Midwinter Break

by Bernard Maclaverty

  It was difficult to see her eyes, in this light. She took off her glasses and bent close to the mirror. How strange it was – eyes looking at eyes. Seeing eyes by using eyes. The wound was inside her. And it had no reflection. Gerry had once said to her in the middle of an argument that he didn’t believe in souls but if, just perchance, they did exist hers would be like a razor. She had been made that way by the Catholic Church, he said. Inflexible, narrow, capable of doing terrible damage by her adherence to rules and systems. But she totally objected. She told him that if she was a good person at all, it had come from her religion. If she had any sense of justice and fairness, any concept of equality, then it had come from the Church. She’d been taught by the Church’s representatives, her parents and schoolteachers, people she loved and trusted, people who had imbued her with a love of others and a love of Christ. It was so utterly simple a child could grasp it, so completely compelling because it came from her natural capacity to love. It had nothing to do with philosophy or intelligence. Her religion was the great equaliser. You could be at Mass in a pew with someone of a different colour or race or brainpower – some woman professor, actress, farm labourer or unemployable dunce – and you knew absolutely that they were all the same in the sight of God. Also whatever kindness she had and whatever generosity she possessed came from those early sources. No room in it for snobbery or hatred of any kind. Except, Gerry would always say, for ‘the treatment of your own fair sex’. Other things – her sense of resignation, her ability to absorb and to distribute love, her calmness, her stoicism, her humility. Her husband’s reply was always to say who in their right mind could boast of humility? Such things, replied Stella, can be said between those who love each other. Her church was her everything. Like any human organisation it had its bad apples. The Garden of Eden was a metaphor for a place and a tribe but you could bet your bottom dollar it included a percentage of those who erotically loved their own gender. In the context, Gerry said, bottom dollar was good. Both male and female was Stella’s answer. There was no gardener in Eden. Indeed, there was no Eden. But if you ran with the metaphor – one or other of Our First Parents had to be a gardener and the other one had to be the flower. To this inevitably Gerry added, ‘And the apple was a bad apple.’

  She became aware of a noise she knew well – a kind of snarl. She looked over her shoulder and there was Gerry weaving into view.

  ‘There isn’t a bin in the whole bloody place.’

  ‘People put bombs in bins,’ said Stella. ‘That’s why there are none. It’s to do with security.’

  ‘Unfortunately I don’t have a bomb with me at the moment.’

  ‘Go to departures, to security. There’ll be a bin for empties there.’

  Gerry shrugged and blundered off. Stella watched him, saw him wander past a bin, his eyes looking up for signs to departures.

  Her washbag was still open in front of her. She took out her eye drops and unscrewed the top. Her glasses were set aside, her head went back and her elbows came up almost like a reflex action. This had to be done ten, twenty times a day – day in, day out. She stared into the high metallic rafters of the airport and squeezed the small plastic bottle. Nothing. Then the cold splash into her left eye when she least expected it. Involuntary blinking. The same with the right. Involuntary blinking. This time a tear overflow, spilling down her cheek. Watering her eyes, like they were flowers. Looking after them. After them looking. Gerry will be the cause of tears before the night’s out the way he’s blundering around. She’d just cried in the toilets and remembering crying brought back the airport in Glasgow, saying goodbye to their son and new grandson. And Danielle, of course. In the days before she’d had this dry eye condition she could cry like the best of them. That first summer when the Canadians visited Glasgow they’d had the luck of good weather – almost a heatwave – and the bridges felt warm under their forearms as they looked down at the diminished rivers. The air was hot in the evenings and people were in T-shirts on their tenement steps. Too early in the year for wasps so it was bliss to sit out at picnics. The baby cried a lot and she had a vision of Gerry behind the pushchair or the stroller, as they called it, in the Botanic Gardens as if he was mowing the lawn. Up and down, up and down till the baby was asleep and the grass full of tyre tracks. And when it came to the farewells at the airport, for Stella, it contained the possibility that it was the last time she would ever see them. Some accident or something unforeseen and tragic would happen before they could meet again. She and Gerry had once been to the Cliffs of Moher, the highest in Ireland, which overlooked the Atlantic. During the famine years families would come to that spot to catch a last glimpse of the sailing ship taking their loved ones to a better place for ever. Migrants. Exiles. The fact that Michael and his family were travelling back by plane didn’t make it any easier to say farewells. She knew they could keep in touch by phone – the days of three-pounds-a-minute calls were long gone. And those were the days when pounds were worth something. None of these things made a difference. What Stella was missing was the rearing, the day-to-day grind of the rituals of love, the babysitting, the bathing, the book reading, the arms around, the cheek to cheek, the sheer physicality of it all. The first words. The first steps. The need to be involved and spoken of as Grandmother. Of course Stella and Gerry went to Canada in between times but it was not the same thing. On such visits politeness intervened. Danielle had to be respected. Lips had to be buttoned. She screwed on the top of the eyedropper and wiped her cheeks with a tissue. Now clear-eyed, she looked around for Gerry.

