I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  They hadn’t told her, Ma and Pa. They’d waited until she’d asked.

  We’re doing a project on family trees, she said to Ma. Her twelfth birthday not long gone, year seven just begun in school. I need the names of everyone in our family, as far back as you can go.

  The names, Ma said – and something different in her voice made Tilly glance up from her folder.

  All the ones you can remember, she said – but instead of giving her an answer, Ma went to the door and called Pa in from the yard.

  I need both sides of the family, Tilly told her, yours and Pa’s. I can get his later.

  Hold on, Ma said, in the same peculiar voice. Wait for Pa.

  And when Pa came in, they told her together.

  We really wanted you, Ma said.

  We did, Pa said.

  We were real happy when we got you.

  That’s true. Real happy.

  You were a real good baby. Slept right through from three weeks, didn’t she?

  She did.

  Hardly never cried. Only cried when you were hungry.

  Tilly had tried to take it in. She wasn’t their child. She didn’t belong to them, she belonged to someone else. Everything shifted a little bit inside her. Everything shuffled around.

  Was I called Tilly when you got me? she asked.

  You were Matilda on your birth cert, Ma replied, but we reckoned you were much too small for that big name, so we changed it to Tilly.

  And what happened to my real parents? she asked, but they couldn’t tell her anything about them.

  We got you from a place in Brisbane, Ma said. Never met your real folks.

  What kind of a place?

  An adoption agency.

  You went all the way to Brisbane to get me? she asked. They never travelled: Pa didn’t even like driving the seven miles into town.

  He shook his head. A lady from the agency brung you to us on the train.

  You were so tiny, Ma said. You weren’t even one week old. I was scared I might let you fall, and you’d break.

  She was, Pa said. Real scared. I remember.

  We were so happy to get you, Ma repeated, because I was told I couldn’t never have children of my own.

  But Robbie is your own child, Tilly said. Robbie was three, and Tilly knew he was Ma’s because she had seen Ma getting fat when he was growing inside her.

  He is, Ma agreed, her face going soft. He’s our little miracle. Ma had been forty-five when Robbie was born.

  And two years after breaking the news of her adoption to Tilly, when Robbie was nearly five and Tilly was fourteen and Ma was three weeks off her fiftieth birthday and Pa was fifty-eight, they’d had another little miracle and called her Jemima.

  They went looking for Tilly when they thought they couldn’t have any of their own, and then they had two of their own.

  I’m adopted, Tilly told her teacher. I don’t know anything about my family tree – and the teacher just nodded and said Tilly could use her adopted family then, it didn’t really matter.

  But it did really matter, of course it really mattered – although it was to take Tilly four more years to do anything with this new knowledge.

  ‘Here we go,’ said the man in the next seat, and Tilly felt the bump of Singapore beneath her.

  ‘What I can’t understand,’ said Gladys, for the third time, ‘is how you could possibly have forgotten me. It’s not like I come to visit every day.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Gavin said again.

  The way he toadied to the woman. You’d think he was after abandoning her in a lion’s den instead of keeping her waiting ten minutes on a pier.

  ‘I mean, it’s not as if you have a proper job. It would be different if you were in an office or someplace like that, and you had to be looking for time off to collect me.’

  ‘Another bit of quiche, anyone?’ Laura enquired, throwing her husband a look. Don’t rise to it, the look said. Three days, the look said, and she’ll be gone.

  But as usual, he missed the look completely. ‘I have a proper job, you know I have. I’m self-employed. I don’t want an office job.’

  His mother waved a dismissive hand. ‘You know what I mean, Gavin, don’t pretend you don’t. I’m just saying you were out and about anyway in your little van. It’s not as if Roone is so big you’d be miles away from the pier.’

  ‘I wasn’t—’

  ‘Quiche?’ Laura thrust the dish practically under her mother-in-law’s nose. He forgot you for a few minutes: get over it. Much as you’d like to believe otherwise, the world doesn’t revolve around you.

