‘CARA, I HAVE TO whisper, I’m in the library.’
‘Go outside.’
‘No, I am – I did – like, I’m in the toilet lobby place but I have to whisper. Listen, I’m way behind with this reading – any chance you’d collect Jem? I found a perfect book here, actually – remind me to tell you about it. You know my dissertation idea for next year?’
‘No, but listen, Freya, I’m working. What time do you need him collected?’
‘I told you about it, Cara – Women who perpetuate patriarchy. It’s about patriarchal laws relying on women’s participation. There’s a book here on patriarchy and property… it’s perfect but I’m not allowed to take it out. There’s a huge queue for the photocopier, so I’m going to—’
‘Freya, what time do you want him collected? I’ve literally just sat down to work. I’ve just made myself a coffee and I’m about to start…’
‘Twelve.’
‘Twelve?’
‘It’s twelve on a Wednesday.’
‘Oh yeah. Fine. Okay. I’ve to get Megan too, I’ll just get her early…’
‘Thank you, thank you.’
*
Cara shouldn’t have picked up. She leans back in her chair and cocks her head at her drawings. She hates them.
She plucks a sugar crystal out of the cork jug and drops it into her cup, careful not to cause a splash. She’ll have her coffee at least. She runs her hand over the weird little jug. She puts it to her lips. The cork covering is uneven and warmish, like something alive.
Each piece is a wound – her grandfather told her that. Cork is made by slicing into the bark again and again, and harvesting the scab that the tree makes. He ran his fingers over the pocked swatches, tracing the seams with his thumb. Do you understand why that is beautiful? Cara didn’t understand at all, but she nodded. She must have been only a teenager then, and it was frightening; the way he looked so hard at her, the slight tremble in his eyelids.
She pulls a sheet over her preparatory scribbles – she wasn’t making much progress anyway, no character at all to Crafty the Rainy Day Duck. The park will do her good. She can study the ducks.
*
Jem sits in the back, his fine, dry hands neat in his lap, a dull- skinned yellow apple untouched on the seat beside him. ‘Em, Aunty Cara, where’s my mammy?’
‘She’s in college, Jem. She’s doing some work. She’ll come and get you soon. We’ll collect Baby Peggy and Denise and we’ll go to the park, won’t that be fun?’
‘What work is she doing?’
‘I don’t know – college work.’
‘Where’s Mimi?’
‘I don’t know, love, probably getting her hair done or something. No – lunch. She told me she might go to my Aunty Aoife’s house for lunch. Come on now, eat your apple. Megan, are you eating your apple, Megan-my-baby?’
In the rear-view mirror, Megan nods, the apple covering her nose and mouth. Megan’s eyes are eerily pale sometimes, like fog, or the air after rainfall. With effort, she pulls the apple away from her face, leaving a large, frothy chunk in her mouth. She chews and, her mouth still full, says, ‘nice apple, Mammy.’
‘That’s good, my loveliness. Right, you two stay in the car – Jem you’re a big boy so you’re in charge, okay? Beep the horn if there’s a problem – ONLY if there’s a problem, okay? I won’t be long, I’m just getting Baby Peig.’
Jem nods earnestly. ‘I’ll hold Megan’s hand.’ Megan lets out a shriek as he clutches her.
‘No, it’s okay, Jem, let go of Megan – you don’t have to hold Megan’s hand. You just sit nicely now and eat your apple and if there’s a problem beep the horn, but there won’t be a problem so just sit nicely, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay, Megan?’
‘Otay.’
*
The new baby-room assistant opens the door only a crack.
‘Peig’s mum,’ says Cara, ‘sorry I’m late.’ She rolls her eyes as though her lateness is a naughty child that they both know only too well and before she can stop herself, she has pushed into the hallway. ‘Em… I’ve got the other kids in the car so…’
She has left them eating apples, of all things; apples that they could so easily choke on; apples proverbially used for killing pretty daughters…
The new assistant closes the door after her and they are left standing too close in the small space. Cara is too loud and big for the little porch and the thin girl in the pink gingham overalls. The assistant’s face looks uncooked; vague features and very fair, blotched skin. Everything about her delicate body and her thin voice is so frail that Cara feels her own brashness like an insult. She takes a stray lock that has swung down in front of her face, twists it firmly and tucks it under the hair-slide above her ear. ‘Poor baby, I meant to get her earlier. I got caught up… I had to collect my nephew.’
