by Hazel Hayes
I noticed myself rubbing the spot on my finger where the splinter had been, convinced there was still something in there, just under the skin. This had become a bit of a habit lately, whenever I was worried. When Theo spoke again it was as though he was trying to resolve a particularly complex riddle.
‘It isn’t normal to be afraid that your own mother might come round,’ he said, ‘is it?’
‘No, honey, it’s not,’ I said.
Another few moments passed before he spoke again.
‘We need to move, don’t we?’
I nodded.
It took us almost two months to find a new apartment. And it’s not perfect, but it’s ours.
Financially, we’re worse off than before; what we saved in rent this past year we’ve all but lost on heating bills over the winter, and Jocelyn is refusing to pay us back what we spent fixing up the house because we left before our imaginary lease was up. She also claims that a lot of work needs to be done putting it back the way it was. We offered to do it ourselves, but she refused. We can’t be trusted, she says.
Our sofa was destroyed by a leak in the garage roof, so we’ve had to fork out for a new one. We got it in the January sales, but still, it wasn’t cheap. It’s leather, like Theo wanted. So with all that, plus the time we’ve taken off work to find a new place and move again, I reckon we’re about two grand down.
It’s taken a toll on Theo, that’s not hard to see; he doesn’t visit Jocelyn much any more and when she calls, crying down the phone like she used to, it still takes him days to recover. It’s getting harder and harder for me to scoop all the problems back out.
He’s been working longer hours and finding more ways to distract himself; running mostly, which I suppose is healthy, but it means we see each other less. Hopefully he’ll get through this patch soon and he won’t need to keep himself so busy all the time. And hopefully I’ll find more ways to keep myself busy, because right now I’m a little bit bored.
Writing has been going well – stories are pouring out of me so fast that I can’t keep up and I find myself waking at all hours to jot ideas down. Sometimes it gets light outside before I realise I’m still writing, and it’s jarring for my mind to return to the real world having spent so long in the one it just created. I think I’m happier in there, most of the time.
Maya and Darren just moved in together so I’ve not seen much of her lately. I understand; I was the same when Theo and I got our first place here. I think about that place a lot, how we were then, how we are now, and even though on the surface nothing has changed, I can feel something just beneath it, niggling away at us.
Canadian Geese
I am my mother’s daughter. For better or for worse. I gravitate towards water when I’m sad. I’m always cold (except when I’m too warm). I can’t drink milk from a cup, or eat soup with a dessert spoon. Driving feels like freedom. Pink suits me. Ice cream gives me indigestion. I bruise easily. I never take the first room I’m offered in a hotel. And I can’t get into an unmade bed. Last time Theo came to visit, he found me making the bed at midnight and asked why I was bothering to make it only to mess it up again. I stood there with the duvet in my hands, and all I could say was, ‘I have to.’ I told my mother the next day and she said, ‘You get that from me.’
I’m also riddled with anxiety, plagued by depression, and occasionally I find great comfort in the thought of not existing. Do I get that from her too?
She drove down to the beach once with a bottle of brandy, a box of pills, and no intention of coming home. I was seven years old at the time. She’d left me back at the house with my father, sister and brother.
I think about that day a lot. I wonder where she parked, what her hair looked like, whether she was crying. I walk through the story in my head, and see it playing out from different angles: sometimes from the water’s edge, sometimes from the dunes behind the car, sometimes from the perspective of a bird flying overhead. Occasionally I’m sitting in the back seat, but I can only watch the scene unfold, I can never change it.
In the end, the thought of leaving her children at the mercy of her tyrannical husband – the very reason she wanted to kill herself in the first place – was enough to make her change her mind. And so, my mother drank some brandy and drove herself home, and a year later she filed a restraining order against him.
I have driven down to the beach today – the same beach my mother drove to all those years ago – and parked my car on the sand. The grey-green sea spreads out in front of me, its soft waves undulating like creases in some endless linen skirt, and here I am, like a scared child clinging to its hem.
In the distance I can see the smokestacks, standing like sentinels over Dublin Bay. Just above them, a flock of Canada geese take flight, little brown Ms against an overcast sky, all turning and diving in unison, unfaltering in their formation. I watch them for a while, and marvel at how they know … they just know.
I grew up near the sea. A ten-minute drive to the beach, straight down the Kilbarrack Road to the coast. To my left Howth Head, and to my right Bull Island, and the causeway where I learned to drive in my little red Toyota. I’ve taken her out today for one last spin.
A young girl from Sutton is buying my car from me. Niamh is her name. She came by last week and stood in my driveway with her hands shoved deep into her pockets, regarding the car as though it were some huge, unpredictable beast.
‘Do you know much about cars?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m starting lessons next week.’
I nodded.
‘My dad says Toyotas are safe though, so …’ She trailed off, tucking a loose string of ginger hair behind one ear.
‘Would you like to sit in it?’
