Children's Children

by Jan Carson

My sister had been the only thing in our house for days. You could feel the awful thickness of her every time you entered a room. Of course there were other fixtures and fittings we’d also grown accustomed to: doors, window frames, a larder stocked with last year’s jam, a short-wave radio resting on the shelf above the fridge. Sometimes it spoke and sometimes it fell silent. The radio reminded us, every hour on the hour, that other people in other places were also anxious, suffering from civil war, tax evasion and the very real possibility of an AIDS epidemic. It was impossible to believe in these people or their far away problems. My sister had been the only thing in the world for days now.

  Beneath the bed, with all of Emily hanging heavily above me, I was sure that satellites and other circling parties could see her from space, the weight of my sister broadcasting its presence to the heavens with an authority rivalling the Great Wall or those deeper, wider oceans.

  From beneath the bed, Emily was just a dent in the mattress. I pressed my nose against the place where her head should have been and measured myself: four feet and a handful of greedy inches. We were small for our age, my sister and I, no bigger than a pair of upright golf bags. Mother was tall, and father taller. We often wondered where we’d come from, only lately understanding that twins were separate people and not a single person divided neatly in two. Everything about us matched – eyes, arms, yellowish hair – everything except our feet, which differed by one size and had always been the objects of prayer and much earnest concern. We could not bear to be different in anything, even the inconsequentials. Emily prayed for less and I prayed for more. Our feet remained odd and ill-inclined to change.

  In the end, Emily took the matter into her own hands.

  On Wednesday morning, whilst my father fed the cows and my mother fixed breakfast in the kitchen below, my sister removed her pyjama bottoms, ran the bath and stood ankle deep in boiling water. She’d heard on a television advertisement that hot water shrank things and assumed that bone and sweating flesh were subject to the same rules as a dry-clean sweater. The scream of her, running down the pipes and through the air-conditioning vents, was thin as hoar frost. It stripped the bathroom clean of mildew for a fortnight after. By the time my mother had untangled herself from the kitchen sink and leapt the stairs in hungry strides, Emily was underwater, floating: a raw-meat mess of herself, still wearing pants and the buttoned-up top of her Christmas pyjamas.

  She was pink when they hauled her out, then red and finally a putrid yellow, though the heat had not affected her eyes, which remained blue, and jittered back and forth in their sockets like a pair of pinball marbles. My mother’s arms blushed a similar shade of sausage, to the elbow, where the water caught her, once again dragging my sister to the surface of things. My mother refused to wear bandages and swore she could not feel the pain. I knew she was lying, for her lips curled like a backyard dog’s each time she touched a spoon or door handle.

  ‘What were you thinking, Emily?’ asked my father, in the dark, with his big shoes angled like a set of empty brackets. He did not know that I was beneath the bed, listening. Neither did he expect an answer.

  My sister could not speak. Her whole face was the colour of tongue, and the thought of words had already left her. I spoke for her, pushing my mouth deep into the mattress where her head was heaviest so she heard these last true things filtered through cloth and springs, summer blankets and kindly feathers.

  ‘We are four feet and a handful of inches, yellow hair and blue eyes, two legs, two arms, two hands and ears, a single mouth and one nose, a set of breasts just beginning to surface and a pair of feet, shoe size three.’ (I did not start into the internal organs or think it kind to mention that the hot, hot water had pickled Emily, bloating her like a beached corpse. We were stranger in our own skins than we’d ever been.)

  I could not see her mouth, but I felt her smile and knew the pain of this, her burnt lips peeling backwards like cooked ham slices. Beneath the bed my throat caught on itself and settled. Emily left, smiling. In her very last moment, my sister was punched beef and two rows of pearly headstones. God himself, staring into that face, could not have split the difference between a grin and a grimace, but I knew. I knew and I did not tell.