The baby-room assistant shrugs, yawns quietly into her shoulder, and gestures at the clock on the wall of the reception booth. ‘It’s not even half twelve…’ She fetches a clipboard from the office and writes the time on Peig’s sheet. Cara signs her name.
Cara takes the baby’s tiny jacket and nappy bag from her personalised hook (her name – Peig – with a penguin making the P). Baby Peig only goes to creche part-time – eight to twelve, usually – but because of Cara’s new commission they registered for flexi-hours this month, just in case. That was a mistake. Cara never gets much work done during the day, flexi-hours or otherwise, but she still ends up leaving Peig for longer when there’s a choice. Wouldn’t you be ashamed, Grandma would say, and Cara not even bringing in minimum wage.
The baby room is cordoned off by a waist-high gate with a lock code. There’s Peig! There, in the middle of the big bright play mat. She’s as dark as Megan. Her short, silky hair sweeps in so many different directions that she looks like a frantically licked kitten. The mat is composed of different coloured squares arranged one after the other in maddening repetition. The tones are offensively primary; an abstract blue, a flat red, a crazy pure yellow – the colours of computer screens or laboratories; too eerily monotone to exist in nature. There are nine across; red, blue, yellow, red, blue, yellow… and twelve down. The next row starts with blue: blue, yellow, red; blue, yellow, red… and so on. This makes diagonals of each colour run across the mat, and they are so bright that they seem to lift away from one another and swagger in turn above the floor. Baby Peig is sitting on this mat and trying to thread the laces on a big pair of cardboard shoes. Cara watches her; wet baby lips too plump to purse, frown so low the brows meet her thick lashes – and she feels a sudden shot of outrage, as the minders fuss about helping other children with their tasks. Do they not notice the absurd beauty of little Peig? Sitting there with her earnest self-importance, the little paunch on her and the chubby hands trying to fiddle the laces into the holes.
There is a stuffed baby bear in the Natural History Museum. It sits like that with a round back and its legs curved around itself. In the morning, she will draw a little bear like that, a beautiful little Peig-bear, frowning at some task, a pink bear-tongue straining out of its muzzle with the effort of rooting honey from a hive. She won’t worry about finding a book to put the bear in. It will be just a picture. She will make it a pen drawing with a light watercolour wash on the tongue and the pads of its feet. She will write ‘Peig Bear’ beneath it and put it in a little frame on the wall, and as Peig grows up she will look at the picture and she will always know how loved she is. Cara hopes she remembers to do that. She hopes she’ll have the time.
The baby has seen her – her face shifts immediately into a grimace, and she begins a dry, comical cry, her whole mouth drawn down and open and her arms floppy in her lap, but she has been caught enjoying herself at creche and she knows it. She drops the shoes and, without leaving her spot on the floor, she stretches her paws up and grasps the air: ‘Mam Mam Mam Mam…’
‘Now Peig,’ says one of the minders, ‘we have to put the shoes away don’t we?’
Peig wraps her arms loosely across her chest – her impression of arm-crossing. ‘No,’ she says, and points at Cara. ‘Mam.’
She is a brat, her youngest little baby girl. She is a stubborn obstreperous little menace. Fat despot is what Pat calls her, fondly, as though pleased with himself for spawning such mayhem. Our fat despot. But Peig will be fine, she’ll be fine out in the world. Oh, look at her, raising herself reluctantly off the play mat and her funny stride, shoulders dropped into an arrogant slouch, limbs swinging apelike as she waddles over to the shelves with the minder to put the shoes away. Afterwards she cannot accept that she has done as she was told, so she frowns and puts her lovely fat fists on her unformed hips, shakes her head and pouts. ‘No.’
Cara laughs, but Lisa, the toddler-room leader, does not.
‘Peig,’ says Lisa, squatting down beside her, ‘would you like to say bye-bye to your friends?’
‘No.’
‘Let’s say bye-bye to your friends and then we will go and say hello to Mummy.’
After a pause, Peig nods, ‘Yep,’ and poddles over to a cluster of toddlers, ‘Bay Bay!’ and then her grin and that funny little fingery wave. Where did they get her from? She turns at last towards Cara, feet out-turned and her arms tucked up like wings. She is stealing something from the creche and trying to conceal it in one of her hands.
