He Is Mine and I Have No Other

by Rebecca O'Connor

  Also by Rebecca O’Connor

  WE’LL SING BLACKBIRD

  Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Rebecca O’Connor, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  The lines from ‘Bluebells for Love’ by Patrick Kavanagh are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 259 1

  eISBN 978 1 78689 261 4

  Typeset in Centaur MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  For my family

  Contents

  Denise, 12

  Margaret, 15

  Angela, 17

  Deirdre, 8

  Aisling, 11

  Josie, 15

  Elaine, 16

  Patsy, 6

  Catherine, 10

  Acknowledgements

  He used to walk by our house every day at the same time, up past Molly’s lane to the cemetery. No one took any notice of him so I didn’t much either.

  I went up there most days after school. It isn’t far – about two minutes up the road, past a derelict cottage where wrens nest and tufted sedge grows out the windows. Past a car park, big enough for twenty or thirty cars. They parked right down by our house, in on the grass verge, for the bigger funerals. There were people who went to every funeral in the parish – the same familiar faces time and again, quietly chatting to one another as they strolled behind the hearse.

  But he wasn’t one of those.

  I thought I knew the place like the back of my hand – the stories behind certain graves, like the orphans who’d died in the fire in town all piled in together, thirty-five of them, without names. And next to them two separate graves for the nuns. Little framed ghosts in their Holy Communion outfits with their jaundiced, freckled faces. Names worn away, railinged plots with whitethorn and wild rose, black-flecked marble, old plastic wreathes with moulding notes of love and condolence.

  It’s on a steep hill that leads down to the main road. At the top of the hill is a large stone cross on a block of slate. High black brambles behind that, thick with blackberries in late September, and behind those, fields for pasture. The prettiest plots are up there still, blanketed in snowdrops, and early spring primroses, and bluebells in May.

  It’s always cold, even in summer. The wind feels like it comes from off the dark surfaces of the lakes.

  I imagined sometimes I could see the sea off in the distance, though the coast is over a hundred miles away.

  An ink-dark line of yew trees runs down on the left, along the path from the car park. Down the middle of the cemetery is an unsheltered shale path; and a smaller muddy track, seamed with dock leaves and grass, cuts to the right, through the older part. I convinced myself they were splints of bone and teeth I could feel through the rubber soles of my shoes – small as chicken bones, some of them, like those of children’s hands or feet.

  A lone farmhouse, stuck to the top of a field beyond the road, used to offer the only glimmer of light between there and the next town over.

  The first time I noticed him was one of those evenings that sucks the light slowly out of things. He was off in the far corner, almost blotted out by the shadow of the trees. I sat still as anything beneath the stone cross, my knees pulled up to my chest, watching him, waiting for him to leave, but at the same time not wanting him to. He stood there for what seemed an age, his figure elongating, expanding in the darkness. Then he turned, scraping the heels of his shoes on the gravel, and walked towards the gate. No sign of the cross. No genuflection.

  I was frightened of him in a way – of his grief, his loneliness. He looked like the loneliest person on earth just then. I imagined he was the type of boy who wondered about things, as I did, who broke his heart wondering about things. Who felt inexplicably lonely hearing voices in the next room, or cattle off in the distance, or the sound of tyres on the driveway.

  I remember that evening. It was dark by the time I got back from the cemetery. The white paintwork of the house was luminescent under a full white moon. I remember the sound my feet crunching on the gravel. I remember it because it was the only thing I could hear besides the blood gushing in my ears. That particular evening the lawn looked like a pale green glass. And I could feel eyes on me as I passed the laurel hedge separating our house from the neighbours.

  The garden at the back was pitch-black. I could just make out the frosty tufts of grass glinting in the light from the porch. The swing creaked slowly from side to side, the blue twine gnawing into the branch’s old bark. If you swung high enough on the seat you could touch the lowest branches with your feet and see right out over the wooden gate onto fields, and to the river, which had burst its banks that winter. I tried not to look down, walking a tightrope of light from the porch, concentrating hard on my steps, and on the footsteps behind me of those little orphan girls in their white dresses, charred black at the hem.

  Gran was sitting alone in the dark in the living room, her left hand slack on her lap, her head slumped to the side. The stroke three years earlier had left her with the notion that that hand was not her own, but my dead grandfather’s.

  Lazy Bones, she called him. She was forever complaining about his nails that dug into her while she slept, leaving sores on her belly and hips that Mam would have to clean and bandage.

  An empty sherry glass sat on the nest of tables beside her, the half-empty bottle underneath. Blue was sleeping fitfully by her feet. I switched on the light and pulled an armchair towards the fire, close to hers. She woke with a jolt.

  ‘Switch over if you like, love,’ she said. ‘I’m not watching this.’

  But I couldn’t sit still. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, Gran,’ I said.

  She patted her hand and said one for her and one for Lazy Bones please.

