Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  ‘Elevation.’

  He nodded cautiously as if she’d said: Closer to heaven.

  ‘Even if Mum gets home right this second,’ Gael said, ‘she’ll say wait till the morning. Then she’ll say wait till the afternoon. You know how she gets when she’s been away. It takes her, like … a day to accept she has a family.’ The word responsibilities occurred to Gael but, like spokes to a bicycle wheel, it used too many syllables for so mundane a meaning. She tapped the top of the moon nightlight on the bed-stand and it glowed meekly. Guthrie contrived a yawn. Gael stood to turn off the main light and then surprised herself by returning purposelessly to the bed. The undissected silence revealed that the alarm clock batteries hadn’t been recovered.

  ‘Whoever designed that lamp’s a moron,’ Gael said. Now, Guthrie’s eyes were theatrically shut. ‘The moon’s not bright. It only looks bright ’cause the sun’s photons bounce off it. We wouldn’t even see it in the sky if it weren’t for the sun. It’d just be there. A cold grey lumpy rock in the middle of nothing.’ Why had she gone into his room? The pillow, yes. But … Was it to introduce this idea to him? Of the nothingness? Lying top-to-tail in her fluffy hotel dressing gown, she felt as though there was nothing beneath her. No bed, no floor, no magma core.

  By morning, Guthrie’s wrist was an uncooked sausage, stuffed to the split of its sheath. ‘Groooooss!’ Gael moaned at the limp punch of it, hued sallow as if it had been unbound from sweaty boxer’s wrapping after days. She sniffed for putrescence. Panting, he shoved her out of his way to parade it into their parents’ room, but the reception he got there was deflating. Their needling came through the walls: I most certainly will not call Carla (Jarleth to Sive) … boy needs his mother … yes Saturday morning … we’re all bone-tired … sitting with him in the … think it’s broken (Guthrie to everyone) … something feels loose … and really really tight like the blood pressure armband … Gael slept in my bed and kicked it … I’ll give you my whole afternoon, love (Sive to Guthrie) … Whatever you want to do after we’ll do … two concerts tomorrow … eighteen-hour day yesterday … breakfast meetings (Sive to herself) … mezzo-soprano … the record company … unseen arrangement … on Monday … Lyric FM … must put together … an hour’s rest …

  Gael pressed a pillow over her head to muffle them. Her lower back had the ache of a fallen arch and she felt the stab of needing to pee, only sharper. Like someone had used a melon baller on her bladder. If she stayed perfectly still, it was less painful. Just … stay …

  When she woke again, it was after ten and Jarleth had taken Guthrie for an X-ray. The bed felt mysteriously wet and warm. A bright red slick on the seat of her robe was the culprit. It looked like a tube of cadmium red acrylic had been spread and had hardened – a hint of browning at the edges where it had dried, clumping where it was thickest. ‘Oh.’ Gael was the wrong way round on the bed. Not her bed. There was a sound like pacing along the ceiling and muffled music surging … from where? Which way? Imagining seagulls racing the crest of a tsunami, she heaved herself from the bed, miraculously unstained. Perpendicular, it was easier to place things. Match consequence to cause.

  Queasy and somewhat crazily, she tore off her spoilt robe and underwear en route to the bathroom, where she ditched them in the tub and, with a hand mirror, studied the ripe, slippery brilliance of her newly operational sex. It was the way in to the body. Now that was clear. Boys had no such access to themselves. She showered with the gratifying effect of washing out hair dye. The mess of self-betterment. She pushed a tampon in, as she had practised many times, and slid a blister pack of painkillers into the pocket of her dark, loose boyfriend jeans with a wisdom she had long looked forward to retroactively earning. She thought of who she might phone, but her friends believed she’d had it for years. Forget it. Screw them. She’d get a period pain absence note, take all next week off and return to school with tales of her homage to Carrie. Let them envisage her box-office gore.

  The attic’s retractable stairs were drawn down and Witold Lutoslawski’s sombre, inwardly dramatic Fourth Symphony issued from the antique gramophone up there. The music kept pausing and repeating the same minute-long section. Sporadic vocals betrayed Sive, lifting and dropping the needle; listening exactingly, as though for the mosquito’s infinitesimaleeeeeeeee. Wonderful how weird a day was developing, Gael thought. This one would not fit into a frame. It would not be on its best behaviour. They were well past that. She made herself a slice of Nutella toast and held it between her teeth to climb the attic ladder, the ruined robe slung over her shoulder.