Cara will make it a duck in a mac for the Rainy Day Book; a little white duck in a yellow mac with a round, messy, feathery tummy. No, a red mac. Because the feet and the beak will be yellow. A blue mac, in fact, and red boots, and the duck will use its wings like hands and fiddle with pipe cleaners and craft tacks and get feathers stuck in the spilled glue. Yes, she can make the Rainy Day Book work.
There is a sign asking parents not to reach over the barrier for their children, to wait until a team member brings them out. Baby Peig is her lovely fat despot and Cara will pick her up when she wants to. She reaches over the barrier and then the child is clamped to her – all four of her limbs clinging fast and her head in Cara’s neck. ‘Mam Mam Mam,’ says Peig, tapping her mother’s back, ‘Mam.’ Cara breathes in the smell of the child; her coconutty sweat, her grubbiness. Though it’s over a year since she gave birth, Cara’s body still misses Peig; it is like breathing again to have her whole little body on her chest. She smells the back of her neck – dirt, the waft of teenage girl’s perfume, but still the smell of Peig under it, and the milk drops in her breasts.
‘Let’s go get Den my little Peggy baby… Give the tractor back to Lisa. You can play with it tomorrow…’
*
Strapped into her car seat, Peig starts to complain that she is hungry, touching her mouth and saying, ‘Am. Am.’
‘Here, Megan, can you hold the bag of baby rice cakes? Give one to Baby Peig and when she’s finished give her another if she wants it.’
‘Can I give one, Aunty Cara?’
‘Yes, Jem, sorry love, yes – let Jem give the next one, Megan…’
As she releases the handbrake, Cara sees a silver four-by-four swing into the spot opposite them and she lowers her head, pretending to search for something on the passenger seat. She is relieved to have collected her baby before the other mothers collect theirs.
‘Dool’ says Peig from the back, ‘Doool’; by which she means ‘Jolene’, by which she means Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits. Cara obeys, nudging the cassette until the slot sucks it in and the thinning tape turns. She sings along – so does Megan and so does Baby Peig, her head back, the little fingers stretching taut in the effort and her voice open and as loud as she can make it, ‘Dool… e, Dool… e, Dooleeeeeeeee,’ and Cara loves her girls – she loves them loves them loves them, these lovely, ridiculous, weird little miracle creatures. A thread of guilt snags in her chest when she sees Jem in the mirror, his hands over his ears, big, sad eyes, and his mouth reduced to a little waver.
The traffic is bad, but Cara will take the other route – up the quays and out by Christ Church – and they should still be on time for Denise. Cara doesn’t want her left waiting in the hall. At five, Denise is the youngest in the music class. The other kids are only a year or two older, but they have bracelets made with elastics up their arms and stickers on their violin cases and they play instrumental versions of pop songs and collect and swap some kind of round cards. Cara was never allowed to put stickers on her violin case. She tries to encourage Den to decorate it, but ‘I just don’t want to,’ she says. ‘Why would I Mammy? What if I change my mind and they won’t come off?’
She is very good at the violin, her Denise, but Cara still isn’t sure why she enrolled her in the first place. ‘Well it seemed a waste not to use the violins’ she told Freya, but was that why, really? She loves the violins; the smell of them, the warm, fruity wood, the f curls, the perfect weight of the scroll and the sticky dry summer smell of resin powder. And yet she remembers hating the violin, and that she was bad at it.
*
Her mother had an intercom between her bedroom and the music room, so that she could hear Cara playing while she sat in bed, and when Cara was not good, she used to scream and cry and then Cara could no longer hear whether it was in tune or not. She could hear only her own pulse and all other sounds took on a warped, faraway quality. So she should not cherish her violins like this, she should not want her daughter to play.
Cara should have been musical. When The Lily decided to make a child, she said, she didn’t just grab anyone off the street. She was careful. She planned. She did her research and she selected Ireland’s most gifted musician, because if she was going to do it, she was going to do it right. She told Cara over and over how she had spent each day of her pregnancy playing classical music to the bump, how Cara had been bounced and sung to at baby music classes from three months, ‘The cost of it…’ At one and a half, Cara was bought a tiny Chinese violin and began lessons, learning the formations before she was allowed to pluck the strings, tapping the beat on the triangle. One and a half. That’s not much older than Peig. The lessons were held twice a week in a big wide hall and each child had a parent with them to help. How long did that go on? Long enough that she can remember it. Cara and her mother were always early and her mother talked to the teacher a lot and flipped her hair and threw her head back and laughed with her big jaw open.
