All That I Leave Behind

by Alison Walsh

  I watch her walk down the path to the gate, her shoulders hunched, her hair flying behind her in the wind. And when I’m sure she’s gone, I shut the front door with a bang and stride back into the kitchen. The two cups of tea are still on the table, barely cold, and when I see them, I can’t help it, the words just come rushing out of my mouth. ‘Why was that girl here, in my house?’

  He blusters at first. ‘What the fuck are you on about?’

  I nod at the teacup.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he protests. ‘I was trying to help you. I can see how much the kids take out of you and I thought we could do with a hand, that’s all.’ But he doesn’t quite catch my eye, turning instead to rummage in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes.

  ‘She’s too young for you,’ I say quietly, turning to put the kettle on the hot plate of the range.

  He tuts, puffing smoke out through his teeth. ‘You know, that’s rich, coming from you,’ he says. ‘With your boyfriend across the way.’ I turn around because his voice is suddenly loud and Mary-Pat looks up from her tea, eyes round. She looks as if she’s going to cry.

  I feel the rage grip me then, a sudden wave of it. ‘I’m earning money to put food on the table,’ I hiss. I go to my purse and empty it out onto the table with a clatter of coins. ‘Which is more than I can say for you.’

  His eyes flash and he grabs hold of the edge of my jumper, pushing his face into mine. ‘Is that right now? The boyfriend pays well, does he?’ And he grabs me and starts pushing his hand under my coat. ‘Get off me,’ I shout and push him onto the floor. I don’t push him hard, just a little shove, but he’s doubled over and he’s not making a sound, until I hear a sob. And then the babies are crying, all three of them, a frightened wail that makes my hair stand on end. Mary-Pat has climbed off her chair and goes to stand behind her daddy’s knees, her tiny head sticking out, thumb in her mouth. ‘Get up, Daddy, it’s all right. We’ll put a plaster on the boo-boo,’ she’s saying, nudging him gently with her hand. ‘Get up, Daddy.’ Why doesn’t she stand behind me, I wonder.

  He lies there for a while, crying softly, and I turn my back, clutching the rail along the edge of the range for support.

  When he speaks, his voice is quiet. ‘For God’s sake, Michelle, do you know what you’re doing to me? I can’t stand this. I need you. I don’t care about her or your fancy man …’

  ‘Well, that’s good to know.’

  ‘Ah, for Christ’s sake, will you just come here to me?’ And he comes up to me and wraps his arms around me, and I can feel him against me. And then he starts to kiss me behind the ear, the way he knows I like, and he murmurs, ‘Wouldn’t do this with that O’Reilly fellow, would you? Smell of chicken shit would put you off. I don’t smell of chicken shit, now, do I?’

  I’m forced to laugh, and he tickles me then. ‘Well, do I?’

  ‘No.’ I giggle. ‘No, you don’t.’ He always could wrap me around his little finger.

  In the end, we leave June in the playpen in the living room, and we give Mary-Pat some crayons and a big roll of wallpaper and we ask her to draw us something special. We tell Pi it’s bed time, because that’s the only time he will actually let us put him to bed, and maybe he wonders why Mammy’s in too much of a rush to wash his little face and hands and read him a story, instead popping him into bed and closing the door tightly, turning the knob that little bit extra so that the snib jams in the lock, the way it does, because the door’s broken. I try to tell myself that I’m not locking my child into his room so that I can make love to my husband and I try to ignore his thumping on the door, his plaintive, ‘Mammeee – need a wee,’ as we crash into each other on the landing and do it right there, him pulling up my skirt and pushing my knickers down and me pulling at the belt of his trousers and grabbing hold of the zip on his fly and pulling so hard that he gives a yelp, ‘Jesus Christ woman, hold on, you’ll have my balls off,’ and as he pushes me up against the wall and lifts me so that he can slide inside me, and I give a little scream and then we’re both laughing and panting and sighing and licking and it feels like never before. But when I feel him coming to the end, I whisper, ‘Wait.’

  He groans and stops for a second, his breath rasping in my ear. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s just … no more babies, John-Joe, please. I can’t.’

