MOLLY WARMS HER HANDS around the cup, pulling some of the steadiness into her bones. She likes her coffee very hot. Dinny used to pour his tea into the saucer to take the heat out. He’d lift it very carefully and slurp from it, while the rest cooled in the cup.
Oh, she’s tired now.
She’s brought in the ham from the deli, and a brick of real butter – lovely stuff with a sour tang, wrapped in greaseproof paper – then the chicken and lamb chops from the butcher’s, and the milk. It took her a few journeys just to do that much; just the stuff for the fridge. She’s left the rest for Freya to get in the morning.
Maybe she should have waited until Monday for the messages. Or she could have sent Freya, of course, but Freya would have insisted on spending her own money, and Molly doesn’t like her to do that. That girl needs to keep her money and get some savings together. She needs to use her head more, Freya, to keep her cards to herself and tuck her heart in safe. That’s always the way with Freya; such a flighty, fragile little thing and everything pouring out of her – all her love and all her ideas just pouring out. No safety valve to Freya – that’s what Dinny used to say.
Molly would like to buy her a little house – a little house for her and the boy. She will, only she needs to find a way to do it that doesn’t make Freya feel beholden, that makes her feel she has done it herself. It’s a shame she has to work like that, but Dinny thought they had made a mistake with their three. He said it was important to know the value of work, that with their girls they had forgotten that. So excited, maybe, that they could suddenly pay for things – all the things they never had – it was something Dinny and Molly hadn’t considered. Then suddenly, it was all Dinny talked about, his big regret – Do you realise, Molly, he said, the great mistake we made? Our girls have never worked a day in their lives.
There is a new type of milk in the shops now – ‘night milk’ taken from the cows at dusk. It’s the milk meant for the youngest calves, to help them sleep. Yellower than the normal milk, and a purple label on it with a pale crescent moon. She picked up a carton in the deli and took it to the till – it would be a lovely thing Freya could use for Jem’s cocoa at night… but then she changed her mind and bought the usual milk, thinking of those silky newborn calves and the lowing cows, and what a terrible thing it was to steal a mother’s milk. Stupid old girl, because of course the same could be said for any cow’s milk, or goat’s milk or anything. It’s only that it seems less personal when it’s white like that. Stupid old goose. She’s getting soft in the head. She’s getting sentimental. There’s something isn’t there? Something is bothering her. There’s some way she’s made a show of herself today… her knitting. The heel flap! Imagine forgetting to pick up the heel flap?
Molly purses her lips as she places her cup into its saucer. Shouldn’t she be ashamed? The last time she did that she was six years old and Sister Celestine didn’t just pull it back to the heel – she pulled the whole sock back, wound it into a tight little ball and made Molly begin again.
Some of the sisters used the stick but not Sister Celestine. Sister Celestine was the best of them. Decent.
But what a fright it was to realise what she’d done – knitting on, round and round like a silly eejit without turning the heel – and then she went and made a song and dance over it. Poor Cara looking at her in alarm. Those great earnest eyes she has. Cara must think she’s going soft in the head. It’s just that it hits Molly sometimes, how things are squeezing up now, and it’s not that she minds so much the idea of growing old, or even the coolness of death coming in on her – it’s the way time seems to be coiling in, winding smaller and smaller and faster and it makes her head tight sometimes, with the panic. Her granddaughters are women now – the creases around Cara’s eyes (Oh she said, and her eyes made the O shape as well as her mouth, Oh – you were just distracted Grandma) – and her great-grandchildren are growing so suddenly it makes her dizzy. Mimi, guess what number I am? and she couldn’t. She couldn’t make a number of the years that had already gone into little Den… What a goose she has been. All down those years she’s been handling her time like portions she could measure out and weigh – but that’s not the nature of the thing at all. It moves in gushes, washing over her with its great crash and spill before she has a chance to draw breath and look at things and say goodbye to any of it. And all the different types of milk there are now. For goodness sake, people aren’t right in the head. But new calves, well, such lovely things as could make you weep – a filmy sack of water, and pink on them, clunk of bones under the slick hide and white gunk in their folds. She saw one born in a barn once – at her uncle’s farm – spindly legs and the straw sticking to its womb-wet skin and a blood smell so frightening and good, like turned earth.
