Later, I stood at the edge of the crowd and watched my grandmother’s coffin being lowered, with melancholy indifference. The Ada of recent years was an old lady living out her allotted span. She was nice, of course-she was my Gran-but she wasn’t the woman who woke me at four in the morning with the answer to it alclass="underline" the Hegarty conundrum, the reason we were all so fucked up and so very much here.
Lamb Nugent looks at Ada Merriman across the carpet of the Belvedere Hotel, and she looks right back at him, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Fifty-six years later we had tea and sandwiches followed by self-congratulation in her surprisingly little house in Broadstone; the sprawling second generation, the beginnings of the third, my mother weakly enthroned in the good room, her sister complaining in the kitchen about whatever caught her eye. By then, the things that go wrong with people’s faces had gone thoroughly wrong with theirs; Rose’s mouth pulled into a jag of disapproval, my mother’s gaze now watery and vague. Ada might have been good with other people’s children, but she was manifestly terrible with her own. But, ‘Oh she was lovely,’ they said, the neighbours and few remaining friends: two men-I now realise they were gay-who were kind to her, the daughter of a dead actress who used to be on the telly. And didn’t Jimmy O’Dea send a basket of fruit on her birthday? And Frank Duff who was the actual head of the Legion of Mary called to her house every Christmas. Indeed he did: I remember him, it must have been the year we stayed there, arriving like a little spinster Santa Claus with a box of chocolates in a string bag. He handed it to Ada and pressed her forearm, like they had lived too much, each of them, to have anything left to say.
That Christmas morning was as clean and crisp as it always is-my memory will not allow it to rain. But neither will it allow us home to Griffith Way, because this was the year that we were farmed out to Ada, me and Liam and Kitty, and we did not see our mother, not even for Christmas, though our father did arrive with a smug-looking Bea some time in the afternoon.
‘Mammy’s still not herself,’ she said, looking extra pious in her new tank top, a mohair thing in stripes of raspberry and blue. And in the evening, Mr Nugent dropped by with a box of jellied fruit, or jelly impersonating fruit, in semi-circles of orange and yellow and green.
I was still too close to these things to care about them, the year that Ada died. The past was a bore to me, Ada’s death completely tedious, as we passed the sandwiches and suffered the overused air of these little rooms. And, ‘Oh she was terribly nice, your Granny,’ which was true, of course. Which was only true. And they sipped or refused their light sherries, and cleared the kitchen in a riot of grease-proof paper, and were gone, leaving my mother in her chair in the good room, my uxorious father standing beside her, slightly stooped; Auntie Rose upstairs sneaking a last fag out the bathroom window, because she still did not officially smoke, even though her mother was far too dead to care, and besides, she always knew.
It might seem a little indecent, but it was at this point we were sent up to Ada’s bedroom, under instruction from our father to ‘take what you like’; the Hegarty girls enjoying the quietest screaming match we ever had, choked with fury and hating each other in whispers. I ended up with some strings of jet beads, the black ostrich feathers from Ada’s mantelpiece, and a little porcelain hand with a gap in the palm where she kept her rings. Someone else got the rings, of course-I didn’t have a chance. Kitty always needed things more than you did, Bea always deserved them more, while poor Midge-well, Midge always refused everything until she was persuaded to grab the lot. So I left the house with a howl of regret for all I had been denied, though there was nothing there I actually wanted. I had baggsed, on a whim, Ada’s swatches and books of cloth and they seemed such useless objects by the light of day that I pushed them into a bin on the street. I did not know how to want what she had left behind. I wanted out of there, that was all. I wanted a larger life.
Liam missed all of this, because after the summer we went to work in London, he did not come home. Or rather he turned up now and then, and went to a few lectures: I would bump into him in the restaurant or bar, and he always had somewhere else to stay, and after a few wild months he was gone.
It was his final year at college. Most nights, I missed the bus and stayed with Michael Weiss in his Donnybrook bedsit: two high rooms with a partition around the toilet that didn’t reach the ceiling and another around the kitchenette. The door into the bedroom was missing, and there was a massive old wardrobe beached against the wall. I fell asleep between these hunks of darkness-the black wardrobe, and the open block of the door frame, through which my senses swung-the sex still warm and hurting between my thighs, and no rest to be had anywhere.
There were things I told Michael Weiss, that year, that I haven’t told anyone since. It was 1981. Nothing had happened yet, in Ireland-is that a funny thing to say? Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it. I obliged Michael Weiss to have whiskey-the theatrics of it-I obliged him, once, to manhandle me around the room and up and down the street to walk off an, admittedly small, overdose of paracetamol. I gave Michael Weiss a wonderful, hard time and I rode him rotten, when all he wanted to do was prop himself up on one arm, and look at my face, and talk me down.
My image of these nights is of a woman (myself) lying on a bed, with her back arched, and her mouth open, and her hand scrabbling for the wall. No sound.
14
I THINK OF her when I do the dishes. Of course I have a dishwasher, so if I ever have to cry, it is not into the sink, quietly like Ada. The sink was her place for this. Facing out of the back of the house, something about the endless potatoes that needed peeling, or the paltriness of the yard, but, like all women maybe, Ada occasionally had a little sniffle and then plink, plink, a few tears would hit the water in the sink. Like all women Ada sometimes had to wipe her nose with her forearm because her hands were wet. There is nothing surprising about this. Though I have to say, I have a stainless-steel Miele dishwasher. And if I have any crying to do, I do it respectably, in front of the TV.
Life was hard for my grandmother, I know that now. The surprising thing was that, most of the time, she did not cry, but just got on with it instead.
Ada believed in very little. She believed in a clean house. But she did not believe, or ever suggest, that if you ate the pips an apple tree would grow out of your belly button. I don’t think she would believe in my picture of ‘the orphan Ada Merriman’; though it is technically true that her parents died before she was grown. Ada just didn’t do all that stuff. There was something about imagining things, or even remembering them, that she found slightly distasteful-like gossip, only worse. These days, of course, I do little else. And it is all her fault. Because if I look to where my imagining started, it was at Ada’s sink, in Broadstone.
There was a red plastic mesh pad for the rough work, a dense green cloth for the close work and a sponge for finishing up. There was a white cotton cloth for wiping the oilcloth, that was never to be used for wiping the dishes. There was a cloth for the floor, that was never placed on the oilcloth. I had to know all this, because I was the oldest girl in the house. It was my job to take over sink duty, and do the washing-up.