  Sive had a home office downstairs, as had Jarleth, but this symphony seemingly required rafters. Whenever she came up here, it was to be absolutely alone with the work; when it needed the higher level of concentration conferred by asbestos. The attic’s discomposure appealed to Sive – the stupefaction admitted here, but not in the house proper. The cleaners were only allowed to dust it twice a year. Dismayed, they might rescue a few mouldy mugs planted like mousetraps among the tackle. A philharmonic of broken instruments, a theatre set of cast-off furniture, artworks, Christmas crap, diceless board games, carpet offcuts, stuffed unmarked bin liners, towers and towers of records, a village made of masking tape and cardboard upon which Gael now perched, not wanting to interrupt. But the more the music mausoleumed her mother, the more she doubted the possibility of breaking through.

  Leaning in, her hands on either side of the turntable, Sive heard out the conversation between a flute and E-flat clarinet until cellos introduced their gentle, chordal strokes and a pair of harps stippled like rain. Then, she lifted the needle back an inch to the beginning of the discourse. ‘What do you hear?’ Sive didn’t raise her head to ask this. ‘Love … or lament?’

  The vinyl coughed into sound again and Gael watched her five-foot-ten mother bent as if over a baby-changing table. She wore cigarette trousers, a long, loose shirt and a forest green, sleeveless duster, like a knee-length waistcoat (that Gael wouldn’t wear for a bet, but looked borderline cool, she had to admit). It was open. A built-in belt hung down at the back. Her shirtsleeves were pushed up to the dry, white elbows, which appeared to be rosined. Her greying dark-blonde hair was held laxly with a pin.

  It was a hard question to answer when offered so little continuity, but the section repeating was at once eerie and graceful. However lightly applied, its colours were dark. ‘Both,’ Gael decided.

  Sive lifted the needle and placed it down again to hear, then once again, talking over it: ‘There should be more of the elegy, early … the gravity of starting, so close to the end. After all that’s gone on. This is a man – Gael, you must go to Warsaw – this is a man whose earliest memory was of visiting his father in a Moscow prison, executed days before his trial; whose brother died in a Siberian labour camp; this is a man who escaped the Germans while being marched to a prison camp and walked four hundred kilometres to Warsaw, where he survived by playing Nazi-sanctioned, Soviet-sanctioned music – no notes of dissent, no jazz, no Jewish composers, nothing atonal or degenerate. Can you imagine it, biting your tongue like that? Silencing your knowledge and your faculty for years on end? And after? This is Poland, Gael. After, he was reduced to writing ditties for the communist regime. It eased off, eventually, the oppression, and he could work again, and then, four decades later, within a scythe’s length of death, he composes this? This symphony? So brief … reduced … like something that’s been boiling too long. To take on another question …’ Sive turned to Gael and her eyes rested on the stained gown. They listened to the swelling strings rising towards the end of the first movement and aborting the climax before it arrived – meanly. In the pause, Sive continued speaking, though not where she had left off. ‘Love and lament, you think? Or’ – she swallowed – ‘I’m wondering …’ Her head moved but her gaze didn’t. ‘Is doubt not only part of it, but the larger part. His offering.’ Her gaze returned to the disc and a smile came close to breaching. ‘I can’t keep putting off the interpretation. It
’s my duty to see what’s in front of me … and my privilege.’

  Gael’s burning cheeks might have passed for a symptom of menstruation.

  ‘After all the dreaded operas and ballets and choral works …’ Sive went on, ‘… might as well be pantomimes. But here … first I have to be sure. Then to convince the players. I won’t just tell them: play it this way.’

  ‘Why not?’ Gael was both relieved and perturbed that Sive had only been talking about the music.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That’s your job.’ Gael gave a half shrug. ‘And they’ll hear that it’s better your way.’