It is one of Grandma’s favourite stories, that Suzuki concert Cara did. She was only three – is it possible that she remembers it? But she does. The grotty guesthouse that they stayed in – Grandma and Mother and Cara. Cara remembers wetting the bed, and Grandma’s brows fluffy in the night and her eyes small while she stripped off the sheets. Then in the morning, with a scoop of shiny jam in a metal bowl, her mother lifting food up on the fork and letting it drop onto the plate, muttering.
‘What’s the Ritz, Mother? What do you mean?’
‘Shhh, Cara, your mammy was only joking.’
The special dress for the concert, the itchy matching tights, and the big stage full of children; the kaleidoscope shapes they made with their violins; rest position first, then holding the instruments up to face the audience, feet apart, their arms stretched straight for Stop Sign, and then up onto their shoulders until the teacher waved the stick to start. Could that have been real? Why had Grandma condoned it all? There’s that story she tells – One hundred and fifty little things on that big stage, and Mr Suzuki playing on the piano. And they all playing. And when it came time to take a bow, didn’t they all take a bow to the audience, except that little thing. My little Cara, the smallest one of the lot, who turns to Mr Suzuki and gives a bow. Because she could see! She could see he was the one who played so well you know. Such a little thing and so pretty that they put her at the front, and all the little ones behind her, they followed suit, turned to that old fellow at the piano and bowed too. Well, we laughed! We laughed… and everyone clapped. And when I told Dinny he said, ‘That wild little thing, I hope the world doesn’t ruin her.’
Some of Cara’s classmates went on to become prodigies; thin adolescents playing solo at the National Concert Hall, or dressed in green for tours of America. It used to make Cara cringe with her failure, when Grandma pointed out their posters, their reviews, their names billed in the papers, and always that story about the big Suzuki concert.
It was the new teacher who saved her. When she was seven, she was sent to Mr Cooney, a kind old virtuoso who smelled like lentil soup. After three gruelling lessons during which he sweated and flinched while she played, he said they would try a new approach. For the rest of her time with him he made a pot of orange spice tea when she arrived, and let it draw while he tuned her violin. Then they sat in his cluttered lesson room eating biscuits and listening to recordings of Jascha Heifetz, Cara’s violin lying at peace on its own armchair. After a year of this, he broke the news to Mother: Cara had no talent. The Lily raged and growled and said she could see it clearly now. Because she had been so sick through that pregnancy and she should have known. After that she could see everything that was bad in Cara – her gypsy hair and her big nose and the black sick heart she had. How long did Cara stay with her after that? She remembers being brought to healer after healer, her mother standing behind her and mouthing to them breathily, ‘My daughter has darkness in her…’ One man who took her up to a bedroom and put his fingers in her nose and ears. And a lady tried to teach her the piano but she would sit at the instrument and her breath would start flashing up into her head until she was dizzy.
Then she lived with Grandma and before long so did Freya.
Why was Freya dumped too? Cara should have been gifted, but what had been the plan for Freya? Her sex was a big disappointment; Cara remembers that. Their father’s wife had only daughters. Perhaps The Lily believed that bearing him a son would increase her status, draw him away from his wrinkly old wife. He came on a Tuesday and a Friday evening, and Cara prepared him whiskey on ice when he arrived. That’s what she remembers – the pleasant burn of whiskey in her nostrils, and the way he pulled his trousers up at the knee before sitting down, the way he jiggled his foot. But she can’t remember his face. She called him Liam, not Dad. He called her Little Lady.
*
‘Why is Denise allowed in the front? I’m bigger.’
‘Because your mammy has to be with you if you sit in the front, Jem. Otherwise the police would take me away.’
It’s a relief to open the car doors and let the children spill out onto the tarmac. As she lifts Peig into the buggy, Cara can see that she’s ready to nod off, so she tucks an extra blanket around her to encourage sleep. Having been warned, no doubt, of the danger of car parks, Jem holds firmly to the bar of the buggy, but Cara’s girls fling themselves around the place. They have lost a bouncy ball. Megan squats down, peering under the car, and Denise lies on her belly to retrieve the ball from behind the wheel, a spume of pale hair flung forward over the dirty ground. When she stands up, the ends of her hair are oil-black, like laces caught in a bike wheel.
‘Say thank you to Denise, Megan.’
‘Fank you DenDen.’
‘Here, Denise, let me plait your hair before it gets all matted… Do you want to go see the ducks?’
‘No,’ says Denise, wincing bravely as her hair is plaited.
