THERE IS A BUTCHER’S hook in the basement ceiling.
Using two hands, Sinéad hefts the bag up the stepladder. The tip of the hook is enamelled with dark stains. While she loops the slimy drawstring over it, she thinks of slaughtered pigs: dainty trotters tied with string; fresh slices of rasher with the nipples and bristles still on.
When Sinéad first moved here as a bride, there were four sows and a farrow of piglets every year. In spring they sold all but two, and last year’s pigs were slaughtered noisily by someone her mother-in-law called ‘my great little slaughtering man’. The killings left the air vibrant and reeling, as after a heavy rain. A smell like monthlies hung in the yard for days.
But after Terence’s mother died, Sinéad left the sows celibate. They were too human; the big, dignified eyelids, white lashes, the terrible particularity of their ears. She fed them peelings and scraps in their sorry little pen and it was a relief when, one by one, huge and tough-fleshed, creaking like boulders, they toppled over, dead.
The bag drops with a decisive thunk, swaggers once, then hangs still, weighted by the fragrant squelch of boiled apples.
There is a kind of cold very particular to being beneath ground. It works into her muscles, tightens her jaw – she should go up to the warmth of the Aga. But she stands there staring, her knees stiffening, until at last the pectin begins to bead out through the muslin; tiny pinprick globules, like blood rising through a fresh graze. Drop by drop, the amber swell gathers into fine, slow rivulets, eking into the basin beneath.
She had no idea how much work apple jelly was. But when she saw the crates of apples on Mammy’s back step, she was seized with a sudden hunger – is that what it was? Or greed? She felt desolate suddenly, bereft, as though everything she could touch and know herself by was pulling away from her. She was only calling in to check on the hens; Aoife told her they were being neglected. But it shocked her to be greeted at the door by her young blonde niece wearing Mammy’s apron. Freya moved comfortably around the kitchen, filling the kettle, reaching for the biscuit tin, offering her tea-or-coffee. The house smelled different. The child was there at the table, sitting before a saucer of quartered apple, and he gave her a look like cold breath on her neck.
‘Are you cold, Sinéad?’
‘Someone just walked over my grave.’
Sinéad looked out the back window at the haggard apple tree. They had spent the morning gathering the windfalls, Freya said, smiling, and did Sinéad know how to make them into jelly?
‘Easier if I just take them home, Freya, you’ve enough to be doing.’
‘Oh. We were looking forward…’
Sinéad sighed in triumph when she had all the crates packed into her car. But then, halfway home, she was seized by regret, thinking of the cross face on the little boy, and the way Freya’s skin turned very pink, her hair falling to catch the fluorescent sunset as she lifted them into the car for her.
It was more work than Sinéad had imagined – cutting out the worms and the rot, weighing them, timing them, taking their temperature as they simmered for hours.
No wonder Mammy used to go spare over the apple jelly. You knew autumn had set in when she was heard bellowing from the utility room, There’s apple jelly hanging. Nobody touch the bag! Girls? Girls do you hear me? No one is to go near the apple jelly! Sinéad used to stand and watch, hypnotised by the steady slide and drip, battling the urge to feel the apple goo through her fingers. Squeezing the bag would let bits of mush into the jelly, making it cloudy and less disposed to set.
How could she have forgotten that smell? The clean, spicy applishness of the pips, the hidden sweetness opening in your lungs. It perfumed everything. She would smell it when she woke in the morning, on her clothes throughout the day. It reassured her.
Mammy worked so hard to make that kind of a home for them; a childhood that had the smell of baking bread on it, and cake, and the molten boil of jam. Some evenings, when she leaned over the bed to kiss Sinéad, there was a terrible weariness to her voice, as though the cords were fraying. Goodnight, my darling.
Her father’s mood could change everything. He was the weather in which they basked, or against which they shored up their silence, their smallness. You could tell the minute you came downstairs in the morning – the temperature in the house would have shifted. Mammy’s large fingers groped at her wrists. She wouldn’t make things like jam or jelly during those periods, but spent all day mixing Daddy’s paints and getting his dinner right. His rages could go on for weeks. The house was very quiet during those times, except for Daddy’s mutterings and roars – he murmured to himself constantly, and then he would shout and bang the table because someone scraped their knife on the plate, someone said the wrong thing, or wore the wrong thing or entered the room at the wrong time. Sinéad was very good at becoming invisible, but it was easy to make mistakes.
What’s that supposed to mean? An impossible question that instantly made Sinéad forget what she’d said.
