Wife in the North

by Judith O'Reilly

  The good thing about banning TV: you move straight to the moral high ground. I do not get to go there very often. It is pretty and I like it. You drop small shiny pebbles into conversation: ‘Of course, the children aren’t watching television at the moment. They’re learning Latin.’ In reality, my children would rather lie glazed in front of the television than do almost anything else. If you offered them a golden ticket to a green cheese, pitted moon, they would probably say: ‘Great. When the programme is over.’

  The bad thing about losing TV: they insist on making their own entertainment. If that is how they carried on in the past, I am amazed anybody made it to adolescence. I stumbled out of the bedroom to get the wailing baby. My husband is away again, which always helps to ramp up the morning mayhem. My six-year-old was hefting the baby along the corridor to me, staggering slightly, both of his arms wrapped around her sleep-suited body, unable quite to see over her head. This was kind and brotherly of him. Coincidentally, fishing the baby out of her cot had freed up her mattress. It could join the other three mattresses the boys had carefully laid, end to end, down the very steep staircase in our rented house. He handed her to me and trotted back down the corridor. ‘Do not even think about it,’ I croaked as he shimmied into his nylon sleeping bag. He perched himself at the top of the Cresta Run. Grinned and launched himself into outer space.

  I am so ringing my Gay Best Boyfriend. I do not know how the boys were not splattered against the wooden door at the bottom of the stairs like Warner Brothers cartoon characters. After all my concern about him bashing his head at school, I had this vision of carrying him unconscious, his head swathed in a knob of bandages, into class. The pyjama-clad four-year-old took my hand to comfort me. ‘I don’t go down in the sleeping bag, Mummy,’ he said. ‘I just go in my pyjamas.’

  Thursday, 3 May 2007

  The sound of silence

  The first time the Patient Mother cut me dead as she walked past me in the car park, I thought: ‘She didn’t see me.’ The second time, when I could not move the car fast enough for her, I thought: ‘What’s going on?’ I went to pick up my six-year-old from school. She was standing talking to another mother at the gate. She did not acknowledge me. I crossed the road, my four-year-old’s hand tucked in mine, the six-year-old close by, the baby on my hip. I put them in the car, sucked my teeth and shook my head in regret. I thought: ‘Well, I know why you’re doing it, but I don’t like you doing it. Am I going to let this happen? I don’t think so.’ I strapped them in. ‘Stay there,’ I said. ‘Sit tight. I’ll be one minute.’ I crossed the road again. She was still chatting in the sunshine. ‘Can you call me please?’ I asked. She looked at me. I said: ‘You’ve got my number, haven’t you?’ Knowing that she had. She nodded, said: ‘Yes, OK.’ She smiled briefly and looked away. I turned around went back to the car. I thought: ‘All right. Let’s sort this out. I’ll wait for you to call.’

  Friday, 4 May 2007

  Checking in and checking out

  It strikes me there’s always something. If I am not worrying about one child, I am worrying about another. If I am not worrying about the children, I am worrying about my parents. I knew I had to fly over to Ireland. My mother sounded forlorn and lost in her calls. She said: ‘Your father’s managing very well.’ Then, later: ‘We’re too old for this.’ They were staking out the sickbed of my eighty-six-year-old aunt in a nursing home. Holding her thin hand, saying prayers, doing what you do as someone you love fades out to black.

  My little family was supposed to go away for the bank holiday weekend to a hotel. ‘We will go another weekend,’ I told them. ‘OK? My aunt is ill. I should tell her goodbye and I have to go look after Granny and Grandad.’ My six-year-old, phlegmatic: ‘If she’s your aunt, you should go watch her die.’ My four-year-old, passionate: ‘I’m coming with you.’ The baby: disappointed. In me. Again.

  At the airport, I take comfort in the fact that once I have, literally, shaken off the children, who make a last-ditch bid to smuggle themselves through to Departures, I am a World Traveller. I decide the new laptop I am carrying makes me look like the professional I once was. I might even be on a business trip.