She nodded and climbed with forced confidence into the driver’s seat, like a child trying on her mother’s high heels. I sat beside her in the passenger seat and couldn’t help but smile at the sight of this young girl shifting uneasily behind the wheel, her pale, bony hands folded in her lap, too afraid to touch anything.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t bite.’
Niamh smiled and placed her hands delicately on top of the steering wheel.
‘Have you had any problems?’ she asked.
‘Plenty,’ I said, ‘but they weren’t the car’s fault.’
That got a laugh out of her. She relaxed a little and started fidgeting with the rear-view mirror, looking at herself, dragging a finger across one freckled cheek.
‘Why are you selling it? Sorry. Do you mind me asking that?’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I’m moving to London next week.’
‘Oh my God,’ she said, perking up. ‘So jealous. I want to move there after I finish school but my dad says I need to get my degree here first. I think he’s buying me a car to bribe me into staying.’
‘Fair deal, though,’ I said, smiling. She smiled back.
‘What are you going to study?’ I asked.
‘Nursing in DCU.’
‘I went to DCU,’ I said.
‘No way!’
She absentmindedly flicked the indicator up and down. ‘That’s gas. Did you like it there? All my friends are going to UCD. I’m gonna be such a loner.’
‘You’ll be grand,’ I said. ‘I made great friends there’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
Niamh decided to buy the car without even test-driving it. I think she mostly liked the colour. And the chat. I suggested she send her dad round to check it out just in case, and so the next day Colm, an unassuming man with thinning hair and a flat pink face, arrived on my doorstep. Colm stood with his hands in his pockets, just as Niamh had, and as he spoke he bent forwards slightly, as though in a constant state of apology.
We drove around the block a few times, and made idle conversation about Niamh, the only thing we had in common. There was no mention of Niamh’s mother, so I assumed it was just the two of them. No wonder he was so keen for her to stay.
‘Niamh tells me you’re off to the Big Smoke,’ said Colm, as he pulled my car up outside my house.
‘I am indeed.’
‘Fair play to ya,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to go where the work is.’
I’m not going for work – I have a great job here, in fact – but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to tell this man that I’m actually chasing a boy all the way to London.
‘I lived there meself,’ he went on, ‘in the eighties. Before the boom.’
‘Did you like it there?’ I asked.
‘I did.’
‘But you came back, though.’
‘I missed the horizon,’ he said, without a hint of irony or embarrassment, and my breath caught in my throat.
I had never really thought about the horizon before. It was always just there.
I stare out now through my rain-spattered windshield at that sharp, bluish line beyond which the whole world might simply fall away, and I imagine a life where buildings block my view in all directions, a life where the horizon isn’t just down the road. Sitting here now, that life feels almost inconceivable.
I roll down my windows and a gust of delicious salt air rushes through. Instinctively I suck it deep into my lungs, wishing I could hold my breath and take it with me. Nearby the waves wash steadily in and out, and I close my eyes to savour the sound of their endless ebb and flow.
Suddenly I’m reminded of a dream I had last night; I was trying to collect the ocean in jars. I ran the length of the shoreline with a jar in one hand and a lid in the other, scooping and twisting, scooping and twisting. Piling them high on the sand. But there weren’t enough jars.
I woke from this dream to the sound of my mother’s voice floating through my window with the morning light. Without even looking, I could see her propped against the pillar at the end of our garden, chatting to the next-door neighbour. Her words were muffled, but the cadence of each sentence was familiar to the point of predictability, like some fond old melody. I rolled onto my side and dozed a while, till she came and knocked on my bedroom door.
‘Come on now,’ she said, ‘you can’t sleep all day.’
‘Is that a challenge?’ I mumbled into my pillow.
She smiled and shook her head as she placed a cup of tea on my bedside table – sliding a coaster underneath it first – then, like clockwork, she threw back my curtains, announced what a beautiful day it was and listed all the things she needed to get done. Then she exited the room, intentionally leaving my door wide open behind her.
Neither of us mentioned the significance of the day – my last full day in Ireland – nor did we acknowledge the two huge suitcases standing just outside my bedroom door; harbingers of my impending departure. As she shuffled past them on her way out, I thought of the night my father left; the half-packed cardboard boxes stacked outside my door and how my mother had squeezed past them after putting me to bed.
In the morning, my father was gone and so were the boxes, along with the TV, the toaster and his extensive record collection, which had filled a massive cabinet in the living room. Pale rectangles appeared on every wall – replacing framed pictures that had hung there – and in the garden an oily stain marked the spot where his car had been. Half the house was missing. We spent weeks reaching for things only to find them gone: the iron, the alarm clock, the first-aid kit. Who takes a first-aid kit?
I’m not sure what I expected to happen when he left. Maybe years of reading fairy tales had convinced me that the nightmare would end once the monster was gone. But that’s not how it was. In my father’s absence, certain fear was replaced by uncertain calm, and a quiet, creeping dread descended on the house. We waded cautiously into our newfound freedom, hesitant to accept that we were in fact safe and he was in fact gone. It was as though we had collectively lost sight of a spider.
