All That I Leave Behind

by Alison Walsh

  Pius felt bewildered now, and then the penny dropped. Of course. How had he never guessed. ‘Who are we talking about here, Rosie?’ he said carefully. ‘Is it that woman … Frances O’Brien?’ When she nodded slowly, he shook his head. Frances O’Brien, with her shiny teeth and nut-brown skin, whom he’d lusted after as a kid. How had he been such a fool to miss that, and her living in the house with them. Jesus, they’d probably done it right under Mammy’s nose.

  He turned to her in the car and said carefully, ‘Have you spoken to her?’

  Rosie nodded. ‘But I don’t think she wants to know, to be honest, and it’s OK, I don’t mind, Pi. She’s not family, I know she isn’t. She’s … she might be my mother, but she’s not my family. I have a family, or at least, I had.’ She wiped a tear away with the back of her hand.

  ‘Come here,’ Pius said, pulling her towards him, the pair of them stretched awkwardly across the gear stick. He squeezed her tightly, feeling the sharp bones of her shoulder blades. ‘You have a family. We’re your family and we always will be, even if we’ve made a holy mess of things. Your two sisters love you, you need to know that.’

  She attempted a weak smile, which Pius didn’t have the heart to return. The two of them were probably sitting hunched over the kitchen table, drinking their umpteenth cup of tea, trading more secrets like currency at a market. Secrets weren’t like that, though. They couldn’t be revealed to win power or to score points – the two of them had got the wrong end of the stick there altogether. He’d never forgive them both. Never.

  March 1981

  Michelle

  I see the cot out of the corner of my eye, a small white carrycot, covered in padded plastic with a pattern of pink bunnies on it. It’s in a corner of the hall, and as I stand there, holding onto the door, I see it move a little, a little vibration, and a tiny mewling sound, like a kitten, comes out of it. I don’t move for a long time, just stand there, until a blast of wind blows the door against the back of my legs and the pain of it shakes me into moving across the hall, slowly, towards the carrycot.

  I see her hands first, or hand. A little, tightly curled fist, which pushes the pink blanket away, followed by a leg, and then the blanket is a wriggling mass of pink as she moves, her cheeks rosy above her babygro. I gasp when I see her hair, a little tuft of it, a pale golden red, sticking up from her forehead. Her tongue is sticking out of her mouth, just the tip of it, as if to show how much she’s exerting herself to push the blanket off. ‘It’s hard work being a baby,’ I find myself saying. ‘Isn’t it?’

  At the sound of my voice, she stops dead, her little fist still in the air, and her eyes move from side to side as she listens, and then she gives a little kick and a grunt of exertion, and I find myself laughing. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ She responds by giving a little gurgle.

  ‘Are you talking to me?’ I coo. ‘Is that it?’ Another gurgle and I think how like Junie she is. June was always on the move, wriggling and shuffling in her cot, a little blur of movement as she tried to kick her blankets off, soft ‘ehs’ of effort coming from her, followed by a satisfied ‘ah’, as she succeeded. But then I catch myself. For goodness’ sake, Michelle, how can she be like Junie? You fool.

  ‘She’s a lovely wee thing, isn’t she?’ His voice is tender and I find myself nodding, almost as an instinct, as we both peer into the cot and, for a second, we are the child’s parents, admiring our lovely newborn, looking down at her filled with love and awe at what we’ve produced. But so quickly, I see that it’s a horrible parody, an awful sham, and I stumble backwards, and he has to shoot a hand out to grab my elbow. ‘Easy. Easy, love.’

  I close my eyes. ‘Don’t touch me,’ I hiss. ‘Do not put a finger on me ever again.’

  He says nothing, but I can tell by the look in his eyes that he feels it, the defeat. He’s given up. His grip on my arm loosens and beside me I can feel him, can sense his shoulders slumping, his head tilting forward, can almost see him bite his lip like a naughty boy.

