So what does that make me?
I’m fucking paying for it.
A disruption of the natural order, that is what I am.
Meanwhile, the train chunters through England, clicketty-clack, and Bea talks on, sitting on my dead father’s knee with a ribbon in her hair, like the good little girl she has always been, and I look at the hills, trying to grow up, trying to let my father die, trying to let my sister enter her adolescence (never mind menopause). And none of these things is possible. None of them. There is a line on the landscape that refuses to move, it slides backwards instead, and that is where I fix my eye.
‘Good luck in Brighton,’ Bea is saying, and I am yanked by her voice into the bushes whipping past.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Look after Mammy,’ and I close my phone, wondering have I said the words ‘body’ or ‘coffin’ or ‘corpse’ into the nice English silence of the carriage, thinking I would rather eat shit than-what?-angels on horseback with the neighbours, around my brother’s dead body in the old front room.
That fucking carpet.
And not just the neighbours, but the remnants too of Midge-Bea-Ernest-Stevie-Ita-Mossie-Liam-Veronica-Kitty-Alice-and-the-twins-Ivor-and-Jem. The dead, the pious and the office managers (also housewives, ex-journalists, failed actresses, anaesthetists, landscape gardeners, something in IT, and something else in IT). We will look around and say, One less. One less. While the kids run around, stripping the house down to the bare plaster with the sound of their screams; Rebecca playing with her cousin Anuna, who is actually my grand-niece-so don’t ask me how many times that is whatever it is ‘removed’.
Oh! he was desperate-that is what we will say. He was a terrible messer. He was always full of it. He just couldn’t get it together. He had a good heart. He was all there. He was the best of company, we will say. Oh! but the wit. He had a tongue in his head, there’s no doubt about that! But he was very sensitive. It was a sensitivity thing with Liam. You wanted to look after him. He was not able for this world. Not really.
‘Yes,’ I will say. ‘He was a messer.’
I don’t know if it is my earliest, but certainly one of my strongest memories of Liam is of him peeing through a wire fence into a smooth lake of water on the other side.
‘Wheee!’
The pee spattering against the mesh, and then not, while I skated past. Skates! When I remember them now, I think that Ada must have spoiled us, too.
8
WHEN I WAS just eight and Liam was nearly nine, we were sent with our little sister, Kitty, to stay with Ada in Broadstone. This was just a few miles from where we lived-I know that now, of course, but when we were children it might as well have been Timbuctoo. It was a world unto itself; a little enclave of artisan cottages close to the centre of Dublin, that fitted together like Lego.
I think we might also have been sent there when Kitty was just a baby. There is a gap in my mother’s reproducing around then, and I think of these as the dead children years, the ones that marked her and turned her into the creature I later knew.
I don’t know what they called these episodes. Single women had ‘breakdowns’, but in those days married women just had more babies, or no more babies. Mammy got going again, anyway, with Alice in 1967 (what would we have done without Alice!) and right after that came Ivor and Jem. I suppose the unfairness of twins might have provoked her final bout of ‘nerves’. Certainly there were always tranquillisers in there among the Brufen and warfarin on her saucer of pills, and she has been, as long as I have known her, subject to the shakes, and inexplicable difficulties, and sudden weeps.
I sometimes wonder what she was like before we had to go away, or if I knew what was lost when we returned each time-if some ‘Mama’ who danced with the sweeping brush and kissed the baby’s tummy was replaced by this piece of benign human meat, sitting in a room.
Ada’s house was very quiet. It was hard to forget the sound of your breath-going in, faltering out-until you were smothered, slightly, by your own hesitation. It was the quiet of a house that had no children and the rooms were full of things. There were things on mantelpieces and little things on tables, that you might not touch. There were drawers full of things that had not been used for years, or were only used once a year. All of these were separate from each other, and special, in a way that things were never separate at home.
Ada herself existed in a distinct way that my mother could not. She fought with Charlie or flirted with him in the kitchen. My parents never flirted, they did not seem capable of it.
‘Turn the telly up now, so Daddy can hear the news.’
They spoke to each other through their children, like every other couple I knew. And if there were no sweet nothings there were no fights either-though sometimes a grinding tone came into their conversation that might have been a sign of private coldness or disgust. I don’t know.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe they talked to each other all the time, but there was something so intimate about their speech I could not hear it, or retain it-the way it is hard to remember the particular laugh of someone you have loved.
But Ada flirting with Charlie-I do remember that: Ada swaying from cooker to table, and singing as she laid Charlie’s dinner down. And I remember her things-the chest of drawers on the upstairs landing that was full of swatches and scraps of cloth; sample books with pages that you could turn like the soft pages of a book that had no story, only one pattern and then the next. There was a cut-glass vase full of feathers on the mantelpiece in Ada’s bedroom; I remember the creak of her straw hats, and the smell of the felt ones that she kept on the bottom of her wardrobe. All this probably from my prissy little-girl phase, at eight or nine, when I loved to fold and smooth and secrete things. Except for the inside smell of the hats, which I remember from the time when I was three.
We were only occasionally in the house, most of the time we ran around the streets or played around The Basin, an artificial lake whose water had once been used in the making of Irish whiskey. It was this fact that obliged Liam to piss into it, and this is the picture I have of him in my head, a small boy swinging up his behind to sling the arc of his pee up in the air, the urine spattering against the wire or pouring, suddenly easy, through a diamond in the mesh.
There was also the fortress of the bus station at Broadstone to besiege, a dark wall, like a cliff cut out of the hill, with a statue of the Virgin Mary set in at the top. We hung around the gates, and finally, one day, snuck in where the double deckers were parked in rows, dodging and creeping along their long sides, until-it must have been Liam, hardly me-one of us reached up to the door handle, set like a dial in a semicircle beside the door.
Whissh.
You could smell them off the blue leatherette of the seats, the people who sat here and got up again, in order that different people could sit here and get up again, minute after minute, day after day, with their shopping and their ordinary lives. And though we did not slash the seats or graffiti the ceilings, the bus was so stalled and empty as we ran through it, that it made us realise, all three of us, how outside of things we were, farmed out to our granny-who meant nothing to us, of a sudden-and missing our parents, who meant less and less. For a moment, as Liam clacked open the driver’s half door, I had a spiralling sense that he could actually drive the thing, careening down to Constitution Hill, up through Phibsboro, to the place where our rightful family was growing up without us, and further beyond.
And then we were caught. I was upstairs and heard nothing except, in hindsight, Liam and Kitty’s slapping sandals as they ran away, Liam turning at the last to shout at me, which sound I did hear, my own name coming, for some reason, from outside the bus, while inside there was the sound of a man on the stairs, and the sight of his hand on the chrome rail as he hauled himself up, step by step, his torso finally rising out of the stairwell like an expanding balloon. Once he was fully up he stopped, and looked at me. He wore a peaked cap and a standard issue blue shirt, buttoned to bursting over an enormous stomach, the kind of stomach that needed a belt to support it, as a breast might require a bra. He walked this stomach down the aisle at me, as I backed away, until I was tripped into sitting by the back seat of the bus. Then he pushed it at me-and even though I doubt all this can be strictly true, I do remember the surprising tautness and bounce of it, as he jabbed at my face with its leading white button: me wriggling under it finally, past his little legs and the ming of his busman’s gabardine. Then off down the stairs.