  ‘You’d have me inflict the hierarchy.’ Sive lifted her low eyelids a fraction. The whitish shadow she’d brushed across them gave her the appearance of a mime artist. Which she was, in a way. She had only her gestures. No cheap deceits up her sleeves. No desire to escape the box, either? ‘They’ll take direction,’ she said, ‘but if they don’t understand it, resentment seeps in and rots the artwork. I don’t want unfeeling technicians … or mulch … or each to his own like so many cats. The onus is on me to keep their minds and hearts open.’ Sive lifted the needle back, because she hadn’t been paying attention, then added, puzzlingly, ‘There are fifty metres between one side of the orchestra and the other.’

  Gael sat there awhile and Sive behaved as though alone again. Her stamina for solo labour was impressive. Still, something rankled. Why hadn’t her mother asked the obvious questions? It was their first conversation in ten days. A lot could change in ten days. She’d saved her drowning brother. She’d eaten half a hash brownie. If a B-minus was anything to go by, it was fair to say she now spoke French. Right this minute, she was flushing her womb.

  ‘Mum.’ Gael held the robe, blood side up. ‘Earth to Mum.’

  Sive pressed her fingers tremblingly to her temples and steadied her head. Then breathed out slowly and paused the record. ‘What … love?’

  ‘I’m throwing this out.’ Gael hopped off the cardboard box she’d been perched on. ‘Safe to assume you’ve no housewifey tricks to clean it?’

  Sive looked directly at the blood but her grey eyes misted over. ‘Do you … need anything?’

  ‘If by “anything” you mean tampons, advice, hugs, painkillers, a pep talk, a hot chocolate … I’ve got myself covered, thanks. But I will take a fifty-euro guilt payment.’

  Sive’s eyes refocused and she said, ‘Will you take it in monthly instalments?’ Gael gave her a withering look and her mother’s smile broke the surface. ‘And in a year or two,’ Sive said, ‘when the novelty wears off, I’ll take you to Family Planning for the pill. Had it been available when I was young … I wouldn’t have bothered with a single, wretched period. You can skip them without consequence, the science says. So far … Not that we’re informed. Barely a sinew holds a woman’s body to her will, Gael. See it doesn’t snap.’

  Gael struggled to keep up with this information. ‘You’d skip all your periods if you could change things?’

  Sive unrolled the too-short sleeves of her shirt. ‘Don’t be dramatic.’

  Tetchiness spread through Gael’s body like a chemical, but her mother was, in fact, being honest and this length of conversation was rare. Perhaps for good reason. In her most neutral, mellow tone, Gael said, ‘I have always wondered why you had us. You’ve never seemed …’ In the silence that followed, Gael missed the music.

  Then, Sive responded simply: ‘Your father had political ambitions.’

  It was as if she were speaking to Gael for the last time. Saying everything. Or perhaps it was leading by example, to help Gael tell her mother what she knew. The word What? must surely have been audible for how loudly Gael thought it. Sive was looking upward, as if to a projected film of her younger, more lenient self. ‘ “A nod to convention wouldn’t go amiss,” was how he put it. The wording stayed with me. Poetic and pedantic at once. “Politicians have families. If you won’t marry me … ” ’ Sive didn’t do Jarleth’s voice, but Gael could tell when the words were his by how they changed her. ‘The National Treasury Management Agency, was it, he wanted to join … or the Economic Advisory Council … At any rate, the government works for the banks these days. So … He’s politicking away.’

  The period pains were catching up with Gael, and climbing down the attic ladder brought back memories of a ferry journey to Iceland. She hadn’t known she was seasick until Guthrie told her that her face was green. Dubious, she’d gone down to the cabin to put on blusher and found herself hypnotized by her vomit streaming slowly from the door to the wall and back with the waves, as she’d counted how many minutes there were in three days.

  Soon, she was napping, waiting for round two’s painkillers to kick in. Something was kicking. No, something was knocking. Guthrie was at her bedroom door saying they were waiting in the car and it was only a fracture and they were going to the museum, all of them, and to hurry.