  Gladys shook her head. ‘No, thank you, dear. One slice was more than enough. I must pass on my quiche recipe to you: once you try the homemade one you won’t go back.’

  ‘Gladys, I have three children under three,’ Laura replied, knuckles white against the dish. ‘I don’t have time to make quiche.’

  ‘Oh, but really, it’s the easiest thing in the world – and Gavin will tell you how good mine is. He loves it.’

  They both turned towards Gavin, who wisely chose that moment to shove a large portion of shop-bought quiche into his mouth, preventing him from doing much more than aiming an apologetic smile in their general direction.

  ‘Doesn’t seem to mind that one either,’ Laura remarked.

  Gladys decided to change tack. ‘Ben, do you think you could take that wooden spoon away from your sister, dear? I’m getting quite a headache from all that hammering.’

  ‘I’m Seamus,’ Seamus said. She was always mixing up the boys – deliberately, Laura was sure. Anyone could tell them apart if they looked properly. She reached into the playpen and eased the wooden spoon from her youngest child’s grasp, causing Poppy to emit a stuttery squawk of protest. Good girl, she thought. Let rip; you might send Gladys out for a walk – but the traitorous child cast about and found Rabbity, and became distracted, in the inexplicable way of very small children, with his left ear.

  It was only Gladys’s third visit to Roone. The first had been sixteen months previously, for the wedding of her son to the mother of his twin daughters. She hadn’t laid eyes on the girls – her only grandchildren – up to then, having turned down an invitation the summer before to attend their christening, and another to join the family on Roone for the Christmas that followed.

  It’s because we’re not married, Gavin had admitted to Laura, who was secretly delighted not to have to put up with a woman who had disapproved of her from the day they’d met in Dublin.

  Nothing had ever been said – Gladys was too clever for that – but she’d found plenty of other ways to make it quite plain that, as far as she was concerned, Laura was the scarlet woman who’d seen Gavin as an easy touch, who’d thought nothing of saddling him with another man’s children. Laura was the merry widow who’d inveigled poor Gavin into moving across the country with her, far from his doting mother. Laura was the hussy who’d trapped him with more children, forcing him to put a ring on her finger.

  Never mind that when Gavin and Laura met, he hadn’t been a bit put out to hear that she came complete with two sons. On the contrary, Laura had got the impression that the twins were an added attraction. Aisling said she didn’t want children, he’d told Laura, referring to his first wife, who hadn’t lost any time getting pregnant with the man she’d abandoned her marriage for. Gavin had bonded almost instantly with Laura’s boys, delighted with his ready-made family.

  Never mind that once they’d decided to embark on a relationship, Gavin was the one who’d been pushing for the four of them to move from Dublin to Roone, the island where they’d taken separate holidays shortly before they met, the island they’d all grown to love.

  Never mind that Gavin had proposed twice, and been turned down twice, before Laura decided she’d better make an honest man of him, now that he’d given her her second round of twins.

  Ignore all that: Gladys didn’t want to know; she believed what she wanted to believe. Laura gritted her teeth on eac
h of the mercifully few occasions that they met, and did her best to overlook the thinly cloaked barbs, and the subtle but discernible criticism of everything from Laura’s housekeeping – fair dues: a tidy home had never been a priority – to her parenting skills, which Laura considered above reproach.

  Last December, Laura had sent Gavin to Dublin a week before Christmas to spend a few days with his mother. It was that or invite Gladys to Roone for Christmas again – and after coming to their wedding in September, there was a very real danger that this time she might accept. Her strategy worked and Gladys stayed put; but this year they weren’t so lucky. In October Gladys announced that she would be paying them a Christmas visit, and what could they do but agree?

  To Laura’s great relief, it turned out that their visitor wouldn’t be staying for the festivities on the twenty-fifth. I’ve been invited to a friend’s for Christmas dinner, she told them, so I’ll go home on Christmas Eve. I presume the ferry will still be running then?