  ‘I’ll give her a bottle,’ he says. I feel like laughing out loud at the idea of John-Joe giving this little mite a bottle, he who has sung and played and bounced babies on his knee but never so much as changed a nappy in his entire life.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I say, and I lean into the cot and pick her up and she’s soft and milky and warm in my arms. I hold her there for a minute. I don’t expect to feel it, not for a second, that surge, that rush of love to my heart that I felt when I first held Mary-Pat and Pius and Junie in my arms. That sense that they were nobody else’s but mine. Nobody’s. But I do. I feel it, and it’s so strong I have to steady myself, the little bundle in my arms, her tiny round shoulders, her soft little bottom, as she bumps her head off my shoulder and gives a little whine. That ‘where’s my food?’ whine that I recognise so well.

  ‘We’ll have a little bottle, won’t we?’ I coo. ‘Won’t we?’ And I carry her into the kitchen, humming a little song, and we sit down together in the old armchair by the fire.

  From that day on, the baby and I are hardly ever parted. She sleeps in a cot at the end of my bed and I take her everywhere with me, pushing that huge ugly pram that Bridie gave me all those years ago up the canal and into the village, where I try to ignore the tuts and murmurs as I head up the main street, into the minimarket and around all the shelves, taking my time. I overheard Dympna O’Brien behind the meat counter say it, speak out loud the words everybody was thinking. ‘I don’t know how she can do that, you know. Pass that baby off as her own.’ Until Paddy Deely told her to whisht, that it was none of her damn business. And I felt like saying, but I’m not passing her off. I know she’s not mine. God knows, I know, but I feel it all the same, that we’re two lost souls, that we need each other. She needs my love and I need hers.

  And I do love her. Every day, that love grows, and if sometimes I wonder where it will all end, I try to push the thought out of my mind. I try not to think of the damage this is all doing to Mary-Pat and Pius and June. Mary-Pat came up to me the other day when I was sitting on the bed, the baby in front of me, waving her little arms and legs in the air while I sang her a song. I was so lost in my own world that I didn’t see her until she cleared her throat. ‘Mammy?’

  I looked up at her and it was as if I was seeing a stranger, and I felt suddenly ashamed. How long had it been since I’d been a mother to her, since we’d talked like we always used to?

  ‘Will the baby be staying much longer, or, ehm,’ she looked down at her feet, before blurting, ‘will we be keeping her?’ Poor love; she’d clearly been plucking up the courage to ask.

  I didn’t answer for a moment but took Rosie’s soft little foot in my hand, feeling the tiny little toes, the wrinkles on the sole, like cracks in a riverbed. I reminded myself to rub olive oil on them later, to stop her skin drying out. ‘It’s just until my sister gets her strength back, that’s all,’ I said quietly, not daring to look at Mary-Pat, because we both knew that I wasn’t speaking the truth. My ‘sister’ whom I had never once mentioned, who, until a few months ago, hadn’t existed.

  I looked up at Mary-Pat and I could see she was waiting. That she wanted me to tell her, but when I just said, ‘I’m sure it won’t be for much longer,’ she gave me a look of bitter disappointment. I’m sorry, I thought. I truly am sorry.

  ‘Oh, all right.’ Her shoulders slumped in her school uniform, and she turned and trudged slowly down the stairs. She knows, I thought. She knows.

  ***

  Sometimes these days, I feel so desperate that I go to the phone box in the village and I park that huge pram just outside and pick up the phone and hold it to my ear. I hear the silence, and I put a 50p coin in the slot and am rewarded with the long, low dial tone. I even dial the number, and then she answers. ‘Hello?’ That slight hesitation, the sense that she’s wondering who can have interrupted her flower arranging or Mastermind. If I just press button ‘A’, the coin will drop in the slot and I can talk to her. I can tell her everything. I
can tell her about my plan and ask if she’ll help me. My hand hovers over the button, and then I hear her say, ‘Who is this?’ a note of alarm in her voice and I know I can’t. I replace the receiver in its cradle and I want to howl out loud for my mummy, like a child. I push the pram back along the canal, the rushes hissing in the wind, the kingfisher bouncing along the edge of the canal, and I wonder how it’s come to this, that this little piece of paradise can have turned into my prison.