There is a reassuring rumble and suck from the utility room – she has Cara’s coloureds in the machine. Things are so easy now. It’s no work at all, just to pop the clothes in with the powder and press the button. Mother help us, the things Cara dresses those little girls in – denim slacks, like boys’, with the knees worn down, and gym suits and all. Even Cara’s pyjama pants – nice, comfortable cotton – have a pattern on them like a man’s dressing gown. Molly was satisfied to notice a glossy stiffness in the seat of them as she turned them inside out and tossed them into the drum. She worries, sometimes, that Cara is a negligent wife, and it is a comfort to know that they are close in the bedroom, she and Pat. When a couple lie close together, it does a lot for a marriage.
Tired. She should eat something – a slice of brown bread is always nice, with a bit of cheese maybe, or some of that ham. Maybe an egg, boiled. Then the sock. She’ll feel better when she’s put that heel flap right. Lunchtime already. Will they be having the soup now, the children, or will Cara hold onto it for the evening meal? Poor little Jem… he has a good appetite at home, because Freya and Molly know what he likes – chicken fillet fried in butter, potatoes mashed with a bit of nutmeg and a leek. He didn’t want to go to his Aunt Cara’s this morning in case she made that brown rice and beans thing again. Does Cara know to soak them well? Beans can be dangerous, you have to be careful with beans… No, Cara won’t want the hassle. She’ll serve the soup for lunch, probably. There are extra meatballs in it so the children won’t have to squabble over them, and little discs of carrot, and Molly minced the celery so small they won’t even see it. It was such good stock that it cooled to a jelly you could cut with a knife. Two chickens she put into it, gizzards and flesh and all, and she simmered it on a low heat until the kidneys bobbed and the spines loosened to strings of gritty beads – Oh!
The breath rushes back at Molly’s throat and punches into her gut so that her gasp, when it comes, is a high, shrill thing like the whistle of an old kettle – those tiny bones! Did she strain the broth properly? Or could there be a nugget of spine in there, small enough to slip through unnoticed but hard enough and big enough to stop the breath of a little thing like Jem with his brown eyes big and his face so suddenly drained and – Oh oh oh! There’s something not right. She can feel it in her waters that something is not right.
Molly stands quickly and makes for the cloakroom. Sore – her knees are sore, the shiver pain of bone scraping on bone. She has Cara on speed dial – number 2. She’ll just tell her she’s to check each bowl of soup as she ladles it out, and she’s to remember that if there is something ever lodged in the breath of a child, you don’t bang the back like she once thought. No, you thrust your palms into his belly to force it all back up—
Molly flicks on the cloakroom light and grabs for the phone but before she can lift the receiver, a short, clear ring comes sounding in at her from all three phones in the house, so that it feels like her home itself is bearing down on her. She keeps her hand there, letting several trills vibrate up through her grasp. The cloakroom is all shadow under the orange bulb – greased cotton, leather and an intimate, scalpish smell. Dinny. She never cleaned his Barbour jacket afterwards. She pushed it in at the back with the white flakes still speckling the shoulders and an oily, working smell off it. She takes a calm breath and picks up the phone.
‘Yes, hello?’
‘Mammy?’
Molly feels for something to hold. The glide of her fur coat. The chair.
‘Yes.’
‘Mammy? It’s Eileen. It’s your little Eileen, Mammy. It’s Lily.’
‘Oh.’
Molly runs her hand over the leather back of the cloakroom chair. Dinny put it there a long time ago, so she could sit and chatter to her sister as long as she liked without her legs tiring. She grips the cool leather, lowers herself sidelong onto the seat. She thought it was gone – the splintering of love that her youngest child could send through her.
‘It’s your little Eileen, Mammy.’
‘Yes I know. Hello.’
‘Hello, Mammy.’
