He considers this. ‘Hedging.’
‘Yeah.’
Art nods. ‘Canny.’
Does he know, Gael wonders, that it will fall to him or me?
He adds: ‘You make your own luck, then? That’s good.’
‘I don’t bank on luck,’ Gael says. ‘I don’t bank on skill either. Neither gets you a fair return.’
She expects the obvious question – What then? – but Art’s gaze has moved to the field across the way, behind where Gael’s stood with her back to the railing. She swivels around to see what’s caught his eye: a brace of teenagers scuttling along the stone wall of the field, trying to go unseen. They might as well be brandishing a picket sign: ‘Up to No Good.’
‘The Irish Rapscallion Army!’ Art announces. ‘What your mum called them.’
‘Ha.’
‘Thought that were dead good.’
‘Doing a bit of fundraising,’ Gael observes, ‘of a Saturday afternoon.’
‘Auntie Bev never knew how easy she could’ve had it, fundraising, had she waved a bit of fence pronged with a rusty nail at a cashier.’
Scampering forward with their knees bent to keep out of sight of the main road, three teenage boys and one girl (differentiable by dint of gold hoop earrings the size of showerheads) are on their way to rob the local newsagents for the second time this month. All four of them are styling bum-fluff moustaches, puffer jackets and giddy smirks, making their advances cross-country from one estate to another. Nylon stockings – swag of an earlier robbery – trail from their fists through the mud and the grass like the true flags of New Ireland.
Gael slides her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and finds a number under recent calls. ‘Close to smooth criminals as the Irish get,’ she remarks, while dialling. Someone finally picks up. ‘Hi, is this Spar?’ Gael says. ‘Hiya. Just to let you know the ganglet’s on its way to empty your tills for you … Yeah. I’d say they’re … ninety seconds off. Will I call the guards? … You’re sure? Okay, grand … No worries. Good luck.’ When she slips the phone into her pocket, she feels something else being slipped in alongside it and jumps. Sive’s fragrance of vitamin E face cream gives her away, even over the lingering aroma of burnt egg and flour. Gael’s heart trips a little at her mother’s warm cheek grazing her own cold one.
‘Happy birthday,’ Sive says.
There’s the sound effect of a kiss, but no such contact. Sive moves straight back in off the balcony to check on the sooty kitchen. Gael finds a wad of US ten-dollar bills secured by an elastic filed into her pocket. Twenty-one notes.
‘Now then!’ says Art, winking at Gael. ‘Forrin dosh.’ He whispers: ‘A dime’s what they call a hundred-dollar bet. A nickel’s five hundred.’
‘Mum,’ Gael steps inside, ‘you shouldn’t have–’
‘None of that, please,’ Sive says. ‘It won’t cover a night’s accommodation in Manhattan. But I can’t dictate where you go. Twenty-one going on forty. Only I couldn’t manage forty notes, so. Just as well I have your birth cert for evidence.’ She’d done half a shift at work. At the Palmerstown Cash Converters. She’d taken a few pieces of furniture in there when they were moving house many months back and, eyeing up a beautiful antique violin that sat behind the counter, she commented on the music that was playing through for-sale speakers. The boss cottoned on to the connoisseur before him and asked would she mind giving some valuations of the musical instruments. Then he asked her to value a quiet, comfortable easygoing workplace to which she would lend priceless class. ‘I don’t know quite how to explain it,’ she’d told Gael on the phone. ‘There’s something … so … down to earth about it, but at the same time, comical. It’s almost a relief, the mundanity of it. The simplicity of the exchange. I’ll only do it for a short while, but I must say I’m not half as loath to go in there as I sometimes was to go into the NSO.’
In acknowledgement of why she was hired, she dresses tastefully for work. An old but well-kept plaid green blazer with navy corduroy elbow patches, tailored navy trousers, a white cami and a beige silk scarf tied at the bosom. She hasn’t dressed with such harmony in years.
She bins all the tea towels that Art uselessly folded, and floods the charbroiled pan with water and liquid soap to soak. ‘Sorry to do this to you now,’ Sive says to Art, ‘and you still in your robe, but my father’s down in the car.’
‘Right-o,’ Art says, locking the balcony door. ‘The bomb’s ticking then.’
‘I couldn’t face getting him into the chair and into the lift to bring him up here just for a quarter of an hour. If you could keep an eye on him while I throw a few things together.’
‘I’ll bob some shorts on,’ Art says.