  I hope that when I get back John-Joe won’t be home. I hope he’ll have gone into Prendergast’s or will have thought of some urgent task in Mullingar. I can’t have John-Joe near me, I can’t. If he walks into the room, I have to leave. Just the sense of him beside me makes me want to vomit and that bloody look on his face; as if he can’t say how sorry he is, as if he can’t find the words. He tried once, when he told me what he’d done to her, that girl. He said he was sorry then, but too late. ‘I don’t know what to do, Michelle. The nuns will probably take the baby …’ He knew, of course – he’d chosen his words carefully – that the very mention of the word ‘nun’ would be enough. Bridie had told me about what they did to unmarried mothers in her day, the poor young girls from the village who disappeared for the best part of a year only to reappear, grey-faced, shoulders hunched, on Main Street trying to ignore the glances, the pointed fingers, trying to bear the shame, while their babies were spirited away. I also know that nothing much has changed.

  ‘You can leave her here,’ I found myself saying.

  ‘Thanks, Michelle,’ he said, barely looking me in the eye. ‘You don’t know—’ but I cut him off.

  ‘Please. No gratitude, for God’s sake. You’ll only make things worse.’

  ‘I thought they couldn’t get any worse,’ he said, a small smile flickering on his lips.

  I almost wanted to smile then too, to make a little joke about just how terrible things are, but instead I say, ‘Just tell me one thing.’

  He looked like a guilty schoolboy.

  ‘Why?’

  He sighed. ‘Because no matter what I do, Michelle, I’m not good enough for you. I just don’t measure up. And so I figured, “why not”. It can’t make her think any more badly of me than she does already.’

  ‘“Why not,”’ I said blankly.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said bluntly. ‘And let’s face it, it’s true. You already think I’m a piece of shit, Michelle, so now you can add this to the long list of my sins, can’t you?’ he said bitterly. I said nothing for a moment, frozen, and I thought of that first day in Macari’s all those years ago. Did I know then and just chose to ignore it? Did I fall in love with him simply to annoy my parents? Was all this hardship just the result of a teenage rebellion, because John-Joe was as far away from being Daddy as a man could possibly be? But then I remembered how much I loved him, how much I looked up to him. He was my hero.

  ‘Do you love her?’ I asked him.

  He looked at me then, an expression of distaste on his face. ‘For Christ’s sake, Michelle.’

  I see it now, that he feels contempt for me, for the woman who accepted his child, who looked at the mess he’d made of his life and agreed to tidy it up, to make it respectable, who bore the humiliation he’d dished out to her, him and that girl – who even paraded it around the town, for everyone to see. When every decent, self-respecting woman would have kicked him out, would have told him and his knacker girlfriend to take a hike. Maybe it’s my revenge. I make him suffer by sticking nobly by him. But I know it’s not that; it’s that I just can’t see any other way. The children need us, the baby needs us, I tell myself. Yes, that must be it. But I know, deep down, that I just can’t think how to end it.

  Part Three

  Winter

  13

  Rosie slipped out without Pius noticing. As she passed the kitchen door, she heard the murmur of the radio, the received pronunciation of some Radio 4 presenter. She opened the front door as quietly as she could, in case she woke Jessie, then pulled it shut, grimacing as it squeaked on its hinges. If the dog started barking, Pius would be out in a flash, asking her where she thought she was going at eleven o’clock at night.

  The moon had risen, huge and yellow over the flat fields and the ribbon of water at the end of the garden. Pius’s planting was taking shape, even if he’d had to stop for a bit now that it was winter. Rosie stood there for a while, looking at the familiar shapes of the henhouse and the red robin hedge at the back of the house, at the tall grasses silhouetted against the night sky, at the dark shadow of the much-hated leylandii in Sean O’Reilly’s – all the elements of her childhood home. Nothing had changed, not even one little bit, she could see that. The outline of Sean’s huge chicken shed, the weathervane on top of the summer house, they were all still there, and yet they didn’t look right somehow.

  I wanted to know the truth, she thought. I said I had to know and now I do and all I can think is that I feel like myself and yet not like myself. I’m still me. I still breathe and eat and walk with flat feet and my hair is still red and I still have freckles. I’m sure if I ate a packet of Jelly Tots or listened to Miles Davis, I’d still like them both. I’m sure I still hate eggs and love the smell of lilies. When I look in the mirror, that woman is still me, and yet, I can’t quite work out who she might be, as if the person I am inside is no one in particular. Maybe I’ve never known, she thought, pulling the racing bike out from behind Pius’s grow-house and hopping on.

