TONGUE-POINT CLINGING TO HER upper lip, Molly backs carefully into her driveway. She likes to park with the car’s nose facing out. She takes her time. No rush. Checking all the mirrors, though it strains her neck to turn like this; a crunch like ground glass between the tendons.
Pleased with her parking, she turns off the engine, lets down a breath with the sigh of the car, and sits for a moment.
Tired today.
She takes her headscarf from the passenger seat, smooths it into a triangle along its crease, loops it over her head and ties it under her chin. Then she hauls her big handbag onto her lap and feels for her housekeys. The one for the front door has a bit of blue yarn wound around the top. It was Dinny’s idea to do that. No more fussing to find the right key. She points it snugly between thumb and forefinger, then zips her handbag closed and opens the car door, easing herself around carefully, slowly – no rush – shuffling on her behind.
The neighbours had a dog that used to wipe its bottom on the carpet, pulling itself along. Disgusting.
She steps down from the car – one foot, then the other. No rush. Her home: the friendly diamonds of the leaded windowpanes, the shaggy pelt of ivy over its brick face. Does she have everything? Her bag and her key and her coat hanging neatly over her forearm. Oh, the messages – there’s a whole bootful to take in, meat and vegetables and the whole lot.
Next door’s car is there, flashy wasp of a thing. Molly saw it as she pulled in. They might notice her and come out to help…
Queer enough fish, the new neighbours – never a peep out of the man, and the wife a working mother. An airs-and-graces sort of a name, long, with roundy letters in it… Decent girl, but a miserable job she’s done on that house – tearing down the honeysuckle and knocking the cladding off the front.
Very quick it happened, the whole thing. It was Freya spotted it one morning through the upstairs window. ‘Grandma, look the Breretons’ has sold!’ Molly couldn’t see from there, but just the thought of it made her gasp as though something had stung her… She went down to look and there it was – ‘SOLD’ pasted over the ‘For Sale’ sign. And the very next morning in comes a skip – huge clang of a thing – emergency yellow and cold pewter where the paint was lifted off it – plonked there just like that with a corner of it jamming into the flower beds. Molly didn’t have to be snooping to know how those poor daffodils had their stalks crushed and the heads snapped off, and them just ready to open. Last spring it was, was it? Just as the apple blossoms were pearling. Weeks and weeks that skip sat there, filling up with all the things the new people thought useless – floral-papered plasterboard, an avocado-green handsink and slices of that cladding; stone humps bulging from the level cement like the backs of bathing hippos. The scene made Molly think of faraway places where there are earthquakes.
But she’s alright, the new girl next door, lovely manners, helping Molly in with the shopping sometimes, and always asking before she has the partition hedge pruned. A soft-spoken girl, but loud makeup on always, a thin neck and mumpsy cheeks – tapping at the door all meek, like maybe there could be a baby sleeping. ‘Mrs Kearney, I wonder would you mind if Gavin gave the hedge a little trim?’ Had Molly been a bit gruff that time, opening the door with a bull face on her? To make up for it, she said, ‘Oh, you can call me Molly,’ but the girl still calls her ‘Mrs Kearney’. Molly appreciates that.
The thing is, the Breretons were Molly’s neighbours nearly fifty years. There was a time, when the children were small, that she and Jackie Brereton were a great help to one another. They had their tea together every morning, nearly. So it wasn’t nice to watch her get that way – stooped and shaky suddenly. It was a miserable thing, and cruel. Pain twisting up her lovely open face, and she nearly seven years younger than Molly. And then Mr Brereton had a fall and their son moved the both of them off to a ‘granny flat’ out the back of his house away in Rathgar or somewhere. A big sly article, the son. A bit of a galoot, Molly always thought. ‘They’re packing us away in the garage to die,’ – that’s what Jackie said before she left. She chuckled then, but it was like a sendup of her usual big laugh, a drowning-inside sound that Molly never thought she’d hear from the likes of Jackie Brereton. It was a sad cup of tea they had that time. The last time Molly saw her alive, was it? She was hardly cold when the ‘For Sale’ sign went up, then the red banner saying ‘SOLD’ across it, the skip and the smashed daffodil buds, and poor Mr Brereton still in shock, hardly a notion what was happening. Ugly business. Illness, death, property.
Molly takes a good breath of the pollen-thick outdoors. She leans on the car while she heaves the driver’s door shut. Her knees hurt but they hold her there a minute – one hand flat on the glossy, warm metal, her bag stuffed under her arm, her key ready in her hand – just a minute so she can gather herself up. Tired today. All that cooking this morning. Oh, she’s glad though, the children will have some good fatty broth for their supper. Cara exaggerates with all her healthy things sometimes; wheat-free this and sugar-free that. No cups of tea for the children either, on account of the caffeine. Poor chicklings.
Well, what a day – the sun warming the brick drive to a lovely rust, the air soft, a bright, open day with a sky high and aloof. Molly moves around to the boot. Nice weather for the children to play in the garden. Little Megan was looking pale today. The same look Cara can get sometimes; over washed, her top lip thinning off to a greyish blue. Bone broth will sort her out. Bone broth is good for everything. Oh, but a pig’s head is good too. She might phone the butcher on Monday, see if he can get her a pig’s head to boil; if she was to make a pea soup with the water, the children would drink it up, even the baby. Split peas and fresh peas mixed – deep and sweet, and it would do little Megan the world of good; put the colour back. She could tear a bit of meat into it too, from the cheeks. Tiring though, all that.
She will sit with a cup of coffee now when she gets the shopping in. Then she’ll sort out her knitting. It’ll take her an hour, only, to put it right. She’d no cause to get so upset about that this morning. Mistakes happen.
By pressing a cushiony button on the car keys, she can make the boot yawn slowly open, and there’s a button to make it close again all by itself. Marvellous things they have nowadays. It was her daughter Sinéad who organised that for her, after her neck that time…
She surveys the contents of the boot – she’s bought more than she planned to. The vegetable man brought it all out for her in a cardboard box, but she won’t be able to lift it into the house. She forgets sometimes that things like this aren’t as easy as they once were.
She’ll start with that little bag of laundry – if she puts it in the machine now, it might even be dried and ironed by the morning. But she won’t manage that big box… Molly glances over the neat hedge. Fair play to those daffodils; the way they multiply quietly in the hard winter soil, emerging each year with more and more of themselves. No stopping daffodils, once they’re down. She hopes Mr Brereton doesn’t know about the new people pulling down that cladding – Mother of God, it took him so many months to put it up that summer – and then a van of men came and hacked it off just like that.
There’s no sign of the new girl coming out to help with the shopping. Molly could ring the bell and ask… Oh, but that house is vicious looking now, stripped back to the cold bricks and the door painted the squeaky grey of a mushroom.