‘It’s cooler out than it looks,’ Sive tells him.
‘Oh. Fore I forget.’ Art trots to their bedroom and groans with the effort of rummaging under the bed. He returns a moment later carrying their old picnic basket. He must have salvaged it from the attic of Amersfort Way. It looks full. He lands it on the kitchen table, then goes to the fridge for two bottles of Lambrusco Bianco, a carton of apple juice, two blocks of cheese and a jar of fig jam that’s been chilling. He loads them into the basket. ‘From me, to you,’ he says, poking his thumb at his own chest and then at Gael’s before disappearing down the hall into the bedroom.
Sive is working off her good brogues to change into low-key shoes. ‘A picnic in Phoenix Park,’ she says to Gael, cautiously. ‘We thought we’d do the zoo after. It’s free entry for the twins until they turn two, so Guthrie wants to get you your ticket as a gift. I hope you don’t mind the lack of style’ – she stands up and takes a breath – ‘with Dad beleaguering us besides.’ In trying to work off her scarf with one hand, she causes a knot. She flops her long arms by her sides with defeat or release, it’s hard to know, and addresses Gael squarely. ‘But it’s one way to celebrate a birthday anyway, isn’t it?’
Gael wafts smoke that’s no longer there from her face and frowns up at the fire alarm, hanging by its wires: a lampoon chandelier. It’s so ridiculous, what’s happened. Maybe laughing would clear it, but what’s funny? No smoke without fire and all that. ‘It’s fine,’ Gael says. What’s fine? What’s funny? ‘A fine idea,’ she says in Audrey Hepburn elocution, at which Sive knits her brow. Gael steadies her voice. ‘I’ll just fetch my white kid gloves.’
The sycamores are beginning to dry and discolour at the edges like fresh food left out. Grape, pear, cheddar, Brie, torn baguette. Lime trees, horse chestnuts, oaks. So much grass, the rug is hardly needed and the deer grazing near the towering Papal Cross in the backdrop tire their jaws feasting on it. The twins pick up everything that’s fallen within their reach. They could stand and take what they want – they’ve been steady on their feet for months and can manage a lurching run, which they practised earlier, trying to catch a mallard by trapping it with their body weight (‘really gently,’ Guthrie directed) – but they’re aware that this array of food is not normal. It’s not porridge. It’s not steaming spud, carrot and broccoli mash that needs to be blown on by Dad before it can be aeroplaned into them.
Soraca takes whatever she likes the texture of and directs it at her face in small wet slaps. Food is clotted in her hair, making it strawberry-blonde. She likes banana most of all and squeezes one so that it pops up out of her two-handed grip like a fish. What she doesn’t like – chopped-up chorizo, for example – she passes to Ronan, who is sitting upright in the nook of Guthrie’s lotus pose. Ronan: light and shallow-breathed and as unreadable as his stuffed animals. As he’s mildly allergic to grass, Guthrie holds him by the waist and wipes the slather from his chin. (He always wipes their faces with his hands, then wipes his hands on something else.) Like his twin, Ronan is white as unrecycled paper and he wears the same featherlike hair tickling his shoulders. He blinks pink-eyed indifference at Soraca’s tackles and declarative gobbledegook. He does have bouts of animation, during which he points at everything that is a thing and has a shape, but he spends
much of his time staring at people’s chests as at an aquarium.
A gust of wind shoves the family vehicle onto its side in a clatter-smash and Ronan’s whole body hiccups. Cue tearless bawling from both children. ‘T minus five, four, three,’ Gael says, getting up to resurrect their trusty method of transport: a granny bike with a wooden box out front, an inverse trailer, which the twins rattle around in like the last two Smarties in a packet. It’s the plastic cover of the trailer that’s trapping the wind. Gael zips it shut.
