‘Oh oh oh,’ she cried, and she hit her weak old fist on to the tabletop.
It was not ten o’clock. Rosaleen had no idea what the proper time was and the card on the table was spoilt. They were all gone from her, there was no one to help. ‘We will be seeing you, I hope, this year? ‘Typical of Hanna to make her mar the thing, she was always an accident-on-purpose sort of child. Hanna lived in mess, her life was festooned in it; her side of the bedroom was like a dirty protest, Constance said once, and she was right. The girl was a constant turbulence, she was always weeping and storming off. Constance said maybe it was pre-menstrual but Rosaleen said that child was pre-menstrual her entire life, she was pre-menstrual from the day she was born. Hanna Madigan, who seemed to require a surname at all times, because she would not do a single thing she was told.
Get in here, at once, Hanna Madigan.
No she would not start a new card for her, she had not the energy. What time was it anyway? Rosaleen looked to the clock and then to the darkness outside. She was not even hungry. Her whole life on a diet and now there was no need.
Rosaleen caught the sound of mischief upstairs and looked to the ceiling. But there were no children up there any more, she had chased them all away.
‘To Dessie and Constance, Donal, Rory and.’
Rory was her pet. The clearness of him. She would remember the little girl’s name in a minute. A little strap of a thing, with blotched red cheeks and orange, tinker’s hair. Rosaleen had no problem remembering the child’s name, but her heart failed her suddenly. Something was wrong. She felt a shadow fall through her — her blood pressure, perhaps — some shift in her internal weather.
‘Oh,’ she said again, and slapped her hand on to the tabletop, then she checked the tremor, silenced by the blow. As soon as she moved, it started again. There were days she would shake the milk out of the jug. She knew a man called Delahanty, who was fine except for a little trouble with the buttons on his shirt. Less and less he was able to do them, and one day not at all. And that was how the Parkinson’s came to him, he said. The buttons were the sign.
Rosaleen left her hand palm down on the tabletop, where it buzzed a little and came to rest. Something was wrong. The turf subsided behind the metal door of the range in a sigh of ash and Rosaleen would get up to put more turf on, if she only knew what time it was. She could go to bed, but the hall was cold and the electric blanket was on a timer. Her grandson, Rory, had set it up for her. If she went upstairs, it might be toasty. Or it might not be turned on, not for hours yet.
The hall was painted autumn yellow, and under the yellow was wallpaper, with little posies of flowers, their leaves in gilt. If she opened the door she would see it now.
But she could not open the door. Because who knew what was on the other side?
Rosaleen felt the same swooping feeling and her feet were numb, somehow, under the table. She pulled a comic, small face at her reflection in the window — if her feet were dead, then surely the rest of her could not be far behind — but it was a mistake to make a joke of it and Rosaleen lost all control as she lunged for the phone. She dropped it on the tabletop, then she picked it up again and stabbed the fast-dial with her thumb, and held it to her ear, listening to the clatter of her heart. The phone at the other end started to ring, but no one answered. Rosaleen could hear it ringing, not just in her ear, but also nearby, somehow. It was real. The thing she had imagined was really happening. It was out in the hall.
Constance was coming in the front door. The ringing stopped.
‘Hello!’ Rosaleen said — into her handset or into the hall, she didn’t know which.
Was that it? Was that the thing that was bothering her? The wrong thing?
‘Hello!’
She had expected Constance, maybe, and Constance had not come. Constance was late.
‘Mammy?’
Where she got the ‘Mammy’ from, Rosaleen did not know. When her children grew out of ‘Mama’, they had failed to grow into anything else.
‘Call me Rosaleen,’ she used to say. Until she realised that no one ever did, or would.
‘In the kitchen!’ she called.
Her grandchildren called her ‘Gran’, a word which made her skin crawl. And they called Constance ‘Mum’, which was worse, for being British as well as whiny: ‘Mu-um.’
O my Dark Rosaleen!
Do not sigh, do not weep!
‘Mammy! How are you?’
Constance was in through the kitchen door now, all girth and bustle. She had a couple of plastic bags she put down on the table. Even her bags were loud.
‘I hope they’re not for me,’ said Rosaleen.
‘Just a few bits,’ said Constance. ‘I was in Ennis.’
‘Was that you on the phone?’ said Rosaleen.
‘Me?’ Constance gave her a sharp look.
‘What time is it anyway?’ said Rosaleen, who could not keep the anger out of her voice, or the upset. Constance did not answer. She picked up the house phone from the table and made it beep, several times, checking something.
‘You got your cards?’ she said.
‘Oh,’ said Rosaleen.
‘They’re not too plain?’
‘Where did you get them?’ said Rosaleen.
‘I kept the Santa ones for our house,’ said Constance who smiled and turned away from her, as though there was someone in the doorway — a child, perhaps — but there was no child there.
‘How’s my pal?’ said Rosaleen.
‘He’s good,’ said Constance. Rosaleen wanted to embrace the child that wasn’t in the doorway. She put her hand out to grip the chair.
‘How’s Rory?’
‘Good, good,’ said Constance, and then, with a deliberate sigh, ‘Actually, Mammy, he’s in his room pretending to study, and he’s on the internet. Twenty-four hours a day. I can’t get him off it.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘If it’s not on the laptop it’s the phone. So I take away the phone and you would not believe it. The temper.’
‘Rory?’ said Rosaleen.
‘He’s nineteen. I can’t be taking away his phone.’
‘And could you not.’ Rosaleen couldn’t think what Constance might do. There was discussion once about his ‘credit’.
‘Could you not take away his credit?’
Constance looked at her.
‘You know, I might,’ she said.
‘Go and give your granny a hug,’ that’s what she used to say. And Rory would walk over, very simply, and put his arms around Rosaleen, and lay the side of his head against her heart.
‘Listen,’ said Constance. ‘I won’t stay. Are you all right?’
‘Of course I am all right.’
‘Put the telly on,’ said Constance, and she had the remote already in her hand. And on the telly came. ‘All right?’
Rosaleen hated the telly. People talked such rubbish.
‘For the news,’ said Constance.
The sound came on to Angelus bells, and now Rosaleen heard them outside too, coming from the church. It was six o’clock.
‘It’s very dark,’ she said.
‘Oh, November,’ said Constance. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll come up to Aughavanna tomorrow, for your tea. All right?’
She had opened the door of the kitchen and was already moving through it, and there was the hall beyond her, painted a Georgian turquoise that Rosaleen always considered a mistake. Too acidic. Rosaleen was pulled after her daughter as she turned on the lights, and opened the door to the wine-coloured study, where Rosaleen slept now, because the room was small and easy to heat — an electric radiator, an electric blanket on a timer that only Rory knew how to control, a smoke alarm. And, tucked in under the stairs, a shining, white room with sink and toilet, all tiled and watertight, like the inside of an egg.