  He eventually came back empty-handed and sat down on the seat beside her. For a long time he said nothing. She didn’t look at him but fiddled with her wristbands.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘What is it you’re saying?’

  ‘When we get home,’ she said, ‘we’re putting the flat up for sale. Then I’m getting a place of my own.’ Gerry’s hands were empty. He threaded his fingers together, tightened them until his skin shone.

  ‘You’d be better waiting till the summer,’ he said. ‘You’d get a better price.’

  ‘The place I buy will be at summer prices too.’

  Again there was silence. Gerry let his head go down. His chin rested on his chest and she wondered if he was asleep.

  ‘You’re a bit premature wearing those,’ his voice said without his head moving.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The wrist things. The flight’s delayed,’ he said.

  ‘Because of snow?’

  ‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes but I’d say that was a fairly reasonable guess. There’s no room for explanations on the screen.’

  ‘We could be here all night,’ Stella said. She began to take the wristbands off. Gerry straightened up, sat more like a man awake and said, ‘There’s lots of them delayed.’

  She looked out at the falling snow.

  ‘It’s getting worse. Maybe we should go through security and wait at the gate. If we fall asleep here they might go without us.’

  ‘Might? They’d definitely go without us.’

  Stella stood and waited for Gerry. He sighed and got to his feet.

  ‘You know the way,’ she said. ‘The way of the empty bottle.’

  They began to walk, he unsteadily, she with her eye on the signage of the distance they had yet to cover.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she said. ‘Maybe we should hitch a ride with your Sikh in his wee cart.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing.’

  At security there were queues. Miles of them. It would take ages to get through. As they wove their way through the labyrinth which doubled back on itself again and again like a folded fire hose Gerry came level across the tapes with an attractive young woman. Several times. He tried to engage her in conversation about the blizzard but each time she looked away from him. Perhaps she does not speak English, Stella suggested. The next time the woman and he coincided Stella engaged Gerry, eye to eye,
to prevent him speaking to her. Not because she’s an attractive woman but because you’re being a pest, she said.

  Flat screens showed what was required of them – take off jackets, remove laptops, empty pockets, what to do with gels, creams, toothpastes. Eventually they made it to the X-ray machines.

  They reassembled themselves at an aluminium bench and set off again for their numbered pier.

  ‘That was ridiculously straightforward,’ said Gerry. ‘I was going to tell the guy I had hidden a half-bottle about my person.’ He pointed into his mouth. ‘But I thought better of it.’

  At the gate there were plenty of people – but still some empty places to sit. They found a seat in a corner facing outwards into the night and Stella sat down. Gerry stood swaying.

  ‘I want to stretch out,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t take three seats.’

  He put his shoulder bag on the ground for a pillow and lay down on the carpeted floor at Stella’s feet. He began snoring almost immediately. A woman reading a German newspaper looked around to see where the noise was coming from. Stella smiled at her but got no response. After a while she reached out the toe of her shoe and gave Gerry a little nudge. It had no effect. She pushed him harder – then almost kicked him. He stopped the noise and turned without wakening. The German woman shook out her newspaper and looked at Stella again. Gradually the snoring returned. The German woman produced an iPod and slipped earplugs into her ears.