  He looks as if he will die of disappointment, so I say, ‘I have an idea,’ and I slide off him. ‘Come on.’

  ‘What the –?’ His face is a mask of disappointment, his breath coming in rasps, his trousers around his ankles. I go into my bedroom to the little drawer beside the bed, to where I put the brown envelope that Bridie gave me and for which, until now, I’ve had no need, and I take one of the foil-wrapped condoms out and I call out, ‘John-Joe, in here.’

  There’s a rustle and a crash, followed by a shouted ‘fuck’ from the landing and then he shuffles in the door, his trousers around his ankles, penis still erect. ‘What is it, Michelle? I’m in agony here.’ He looks comical, but when he sees the condoms, his whole face lights up. ‘You beauty! Where the hell did you get those?’

  ‘I have a source,’ I say coyly, ‘now hurry up.’ And he jumps on top of me so enthusiastically I think the bed will give way underneath us. And I try not to think of Bridie, or that girl with her lovely hair, or how he must laugh with her the way he doesn’t with me any more, or about Sean and the way he looks at me sometimes.

  We lie on the bed after, catching our breath, a tangle of sheets, clothes and limbs, and I lean on his chest, listening to his heart, feeling it beating steadily underneath his ribs.

  ‘You know, I don’t love anyone but you,’ he says. He’s not looking at me but staring up at the ceiling. ‘You know that, Michelle. From the day I first met you, you were the only one for me. You have to believe me.’

  I don’t say anything for a few moments, because I’m thinking. I’m not really sure I do believe him, because I’ve seen it. Not just silly Fidelma in the post office, or this young girl, but the way women are with him, fluttering around him. He seems to bring that out in them, the butterfly. How strange, I think, that he never brought that out in me. Instead, he’s made me hard, impatient, as if he’s a boy and not a grown man and I’m his mother, not his wife, or his lover, or his companion. His bloody mother.

  I try a different tack. ‘Look, I know you’re scared,’ I say. ‘I’m scared too, sometimes, that we won’t make it here. But it’ll be OK, I know it will. We just need to remember what we’re trying to do here. What we’re trying to achieve.’

  I know I’ve made a mistake when he groans. ‘Achieve. For fuck’s sake. You make it all sound like some kind of cow-shit enterprise, like we’re some bacon factory in Ballina or something.’ He sits up then and begins to pull his trousers and underpants on, grunting with the effort. Then he curses and lies back down beside me and gives a heavy sigh. ‘Look, I am scared. Scared that we’ll starve in this place, that we won’t survive another winter, and it’s all so bloody hard.’ He thumps the bed. ‘Why the hell does it have to be so hard?’

  I sit bolt upright then. ‘John-Joe,’ I say quietly, ‘I know it’s hard, but we both went into this together, you know that. And I can’t do it without you. Please don’t give up on me.’

  He just shrugs then, his eyes full of misery. ‘I’m trying to be someone I’m not, Michelle. I don’t belong here, in this life.’ And then he turns on his side and I wonder how, one minute, we are making love as if our lives depended on it, and now this. This sense that there’s something between us: something we can’t name, that’s pushing us apart.

  Later, I have to change Pi’s pyjamas where he’s wet them and quietly wipe away his tears, while I give him a little bath, filling the basin and letting him sit in it. His sobs have subsided into hiccups and when I give him a squeezy bottle and a sponge, he’s content to fill it and empty it over and over again, humming to himself. And I thank God that he’s too young to have understood what his parents were doing.
I allow myself a minute of self-loathing, that I put John-Joe before my son, but I had to. I needed to. Without John-Joe I’m not fully myself. And I want him back. I want him to be mine and mine only.

  9

  John-Patrick had said he’d drive her and wait around outside for a bit. ‘Shag-all else to do,’ he’d said, but Rosie knew he was trying to help. He was supposed to be helping PJ in the shop at the weekends, but ‘All those kids wreck my head,’ he said, about the nine-year-olds on bikes who’d pitch up in search of free bait. He preferred to be outdoors, helping Pius in the garden.

  They were on their way to see Frances O’Brien, even though Rosie had no idea if she’d know anything. ‘It’s total crap, the whole thing,’ Pius had said to her. ‘But if it’ll put your mind at rest, go ahead.’ But keep me out of it, had been the unspoken words. Fair enough, Rosie had thought. Put your head in the sand as usual.