  They assured her that it would: Leo Considine, Roone’s long-serving ferry operator, always worked a full day on the twenty-fourth to ensure that everyone got home for Christmas. Even if that hadn’t been the case, Laura would happily have paid him double time to make a special trip. Come hell or high water, Gladys would be sent packing on Christmas Eve – and Laura had quietly invited a gathering of neighbours around to the house that same evening, in celebration of the event.

  Who cared that she had a million and one things still to do? The artificial Christmas tree standing in the sitting room but as yet unadorned, not a single present wrapped, the cake she’d chanced making still without icing, the crackers not bought, the decorations not up. Who cared that the very thought of hosting a party made her weary? She needed a party, she’d find the energy, and it would be good to have a few friends around. It might take her mind off things for a while.

  She rose from the table now and lifted Poppy from the playpen. ‘Time for us ladies to have our naps,’ she said. ‘Gavin, you’ll manage for an hour or so?’

  ‘Course I will.’

  ‘Gladys, don’t dream of doing the washing-up: you’re the visitor.’

  ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ her mother-in-law replied, as Laura knew she would: any excuse to contradict her. It was a tiny victory: she found scant comfort in it. What did a few plates and cups matter, when everything else was such a shambles?

  She took her leave of them, feeling the familiar heaviness in her legs as she trudged upstairs with her load. Would she ever feel normal again? Would she ever get back to where she’d been before the world as she knew it had been yanked off its axis last March?

  Jack had said it would take time. He’d sat her down in his surgery and confirmed her fears as gently as he could. She’d gone to him in confidence, knowing that Gavin would be no help to her if the news was bad – he was hopeless in a crisis.

  No B&B for you this year, Jack said. It’ll be challenging enough for you to cope with everything else – everything else being one husband, four children, thirty-four hens, a donkey, a pot-bellied pig, two miniature goats and a dog, not to mention whatever treatment would be needed to make breast cancer go away.

  Oh, and a fifth baby due in early August, the pregnancy she’d been pretty sure of officially confirmed by Jack on the same day. Some day that had been.

  Predictably, Gavin cried when she went home and told him. Well, first he laughed.

  I’m pregnant, she said – start with the good stuff – and he caught her up and spun her around, over the moon at the news. Thrilled at the prospect of becoming a father again. Born to be a dad, Gavin Connolly was.

  One or two? he asked, and Laura told him just one this time.

  There’s more, she said then, seeing his happiness drain away as she told him the rest of it.

  No, he said, his face collapsing. No, he repeated, his eyes filling and overflowing, his chin trembling. Not cancer, he said, gathering her towards him again, great heaving sobs making any more words impossible as he wept into her hair. Crying the way he always cried, as messily and unselfconsciously as a child, shaking and shuddering against her.

  It’s OK, she told him. We’ll get through this. Offering what comfort she could, as if he was the one who’d been given the diagnosis. Of the two of them she’d always been the strong one: she was the one who’d survived when her first husband Aaron had taken his life a week before his twin boys were born. She’d cried a billion tears after him but she’d survived, and battling against the grief that attacked at every turn had made her stronger.

  We’ll cope, she told Gavin – because they had to cope. Leaving five children without a mother was simply not an option. But God, the thought of what lay ahead was terrifying.

  A mastectomy, as soon as Jack could arrange it. Too late for a lumpectomy, he said, the swelling under her arm ignored by her for too long. Chemotherapy to follow, however much would be needed. Weeks, maybe months of treatment to be endured, running parallel with the usual ups and downs of pregnancy. The prospect appalled her beyond measure.

  The surgery was done quickly, at least. Thanks to the premium health insurance policy her father paid for – on the insistence of her stepmother, Susan – Laura was on the road to Cork Hospital less than a fortnight after her diagnosis, a road that was to become wearyingly familiar to her.