  Stella opened a compartment of her bag and took out one of the English crosswords she had torn from the paper in the Amstel place. It was the only one she had left. It took her about half an hour to finish it then she wanted to stretch her legs. But she was afraid of her bag disappearing or causing a fuss. She moved it closer to Gerry.

  She walked to the nearest screen. Multiples of ‘delayed’ were stacked one upon the other. It was lucky they didn’t have a connection to catch. They had no particular reason to be urgently at home. There was just the irksomeness of waiting, the disappointment of disruption.

  By this time a crowd had accumulated. Almost all the seats were taken. People were sitting on the floor. Children slept on overcoats laid down as mattresses. Stella smiled at a little girl sucking her thumb who was staring up at her. She marvelled at the brashness of tiny children – the way they gave you the once-over. Unaware of politeness, of giving offence, of themselves. Beside this girl was her mother, whose hand had strayed down and was stroking the hair at the child’s neck. And beside her, slightly sprawled on the seat, was a grandmother figure talking, talking, talking. Three generations.

  She might as well get some information. There was a long queue at the desk. Stella joined it. The poor girls in uniform were run off their feet. When she asked her question about how long the delay would be the girl looked over her shoulder at the snow – as if to say your guess is as good as mine. Dozens of flights have been delayed or cancelled, she said, and to make matters worse there is a strike by Spanish air traffic controllers. The snow is all over, in the UK and in Germany. Here in Schiphol the airport authorities are using snowploughs to try and keep the runways clear. More heavy snow and black ice are expected tonight. There was a pause. The blue-uniformed girl gave a little shrug. They both smiled at each other and Stella turned and walked away.

  She wandered along the central corridor with its travelators going in opposite directions. She saw a sign pointing to a Meditation Centre but resisted the temptation. She had been to such places in other airports. Lowest Common Denominator Religion. Hire-a-prayer-mat. A picture of the Sacred Heart kept in a cupboard. A sign, ‘Praying clothes for women are stored in this wardrobe.’ And God knows what else. So she walked to the shops. Outside the wind hurled and flurried the snow at the building.

  People stopped and listened to a long announcement in Dutch, which was followed by muttering and resentment. Some rolled their eyes, others shook heads. A translation into English stated that weather conditions were so adverse that all flights for the foreseeable future would be disrupted. Passengers would be informed of developments but there would be no more incoming or outgoing flights that evening. Now it was the turn of the English-speakers to grumble and pull faces. One woman began weeping aloud. Stella shrugged but continued to browse magazines. The announcement was repeated in other languages. She should tell Gerry – give him the bad news.

  She made her way back to where he was lying. Of course she had lost her seat – to some old man in a red baseball cap who was sound asleep. In her absence Gerry had turned to face the wall. Stella knelt, opened her case and produced the novel she was reading. Before she went off again she crouched and shook his shoulder.

  ‘Gerry.’

  At the third call of his name he opened his eyes and looked up at her.

  ‘We’re not going to get away tonight,’ she said. ‘Everything is cancelled. So you can go back to sleep. Keep an eye on those bags.’ She straightened up, leaning on the arm of the chair she’d forfeited to the old man in the red baseball cap. Then wandered off again.

  She came to a gate which had reduced lighting and no destination displayed. There was a certain amount of overspill from other crowded gates but still there were empty seats and the area seemed much quieter. It was dark and warm. Whether the light had been reduced to indicate the gate was not functioning or whether something had fused and the gate had been withdrawn from use, she didn’t know. She sat down. There were empty seats on either side of her. One or two people stretched across other seats, sleeping. She couldn’t make out if they were men or women because they had removed their shoes and their heads were half hidden – either by elbows or hijabs. She extended her legs, crossed her feet and sensed the seat comfortable, hugging her back. This was a better place than any Meditation Centre. She tried to read but the low light was a problem. Eventually she gave up. The partial darkness made the world outside more visible. Still the snow slanted silently down.