  As I walk through security, a guard who has used his X-ray vision to look into my handbag calls his colleague over. I wonder if he is admiring the shiny laptop. He points to something and a security guard walks back over to the belt. He nods to the bag. I say: ‘Absolutely.’ I want to be helpful and support the fight against world terrorism. Even in my handbag. He takes out and moves aside my laptop, two mobile phones, two notebooks, a black leather diary and a cosmetics bag. He puts in his hand and extracts a jammy knife. I had cut bread in the kitchen, brought the slices and a pot of jam into the car for our drive to the airport an hour away. I jammed bread for all three children before I lost the knife. I twisted and turned in my seat to find it but it had disappeared. It reappeared. In time to have me labelled ‘the madwoman’ at airport security. At Heathrow they would have taken me away to a little room and strip-searched me for the matching fork and spoon. As it was, the guard held up the knife for inspection. He looked at it. Then at me. ‘Raspberry,’ I said. His eyes narrowed.

  I made it to Dublin. Being away from your husband and children is both gutting and empowering. These step-away moments make you remember there was a time you could cope on your own – obtain euros, hire cars, figure out how to reverse them. Particularly empowering is the moment on the motorway when you realize you are driving not so much a sluggish car, as a car with the handbrake on. It had its revenge. Arriving at the lakeside hotel, I shut the door. It locked. It would not unlock. I press the electronic key fob. (What is it with car keys?) Nothing. I had clicked a switch inside the car marked ‘Lock/Unlock’ before I climbed out. I did not realize that meant for ever. I try a different approach. I abandon electronics and look for a lock to put the key in. I prowl the car in case a lock magically appears. It does not.

  I ring my husband. I say: ‘I have a bit of an emergency.’ He says: ‘I’ll ring you back.’ He does not. I have to ring the car-hire company and explain. I try to explain without telling them I clicked the ‘Lock/Unlock’ switch. I have to ring the AA and eventually a nice friendly man with a garage rings me back. The young mechanic he sends shows me how to slip the tail of the key or a screwdriver into a small slit in the lower edge of the black plastic door handle to flip it off and reveal the metal lock underneath. I now have options; as a mechanic. Or a master criminal. The young man says I am not stupid, I just need a new battery for the fob.

  About this time, my parents arrive back at the hotel. My aunt died in the early hours. I am too late to say goodbye.

  Saturday, 5 May 2007

  The removal

  The mourners fill the chapel at the nursing home to thumb their crosses on my aunt’s cold forehead and tell their rosary beads, paying their respects before tomorrow’s funeral. There is no table, chair, rock, stiller than the dead. You look into the coffin at the dead. You know there cannot be a breath, but part of you, the undefeated part, that part, searches for a glimmer. Something in you, looking at the dead, knows you are looking at your future. Your own contained stillness. That makes you look again.

  I have been lucky in my aunts. I enjoyed a goodly collection whom I loved and was loved by in return. I still have a few. This one, however, escaped the net. I hardly knew this Irish aunt. No going back on that. She knew all of me through phone calls and photographs; school, wedding, children. Yet to me, she was hardly more than a name. A chapter or three in my father’s life. A kindness at Christmas sending me Brer Rabbit storybooks past any interest in such things. I travelled to Ireland for my parents. Truth be told. If that does not sound harsh. Which it does, of course. Now that she is dead.

  Even so, it is a shock gazing at this almost stranger as she lies in a ruched white satin and lace-trimmed cover, which drapes under her body, folds blanket back over long legs, then gushes over the coffin edge. I have seen the same satin and lace on the little
girls that fill the hotels of Ireland, celebrating their first and holiest Communion. Little brides of Christ, as is my aunt. Though bigger. This unknown and dead aunt wears a ‘habit’ of blue, a picture of the Virgin Mary emblazoned on her chest, pearly rosary beads wrapped around her bony fingers. It seems so intimate, this communion with the dead. But I do not think she would mind. She, after all, knows me through my father. In any event, she is in no state to complain aloud that I never visited, never called. I stand there, guilty, hearing the accusations in her silence.