  The weather blew a bit and spat a bit and the sun ducked its head through the curtains but didn’t stick around for coats to come off. The traffic was so bad that Jarleth flicked from station to station and waited out the whole track of t.A.T.u.’s ‘All the Things She Said’ in order to get an explanation. They’d been held at the same junction for four light changes. The radio announced:

  ‘Only a few thousand were expected to take to the streets for today’s Iraq invasion protest, which is disturbing traffic throughout the city, but the Gardaí are at sixes and sevens at the estimated ninety to a hundred thousand people marching from Parnell Square to Dame Street, passing through the Department of Foreign Affairs at St Stephen’s Green presently. Babies and grannies, uncles and aunties, gach naomh agus peacach is picketing today. At the final destination, Labour Party politician Michael D. Higgins is scheduled to speak out against the invasion, and Christy Moore will bring a defiant tune to the platform, alongside other, lesser-known artists. With placards reading “No War for Oil,” “Weapons of Mass Distraction” and “Stoppit Now,” protesters demand that the Irish government stop allowing the United States military to use Shannon Airport as a transatlantic refuelling point in bringing soldiers to the Middle–’

  Jarleth switched it off. ‘A hundred thousand Irish step out of the Church of Consumerism to wag their fingers at the sky.’ He dropped his hand from the wheel and landed it on Sive’s thigh. ‘Whoever said the rebel consciousness died with Pearse?’

  He looked at her. In a way, his hand on her was ludicrous. In another, it was charged. In the passenger seat, Sive huffed (a laugh or a sigh?), since no answer was required. Her questions were rarely rhetorical: ‘If we carry on down to Fitzwilliam Place, could we come in the back of Merrion Square?’

  Jarleth said nothing.

  Twisted around to scan the traffic that had backlogged, Guthrie undertook a social study. ‘A lot of cars only have one person in them.’

  Gael saw the data differently. ‘Is that a Bentley?’

  ‘How you can tell,’ Jarleth called back, ‘is if the driver’s wearing a hard hat.’

  The lights had turned but there was no room on the other side of the junction to go through. Jarleth lifted his hand from Sive’s leg and indicated in the opposite direction to her suggestion. The national museums and galleries were all between Merrion Square and St Stephen’s Green. ‘The museum’s not on.’

  Guthrie thudded the car seat angrily with his good hand and Jarleth told him to send his complaint to Tony Blair. He checked the rearview mirror and Gael felt a certain obligation to smirk, even though she didn’t find it funny and now the day could be consumed by bickering and errands. As if it carried on from something they’d been discussing, Jarleth said, ‘And I don’t condone your mother’s system of rewarding you for every hike in our insurance premiums.’ The sighing competition that followed was elaborate and Jarleth finally had to offer something in the way of a conciliation. ‘If you have no suggestions other than sitting in traffic, then so be it. Homework.’

  ‘You didn’t ask for suggestions
,’ Guthrie said, somewhat heatedly.

  ‘Well?’

  Guthrie leaned his shoulder against the window, cheek to the glass, and stared at the skyline of cranes to think. Everything was in town. Everything that you could do with a fractured wrist. In a voice too faint to be heard, he proposed the cinema or bowling, but Gael stepped in with what he wanted. ‘Isn’t there an art gallery, like … on the left side of town? Away from the centre.’

  ‘The left?’ Jarleth said. ‘My oh my.’

  ‘Go easy on her,’ Sive said.

  ‘Go easy on her now too?’

  ‘East,’ Gael said. ‘I meant east. And Mum means go easy on me because I’m on the blob, Dad. For your information. Okay? I have the woman flu. Code Red! There’s a leak. My Vesuvius is erupting. Red lights at the Y junction. Okay?’ Gael looked at Guthrie, who seemed to have inflated and had made an n of his mouth in order not to laugh or cry. ‘Quick! Give me your gauze! I’m losing blood!’ She leaned across and angled for his bandaging which made him go ballistic, and Jarleth put the radio back on, shaking his head. Sive pronounced, with the zeal of an epiphany:

  ‘IMMA. IMMA. IMMA is on the left. The Irish Museum of Modern Art.’

  ‘Oh good,’ Jarleth said, ‘The museum at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Sive said.

  ‘Out by St James’s Hospital.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Out by St Patrick’s University Hospital.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Van Gogh’s red period!’ Gael was still going strong.

  ‘Hospitals on all sides,’ Jarleth said, ‘in case Guthrie falls left or right or sideways.’

  Gael was still high on ibuprofen WITH CAFFEINE, but she could sense how they were close – perhaps only one quip away – from killing however it was they hoped to be. She said: ‘I’m hungry, though. Is anyone hungry …’