  I was under the bed when Emily died. The room did not move. Nothing entered. Nothing left, but my father leant suddenly forward and back as if swayed by some ungodly current. My mother made the noise of a trapped cough and hunkered down on the bedroom carpet; a small child preparing to leap or topple. The arm closest to me was raw-meat red as it clasped her knees. Her skirt was caught up in a most undignified manner. She had the look of a much older woman. I reached through the valance and touched the tip of my mother’s shoe, just once where the leather had scuffed away. It was hotter than a shoe should ever be.

  ‘She’s gone,’ said my father. Beneath Emily’s bed the dent in the mattress defied him. It remained deep and deft, weight spread equally across four feet and a handful of heavy inches.

  ‘It’s empty in here without her,’ he said. My mother nodded assent with her whole body. Heel to toe. Toe to heel. Keening softly as she rocked.

  The house was emptier without my sister. Her absence grew to fill the rooms and cupboards, sliding down the back of the dishwasher till there was not so much as a square inch left to hold me. I did not move. I did not move a single shivering muscle. I thought it best not to breathe for fear that in shifting a fingernail’s sleight to left or right, I might sacrifice my own corner.

  I was no stranger to emptiness, even then. Our parents, expecting one and receiving two, had raised us thin and quick on home-grown vegetables and the last deft licks of an army pension. I was no stranger to emptiness and all its bastard sons. I had often known the dry end of a milk bottle, also car parks, biscuit tins and next-door-but-one with its boarded up windows. The removal of a tooth and the salt-gum hole which mourned its passing. Great Aunt Irene, who howled for hours at the empty room where her cats had once lived. Ten years’ worth of Easter tombs, each complete with a rolling rock and an angel host. Certain sections of the Central Library.

  Emptiness, I knew without saying, was just another word for anticipation; the dry pause before filling; the memory of a good, true thing sucked and sucked again like a boiled sweet dissolving on the tongue.

  Emily left a different kind of emptiness behind. It was a cloud and then the roof came down so there was no room for anything, even God, who, I’d been led to believe, was more than capable of squeezing through the thin places.

  Everyone arriving at our house said, ‘It’s empty in here without Emily,’ or, ‘You’ll feel the house empty now she’s gone,’ or words to this effect, with similar intonation. Their voices were spades and spoons, dig, dig, digging a wide trench between my parents’ emptiness and their own front doors, which still said, ‘Welcome’, and ‘Home Sweet Home’, in the sort of dirt-proof lettering most people chose to believe in. They did not stay long in our house. The emptiness forced them out the door and down the path, to the front gate and the gravelling roads beyond where there was finally air enough to breathe.

  I was under the bed when the doctor came, also my aunts on both sides, the next-door neighbours and various ladies who brought casseroles and Bible prayers, neither of which my mother had stomach for. She was too polite to spit in their presence. She took their concern graciously, shelving it, like last year’s jam, at the back of the larder. No one asked after me. No one noticed my absence, even the best of all aunts and her Southern boyfriend.

  Once, the Southern boyfriend said, ‘There’s something missing here. Some small detail.’ He looked round and round Emily’s room, his blue eyes beaming in wide, concentric circles.

  Beneath the bed I clamped a hand over my mouth and said, oh so very quietly through my fingers, ‘It’s me, it’s me you’re looking for.’ My heart was in my throat and my throat was in my mouth. My mouth was caught like corn grass in my teeth and could not see a way through.

  ‘It’s the cat you’r
e missing,’ said my father. ‘The cat went under the bin lorry last Tuesday, chasing a mouse or a bird or something, and that was the end of the cat.’

  ‘Splat,’ said my father and made a hand-slam motion with both palms open.

  ‘I suspect you’re right, sir,’ said the Southern boyfriend. He folded his hands, one over the other like a church amen, and that was the end of that.

  I was still under the bed when the Measuring Man arrived. He stood next to my father and asked ‘How tall was your daughter?’ His voice was nicely, nicely, fog and tissue paper. His shoes, the most certain things I’d ever seen. Even then I might have said, ‘I’m under here. I’m your answer. Measure me,’ but I did not dare speak nor show myself in the presence of those shoes.

  My father said, ‘My daughter was this big,’ with his arms like an open mouth and ordered two boxes: one for my sister and one to fill the space she’d left behind.