  The cottage

  My father wanted to visit the cottage where his sister lived. It is a place out of time. It cannot be today. This is no Celtic tiger. It is a sad and Irish Brigadoon. A time-forgotten land. You drive off the road and turn down a lane bordered with a mossed and tumbled wall. A broken-up yard, once neatly swept and with flowers, now laps at a string of falling-down barns. Their wooden doors, rotten; bolts and locks hanging loose. Poor guardians to emptiness. My father says there were chickens, a horse, cows and pigs. Today, spiders crawl through the black fissures that cut through gaping gable walls, and roof beams hang jagged in the air, held up by cobwebs and history. The loft has been sealed since 1920. My father tells how it was used by men from the IRA as a bolthole. Hearing the lorries of Black and Tan British soldiers rumbling along the lane, his father checked the loft to find weapons and ammunition, which he dumped down the well only moments before the soldiers pulled up in the farmyard.

  Like my aunt, the cottage has been cleared of life but somehow the cottage remembers it. Dark air heavy with acrid peat smoke from an ancient stove. A Givenchy perfume on the table, more glamorous than the peat. A fierce warning shouted by a pot of pills resting on a shelf: ‘Do not stop taking this medicine except on your doctor’s advice.’ Sacred Heart pictures watching. A perpetually flickering electric flame burning, divine and neglected, on the wall. Newspaper pages from 14 August 1964 protect the kitchen table underneath heat-hurt plastic cloths. A calendar with the leaves torn off from January, February and March 1954 lies on an old seat. Another for 2003 hangs on the wall. I wonder, were these the years worth keeping?

  My aunt lived as no one lives now. Her mother dead at thirty-three, left as a child of fourteen to look after five other children and her father. Boiling up pans of potatoes and meal for the pigs, selling eggs to buy flour and sugar, making her own butter and bread. She waved goodbye to the young ones bound for England, and grew old with a brother in a two-bedroom cottage, she in one room, he in the other and a smoky kitchen between. She brought in the cows for her brother to milk and pushed a wheelbarrow with two milk-filled creamery cans up the lane, then brought the empty ones back again. She carried water from a spring to drink and washed only in rainwater. Fifteen years ago, water was piped into the house. Five years ago, the brother died. She did not, and measured out the days left to her in prayer. Visited Dublin just once, England, never. Then cancer. Death. Heaven. My aunt. I never knew her.

  Sunday, 6 May 2007

  Dead and buried

  My father hates to be late for anything. Consequently we arrived an hour before the funeral and sat outside the church in driving rain waiting for the dead. The Irish know how to mourn, face up to death, shake the hand of the hunched bereaved, whisper: ‘I’m sorry for your trouble’. They bow their heads in churched and wooden ranks and pray that their own day will not come too soon. The rosary at the funeral mass is as the sea washing over shingle on a holy shore. Then back out into the driving rain to fill the waiting hole with womankind. Umbrellas covering my mourning father and his living sisters; wood keeping the rain from the face of the sister lost in death.

  After the funeral and a lunch of soup and ham sandwiches, we went back to the cottage. Leaving the family to plunder damp holy pictures and wallflowers, I set off with a local farmer to brave a bull-filled field. One bull can fill a field very fast when you are trying to make it to the other side. I wanted to reach the ‘fairy forth’ and figured I needed a bodyguard. Across Ireland, there are small mounds or hills called fairy forths or ring forths. There is one on the thirty acres left behind by my aunt. One superstition goes that if you walk round it seven times, you get a wish. I like to make wishes.

  The hills were probably lookouts or defence points in ancient times. Folks are wary because the mounds are surrounded by trees but nothing grows on the top of the forth. The superstition goes that you never cut down trees on the forth nor do you plough them under. Sinister tales abound. The man who cut down a tree and was blinded in his eye; the farmer who ploughed it under only for his twenty-two-year-old son to die in a car crash. ‘Why risk it?’ I thought as I walked my seven rounds. ‘I hope the bull doesn’t get me.’ I thought too about my wish. Life is packed so tight, it can be difficult to make a moment to know what to wish for. If you do not make the time to catch the wish, you cannot hope to have it come true. Walking the fairy forth gives you a moment in space and in time to think what it is you want most. You can wait for the fairies to give it to you or you can go get it. It might be quicker to go get it.