  ‘Sure you can share,’ I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

  The kettle was still warm. I stood looking at my reflection in the dark window pane as I waited for the water to boil. I tried to look through the glass but couldn’t make anything out. There wasn’t a sound from outside. No wind. The cows had moved off to the hollow corner of the field, furthest from the house.

  That boy walking home in the dark. He wouldn’t be scared of the dark as I was. He’d cock his ear to the animal sounds, turn towards the sudden beams of car lights, pulling himself slowly onto the mucky verge and gingerly stepping back onto the glistening surface of the road once all was quiet. It was difficult to imagine what that boy might be thinking as he walked home. And wrong for him to be spending his evenings as he was. That’s what I thought as I let the tea bags in the pot brew to a dark pulp.

  Gran liked her tea sugary – three, four spoons sometimes. I made it extra sweet for her.

  She’d slouched further into her chair. I set down her tea and tugged at the pillow at the base of her back.

  ‘Why do nails grow on dead people?’ she asked, clicking the nails on her left hand. I wasn’t sure if it was me she was talking to or herself.

  ‘I put lots of sugar in your tea, Gran,’ I said.

  She needed to sleep, but I couldn’t be doing with the removal of the false teeth, hauling her out of her clothes and into her nightie. So
I ran up the stairs and turned on her electric blanket instead, then waited with her until Mam and Dad returned, flicking from channel to channel while she dropped in and out of sleep. Blue twitched her back leg as if she was trying to bury something.

  Mam and Dad seemed in no great hurry to put Gran to bed when they got in. Dad sat himself in his usual chair, straining slightly to one side towards the television, half listening to the news, half waiting to hear one of us speak – like he did when Mam had visitors over. Mam sank into the cushions of the settee. The veins on her hands, palm down on her belly, shone bluer than usual against her pale skin. The skin around her nails was all chewed.

  ‘And where were you earlier, Lani?’ she asked. ‘I was looking for you. To see if you wanted to come to town with me.’

  ‘I just went up the road . . .’

  ‘What have I told you about going up there on your own, Lani?’

  I didn’t answer. I knew she wouldn’t expect me to.

  ‘Things are going to have to change in this house . . .’

  She’d been threatening that as long as I could remember, but nothing ever did.

  ‘Your father and I were over at the Reillys’. You know what they’re like. You can’t leave without taking a drink, and then you can’t stay without having a second, and then they’re highly insulted if you refuse a third.’

  ‘Aye, it’s vicious,’ my father piped in.

  Mam got up to put the kettle on and swayed suddenly to one side.

  Dad hopped off his seat and went and took hold of her elbow. ‘Take it easy, love.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said, flashing him an awful dirty look. ‘I’m okay. Let go of me.’

  That night I lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, then the sound of Mam cajoling Gran and Lazy Bones up the stairs to bed, followed by their plodding steps.

  That room of Gran’s was where I’d go to get away. All her things – the caked make-up in her pearly white vanity case, its gold-plated clasp rusted and broken; the crystal jewel box stuffed with cameo brooches and rings, bent kirby grips. Drawers filled with thread spools, dented snuff boxes, hair nets, baubles, perfumed powder puffs, old letters and postcards from Bettystown and Lourdes. A creased photograph of her other daughter, the one in England, ‘Celia, aged nine’ written on the back. Earnest-looking. And skinny as anything. It was the same one Gran had had at her house, before she got ill.

  The kitchen in that house had always smelled faintly of gas and burned sausages, and the cutlery was spotted brown with rust. And in the living room she’d have small heavy-bottomed glasses of whiskey and ginger for adult guests, red lemonade for me and the neighbours’ children. And this girl who was my auntie, who I never met, peering down at me from the mantelpiece.

  There was a hatch between the kitchen and the living room. I loved to pass things through that hatch, shutting the doors, opening them again. It’s funny how I can remember those doors more clearly than most things – the oily feel of the paint, the slight jamming on the sill, the way the light was shut out so suddenly, or let in on a bright day.

  It had been near a lake, that house. Next to a jetty that I remember sitting on, watching the coots murder each other.

  There was a silver-framed picture of Gran in front of the three-way mirror of her dressing table, propped against the jewel case. She must have been only my age. She looked so different, her elbows perched on a card table, her head resting on her hands. Eyes dark as raisins, dark hair, straight mouth determined to give nothing away. I liked the company of this young girl. And when Gran wasn’t there these things were all mine. I could sit before my reflections, soaking in the musty smells and the view through the window over the fields at the back of the house.

  I couldn’t sleep that night, couldn’t think of anything else but that boy. I didn’t want to think of anything else.

  It was only the next morning that I finally drifted off, dreaming I was on the swing in the back garden, swinging right over the river, my feet bare, my hands outstretched, the air filled with white flowers, and the sweet, buttery smell of whin. I looked down and saw that the seat was gone, the rope was gone, and I was floating – right over the river and into the fields beyond the house.

  My skin was goose-fleshed when Dad called me for school, as if the blood had curdled right up to the surface.

  ‘Lani, would you ever eat with your mouth closed?’ Mam pleaded with me at the breakfast table, her breasts slumped low in her flowery dressing gown, hands cradling a mug of tea.