  The first box sank, dragging Emily with it.

  The second box stood like a wayside pulpit in the corner of my sister’s room. The colour of it was sand: ordinary beach sand, not the holiday kind. Three brass hinges ribbed it shut on the left side, a keyhole and a clever little key on the right. My father balanced a bedside lamp on top of the box – pink with a corrugated frill for a shade – and ran an extension cord all the way under the bedroom rug to the plug socket beside Emily’s bed. He kept the light switched on: a pillar of fire by night, by day, a birthday candle, mumbling in the sun. ‘So we can always see it,’ he said, and I remembered from school the Egyptians and their hulking, pointed pyramids, their reluctance to let things slip quietly into the past. I felt ashamed for my father and also afraid. He had not slept for days and only spoke when the box was listening.

  The box was the exact head-to-heel size of Emily, my father’s brave attempt at filling all those feet and empty inches she’d left behind. From beneath the bed, without moving, I could see the last squat third of it. It did not have a face or feet. It could not sing or recite, without looking, every line of the 23rd Psalm. It did not smell faintly of Vosene shampoo. It had never once fallen asleep next to me, head to toe, fitting like a pair of pickled herrings. Planted in the corner of the room, the carpet had puckered slightly around each edge, as if frowning beneath its weight. It towered over the bookcase, terrified the sock drawer and blocked all but the most determined draughts of sunlight. These, and other observations, were more than enough to convince me that a box was no good excuse for a sister.

  ‘No difference,’ announced my father, though no one had asked. ‘No difference at all between Emily and the box. I measured. They’re exactly the same. Don’t try telling me the house is empty without her. It’s just as full as it’s ever been.’

  My mother agreed. My mother agreed with almost everything my father ever said. Sometimes she agreed with things my father had not even said yet. My mother was a very agreeable kind of woman. However, on this particular occasion she could not stand in agreement. She found herself sitting heavily on the bedroom carpet, drawn to the floor suddenly. Clump. Thud. My mother made the sound of meat falling. Later, she would wonder why my father’s words had dragged on her like hammers and gusting wind, and realise that the box was the largest thing he’d ever asked her to agree upon. In the future she would sit down every time he asked her a question, preparing as best she could for larger boxes, for houses, hills and perhaps one day, a medium-sized mountain.

  Every day after Emily, and especially before breakfast, my mother had the look of a much older woman. She anointed the box, morning and evening, going at it furiously with an old tea towel and the same furniture polish she used on the dining-room table. It was not quite my sister but it gave her something to do with her hands when the twitching took hold.

  The room, without my sister, began to smell like church and synthetic flowers. It was impossible to tell if the box was to blame, or whether it was subject to the same sad aroma as the rest of us.

  My father poked his head into Emily’s room each time he passed the open door. He nodded at the box and smiled. Occasionally he took a measuring tape to it, checking earnestly, and with clipped precision, that the room was just as full as it had ever been. My father smiled all the time, even in the dark when the lamps weren’t looking, ear-to-ear like a sliced melon. The smile sewed him together. Without it he was afraid his face might fall off.

  At night while my father told himself he was sleeping and my mother lay straight beside him, picking individual threads from the sleeve of her nightdress, I crept out from beneath my sister’s bed and placed small items inside the box, one item per night for three straight weeks. A jar of peanut butter, unopened. A scrubbing brush. A twenty-pence piece. A clean flannel and a desert fork. Two sports socks, balled in a fist. Scissors and a pair of my father’s reading glasses. A National Geographic, hoping, as I placed it amidst the mumbling detritus of our old lives, for a dose of global perspective.

  I dared my parents good, but they did not notice the money or the scissors. Or the glasses –though, in his defence, my father had not read a book in years.

  I was under the bed when they noticed the peanut butter was missing. I expect they were making sandwiches. It had been weeks since they’d made a meal requiring anything more taxing than a tin opener.

  ‘Something’s missing,’ said my mother, her voice itching through the air-conditioning vents, along the corridor from the kitchen to my sister’s bedroom, ‘I could have sworn we had a jar of peanut butter in the larder.’