  She tried closing her eyes, folding her arms for ballast. Sleeping upright was a skill her mother had developed late in life because of a hiatus hernia. It was a skill Stella did not have. She could doze, and frequently did, during sermons but it was more sleep-interrupted than sleep. That slow sinking of the head and then the sudden jerk into consciousness when the head went too far forward. The inability to guess what the priest was talking about when she came to. Without opening her eyes she said a prayer for both her parents – that they would both be at peace. That was another phrase of her father’s when, as a child, she’d climb into his bed. If she so much as moved an eyebrow he’d say, ‘Lie at peace.’ Was she asleep? Had she dreamt the whole nightmare of the Beguinage? She tilted herself and leaned her elbow on the arm of the seat, then rested her head on her hand. Eyes still closed. Drifting. Today had been a cul-de-sac. The whole holiday had been a cul-de-sac. The substance of things hoped for had melted away – a snowflake touching her tongue. Relying on the evidence of things not seen. How different the setting out and the going home. In primary, Master Ryan had furnished them all with stock phrases to be used in their compositions. First he would clean the board. If the sun was shining everyone saw the chalk dust turning in the air. He would write ‘Words and Phrases’ in his flawless hand. She especially remembered ‘A Walk in the Country’. As he wrote the chalk would hiss and when it came to full stops and commas it would smack and click against the blackboard. He would raise his voice above the noise he was making. ‘I’m writing these phrases to help you. I want to see them used. But there are some people in this class who think they can do better. Isn’t that right, Geraldine Kearney?’ This meant that many of the compositions were similar. Children ‘rose early’ and ‘set off in high spirits for the mountain or woods’, their mothers ‘packed their egg sandwiches’. On the way, they all met the same shepherd who warned them not to ignore ‘the donkey braying from afar’. Such a thing ‘was a sure sign of rain’. But just when they were about to ‘tuck into our outdoor feast’, ‘the first roll of thunder was heard’, which me
ant that ‘we returned home under a different sky than witnessed our commencement’. Such phrases identified the teacher and where the child had gone to school. Sister Marie-Thérese who taught English in the first year of grammar school would return corrected essays and say, ‘And how is Master Ryan getting on these days?’

