SINÉAD USED TO BE the type to refuse a paracetamol, clip her nails so short that her fingertips were tender, tug the brush impatiently through her hair, but these days pain frightens her. The sting of a paper cut, a knock on the elbow – the tiniest thing can send tremors through her.
She creeps her fingers up along her matted ponytail until she finds the elastic. Though she’s careful unwinding it, some solitary strands snag and snap, making her wince. How long has it been since she’s combed her hair? Or washed it?
There’s a special brush her mother bought from someone at a promotion stand. It’s a gimmicky thing – bright pink and yellow, like a child’s toy, and the plastic bristles all different lengths. It’s supposed to ease out the tangles. Her mother is always buying crap from people at those stands. She says she feels sorry for them.
She squeezes conditioner onto the spikes of the brush. She spreads the split ends across her palm, and crunches the bristles into them. Blobs of conditioner go sliding down her wrist, flecking the bowl of the sink, smattering her chin and neck. She’s not even sure she hears the phone at first – a little beep under the sound of the hairbrush. But when she stops and listens, she is suddenly aware that it’s been ringing for some time.
‘Terence! Terence, can you get that?’ Then she remembers – her husband is out by the woods, watching for the fox cubs.
On the landing, the cold sweeps over her arms and feet, slinks up around her bare knees and in under her nightie. Even the carpet feels cold. It is such an effort now, walking down the stairs. Her hips and pelvis still ache with loss. She is fat now – it took some time for her to realise that – she has become a fat woman. She takes the steps slowly, holding the banister, her breath high and loud, thighs easing past each other like great bags of liquid. The doctor didn’t tell her she would grow so fat so quickly. It’s to do with being bed-bound for so long, and something to do with hormones too. They explained all of this afterwards, when there was no going back. One of the nurses said she should try to eat sweet potatoes, for her hormones.
Sinéad stops on the turn of the stairs, places her forehead on her elbow and breathes. The ringing seems to grow shriller before cutting off mid-cry. There’s a tug of pain pulling down into her groin. Could she be imagining that? They told her it would stop hurting after a few weeks.
The phone starts up again.
She moves quicker this time. The pain is probably normal. There is so much they didn’t tell her. They didn’t even mention the hysterectomy until they had already taken half the cervix. Then, before they discharged her, the doctor explained that he’d need to schedule her in. ‘Nothing to be alarmed about,’ he said, crinkling his eyes as though in kindness. ‘Just a preemptive. A uterus isn’t much use to you now, anyway, is it? At this stage of life.’ She was still bleeding and bleeding and when the painkillers wore off it was too much and too deep– a shriek all through her, like her waters were boiling. They say childbirth is terrible, but it couldn’t be worse than that; the sensation of wrongness, of having been looted.
She lifts the receiver just in time.
‘Your mobile is off.’
In the dim hallway Sinéad lowers her head like a shamed child. ‘Oh, is it? Sorry, Aoife… it must be out of battery.’ She scans the hall for her slippers.
‘Well. How are you?’ There is an eye-roll in the tone, as though the idea of Sinéad being well or not well is a ridiculous notion that must be politely indulged.
‘Okay. Still sore…’
‘Oh, it’s probably in your head at this stage Sinéad – it’s been, what? Three months? More?’
‘Em… let me think—’
‘Well anyway I was with Mammy today – having lunch with her, getting her shopping for her and all that. She was asking about you. The place is a state, you know. I don’t think Freya does a tap. She has these dying tulips on display in the hall, pollen everywhere…’
The band on Sinéad’s wrist is tinselled with broken hair. She plucks at it with short, dirty fingernails, holding the phone with her shoulder.
‘Mammy says she hasn’t heard from you in a long time, Sinéad. You’ll have to get over this hysterectomy nonsense. It’s only a little op, you know. Miriam Brennan had one last year and she was out for dinner the next evening. You’re going to have to start thinking of others a bit now. I can’t look after Mammy all by myself.’
‘Oh,’ says Sinéad, taking the phone in her hand now – her neck hurts. ‘I’ll call her tomorrow. Or this evening. I’ll call her later—’
‘It’s nine o’clock Sinéad, what time do you think she goes to bed?’