  She remembered the first time she’d gone with Craig to visit his mother. Margaret was her name, a short, squat woman with a tight perm and a bright smile, who was only delighted to discover that her son was marrying ‘such a nice girl. You Irish girls are so charming,’ and then, slyly, ‘You must be a Catholic, honey?’ That had been the clincher for Margaret, a devout Catholic, and Rosie hadn’t had the heart to contradict her, to tell her that her Catholicism stretched as far as her First Holy Communion and no further. Besides, she’d thought, helping herself to one of the cupcakes Margaret had made for her – iced a luminous green – what did it matter? She could be whoever Margaret wanted her to be. She’d become very good at it, even while she’d known that this life wasn’t for her, that she’d felt like a cuckoo in Craig’s neat little nest. She’d loved belonging to him, though, and she’d clung to that, through endless boring hikes in the mountains, full of compasses and backpacks and water bottles, through baseball games and spreadsheets and plans for the future; it wasn’t fair to him, she understood, to have hijacked his life like that, it really wasn’t. He’d been right all along: she wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was.

  Mary-Pat used to say it to her all the time, that she was like Daddy, ‘a real chip off the old block’, her face alive with sarcasm. Everything she’d done as a teenager, every mistake – little and big – was down to Daddy, down to his bad influence. ‘The apple never falls far from the tree,’ had been another of Mary-Pat’s dark pronouncements. It was the one thing she’d remembered when Daddy had told all and sundry she wasn’t his at her wedding. That at least Mary-Pat wouldn’t be able to throw that at her any more. But now, it turned out that she was a chip off another block, a block she didn’t know even one tiny bit. She thought of Frances O’Brien, of her angry eyes and helmet of hairsprayed hair, and she rolled the words around in her head: ‘You are my mother.’ No, they didn’t sound right at all.

  She was quicker on the bike now, having got used to dropping low over the handlebars of the racer and to keeping up a good speed so that she didn’t wobble and fall off. She pushed hard over the bridge, past the pub and onto the main street, which was entirely deserted, the bitter November wind having driven people inside, and with no one to see her she rode along the middle of the street, her legs going faster and faster as she pushed the pedals around, her breath coming in ragged puffs, the cold making her eyes water. She needed to get there quick, she thought as she sped around the corner into a little laneway behind the church, along which was a row of cottages, each painted a
different ice-cream colour. His was the eye-searing blue one; she knew that because she’d spotted him going in there one day after work. He hadn’t seen her, but she’d stopped dead halfway across the little street, watching as he unloaded two catering trays out of the back of his van and carried them into the house. She’d almost called out his name, thought of asking if they could just talk, before telling herself of course not, of course they couldn’t.

  Now, she pulled up and parked the bike beside the ornate wrought-iron railings in front of his place. She didn’t lock it, just left it there as she walked up the path and knocked on the door and waited. There was no movement inside, and her heart plummeted. He must be there, she thought. He has to be. She knocked again, and just as she was turning to leave, the door opened. Rosie blurted. ‘Hi. I’m sorry to burst in on you, but I had to see you. I had to talk to you,’ she began. ‘You see it’s—’

  ‘Rosie,’ he said sleepily. He was wearing nothing but a pair of red boxer shorts with black cats on them and his hair stood in tufts on his head. His eyes were bleary and he rubbed them for a few seconds before saying a sleepy, ‘Come on in,’ turning his back and shuffling along the hall, disappearing into a room at the end. Rosie hesitated for a second before following him, closing the front door quietly behind her.

  The hallway was dark and narrow, and she followed the dim glow from the open door until she found herself in a small kitchen–living room. It was a little Aladdin’s cave of lovely things: an armchair covered in buttercup yellow, a set of Chinese coffee tables with intricately carved legs, a comfy leather sofa with a bright orange throw slung over it. On it perched a huge grey cat, who peered at her with enormous marmalade eyes.