‘What do you want, d—’ Molly can feel her voice trip onto the next word, and she tries to suck it back in but too late, ‘darling?’
‘I need you, Mammy.’
‘Oh?’
She’s keeping her voice even and flat. Dead to the sting of it. Buying herself time to think. I haven’t my glasses – that’s what she thinks – I need my glasses. The blurring feeling is wrapping her like a shadow and rushing right inside her now, like smoke filling up her nose and muffling her face. She lays her thick, dry fingers across her eyes. She is a practical woman and she will not swoon like this. Your Eileen like Molly is some eejit, like Molly will forget… Lily. Lily. Oh but it’s a sharp thing, her child’s voice bursting into her tired belly, her tired flesh. Tired today. Oh.
‘I need you Mammy. I have a mission. Your Lily has a mission, Mammy, and I need you.’
‘What do you want, darling?’
‘I was in Canada, Mammy, did you know that? And I went to the ancient pools, and I was chosen, Mammy.’
Molly squeezes her lips and nods into the dimness of the cloakroom, her eyes dry, her voice sore and too big for her throat. ‘I see,’ she says.
‘I was chosen by the spirit of the elders to bathe in the sacred waters.’
‘I see.’ Molly rubs at the rough patch of skin on her forehead. It has been there for some time, raised a little browner than the rest of her face, and she knows it is darkening into an age spot right there on her front for all to see.
‘What I learned from the elders, Mammy, is that I need to make another exhibition. But this time it won’t be painting Mammy. What I must do is a carpet of colour with the faces of the elders showing up through – transgenerational hauntings, Mammy, that’s what it will be about, you know…’
Molly’s eyes are closed now, a stinging heat rushing up from her stomach. She rubs at her forehead so hard it hurts. She can feel little rolls of it under her fingers, the bad old skin lifting up off her and the shock as her blood meets the stoic air of the cloakroom.
‘So Mammy, I suppose you’re wondering where you come in? Well, I need you to knit, Mammy. I am going to bring you the wool. It will be wool from the clothes people have died in, and I will pull it out and wash it and wind it back down. Don’t you worry about that Mammy, I’ll do all that. All I need you to do is to knit each ball of wool into a patch. I want big patches and small patches, okay? All different stitches, whatever stitches you want. Then I will arrange them, and the spirits will show up through. Oh Mammy, it’s going to be spectacular! Daddy would be so proud of me. I’m going to exhibit in Soho, where Daddy began. Mammy, your little Lily is going to win the Turner Prize! I know it, Mammy, in my heart, I know…’ She makes the word ‘heart’ heavy, like a big stamp of the foot, emptying her lungs entirely. She says it again, ‘In my heart,’ carefully and slowly, like a theatre actress, and then she says it again, ‘In my heart, Mammy.’
‘No, darling.’
‘No?’
‘No, darling, no.’
‘No? What do you mean no Mammy? Why would you do that to me? No! That’s all you ever gave me Mammy – no no no no no. After all these years, here I am working through all the pain of all your no-ing, forgiving you, asking nothing of you. You are my mother! Doesn’t that mean anything to you? You are my mother!’
Egged on by her own performance, Eileen is screaming now, that way she does – each sentence rising to a great climax and breaking then, as though she is about to cry. But is she? You never know with Eileen. You never know where you are at all. Was she always like that and they just didn’t notice?
‘Goodbye, darling.’
Molly lays the receiver down slowly into its cradle. She sits in the cloakroom and rubs and rubs at the little patch of oldness on her forehead. The phone rings again, of course it does, the sound coming in at her from the landing upstairs and from Dinny’s office, and from the little table beside her. It rings and rings – it rings and stops, and rings again, swelling up against the old coats and the furs, and Molly can only sit here on the chair that her husband once lifted in for her. She holds her face in both hands and she hears her own sounds – her wet sigh and her voice small, old and strained like an elastic band pulled too thin, ‘Dinny’ – and the telephone’s relentless, rhythmic call, pushing at the walls and clamouring at the shut door.