  According to her oncologist, the operation was a success. Looks like we got it all, he said, a big smile on his overfed face. I’m very pleased with your X-rays, he said, as if he expected her to pin a medal on him. She couldn’t look at the mess they’d left behind, couldn’t think about it without wanting to dig a hole and bury what was left of her in it.

  Cop yourself on, she told herself, you’re one of the lucky ones. Look at all those who don’t come through it. Look at Francie Keating, dead last Christmas from a brain tumour, leaving three young children without a father. Count your blessings, stay strong. And for the sake of her four children, and the fifth that was waiting to be born, she did the best she could, but the effort almost killed her.

  Thank God for her stepmother, Susan, who arrived from Dublin the day Laura came home from the hospital, bringing chocolates and perfume and books. She stayed with them for ten days, fielding visitors, baking Rice Krispie buns with the children, drinking green tea with Laura after everyone else was in bed.

  You’ll get through this, she said, the night before she returned to Dublin. Half past one in the morning, the house still and silent, the red coals in the fireplace their only light. You’ll fight it and you’ll win.

  Not everyone wins, Laura replied. What if I don’t? Susan the only person in the world she could have this conversation with: Gavin would crumble, Nell would probably cry too.

  You will, Susan replied calmly. Of course you’ll win, you’re far too strong not to. Lots of people beat that bastard, and you’ll be one of them. Her voice full of certainty, every word like balm.

  You needn’t think you’re going to land me with five kids, she went on. Bad enough making me a grandmother at thirty without expecting me to raise them too – which brought the first smile to Laura’s face in days. It was a watery, shaky effort, but it was a smile.

  Of course there was no danger of Susan being landed with the children. They’d still have their father – who would surely pack them up and bring them straight to his mother in Dublin, and Laura couldn’t bear the thought of them being raised by Gladys. But what could she do? Gavin was their father: the decision would be up to him.

  Not that any decision would be needed, of course, because Laura was going nowhere.

  When she left, Susan promised to come back as soon as the chemo started. I’m four hours away, she said, that’s all.

  Gladys had offered to come too, of course, when they’d broken the news to her. We don’t need her, Laura told Gavin. We have plenty of help. Susan is coming.

  I’ll tell her that, he said – but Gladys was having none of it. She bided her time until Susan had left, and then descend
ed on them, bringing with her a crocheted bed jacket two sizes too big for Laura, a stack of colouring books for the children and several loaves of her intimidatingly wholesome brown bread.

  And to give the woman her due, she rose magnificently to the occasion. She took possession of the kitchen, rearranging shelves and restocking the fridge with her own preferences. She managed to get the children to eat porridge and brown bread for breakfast – it was only weeks later that Gavin confessed he’d bribed them into it – and for dinner she served up the dishes that the various women of Roone were dropping in each day.

  In a whole week she managed to upset only one person, when she remarked to Ita Fennessy – within earshot of Gavin – that the laundry Ita was collecting and dropping back for Laura could do with a bit of conditioner in the final rinse. It makes the towels softer, she said, seeming oblivious to Ita’s offended silence. The day she left, Laura served the remains of her bread to Caesar, who accepted it without complaint. Then again, pot-bellied pigs ate everything.

  The chemotherapy was horribly sickening but she endured it, got through it, like she’d said she would. She pasted on a smile when the kids were around, and saved her rage and her tears for when they were out of earshot. Susan was a regular visitor, ferrying Laura to and from the hospital, tucking her into bed when they got home, keeping the children at bay until Laura felt human again.

  In the middle of it all Poppy was born, blessedly healthy, protected by the placenta from the poison they were pumping into her mother – and finally, at the end of September, her second round of chemo came to an end and Laura was deemed well again.

  But Lord, the fight had sucked every ounce of energy from her – she who had been ferociously energetic before. Now, even with her afternoon nap, she felt like a zombie most of the time. And was it really over? Had they really cut it all out? And even if they had, what was to stop it coming back? It had invaded her body once: what if it decided to pay another visit?