‘No,’ says Megan, still grateful to her sister for rescuing the bouncy ball.
‘I want to see the ducks,’ says Jem, hopelessly.
‘Let’s see what we see,’ says Cara.
In a fit of optimism she slips a book out from under the driver’s seat into the mesh beneath the buggy. She can’t stand the caged-in playground, but thank goodness for the park. They walk onto the tarmacked paths towards the vast stretches of green, and Baby Peig’s eyelids start to flutter on the brink of sleep. Jem is still clinging to the buggy, that serious good-boy look on his face. Denise skips along beside, humming something, tapping a tune on her right wrist with the fingers of her left hand.
‘Oh Megan!’ She is shocked by the anger in her own voice, but Megan is prancing around in front of the buggy, squatting to pick up stones or branches, using sticks to vault across the path. ‘Stop it, Megan. I very nearly crashed into you…’
‘Mammy?’ Denise is still playing her wrist-violin.
‘Yes, baby.’
‘Do you know how I make sure each bit of the piece is different?’
‘How, my baby?’
‘I imagine a different animal for each one. There’s a lion bit.’
Denise scowls and bares her teeth, still humming.
‘Megan, stop it!’
Megan is running back and forth in front of the buggy, throwing a stick as high in the air as she can and watching it fall, the wheels of the buggy biting at her feet.
‘Megan!’
Megan stops suddenly, and the buggy snags in her trouser leg. ‘Owww!’
‘I told you to stop, Megan.’
Megan drops her hands by her sides, tilts her head back and begins to wail with her mouth drawn down into a parody of tragedy. ‘Iiiii stooooopped!’
A violent impulse twitches in Cara. ‘Stop it, Megan!’
Megan pauses for a moment and fixes Cara with a stare, teeth bared, her hands in fists and her pale eyes narrow. ‘YOU TELLED me to stop!’ Then she throws her head back and begins another long wail.
Baby Peig startles, looks around and starts crying too.
‘Megan, stop it! Look, now you’ve woken the baby.’ Megan’s voice lifts to a screech.
‘Megan, SHUT UP!’
Jem has let go of the buggy and is pressing his hands over his ears.
‘Look, Megan!’ Denise points to a dead tree. ‘Look at all the twisty sticks! There might be a nest in there, even. Will we go and look?’
Megan stops crying as quickly as she started, and rushes towards the dead tree to look for treasures.
‘Hide and seek!’ says Denise. ‘Jem, let’s play hide and seek – you seek and we’ll hide!’
‘Right – no one go beyond the grass,’ says Cara.
Cara walks Peig up and down until she falls asleep. Then she settles herself down on the roots of a tree to read. It’s Jem’s turn to seek now. He squats beside her, his hands over his face, counting very slowly and loudly, and the girls scurry off.
‘… twenty! Here I come!’
Then there is a little oasis of aloneness. Her book is called The Queen of Bohemia. It’s about an underrated Welsh artist of the fifties. She bought it three years ago and has read the first page several times…
It’s Megan’s shriek she hears first, and the first thing she feels is only irritation at being disturbed, but then she hears Denise too, and Jem, and the shrillness of their voices; and when she looks up she can see the three of them at the other end of the green. She has to strain her eyes and guess at what’s happening, but she can make out Jem slapping at the air, Megan shaking her head like a sneezing dog and Denise trying to pull her away from the hollow of a tree, and then she knows what it is and she’s running towards them. And as she nears she can hear the electric charge of the wasps and she can see that they have made a big dark net over her children. The first sting is on her neck as she heaves Megan up by the waist and tucks her under her arm and pulls Denise by the wrist. ‘Come on Jem!’ but Jem just stands in the cloud of wasps, his mouth open, gagging for breath in the shock and pain of it. She can already see the stings swelling on his face. Grandma will kill her.
‘Fuck.’ She drops Megan onto her feet and hauls Jem under her arm, ‘Hold Megan’s hand Denise. Hold Megan.’
Then she’s running away over the tarmac with the buggy in front of her and the children wailing, Denise tripping over her feet as they speed along, and the wasps stinging her wrists and cheek, and it’s only now in the car park, after stripping Jem off, unplaiting Denise’s hair to release a live wasp, rocking the crying baby, that Denise’s face drops, washing red and white with the panic. Her lips pull down and open, all saliva and tears, brows glowing white in the bright face, and there is accusation in her voice as her cry rises up, ‘Megan!’