  The noise of the terminal began to diminish. It came and went like a radio not quite on the station. Like they did in the old days – before this digital stuff. But she found little difference. She liked to get on the station and stay there but Gerry liked to fiddle, change it to Radio 3 and be selfish enough not to return it to where he found it. Like the kettle. When she emptied the kettle she always filled it for the benefit of the next person. Which inevitably was Gerry. Maybe it was her hearing, coming and going. Cave echoes, a child crying, chimes, announcements on the tannoy – although it was difficult to tell if they were in Dutch or English. Just as it was difficult to tell a dream from the reality. Angst crept into her. Her head was too heavy for sleep. She was tired – deeply, deeply tired. It felt like a lifetime’s tiredness. Apart from the exhaustion of teaching there was every nappy she had ever washed, every meal she had ever made, every shirt she had ever ironed, every floor she had vacuumed. It all seemed registered in her bones at that very moment. When Gerry started into the heavy drinking it affected her, put her on edge, made her think thoughts she was not proud of. And as well as that, going back to the shooting. Telling it all to that woman, Kathleen. It was too much in such a short time. She clenched her eyes, hoping to sleep, but that was useless. Sleep was about relaxation, not tension. She switched her visions to something else but each time she gradually returned to the day in Belfast. It was the kind of day which doesn’t happen very often there – As I Lay Dying. Sunny and hot – the sky blue with white clouds waltzing around the horizon. This line of thought was edging too close to danger. She should think of other things. There had been days like it in her childhood – July days when the tar of the roads went soft in the sunshine. And the wonderful smell of it. She’d been warned not to play with it. This was a good deflection, a good shield. And she remembered her mother, and her yelling, ‘That sort of black would never come out of clothes, no matter how many times you washed them.’ Everything was boiled in the zinc bath on the range. The clothes swelling up, the wooden spoon pushing them down again. Bursting the air out of them. The warm kitchen soapy and perfumed. She had dug at the road stuff with a lollipop stick, moving it like stiff treacle. Squatting in the gutter. Seeing the shimmer of air above the black surface. Dark stuff. Dangerous. Too close. But she loved the dark smell. It got on her hands and, of course, she wiped her hands on what she was wearing, which was not very much, the day was such a scorcher. ‘How dare you come in here in that state,’ her mother had shouted, ‘those things are going straight in the bin. That tar would get on everything else in the wash.’ William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying – you couldn’t make it up. A strange and great book, which she’d just reread. Not to be confused with Brian Faulkner – the prime minister of the time. The early seventies when the war was at its worst. Maybe she should go back to the black stuff again. The black stuff and the boiling of clothes was safe. One of the things that amazed her was the sharpness of her recall of events just prior to the main event. How did the mind do that? Select and retain in detail without knowing the awfulness of what was to come. There must be some kind of fixative that washes the brain. She was wearing a white summer dress and open-toed sandals. A variation of the ‘A line’ was still around and it made her condition a little less noticeable. She disliked the idea of boasting – even about something as natural as having a baby. But it was now just too noticeable – carrying all in front of her. The day, too hot for tights. At the antenatal clinic they told her that some mothers were grateful for a winter pregnancy because in their condition the body temperature actually rose – like carrying a hot-water bottle round their waist. And she remembered even to this day that she was actually imagining how her life was going to change. I will become a mother and I will get up in the middle of the night and I will breast-feed and it will be a joy. And Gerry will turn oh so sympathetically in his sleep. Maybe bring me my breakfast-in-bed before he goes out to his work. It was a whole word – breakfast-in-bed – such a rare occurrence it required that completeness. Sheer fantasy, as it turned out. As I Lay Dying – when she’d read it the first time in her Senior Certificate year she’d been confused. Each chapter was called something odd like Darl or Jewel and it was all written from the ‘I’ point of view and she read it – stupidly, as she afterwards thought – as the thoughts of the same person, the same ‘I’, when it was actually the thoughts of different characters called Darl or Jewel. She kept flicking the pages backwards and forwards – what’s going on here? – until she got what was happening. Could have kicked herself. She had just been to the library and left back As I Lay Dying along with two or three other books she couldn’t now remember. Probably things on childbirth and mothering. Doctor Spock, maybe. ‘You know more than you think you do.’ And she was now going to the butcher’s at the crossroads. Sausages, chops, maybe some calves’ liver if they had it. She’d developed the habit of buying a week’s supply of meat and keeping it in the fridge, to save her trailing down such a distance to the shops again. Especially now that she was in this condition. Especially during a heatwave. The butcher’s was beside Madden’s, the greengrocer’s, where she’d get potatoes and a Savoy cabbage and some beetroot, which Gerry was very fond of. A taste of the earth, he said. And everything had gone according to plan and she’d had good crack with Old Trevor as he served the beetroot, stooping and bowing and scraping as if he was selling her golden apples. And she was joining in the fun as she received them, bowing and scraping back to him, like they were silver apples. The oul butcher kept up a banter with one of his young assistants, who was sharpening knives in the back by the sound of it, as he wrapped