen face and the foghorn noise. She was attracting attention now. She knew it even though her eyes were shut. She could feel it. The Get-Well-Sooners. They gathered around her, put their hands on her shoulders, her hands, her arms. She wanted to shout at them, to tell them to back off, to go away, to leave her alone. Instead, she stood in the centre of them with her eyes shut, which did nothing to stem the flow of her tears, which poured down her face and hung from the line of her jaw before dropping onto her T-shirt. They were a curiously comforting group of people to cry around. They didn’t ask her questions – What’s wrong, Marianne? Are you all right, Marianne? – and they didn’t do the dreaded hug. They just stood around her, near enough so she could feel the warmth of their collective bodies but not so close that she could smell their breath or feel anything other than the slightest touch of their hands on her.

  She stood like that for way longer than she would have estimated, had she been asked how long she could withstand such an encounter.

  She didn’t just cry, she sobbed. She thought she might have said things too. Random words, but these were mostly lost in the maelstrom of her cries. They didn’t ask her to repeat, to explain, to clarify. They didn’t ask her anything but stood, like first responders on a runway, waiting for a distressed plane to land.

  Afterwards, they guided her to the nearest chair, which happened to be Shirley’s, lowered her gently into it.

  Shirley did not object.

  ‘And I didn’t even know she was sick,’ Marianne said when she managed to quieten.

  ‘She wanted to tell you,’ said Bartholomew, rubbing her shoulder.

  ‘She was waiting for the right moment,’ said Freddy, squeezing her hand.

  ‘I’d be the same with the boys,’ said Shirley, nudging George aside before squatting in front of Marianne and lifting her fringe away from her tear-stained face. ‘I wouldn’t know how to tell them.’

  Marianne squeezed her eyes shut, but still she could feel the fall of her tears down her face. Ethel rummaged in her handbag and handed Marianne a handkerchief with a tiny daisy embroidered in the corner and a monogram above it in elaborately cursive script. The initials S.A.

  ‘I can’t blow my nose with Stanley’s handkerchief,’ Marianne managed to say, in between shuddering gulps.

  ‘Please do,’ said Freddy, pointing at her nose. ‘You have … residue.’

  ‘It’s snot,’ Shirley told him.

  ‘Stanley doesn’t need it any more,’ said Ethel, dabbing at Marianne’s face with the enormous piece of linen.

  ‘Maybe Rita’s gone to the graveyard?’ Marianne sai
d when she had blown her nose for what she hoped was the last time.

  She didn’t say Flo’s name out loud. She thought that might set her off again. Although anything might set her off. Shirley’s nails, bitten down to the quick. Ethel’s glasses perched in her hair that she wouldn’t be able to find later. Freddy picking one of Bartholomew’s hairs off Marianne’s shoulders. Bartholomew glaring at him and then smiling, a sudden smile, as unlikely as a warm breeze in November but all the more tender for it.

  Marianne thought any of these things might set her off again. The Get-Well-Sooners shook their heads in tandem and with authority. ‘She only ever goes to the graveyard in the afternoons,’ said Bartholomew gently, not quite looking at Marianne.

  ‘She’ll have had to take a taxi to wherever she went,’ said Freddy, striding towards the door. ‘I’ll ring Tried and Tested Taxis and see if Hugh might be able to throw some light on the situation.’

  Marianne thought that was a sensible plan. Something she might have come up with ordinarily.

  She blew her nose again. The noise made Ethel jump. ‘Sorry, Ethel,’ said Marianne. Her voice was watery with tears and when Ethel smiled her sweet, kind smile at her, Marianne thought she might start bawling again.

  ‘Hello?’ came Freddy’s voice from the hall. ‘Is Hugh there? … Well, yes, I hope you can. I’m looking for Rita. Did she phone for a taxi this morning? … Oh, I see, well, we’re a little worried about her so I would appre— … What do you mean, who is this? It’s Freddy. Frederick Mongomery. Oh, for goodness’ sake.’

  Freddy poked his head into the drawing room. ‘The other guy is there today. The one who calls himself “the controller”.’ Freddy rolled his eyes. ‘He says he can’t divulge information relating to any of their clients’ activities over the phone,’ he said. ‘He thinks he’s the bloody secret service.’

  Marianne walked into the hall, followed by Bartholomew, Shirley and Ethel. Freddy handed her the phone.