The tide is coming in now, licking at a patch of sand just in front of my car. I start the engine, reverse a few feet, and switch the engine off again, buying myself a little more time.
Nightfall has settled on the edge of the horizon, like ink sinking to the bottom of a glass, and a deep, violet line stretches endlessly in both directions. All the picnickers and dog walkers have dispersed, and a swarm of seagulls have gathered on the sand, noisily scavenging for scraps. Again I close my eyes and try to savour the sound – the raucousness is oddly relaxing – but the water inches inexorably closer and eventually I have no choice but to take a few more gulps of precious sea air, roll up my windows, and make my way slowly back towards the road.
*
My phone rings as I reach the causeway. It’s my sister, Una. When I answer, her voice comes booming through the speakers in my car.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘are you all set?’
‘I think so,’ I say, taking a right turn onto the coast road towards home.
‘Are you driving?’ She must be able to hear the indicator ticking in the background.
‘I was just down the beach.
‘Ah, God.’ Una drags each word out sympathetically. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah,’ is all I can say. I feel tears gather in the edges of my eyes.
‘You’ll miss it,’ she says.
‘I will.’
A brief pause. We both inhale and exhale together.
‘How’s Mam holding up?’ she asks, and I laugh pointedly.
‘Sorry. Stupid question,’ she admits.
‘We haven’t actually spoken about it, obviously, she just keeps dropping these massive emotional bombshells and expecting me to know what to do with them.’
‘Mam? Really? That’s not like her at all,’ says Una dryly.
‘It’s absolutely infuriating!’ I blurt. ‘She keeps staring wistfully into the distance and announcing her feelings. Everything is “the last this” or “the last that”. You’d swear I was dying or something. I was leaving the house today and she just stood there, all hunched and sad, watching me put on my coat. “One last drive down the beach,” she said, to the non-existent fourth wall, “before she leaves for ever.” I swear to God, Una, she actually referred to me in the third person! It’s like being followed around by some miserable fucking narrator whose job it is to remind me of all the shit I’m trying not to think about. You’d think she was the one uprooting her whole bloody life.’
The sound of Una guffawing on the other end of the line makes my anger dissipate, leaving only disgruntled amusement in its wake. This is how we put up with it, Una and I – we turn it into comedy. We do little routines just for one another. Because if you can make yourself laugh then maybe you won’t cry.
Una is the eldest of three kids, and thirteen years older than me. I’m ‘the baby’, as they all still insist on calling me. Una was already grown up and living in an apartment of her own when our dad left, but when Mam broke down she decided to move back in for a while to help look after me and my brother.
I don’t remember the details of the breakdown, only that my mother stayed in bed with the curtains drawn for what felt like a very long time. She stopped working, which to my child’s mind was the biggest indicator that something was wrong. She ran an interior design company that she built herself from the ground up – her fourth baby, we called it – and over the years I’d watched her drag herself out of bed and go to work despite colds, the flu, heartbreak and even a hysterectomy. But this time she just couldn’t bring herself to care, and my aunt had to step in to keep the business afloat.
From what I could tell, she stopped eating too. Trays of food were delivered to her room and then taken away hours later with plates still practically full. I saw her getting undressed one evening through a crack in her bedroom door, and was horrified by the sight of her. I remember the sharp protrusion of hipbones, and the roll of ribs under her skin. Una caught me looking, and she quickly closed the door over. Later that night she told me Mam was sick but that she would be better soon.
This wasn’t a lie; Una knew all she needed was time, and several months later, fu
elled by fear and a stolid sense of determination, my mother managed a resurrection of sorts. She teetered back into the world, returning to work, making new friends and resuming her motherly duties. She also took up tennis and changed her entire wardrobe. The word ‘thriving’ was thrown about a lot.
To this day, I’m not quite sure how she did it. If I asked her now, she would tell me that ‘she had to’.
Una stayed with us for two more years, occupying a role somewhere between a sister and a surrogate mother. She slept in my room, and every night we’d chat about our days while she took off her makeup and got ready for bed. Some nights we’d spoon until one or both of us fell asleep – she was the big spoon and I was the little spoon, which seems odd to me now that I’m taller than Una – then in the morning, she’d get up and leave for work before my alarm even went off.
I was first home from school in the afternoon, followed closely by my brother Donal, who worked in the local library. He watched Star Trek with me every day at 5 p.m., and we took it in turns to make tea during the ad breaks. After years of practice we could time each trip to the kitchen with exact accuracy.
In the evenings, Donal helped me with my homework. I was oddly meticulous about schoolwork – desperate to be right, to be special, to be praised – and I enjoyed every subject bar maths, which I hated as a child because I saw no everyday application for things like differentiation. I didn’t know or care what x equalled, and I resented being asked to figure it out. My teachers struggled with my need to know the why of things. There is no why in maths, they’d tell me, things just are the way they are.
Biology, on the other hand, made sense. Everything could be explained by evolutionary or environmental factors. Even the organs we no longer need, even bad things like death, disease and mental disorders, they all have a practical, reasonable why if you go back far enough.