each item of meat separately in a membrane of grey tissue and parcelled them snugly together in brown paper. He was explaining how he was recovering from a bad shoulder – claimed he could tie the loops of his apron but damned if he could put on his bra in the mornings. And she laughed at the contortions of him trying to demonstrate his shortcomings – and failure. And then it was back into the crossroads and the blare of traffic and the heat shimmer of the asphalt when the eye could see the grey-green of the distant hills. The air shivering, it was so hot. And the Brit soldiers’ vehicle approaching the lights that led to Andersonstown before they pulled in on her side of the road. And then something happened. She is crossing the road on a pedestrian crossing when she is hit. It feels like a car. But how could that have happened? The lights would have been red. Some drunk in the middle of the day. Careless driving. She felt she had to run. Something inside her, her very nature was saying run. And she was running, clutching her basket to her. She didn’t know how long she ran for, how many steps, but for some reason the running became falling and she was down on the ground – had fallen her length, a slap forwards on the pavement – on her bump – and somehow she was unable to look around, to look down at her knees to see if she had skinned them or not. It was like ‘holding in’ as a child. Falling and the slap on the ground was such that her hands burned and her knees bled but she had not to cry whatever happened and she would run to the house, to her mother and hold in the crying and only when her mother put hands on her and held her face against her did the crying erupt. But her mother had died years ago and she, the daughter, was about forty miles from the home where she was raised and she couldn’t understand why she was lying here. Sprawled. That was the word. She was sprawled on the ground on the dome that had grown within her. Unable to look down at her knees. And there was confusion. She thought there were some kids playing with cap guns. Utter confusion. But they should have been in school. In the classroom watching the board. Then she remembered it was the summer holidays. Pap, pap, pap, pappa. In front of her face was her basket and there was a hole in the raffia which had not be
en there before and something was seeping out of it, forming a trickle – which was moving towards her because of the slope of the terrain. Something must have burst when she fell – the beetroot or the liver – because the effluent was somewhere between maroon and purple. And she felt wet. Had her waters broken? She wondered if she could move her arm. To her amazement it moved when she willed it. She felt with her fingers all the way down to her waist. She definitely was soaking. They had done the breaking of the waters at her classes. Made it sound like a folk song. The Breaking of the Waters. She loved the Irish ballads and ballad singers. There was one – Molly Bawn – who gets shot by her lover when he mistakes her for a swan. Because of her white apron. And the onset of darkness. A glimpse out of the corner of the eye. Like a warning signal, the scut of a rabbit. And he whirls and shoots. Her limbs they grew weak. Nevertheless she brought her hand up to her vision and it was blood. Jesus Mary, there was something very wrong down there. Maybe she’d been shot like Molly Bawn and was going to die. An Act of Contrition. Oh my God I am heartily sorry. You’d think you’d know a thing like that. Maybe she’d been shot through her basket. Her bloody breadbasket. She’d read in the paper about a Catholic boy who’d been shot in a drive-by on the Antrim Road and he’d run about half a mile, as far as Ponsonby Avenue, before dropping down dead. Pap, pap, pap. Somewhere a baby, a very young baby, a day-old-sounding baby was crying, yelling itself red in the face – mah mah mah – the squawks very quick, one after the other, in among the sounds of traffic, in among the roars of a motorbike – and she thought, is that my baby? – have I given birth lying here dying? Has it come out of me somehow without me knowing. Jesus have mercy. This was not how it was supposed to happen. She’d been to classes and nothing like this had been mentioned. The pavement was rough and pressed against her cheek. An inability to move. Except for shaking. Shaking was easy. Inside her stomach was being scoured with a metallic scrub – the kind of thing her mother did burned pots with. The kind of thing she quoted in English classes. Oxymoron – the hardness and the softness. Steel wool. She was by a low wall, a perimeter red-brick wall which would have been knee-high if she or anyone else had been standing up straight. It was at Safeways and there was a bunch of dandelions growing up out of a niche in the ground right by her face where her bag was sweltering in the summer heat. A couple of yellow ones, ones in flower, ones in bud. And another one – grey fluff – ready to be blown to the four winds. Was there any time left for her? For her baby? And God knows where her dress was. Could be up the back of her neck. There was a soldier on the other side of the wall – flat out. She didn’t think he could see up her clothes from where he was. He was shouting at her but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. What was the point of sending over people with such incomprehensible accents? What selfishness to be thinking of herself at a time like this when she should have been thinking of the child within her. That was what the papping was all about. She was utterly convinced it was a boy – said he was always tackling her with his studs on show. When she was in the bath she could actually see pale moving points on her stomach when he kicked her from within. Then she closed her eyes. A drawing down of blinds. She was aware of the red world behind her eyelids – the red world of her body. A man bent down and asked her if she was all right. He was gently shaking her arm but she could not be bothered to answer. The next thing she heard was the sound of an ambulance and for the first time in her life, which of late had been criss-crossed with such sirens, she realised this one was for her.