‘Oh, well, in the morning, then.’
‘What time did you think it was Sinéad?’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Do you not have a clock?’
‘I was about to have a bath.’
‘No, Brendan is just off the phone to her. She’ll be gone to bed now.’
‘I’ll call her in the morning.’
‘Will you now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anyway, she was asking if I’d heard from you and I said you were busy gardening. I didn’t mention your little op. Still top secret is it?
‘Yes, I – yes.’
‘How is the garden?’
‘Oh, well – hard work and all, but the tomatoes have been amazing Aoife – too many for me, I’ve lots in the freezer. I’ll give you some – but then the other day they started to get this little grey patch on the bottom of them—’
‘Well I’m glad you’re enjoying it, but Mammy says she hasn’t heard from you. She’s looking for her chives.’
‘Okay, well I’ll ring her in the morning… I’ll try to get over to her. They said I could drive now, but really it’s sore…’
‘Well, it’s psychosomatic then, Sinéad. You’ll have to overcome it.’
‘How are you?’
‘I’m fabulous thank you. Great. Valerie’s coming back on Wednesday so I’ve just been getting everything ready for her. I got Daria to spruce up her room… There’s something else I need to talk to you about. Brendan has sorted it out for now, but we need to keep a better eye on Mammy.’
‘Why’s that?’ Sinéad’s knees are starting to stiffen with the cold.
‘Well, I was early to Mammy’s today – my appointment was cancelled – she wasn’t expecting me till later, but in I come, and who do I find drinking tea in the good room? Davitt Dunlin.’
‘Oh?’
‘He’s aged a lot. Anyway, lucky I did because guess what I found out? The Ladies Muck are sniffing about, trying to wheedle money out of Mammy…’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know Mammy – completely evasive, talked in riddles, wouldn’t disclose anything. She got passive aggressive when I asked her so I just let it go. But I called Davitt this evening and it turns out she summoned him to the house to talk about her will.’
‘He told you that?’
‘He told me without telling me, “sometimes elderly people want to take another look at their will…” that sort of thing. Anyway, she had some idea about providing for the grandchildren and their children – completely ridiculous – but I had Brendan call her and explain that it’s completely unjust…’
Sinéad examines her hands under the murky glow of the lampshade. Her hands are the only things that haven’t fattened and fallen loose in the last months. The skin is weak though, and easily torn, the veins running too close beneath. She turns them slowly under the watery light; the hulking grace of big, sad sea creatures.
‘Well, it’s her choice, Aoife. It’s her money.’
‘No,’ says Aoife sternly. Sinéad can see her now – poor Aoife, with her top lip pulling unpleasantly tight and her cheeks trembling – but she can’t rise to her sister’s outrage, she can’t think beyond tomorrow, the orangery, the garden wall. All she can worry about is the tomatoes and how to save them. She planted them on a whim – three trays of ‘Organic Medley Heirlooms’ from the market. She didn’t know what to expect, but when spring came, they tumbled out big meaty globes with yellow and pink mottled flesh; small sweet ones full like little capsules of fragrant blood that popped in the mouth; great crimson ones streaked with navy blue, pleating in on themselves, dew gathering in their folds, bending the whole plant over with their weight. Until those tomatoes ripened she didn’t know such pigments could exist – a yellow that is also pink; a black that is also red and green at once. It defied what she knew of colour. They were the wordless stuff of matter.
‘No, Sinéad,’ says her sister, ‘It’s not actually. It’s not her money – it’s Daddy’s money and our inheritance.’
‘I’m not sure you should be putting pressure on her Aoife, I’m sure it will work itself out. I don’t think Mammy would disinherit us… you might have the wrong end of the stick—’
Yesterday she noticed little patches of black blossoming just under the skin of the beef tomatoes, and she decided to order in some copper spray. But the invisible threads moved swiftly in the night; a ghostly breath that reached all the way down to the core of the fruit and rotted it in the dark. She went in this morning to find them all shrunken into rows of sticks, their spindly shadows thatching out the morning light. Armies of slugs had come in through the open door – was that a coincidence? While the green fruits rotted, the ripe ones were turned to mush by great orange slugs that sucked fast to the flesh – even against the force of her fingers – and left a layer of slime that she couldn’t wash off. This afternoon she cut open one of her rosy little bell tomatoes to find it hollowed out; three pale, speckled slugs nestled like raindrops in the papery shell.