Who do you think you are? Another impossible question.
At night they could hear him from their bedroom, I’ll kill myself, if he gets the prize! I’ll kill myself Molly, I will!
Shush darling, the girls…
Don’t shush me, Molly! Don’t attack me for speaking the truth! Shush shush – that’s not the point. You’re ashamed of me, Molly, I know it. You’re right to be ashamed of me… Shit! It’s shit. Look! Come and look. Look at the elbow it’s wrong it’s wrong it’s wrong! It’s not what I meant at all!
She and Aoife always shared a bedroom. There were plenty of rooms, but Mammy thought it was strange for children to sleep alone. On those nights, Sinéad was glad of her big sister. The astringent heat off Aoife’s body when she lifted the duvet, the firm way she tucked it around Sinéad’s shoulders, and the steadiness of her breath.
*
‘Sinéad!’ Terence is on the basement steps. He calls to her softly, almost a whisper, as though the gloam down here requires it. ‘It’s your sister on your mobile.’
‘Which one?’
‘The mad one.’
‘Doesn’t narrow it down.’
He picks his way towards her through decades of clutter – blackly oiled pieces for long-gone machines, boxes of fermented jam, a horse’s foot topped with a gold disc, the animal’s name and dates engraved on it. When Sinéad first moved here, that foot was a doorstop.
‘Eileen,’ he says
‘Oh.’
‘Will I tell her you’ll call her back?’
‘No. I’ll come.’
He stops a small distance from her and picks up the horse’s foot. ‘It’s cold down here,’ he says. ‘Do you need help? Need me to lift anything?’
‘No. Thanks, sweetheart. I’ll be up now in a minute.’
The yellow apple water has worked up a beautiful sweat in the muslin bag. She checks how much is in the basin. On the internet it said to leave the apples dripping for three hours, but Mammy used to leave them overnight, so that’s what Sinéad will do. In the morning she will have to measure it out. She might need to buy more sugar.
Her husband moves with an unobtrusive shuffle, making him look older than he is. He is still wearing that cashmere jumper. Even the elbow patches have holes in them. She has long given up buying clothes for Terence. He is more comfortable in old, worn things. He likes things with ‘character’.
‘I’m going out to the boathouse.’ He manoeuvres around the dangerously sharp, rusted hinges of a tractor door, the horse’s foot in his hand. ‘I’m going to see if those corncrakes have left.’
‘Okay.’
‘Come out and join me for a whiskey if you feel like it.’
‘Okay. I might.’
‘You better come up then. See what Eileen wants.’
*
The boathouse is a rickety little structure that Terence built as a child. The windows are black with moss and there is water coming up through the floor. The wind splashes dark water against the windows. It has two chairs in it, and a little table covered in clammy newspaper. Terence spends hours there some days, drinking whiskey, watching the lake and listening for the corncrakes with a patience that makes Sinéad jittery. He might have made a very good father. He is interested in everything, but he has no desire to achieve or prove anything. Perhaps that’s why she married him – to cure her of her own restlessness, to counter the exhausting demands her father wrung out of a lifetime. But sometimes it occurs to her that their whole life together has been spent simply passing the time, avoiding the grist. Perhaps that is as it should be.
Until she met Terence she had never known a person could be so self-contained. He inherited his wealth and is neither proud nor ashamed, hardly even glad of it. His family had hobbies, and they bought and sold horses and paintings, but none of them, as far as she understands it, had ever earned their living. For generations, they had been selling off chunks of their estate, until there was only this house and a handful of valuable possessions and connections.
*
She wipes her fingers on a tea towel before picking up her mobile.
‘Hello.’
‘Oh, Sinéad!’
‘Hi, baby sister. Sorry, I was in the basement…’
‘Sinéad!’ Eileen’s voice rises to a whine. Is she crying? Is she pretending to cry?
‘What’s wrong, Lily?’
‘I’m so embarrassed asking you this, Sinéad. I’m so embarrassed. Oh God, imagine what Daddy would think if he saw me now, Sinéad!’
‘What’s going on, Eileen?’
‘My tenants – those officious pieces of shit, they won’t leave until their lease ends, that’s in three months. So, I am destitute, Sinéad. I am homeless. I’m fifty years old and homeless. Can you imagine what Daddy would have thought?’
‘I thought you were staying with Aoife?’
‘I can’t live on her charity, Sinéad. I’m going to have to come to Stokerstown House for a while. Can I? Can I come to you for a while, just until I get myself sorted?’