  ‘John-Patrick,’ she said now. ‘Ehm, would you do me a favour?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘Would you mind not telling Mary-Pat about this … this visit? It’d only upset her. I mean, she’d only worry about it and she has enough on her plate.’ Not to mention the fact that she has barely spoken to me in the six weeks since the wedding. She has barely passed the house and if Pi wants to see her he has to call up. She’s avoiding me. I know she is.

  He didn’t say anything, just nodded, eyes fixed on the road, but his cheeks flushed a bit. He was a good kid, John-Patrick. Mary-Pat was worried about him because he preferred manga and Japanese cartoons to Gaelic football, and had thus marked himself out as an oddball in Monasterard. Rosie thought he had guts to stand out in this place.

  John-Patrick pressed hard on the brake and screeched into the verge with a spray of gravel. He drove like a Formula 1 racing driver, all handbrakes and roaring engines – it took a bit of getting used to.

  ‘I think this is the place,’ he said.

  Rosie sat there for a few moments, looking out the window at the pristine little bungalow. It looked as if it had recently been scrubbed with a toothbrush, the render a blinding white, the slate roof an immaculate shiny black, a neat pebble path leading up to the front door, with its stained glass window that gleamed as if it had been blasted with Windolene. Pi had said she was ‘an old hippy’. Could a hippy really live here?

  She tried to compose herself. ‘I have no idea why, but I feel nervous.’

  John-Patrick nodded, clearly out of his depth with this information. Eventually, he cleared his throat. ‘I suppose it’s better to know, like. Better than not to know … ah, shit.’ He shook his head and banged the steering wheel.

  Rosie stretched across and squeezed his arm. ‘I know exactly what you mean. Thanks. Look, would you mind if I walked back? It might clear my head.’

  She could see his solicitous expression clear, to be replaced by one of relief that he’d be spared any emotional fallout from the visit, and she almost smiled. Men. They were all the same.

  ‘Grand so.’ He nodded, trying to look regretful, and as she got out on wobbly legs and nervously opened the little wrought-iron gate to Frances O’Brien’s cottage, he screeched off back up the road, more gravel spraying behind him.

  Rosie was distracted for a moment by the doorbell. When she pressed, it played the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, a tinny whine, and when she looked in through the porch window, she could see a sticker with the American flag on it and the slogan ‘Is Féidir Linn!’ – Yes, We Can. The hall door opened and a trim middle-aged woman in a red business suit with big gold buttons was squinting at her from behind the porch door. Rosie gave a little wave. The woman didn’t wave back, and her face was expressionless as she opened the door just enough to stick her head out. ‘Ms O’Brien? I’m sorry to bother you, I’m Rosie O’Connor.’

  ‘I know who you are.’ The woman opened the door a fraction more, but not to invite Rosie in. Instead, she stood there, arms folded across her chest, as if she were barring Rosie from entering. She looked like an angry Sarah Palin, a helmet of red-gold hair sprayed onto her head, a pair of reading glasses around her neck on a long gold chain. The idea that this woman could once have been a hippy seemed utterly ridiculous.

  Rosie pinned a smile onto her face. ‘You do? That’s great. You see, I’ve come to ask you a few questions if I could. It’s about—’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’ The line was delivered with such force, like bullets from a machine gun, that Rosie hesitated for a second, wondering if Pius had been confused and there was some other Frances O’Brien and she’d got the wrong one. ‘I’m sorry, I thought … Do you remember my parents, John-Joe and Michelle?’

  Suddenly Frances was all movement, bustling forward towards Rosie, her arms outstretched as if she wanted to push her away. Instinctively, Rosie took a step back onto the garden path. Frances rushed past her to the front gate, opening it and then closing it, as if to check if anyone was outside lurking on the canal bank. Then she turned to Rosie. ‘Who sent you?’

  Rosie didn’t understand the question for a second. ‘No one,’ she answered. ‘I came myself. You were at my christening.’