‘Oh, Sinéad, don’t be ridiculous! It’s obvious what’s happened here… it’s what I’ve always told you but you won’t listen. Obviously, it’s Freya. She’s a manipulative little bitch and always has been. She’s always had Mammy wrapped around her little finger. Always. I tried speaking to Mammy myself but you know how she is. That’s why I got Brendan to call her. She respects him…’
‘But we can’t change it, Aoife, if it’s what Mammy wants…’
‘What Mammy wants, Sinéad? What Mammy wants? So, we should let Eileen’s kids rob us of our birthright? Just because they have Mammy twisted around their little fingers, is that it?’
Our birthright – where did they get her from? Where does she even pick up these phrases? Sinéad lifts one foot up off the floor and reaches her hand back, making her shoulder creak. She squeezes the toes to warm them. Even at the height of summer, the nights are cold in this house.
‘And you know, if she gives everything to the Ladies Muck, who’s going to be left paying for Mammy’s Shady Acre years?’
‘What are Shady Acre years?’
‘You know what I mean. She’ll need to go to a home eventually, it could be years of costs. And who will pick up the tab? Me. Me and you. How much did you tell me it costs for Terence’s Aunt Toots?’
‘Oh… I can’t remember now, Aoife. But, you know, his cousin helps.’
Poor Aoife. Even as a child she had that anger in her. She was competitive with everyone, a little bit begrudging, very quick to take people down a peg – but it was all because of the sickening feeling in her, the sense of never being quite right, or quite good enough. Daddy was difficult to please – was that why?
Perhaps as children they were close. There is so much that gets forgotten, but Sinéad and Aoife have been, for years, like strangers sharing a mother. Aoife has never had any interests, really, or any talents. She attends exhibitions because she thinks she should, reads books so that she can say she has read them… Maybe she is lonely now. She’s started telephoning more and more often.
‘Well,’ Aoife lowers her voice, ‘one thing’s for sure. We have to sell the properties – the one in Monkstown and the one in France now and maybe even the house in Enniskerry. The warehouse too—’
Sinéad can hear the back door bang as a cool night wind rushes through the hall. Terence must be in. The blood is stagnating in her ankles. What has she done with the hall chair? It’s in the orangery; the grapes. The grapes are a disaster – small and all pips. There’s a reason no one grows them in Ireland. It was a silly idea. It’s only that the leaves looked so beautiful and romantic, and the stalks with the little tendrils. And she thought that maybe, if they once grew oranges in there, then grapes might be possible too.
‘There’s four of them—’ Terence is still in his garden boots. Sinéad frowns at them, and he looks down at his feet. She covers the mouthpiece and whispers, ‘Aoife.’ He grimaces, bearing his teeth, and whispers, ‘There’s four of them! I wish you’d seen them, they’re beautiful!’
Sinéad uncovers the mouthpiece and makes listening noises for Aoife.
‘… I mean, put it this way, Sinéad, it’s not like she’ll be going back there – and we can get her to divide the proceeds fairly and above board, because at least then it won’t all go to the Ladies Muck!’
Terence stands there, waiting for her response, and Sinéad just rolls her eyes and shakes her head, pointing to the phone.
‘Tell her you have to go!’ whispers Terence.
‘I know what you mean, Aoife, I do, but—’
If she tried, Sinéad could share in her sister’s rage. Because it does hurt her, the way those girls soaked up her mother’s love. Freya’s son gives Mammy junk like ladybirds made from stones, with wobbly eyes glued on, and her mother displays them around the house proudly, something she never did with the things her own children used to make her. The daisy chains lying in the bin that evening after supper, and Mammy not even trying to conceal them, scraping the gravy-sodden gristle and bones in on top of them.