Guthrie’s sniffling all the while. He’s had a cold for as long as Gael’s been home – months, now. A combination of his mouldy house, cycling in all weather, staccatoed sleep, being around children non-stop (playdates with neighbours’ kids included) and poor nutrition. His cheekbones are like mussel shells: tough and arched. The only difference is the colour. His cheeks are the silvery blue of the mussel shell’s interior. The curve of them angles down as he turns towards the fastest-growing loves of his life. His hair, more mouse brown now than beige, is tied back in a bulb Gael says he can just about pull off if he’s going for the Finnish transsexual high-fashion look. ‘I’m going for the don’t-call-social-services look,’ he’d told her. More than once, strangers have approached him to casually-not-casually inquire after his relationship to these two babies. This might have to do with his youth. Or the fact that, when they were tiny, he would swaddle them in a blanket, top and tail, and go for walks just holding them in his arms. No sling or backpack or pram. No one ever told him That’s Not What One Does. Sometimes, it seemed as if he needed a permit for them. The long hair does make him look older and more likely to have had kids early as a lifestyle choice, the way one might keep chickens or tend a marijuana plant. He’s struggling to cut grapes in half with his one free hand, so Gael takes over. ‘Thanks. They can choke on them.’
Gael hums in dismissive acknowledgement.
‘Did your mum tell you lot about t’ fella come into the shop yesterday?’ Art says. ‘And what he tried to fob off on them?’
‘No?’ Guthrie says.
Art turns to Sive. ‘Go on! Give em the yarn.’
‘You tell it,’ she says. ‘You’ve more energy.’
He pats her on the back, goadingly. ‘Go on. Av some pop.’ He uncaps the bubbles and refills their plastic cups.
‘I won’t listen to her,’ Sive’s father declares from where he’s perched in his wheelchair, having heard the word pop, which he is vaguely aware has to do with himself, or at least these people keep telling him so.
It takes them aback whenever he says something coherent like that and Gael has to bite her cheeks not to laugh. ‘Good man, Ned,’ Art says. ‘You’re with us.’
‘Am I?’
‘By the looks of it.’
‘What are you looking at?’ Ned says. ‘Who are you?’
‘Your personal chef.’ Art hands him a filled baguette he’s been putting together, which Ned cagily accepts and holds like a prop. Ninety-one years of life and mild obesity restricts him to the chair, where he looks the permanent fixture in his cap, coat and mantle as if it were January, shoulders coated in dandruff. Through their milky film, his grey eyes are wild and searching: Sive’s eyes when she’s conducting. The wrinkles that are deepening on his daughter are in full form on his own cheeks – black lines dropping directly from the bags beneath his eyes all the way to his jowls like windscreen wipers at rest. A smile would set them in motion.
‘You’re a good man,’ Ned tells Art, as fact.
‘I am a good man,’ Art agrees. ‘Always thought that.’
‘She’s not,’ he says, eyes darkening on Sive.
‘She’s not a good man, no,’ Art concedes.
‘What she’s after?’ Ned says, a little slurry from sedatives and minor strokes. ‘Disgrace of a woman. No … qualifications. Don’t let me alone with that bitch.’
Sive has her head knocked back and is smiling up at the clouds, eyes flooding. Gael considers crawling across the rug to hug her, but there’s too much stuff in the way. Sour cream crisps, a banana skin having found its moment, the knife Soraca eyes up for a toy. Gael puts it away in the basket, reaches for her niece instead of her mother and shows her how to push the curds of fat out of the chorizo slices: a game that will beguile for at least thirty seconds.
The Saturday in May when Gael had arrived back from London, Sive had answered the door. After a moment’s shock at seeing her daughter stood there with a suitcase, Sive took her by the elbow into the study and shut the door. ‘Dad’s in the living room,’ she said. Gael hadn’t visited her grandfather in years and didn’t even know he’d been moved to a new facility. ‘I don’t know if I ever explained to you,’ Sive said. ‘According to the nurse, this often happens that people get locked into one mode … related to how they were, or what their profession was, but tangentially. If someone was a social butterfly, they might get stuck in that loop, where you can’t get them off the subject of arrival and departure and what’s to eat and drink and where are the napkins, or others, maybe their thought-rut will be dirtier, darker. And it’s a horrible shock for people who knew them. It makes sense, an actuary’s default state would be one of suspicion. And we’re lucky Dad’s mistrust hasn’t extended to food and medication. Because if that happens, then, that’s that … Just to warn you. The things he says to me … It’s a sad loop. He’s confused and fearful.’
He’s on better behaviour in front of the twins, now, as if he knows he could frighten the wits out of them by showing his panic. Whenever he moves, they watch him, the way a dog’s tail goes stiff when it sees another dog coming its way. Ned is a shorthand he could never abide while he still knew his name was Eamonn. Sive called him Ned once to hurt him after he’d struck her and he didn’t seem to notice the name change, so Art said she should keep calling him that as a reminder that he’s changed. Ned opens the sandwich, withdraws the slice of cheddar like a note from a wallet and puts it in his mouth. The side-to-side working of his jaw suggests its slow, toothless disintegration. Ronan moves to the grass and hunkers down to dig a hole. Soraca brings over her small pile of pig fat to plant in the soil, a moment of supreme generosity for which Ronan is cooingly grateful. Pat pat pat.