  The woman was hovering by the gate, her hand on the metal handle, and Rosie noticed that her hand was shaking, trembling. And then she shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. It’s just … I saw your name, on the parish records. Father Naul showed them to me. And you’re on my baptismal cert – your name is beside my name and my parents’ names in the register. It said you were my godmother.’

  The woman turned to her now and pinned a smile on her face, revealing a set of shiny white dentures, like tombstones in her mouth. It made Rosie feel uneasy. She suddenly wanted to push past the woman out onto the canal, but the woman was blocking her way. ‘Rosie,’ she began. ‘Is that your name?’

  Rosie nodded. I just told you what my name is, she thought.

  ‘Look, pet, I’m sorry, it’s just … I think you’ve made a mistake. I don’t know anybody by that name. Those names.’

  ‘Oh.’ Rosie knew that she sounded like a child, but she couldn’t help it. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. How it was supposed to turn out. ‘My father’s ill, you see, and, well—’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. But I can’t help you. I don’t know who they are. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a cumann meeting. The bainisteoir will kill me if I’m late.’ Frances O’Brien pushed out the gate and trotted onto the towpath, where she eased herself into an immaculately clean red Nissan Micra with a clutch of holy medals swinging from the rear-view mirror, then drove off.

  Rosie stood by the gate of the bungalow for a few moments. She felt as if she’d been buffeted by something, by some huge wave, and had been left on the shore, a mouth full of sea water, that feeling of nausea at the back of her throat. She’d had it all written in her head, the script, the two of them sitting side by side on an immaculate sofa, reminiscing, munching biscuits and drinking tea. She would tell Rosie all about her parents, what they’d been like. Maybe she’d tell her what Mammy was like, so that Rosie could get to know her. Could hang onto more than just sensations, smells, feelings. Things she couldn’t get a grip on, no matter how hard she tried.

  Maybe Frances hadn’t liked them. Maybe that was it – she wouldn’t be alone there, at least with Daddy anyway. He hadn’t bothered much about whether people liked him or not. ‘I couldn’t give a flying fuck,’ he’d said once, when Mary-Pat had asked him not to hang around Prendergast’s after closing time, shouting at anyone who happened to be passing. ‘I had to hear about your carry-on in the minimarket,’ she’d scolded him. ‘Do you not know you’re making a holy show of us?’

  ‘Caring what people think about you is the road to ruination, Mary-Pat. It’s what’s made this country an effin’ Valley of the Squinting Windows, do you get me?’ he’d said, waving his cigarette while his daughter rolled her eyes to heaven, rambling on about how the only judgement he’d accept would be God’s in heaven.

  ‘
You’re an atheist,’ Mary-Pat had barked. ‘Now, eat your dinner.’

  She walked back, trying to compose some kind of an explanation to Pius while she had the time. The towpath was straight here, a long line of grassy track stretching away into the horizon. Rosie trudged along, head down, watching her feet, in their muddy trainers, slice through the thick grass, the purple knobs of the clover flowers disappearing under her feet. She could hear the warble of the moorhen as she shuffled in the rushes, the little ‘peep’ of anxiety as she became aware that someone was approaching. Rosie had always loved this season – the stillness of the water, the murky sheen over the September trees, but now she found it hard to enjoy it, because her mind was filled with random thoughts, with Frances O’Brien, with Craig, with Pi and Daphne and Mary-Pat and Daddy up in St Benildus’s, unaware, as usual, of the havoc he’d wreaked – they were all jumbled in her head, talking to her, and she wanted to yell at them all to shut up.

  Craig had gone home, two weeks after the wedding. ‘It’s best, in the circumstances, to let you sort everything out,’ he’d said. He hadn’t even looked at her as he’d folded the expensive waterproofs he’d insisted on buying ‘for the terrain’, even though she’d tried to explain that there wasn’t much terrain in Monasterard. He hadn’t needed them even once.

  You have no idea what a relief that is, she’d thought, sitting there on the bed, the suitcase open beside her. She’d felt light-headed about it, almost gleeful. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, it was the relief that she didn’t have to keep it up for much longer, the pretence. She felt she had to protest, though, putting a hand on his, which he’d hastily removed. ‘I haven’t changed. It’s just Daddy …’