Terence is growing impatient. ‘Bye bye, Aoife,’ he mouths. Sinéad scowls at him and he mimes a glass, wobbling it in the air, whispers, ‘Whiskey?’
Aoife is getting carried away now, her voice coming faster and louder down the phone. ‘She owes a big sum to Valerie too – don’t forget how she gave Cara a deposit for her house that time! They think we don’t know about that. And I’m nearly sure she paid Freya’s repeat fees for college! No, she owes Valerie a good sum of money to even that out…’
Their niece, Freya, always gets Aoife worked up. Freya, or Freya’s child. Because Mammy is mad about that elfin creature, when he should really have been a source of shame.
‘Oh, she thinks Freya’s so different from Eileen, but actually the apple doesn’t fall far…’
Sinéad pulls the elastic off her wrist and lays it on the hall table. Slug pellets and copper spray. Perhaps she can save the tomatoes.
Terence makes an exaggerated shrug and leaves, shaking his head and muttering.
Their father used to pay them a penny a slug, and they would go out in their wellies with buckets of salt water, pick them deftly off the strawberries and plop them into the killer bath. It used to make her feel sick, watching them curl into themselves and sink to the bottom. And there was one concoction their youngest sister Eileen made from things in the garden shed, which made the bigger slugs foam and judder and change shape. She remembers Aoife standing over the bucket, trying to conceal her horror, two hands on her portly belly and the serious, downturned mouth explaining to her little sisters that Lily’s experimental mixture turned slugs inside out, that it was ‘inside-outing potion’, and must not be allowed to splash on humans.
She has no childhood memory of the slime they left on the fingers. The slug slime this morning was impervious to water. She scrubbed her palms with a nail brush but still the stickiness remained. It was impossible to shift. It sent a nausea right into her scooped-out pelvis and her shaky spine. Eventually she soaked her hands in the syrupy brown soap her mother uses for cleaning floors. It turns white when it’s mixed with water. She has at least a dozen bottles of the stuff, left over from that phase Mammy had, of giving her cleaning products ‘to help you get that house in order’. She sat looking at her hands in the basin of hot, cloudy water. She did nothing but sit and watch as the skin turned white and wrinkled and free from slug slime. Her nails frayed, layers peeling back in thin, transparent furls.
‘Remember the library fine, Sinéad? Only that I found the receipt in Mammy’s handbag I never would have known about that. Paying Freya’s library fine! A fine, because she couldn’t be bothered to bring her books back on time… Oh, I ate Mammy over that one, but she never learns.’
Sinéad knows how her mother must have trembled and nodded, saying as little as possible while Aoife ‘ate her’. It’s the same way she responded to Daddy when he would rant about one thing or another. She would nod, and look down or far away, and try to agree without agreeing. It gave Sinéad a pain in her throat, as though there was a wedge of cold porridge lodged there. She could never bear to see Mammy quiet and cowed and nodding like that; those sudden red patches under her eyes, and then her cheeks flushing so hot that as a child Sinéad would have to look away, or run to the bathroom to cool her own face with water. She could never speak to her mother the way Aoife does.
‘Okay, Sinéad, I’m going to be completely honest with you here, but this is between us – you’re not to tell a soul, because Davitt wasn’t supposed to tell me all this…’
Maybe she never participated in her father’s slug hunts after all. Maybe she refused. Because there was nothing familiar about the sensation of slugs on her fingers today, and she has no recollection of the slime they left. But she remembers him offering them a penny a slug, and she remembers little Eileen watching them die in the bucket – her boxy bobbed hair and gappy mouth and her eyes pale and round with the excitement of it; and Aoife’s face too – the way she locked her jaw against pity, the way she had of looking sensible always, and respectable, plucking them swiftly and daintily, plopping them into the bucket, frowning.
‘This new will, Sinéad, bypasses her own children! Davitt read it out to me Sinéad – “My children have had plenty of financial support over the years, they want for nothing…” all this jibber. Now don’t tell me it’s not Freya who’s behind that – working on Mammy day and night to get what she wants. So, in this new will she wants everything divided in equal parts between the grandchildren – Freya and Cara and Valerie – and the great-grandchildren; so that’s the little bastard as well as Cara’s three…’
‘You’re being nasty now, Aoife. You can’t call a five-year-old child a bastard.’