‘You can, Lily, but we haven’t done any repairs since last time. You remember you weren’t too happy last time. Too damp you said, and you thought the peeling paint was making you sick, do you remember?’
‘Has Terence not sorted that out yet, Sinéad? Protestants: tight. Daddy was right, they’d rather go shitty than waste a scrap of paper cleaning their arses… They take the lightbulbs with them when they leave a place, but I suppose you know that.’
‘Why don’t you just rent somewhere? Rent somewhere nice, or stay in a hotel for a little treat.’ Lily was given her trust fund, the same as the rest of them. It hardly seems possible that she’s lost it all.
‘Rent somewhere, Sinéad? RENT somewhere? My own house occupied by scummy strangers and my sisters won’t even afford me a spare room? I wanted to move into Mammy’s for a while, but Freya wouldn’t even let me in the door, Sinéad. She wouldn’t even let me in the door of my own home, the home I grew up in—’
‘I suppose, considering the way things are, Lily…’
‘The WAY THINGS ARE, Sinéad? THE WAY THINGS ARE? What’s that supposed to mean? The way things are.’
Sinéad isn’t sure. The way things are is that both of her nieces have a sort of phobia of their mother. It has never been completely clear to Sinéad, what happened. First there was Cara, a lanky, morose seven-year-old living with Mammy and Daddy ‘to give Lily a break’. Lily said she was a problem child, that she was violent, but Lily said a lot of things.
Then there was news that Freya was very ill – leukaemia. Mammy was beside herself with worry, on the phone to Lily day and night, driving back and forth to her house with chicken broth and bitters. There was even an article in the paper – Mother of Leukaemia Victim Shaves Head in Solidarity with Brave Little Girl. But there was no leukaemia, as it turned out, or chemo or any of it. Some kind of misunderstanding, that’s what Mammy said. Suddenly Freya was living with Mammy and Daddy too, and Lily was gone – she had left the country. She sent a letter asking Sinéad to rent out that big ugly house Daddy bought her in Dalkey, and have the money sent straight to her bank account. Sinéad nearly jumped when she saw Freya that time – so skinny, the nimbus of stubble on her huge skull. What Sinéad remembers is her collar bone and the blades of her knees. Her eyes looking out of their deep sockets made Sinéad think of coins lost at the bottom of a well. She was a tiny child. So bony, and such white eyebrows. She said her mother had shaved her head; a misunderstanding.
‘I don’t know Eileen – I don’t know. Of course, you’re welcome here.’
‘It’s not her house, Sinéad! It’s not for her to say who can and can’t live there. What next? Is Mammy going to be allowed home after the hospital? Or will she be told to RENT somewhere?’
‘Don’t be silly, Eileen,’ but she can’t stop thinking of Freya yesterday, wearing that embroidered apron, pouring Sinéad’s tea for her. Do you know how Grandma makes the apple jelly, Sinéad? She showed me last time but I didn’t pay attention… Somehow, Sinéad has never grown as close to her nieces as she would have liked. There’s only so near you can get to them. Despite all the smiles, the apparent warmth, they have a strange steeliness about their cores, both of them.
‘It’s up to Mammy, Eileen. But you know she’s still not herself. I think I’d just wait out the three months if I were you. It’s not worth upsetting Mammy, is it?’
‘Mammy wants her out, Sinéad. She told me!’
‘Did she? She doesn’t seem to know what’s going on at the minute, Lily, to be honest with you.’
‘She wants her OUT, Sinéad. Only she’s scared of saying it. I’m going to help her put it into writing…’
‘You are welcome to stay here, Lily. Just stay here until your tenants are out. Or, you know, talk to Brendan about it but I think you have the right to tell them to leave, if you’re moving back in yourself…’
‘Well, Aoife’s right, Sinéad. She said you’d be no help.’
Sinéad closes her eyes. She could do with that whiskey.
‘Sinéad? Aren’t you going to say anything?’
‘What do you want me to say, Eileen? I think you’re causing trouble for nothing now, to be perfectly honest.’
Sinéad looks out the kitchen window at the wet yellow field. A loud rain has started, great fat drops coming slantwise at the windowpane.
‘It’s raining,’ she says, ‘can you hear it down the phone?’
‘No,’ says Eileen. ‘It’s not raining here.’
She leans against the draining board and watches the rain, allowing the crackling silence to tighten between them, until Eileen hangs up.
At the back door she pulls on her wellingtons and her Barbour jacket, and makes her way out across the field to the boathouse.