‘So this customer …’ Sive smiles widely and looks radiant, resisting her sadness. ‘We saw him coming a mile off. Jazzlin was outside the shop having a smoke and she rushed in to say there was an ’06 Audi indicating our way that bore the innards of a dead marriage.’
Art leans in and kisses her shoulder.
‘Jazzlin with the quiff the size of a top hat?’ Gael says, one eyebrow cocked. ‘Put it like that, did she?’ (Guthrie swats his pear core at her.) ‘Jazzlin with the diploma in motorbike backseat ridin’.’
Guthrie cracks a laugh. ‘Don’t!’
‘I wouldn’t underestimate Jazzlin’s way with words,’ Sive says.
‘I won’t underestimate you having your way with her words,’ Gael says, ‘but go on.’
‘Only if I have your permission.’ Sive drains her cup. ‘So the Audi reverses to within an inch of our door, making a hostage scene of the shop. And in this fellow arrives.’
‘Hang on,’ Gael says, but Guthrie shushes her. Sive continues: ‘Were either of us golfers, because he could return another time when the boss was in. He wouldn’t see his clubs undervalued. They were a collectors’ affair, once owned by Sr Christy O’Connor. Jazzlin asks him: “Is that Sinéad’s da?” Bless her timing. “Google him,” your man said. No, there was no proof of ownership, but any serious golfer would know, the drivers alone were worth a fortnight’s pay. He didn’t specify whose pay. He’d have to pick up a new set in Dubai where he was headed for a job opportunity because there’s different sorts of clubs there. To suit sandier courses and all the rest.’
‘Did you buy them?’ Guthrie asks.
‘He suggested we hold off and make an offer on the whole lot.’
‘Did he, now?’
‘He was the actor, stage manager, director and fr
ont-of-house all at once,’ Sive explains. ‘We were the set.’
‘Natroly,’ Art says.
Sive feeds Ronan a bit of bread because his mouth is hanging open and any excuse to fatten him up. ‘The next offering was a his-and-hers watch set. He opened the cases, tapped the side of his nose and said, “Personal fitness monitors. It tells you how many steps you’ve done in a day and how many hours of deep sleep you got.” Jazzlin was swayed by that and inquired, very seriously, “Does this thing make ye skinny?” He wouldn’t dignify that with a response and went out to the boot to get the next thing. A cinema projector. You begin to picture the household that had broken up?’
‘Not half !’ Art says.
‘Jarleth might go for the clubs though,’ Gael says.
‘The home cinema on all day,’ Sive says, ‘projecting a Caribbean beach on the living-room wall.’
‘The moody Cliffs of Moher!’ Gael corrects her. ‘Patriotism, Mum!’
‘To be sure,’ Sive says, ham-sandwiching it. ‘The magnificent cliffs cast onto a big swathe of wall. Oh the lumens he was telling us. The definition of definition. The quality of it was undeniable and fifteen hundred he’d bought it for on the continent and a steal at that. Hardly used. Would we consider the fact that it was in the box? We might appraise the surround sound separately, he said.’ Sive’s gestures conduct this small concert in the park, her arms lifting as she describes the columns of aluminium he needed help to carry in. ‘Like a syndicate of skyscrapers, he erected them on the countertop.’
‘Crikey,’ Art says, as if he’s not heard it already.
‘Ostentatious as Austen,’ she adds.
‘Love it,’ Gael says, thrilled to see her mum raconteuring like this and thinks, because of Austen, of Harper.
‘Nothing!’ Ned arrives at the punchline of his internal narrative and showers the party in bread roll confetti. ‘Zilch!’ The twins scream in approval and Soraca is nudged towards the realization that gardening is unrewarding in the short term. Bury things in the ground, they disappear. Throw things in the air, they hit somebody on the head. She bullies Art’s flip-flops from his feet, flings them away, runs to where they land, steps into them (keeping her own shoes on for practicality’s sake), test-runs them around the grass, trips over and over before deciding they’re defective and kicks them lake-ward for the ducklings to use as lilos.
Orchid & the Wasp Page 16