Oh, there’s a deathly chill in the hallway. The ceiling stretches all the way up to the second floor, that’s why. And the blind stuffed stag head hanging there, casting its dead gaze over the house. God, she has always hated Terence’s family heirlooms – all of them; the stuffed things and the rust-bleeding knives and the once valuable tapestries and the handmade lampshades. Why has she never put her foot down and got rid of them? And where has he gone off to now? Trailing mud all over the house…
‘Oh for goodness sake, I’m being accurate, Sinéad. He is a bastard. Or do you not know what a bastard is?’
‘Whatever, Aoife. Go on.’
‘She’ll let us have a few of Daddy’s paintings, but everything else is to be turned to money, and divided in seven parts, equally between them all…’
‘Well, I suppose that seems fair to her…’
‘Jesus, Sinéad, do you not get it? Instead of being divided in three between you and me and Eileen – it’s divided every which way now. So, we are being punished Sinéad, do you see? We are being punished – basically you have been disinherited. Eileen’s kids will get everything – you get nothing for having no children and the Ladies Muck take it all! Freya will, effectively, get twice as much as Valerie because she gets a share for the bastard – and Cara gets a cut for every brat she’s popped out…!’
Her sister’s voice hurts Sinéad, like something pecking, pecking, dragging her up like a worm from the earthy quiet she’s been sheltering in.
‘Tell me this, Sinéad, why should you be punished for being barren?’
Aoife knows full well how that word stings, carrying with it the image of a parched landscape, cracked earth, women with hairy lips and cheeks; their insides all wrong. But she can’t help herself, sometimes. It’s a kind of relief for her, to put people down, push them out of the way, feel better than them.
Aoife just never found her feet in the world – that’s what Daddy used to say, that’s how he explained her; Our Feefs; she just hasn’t found her place yet… Perhaps that’s true. Aoife seems always to be grappling; there’s a kind of terror that lurks just beneath her chin.
Sinéad swallows quietly. ‘That’s not nice, Aoife.’
‘Well, why should Eileen be rewarded for being a slut and having illegitimate children? And then Freya follows suit, knocked up in the first year of college, and Mammy acts like the Virgin Mary couldn’t have done better.’
‘It’s upsetting, Aoife, but I don’t see what we can do.’
‘I’ve told you what we can do, Sinéad – if you were listening you would know exactly what we can do. Brendan has talked to her and she won’t go ahead with it for now. He explained that it was unjust and she understands. But – now both Davitt and Brendan have suggested this so I really think it is sound advice – what we can do is distribute as much as possible now. It’s better tax-wise anyway. What we do is we get her to sell the properties, and we sort out those proceeds first, and then we make sure she gives us the paintings now directly – I don’t think that’ll be a problem. They’re just hanging in the studio anyway, she can’t even bring herself to look at them…’
‘Aoife, can I call you tomorrow? I’m sorry, I’m feeling very lightheaded.’
‘Where is Terence? Is Terence there? Brendan wants a word with him.’
‘He’s out. He’s watching for foxes. I just need to sit down for a bit. Look, I’ll call you tomorrow. I promise.’
‘Okay, well listen, we’re having a lunch on Wednesday. Come to lunch on Wednesday…’
It is a relief to hang up, but the word is still here in the coolness of the hallway, settling on the mahogany console and the dusty pictures and the stag. Barren.
‘At last!’ Terence is standing at the entrance to the hall, the top of a big toe poking out of one of his nice lambswool socks. She’ll have to ask Mammy to make him some more. He’s holding two cut-crystal glasses with ice and generous portions of whiskey.
‘Whiskey! Oh Terry sweetheart, thank you. Phew. Just the thing. Oh God, she’s tough going.’
‘She’s a bitch. The Dragon of Dublin South.’ He pads towards her, her soft-bellied, soft-chinned, gentle old badger of a husband. He hands her the whiskey. He kisses her temple. ‘She always upsets you. I don’t know why you answered the phone.’
‘She’s my sister.’