  Monday, 7 May 2007

  Poster boys

  I have made it back. I am lucky to be back at all. The general election is on in Ireland. I know that because I nearly joined my aunt in the grave on the drive back to Dublin airport. I was trying to read the election posters that hang off every other lamp post and telegraph pole. Somebody, somewhere, has told Irish politicians that the best way to bring out the vote is to become a major road hazard. It is a retro-chic thing.

  Pink is the colour of my return. I came home to a kitchen table which has been tinted a lovely shade of deep-rose pink. My six-year-old said: ‘You like pink. Don’t you, Mummy?’ I looked at the table, which was once my grandfather’s. It is oak; you can see the grain through its pink glaze. I looked at the carpet in the kitchen of our rented house. Also pink. A ‘no getting away from it’ shade of pink. An ‘I hope you are not expecting to keep your deposit’ shade of pink. ‘We were playing at being master chefs,’ the six-year-old continued. ‘We made bubbles.’ He giggled. He kept watching me.

  The master chefs knew what they were doing. They had tipped red, blue and yellow food dye into a bowl along with honey, syrup (maple), curry powder (madras), rice (brown), pasta (quills), ketchup (Heinz), baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and a bottle of vinegar (malt). We have performed a less ambitious variant on this experiment in the garden as Mummy explained the nature of a chemical reaction and the creation of a gas. At least, she pointed and said: ‘Look.’ During the master chef extravaganza, in the kitchen laboratory, Daddy was upstairs, trying to get the baby to go to sleep. ‘You know that story of the magic porridge pot,’ he said. ‘It was like that. But worse.’

  I was trapped. I encourage scientific experiments. I ban TV. I left Daddy in charge. ‘You do like it, don’t you, Mummy?’ asked my six-year-old again, anxious now. I caught back a sigh. I nodded, slowly. ‘Pink is my very favourite colour.’

  Friday, 11 May 2007

  Totally unfunny

  I am fed up. I am so fed up I do not think I can even be funny about how fed up I am. My ‘home’ is occupied by smiley, dusty men with big boots who have revealed they are four weeks behind schedule. We cannot move back into the cottage when we thought we could. It is not their fault. Two weeks went on slating a roof, which was not in the orginal spec; another two weeks replastering all the walls, when it was hoped they would just need repair. Both roof and walls look better; I feel worse. I want my house back.

  I do not think the funeral helped. Death, I have to say, is a bit of a downer. Not just for the dead. Funerals give you the chance to catch up with those you love and never see, to meet those you like and will never see again. I met a deal of kindness there. Other people’s kindness fills up an empty part of me. Someone who walked me across a field with a bull in it. He made me braver. An old friend of my father who said to me: ‘You’re a lovely-looking girl.’ I am forty-two; I suspect he had cataracts. I am forty-two; I tak
e a compliment where I can get one. There are times when I feel my life has no pause button. Something you could press for a few moments of silent, thinking time to ask: ‘Where am I now?’ I grope around. No button. The clock ticks on. Even this morning, I crawled back to bed after the school run. At least I tried to. My husband was downstairs, Girl Friday was downstairs, but my four-year-old came up to me three times within half an hour, hectoring, demanding, loving.

  Yesterday, the boys had a spaghetti sword fight. Inch-long pieces of (uncooked) spaghetti, shattered over the kitchen floor. At bedtime, the six-year-old water bombed the four-year-old’s bed. What am I going to do when the baby is old enough to join in concert with her brothers’ mayhem? We are outnumbered. In twenty years’ time, I am sure I will laugh at their antics. If I am not dead, I will play ‘remember whens’ with them. I will say: ‘Remember when you flooded the bathroom? Twice in four days.’ Today, today, I want to weep. I feel guilty that I work. Working at home, but still working. If I was more focused on the children, they would stop moving seamlessly from one outrage to the next. If I was more willing to make papier mâché piggy banks and take them on more forays to the beach, they would transform themselves. They would be Granny’s dream boys. I am constantly the bad guy. I take treasures away, rant, drone on, endless and relentless. They must ‘listen … do as you are told’. They carry on, regardless. I am reconstituting the star chart (rewards and praise for good behaviour.) I do not want to draw up a star chart; I want to run away. I am just not sure London is far enough.