  I burned my fingers uncapping my boiled egg, gave Mam my upturned empty, like I always did. She ran her fingers absentmindedly round the rim of her mug.

  The sun bounced off every surface. It was the wrong way round somehow. I felt like it should be dark. I had a fondness for the darkness just then, I can’t explain it.

  It was better when I stepped outside and felt the prickling of the cold at the back of my nose and throat, the frost tightening the skin around my shins, my wrists, the air lifting me out of myself. Dad revved the car up the driveway. The engine stalled, the car rolled back a little, then jolted to a stop.

  ‘Is Mam okay?’ I asked.

  ‘She wasn’t feeling too hot last night, love, but she’ll be grand . . . Probably one too many egg sandwiches over the way.’

  Mam was never ill, except when she’d been ill with me. But that was different. She couldn’t hold anything down for months. Then once she got me out of her I couldn’t hold anything down for months. I was a great spitter and dribbler. So she’d tell me – and of how she’d piled on the pounds, and had to spend the rest of her life weight-watching. Every pound and ounce she’d watch. She’d eat nothing but banana sandwiches for lunch until she couldn’t look at another banana, then nothing but baked potatoes and beans, then Ryvita and cottage cheese, and on it went. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays she’d speed-walk around the hospital grounds with Mary Reilly from over the road, or with one of the ladies from the office. There was a bit of a craze in town for speed-walking. You’d never see a jogger or a stroller – just groups of middle-aged women swinging their arms and waddling their arses round certain well-worn routes. You’d hear them coming before you’d see them, the swish of their shiny tracksuits. Then heading down to Weight Watchers in the town hall every week to be weighed in front of everyone, like the prize pikes you’d see in the local paper.

  Anyway, she was fine, Dad said. I thought nothing more of it, is the truth. I’d other things to be thinking about. All those hours spent the night before trying to conjure up this boy. A boy I’d only ever seen far off and in the evening when the light was poor. He was from the school down the road: he wore the uniform of dark grey trousers, white shirt, navy tie, grey jumper. He was a boarder, for sure – not just because he was always in uniform, but because no one around our neck of the woods seemed to know who he was. I’d surely have heard one of the neighbours mention him, if only to say they’d offered young so-and-so a lift, or they’d seen young so-and-so on the road.

  I was trying to put him together in my mind’s eye – tall, hair dark brown, skin pale – but I was at a loss as to the shape of his hands or the colour of his eyes. Or to what it was had changed about him or me that night that I could never be the same.

  Dad dropped me at the bottom of the laneway up to school that morning. Usually he’d drop me right outside the front door but we were running late. I’d spent ages in the bathroom staring into my eyes, the size of my pupils: they were that dilated the blue of the iris was almost invisible.

  There were dozens of girls pouring out of school buses, smoking inside the front gates, their shoes scuffed white, skirts rolled up round their thighs. There were boys on the buses too, which made the skin on my face and neck taut and hot, even though I knew for sure there were none of them I’d like. They were all smaller than me, for one thing. And they smelled, most of those boys. They smelled like they had dirty things on their minds.

  I went round wh
ere the cars were meant to go, rather than the path at the side, and slipped crossing the cattle grid, grazing the palms of my hands on the pebbledash of the gate pillar. My whole body burned with embarrassment. I wanted to scramble through the ditch and run through as many icy fields as it would take for me to feel cold and in control again – dozens of icy fields, so that I could feel the wet soaking into my wool tights. But I just squeezed the strap of my school bag with both hands, digging my nails into my palms, and walked as fast as I could without looking, like I wanted to disappear. It wasn’t that I was worried what they thought of me, but that they would see me at all, look at me, watch me. That’s what I hated more than anything.

  On up past the rhododendrons, covered in a mint frost, past the woods on the right, past the nuns’ plot of vegetables, the gardener spreading pot-ash. I could feel the cold trickling down my neck and down my spine. Past the statue of the Virgin Mary and child. The redness fading from my cheeks. Sister Rosario off in the distance. Only her legs, in their skin-coloured nylons, seemed to be moving. The rest of her covered in a dark grey habit the colour of her eyes. Her tiny hands folded under the heavy sleeves. She nodded and smiled at me, and I felt better for seeing her.

  I said, ‘Hello, Sister,’ in a voice that wasn’t really my own.

  First class that morning was pastoral care.

  ‘And Lani, would you like to draw around Josephine please?’ says Sister Anne, handing me a lump of blue chalk.

  I went beetroot and nearly tripped over myself. Josephine was lying on a large sheet of paper in the middle of the floor, her scrawny body twitching with embarrassment. The desks and chairs were stacked up against the walls, and the rest of the girls standing around her. I crouched down on my hunkers first, then onto my knees, and drew a vague outline. I didn’t want to have to touch any part of her, not even her clothes – especially not in front of all those other girls. I didn’t even know what we were supposed to be doing, but I’d have looked stupid if I asked then.