  ‘You’re imagining it,’ answered my father. ‘The house is just as full as it’s ever been.’

  There were charts he could have shown my mother had she bothered to ask: an almost full notebook, with each day’s measurements carefully noted in royal-blue biro. Four feet three inches, never deviating more than an eyelash to left or right of the measuring tape. My mother did not ask for proof. In the grander scheme of things, peanut butter seemed a small and infinitely manageable concession. She sat herself down on a foldable chair and wholeheartedly agreed.

  Under the bed I felt like a lost coastline.

  That night, while my father thought about all the times he had, in the past, slept deeply and thickly through storms and winter winds, and my mother lay straight beside him plucking individual hairs from the crown of her head like an early bird worming, I crept out from beneath my sister’s bed and went rummaging through her wardrobe for a pair of school shoes, one size too big but wearable with thicker socks. Removing the scrubbing brush, the twenty-pence piece, the scissors and reading glasses, the unopened jar of peanut butter and the National Geographic, I climbed inside the box and closed the door behind me.

  My father was right. It was exactly the size of my sister inside.

  It was empty in the box without her, and difficult to breathe. I closed my eyes, though this was entirely unnecessary on account of the darkness, and I wondered, in the morning, if my father would wake uneasy, if my mother would find the house emptier without me.

  6.

  We’ve Got Each Other and That’s a Lot

  Dad has his Bon Jovi tape on again. He likes a bit of Jon Bon and the boys while we’re waiting for my brother. The music makes him feel like a getaway driver from a film. This is a hard feeling to fake when you drive a Citroen Saxo (two doors, not four). For a while there, he even wore a bandana and a jeans jacket with the sleeves ripped off. There were thin, white threads like feathers sprouting from his shoulders, as if the stuffing was coming out of him, or his wings had fallen off.

  ‘What in God’s name are you wearing, Samuel?’ said Mammy, the first time she saw him in his bandit gear. ‘You look like a woman in that get up.’

  She said the word ‘woman’ to sound like ‘wee man’, which is the way they say it round here.

  After this, Dad quit wearing his jeans jacket. ‘Too conspicuous if the cops catch us,’ he said. He said this as if he’d considered all the angles and arrived at the decision by himself. My dad couldn’t choose
left over right without consulting Mammy first. Still, I could tell it was a relief for him to get a jumper back on. He’s never done well with the cold. It brings him out in red pimples like he’s taking an allergic reaction to himself.

  It’s always cold ’round here, even in the summer. When we have enough money, or my brother gets too old to sell, we’re for moving to Australia.

  ‘They’re crying out for skilled workers over there,’ says my dad, ‘and it’s always roasting. Most folks have a swimming pool in their back garden.’

  I sometimes wonder which of his skills Dad thinks is the best: gutting chickens, waiting in parked cars or thieving money off young married couples. I know better than to ask.

  ‘Them Australians will be lucky to have us,’ I say. Dad reaches over the driver’s seat to give me a backwards high five.

  He hasn’t noticed yet that the fabric on the corners of the Saxo’s front seats has been gnawed away to reveal the yellow padding beneath. I have done this with my teeth while we are waiting. There is nothing to do in a parked car and Mammy will not allow me to sleep.

  ‘You’ve to be on your toes, Paddy,’ she says, ‘primed and ready for action.’ By this she means that I’m the one who’s to fold the front seat forward and let my brother in the back when he comes running. I am what you might call an integral part of the whole operation. I’d feel a lot more important though, if I had a gun or some sort of disguise.

  We spend a lot of time waiting in the car with the heaters off. It is colder behind the glass than outside. I can see my breath curling over my parents’ heads in whispers. My mammy used to laugh at this and say, ‘Look at the cut of us, like fire-breathing dragons.’ She used to tell jokes to pass the time. ‘Knock, knock.’ ‘Doctor, doctor.’ ‘Did you hear the one about the blind priest?’ Now she doesn’t say anything any more. We sit in the dark and count the money up in our heads. This is a bit like praying when you don’t use words.