BLACK THREADS CHART THE veins like poison ink. Sinéad slivers off the top and bores out the core and uses the knife-tip to wheedle every streak of rot from the seeds and flesh. She puts the healthy green bits into a big stock pot and pours cider vinegar over them to kill any traces of mould. Fungus has invisible filaments that reach deep into tissue, breathing sickness into everything – fruit, meat, even flesh.
In July, she sprayed the tomatoes all over with a fungicide of startling turquoise and fed them with fertiliser. It was a stupid thing to do. The plants kept on going right through September, but she had created a little tragedy for herself out there. For weeks she watched the tired stalks push out more blossoms and fruit. She picked the tomatoes daily, and every single one was tainted with a soft, grey bottom before it grew ripe.
It was a relief to succumb to the autumn, ripping up the stalks by the cool light of dawn, laying the last of the fruit in a wooden crate and tossing the wiry plants into a big heap at the end of the garden – she will burn them, rather than risk infecting the compost heap.
Next year, she will steep the March nettles in hot water for a week, and then pour it into the prepared soil before planting her tomatoes. She found a blog that said rot could be prevented that way.
Rescuing the last of the tomatoes from decay has become an obsession. Sinéad hasn’t stopped working for hours; not for breakfast or a cup of coffee. She is intent on her task but she works clumsily, slicing into her thumb and fingers with the sharp steel knife – an old, wooden-handled knife with a silver hilt and a crooked, wire-thin blade that rusts if it isn’t dried well after washing. There’s a bitter satisfaction in the way the vinegar and the tomato juice send a searing pain into her arm when they enter the fissures in her skin.
She’ll try the nettle thing next year. Nettles are good for the kidneys – who told her that? When Sinéad was a child, her mother went out with her rubber gloves and gathered the first nettles of spring. She made meals with them – stuffed pillows of pasta, mud-coloured soup with nutmeg and black pepper and a swirl of milk. A long time ago now. They had less then; Mammy had to be careful what she bought. The nettles tasted like spinach, only spicier.
Only a few tomatoes to go. Tomorrow she’ll start on the chutney. Chutney is the only thing that can be made from underripe tomatoes. And jam. Green tomato jam.
She’ll have to finish up soon though; make herself presentable and prepare something for lunch. Her niece Valerie is arriving today with the hens.
*
Sinéad gave up on her own chickens three years ago, after the pine marten got the fat little black one, but she still has everything they need – a shed with nesting boxes and a run. She loved the little black one, and it really broke her heart to see it lying there with its speckled throat pulled open. This time she has nailed shut every tiny hole in the shed. She and Terence patched up the run themselves. It took two weeks to dig an extra barrier of chicken wire down deep into the soil, and her hips are still screeching from it. She will lock these hens up safely every night; she’ll be vigilant. She’ll keep them alive until Mammy is well again…
She has stale bread in the cupboard, does she? And chicken breasts in the fridge.
She’ll dress now in a minute, and maybe prepare a quick lunch for Valerie; something tasty and simple and maybe she’ll sit with her a bit and her niece can tell her things about being young in London. Sinéad does a great breaded chicken. It’s a long time since she’s made that. The secret is in the double dip – egg white, flour, egg white, breadcrumbs – and she puts a spoon of mustard and one of paprika into the egg, and a dollop of milk… that makes all the difference. That’s what she’ll make. Lovely.
*
Her mobile sounds. It’s Aoife. Sinéad puts it face down on the kitchen table. Watching it ring out, it’s a kind of heartbreak she feels. It is a kind of frustrated and hopeless and unworthy heartbreak; ‘Aoife,’ she says aloud. The word strains in her chest. She shakes her head, ‘Aoife,’ and sighs dramatically – a performance for no one. She has given up worrying about this new habit of talking to herself – she likes it; it feels like health to be able to make sounds and words that fit. ‘Aoife!’ – her throat is tender with the pain of it – her queasy regret for how her sister is now. For years at a time Sinéad could forget how she had laughed sometimes with her sister, how Aoife could be witty and light once. In those stretches of amnesia it was fine to listen to her sister’s rants and think, ‘Oh Aoife.’ But – was it the shock of the operation, or Mammy’s fall? But something has lifted her out of that kind of time, and the chubby nineteen-year-old Aoife, funny sometimes, warm even, rebellious and mischievous, is now palpably present, juxtaposed with the chronic bitterness and stiff rage of the woman at the end of the phone.
The ringing stops, and a text message comes in:
Mammy tired but fine. Ate a little.
Polish girl is stealing going to have to fire her
new girl available in a fortnight. Asian.
*
She stands on the stone steps, waving a tea towel at a shiny red Mercedes bus crunching up the gravel drive. She is surprised by a surge of affection when Valerie grins down at her from the driver’s seat, as though after a great achievement. Oh, but all that makeup, all that hair dye; poor Valerie. She has one of those faces that has never been girlish – shapeless eyebrows like her father, a rubbery nose, and, no matter how thin her body gets, she has Aoife’s heavy cheeks. When she was a toddler, Daddy painted a portrait of her called The Little Washerwoman, and he took to calling her that then, because of the dour, old face on her and the thick arms. The girl has little character to her face, no quirks; nothing that can tell a story. Perhaps that’s why she spent those years dressing in black and painting her face like a corpse – to make herself special, give herself character. It was terrifying – the white, white skin, black lipstick, corsets and all that garb. She called herself a goth. She would drive to Dublin in that little car Aoife bought her, to hang around Temple Bar, smoking. Poor Aoife. It was mortifying for her.
There is a residual morbidity about Valerie. She still wears a lot of black. She still dyes her hair black and wears very pale foundation but she is too sloppy-featured to look like a dying Victorian.
Valerie kicks the door open and puts a careful foot on the step leading down from the driver’s seat – Sinéad puts out a hand to help her and is struck by how feeble they both are: she middle-aged and bloated; Valerie limp-fingered, tiny on the waist and a nauseating whiff of sugary perfume off her.
‘Were you okay driving that thing?’
‘Not really.’ Her niece leans close and places a kiss on Sinéad’s cheek, touching her shoulder with a tenderness that makes a warm blush rise in her cheeks. That must be something she has picked up in London – Sinéad has never been on kissing terms with her nieces.
‘It’s Aunty Eileen’s…’
‘Why does she have a bus?’
Valerie shrugs and slides open the passenger door. The low, panicked cackle and err of frightened hens and a warm, dirty smell; the tang of their feathers, the powdery faeces under their claws. They have been inexpertly packed in cardboard boxes, which have been duct taped closed and pierced on top with a knife.
‘Six of them aren’t there?’
‘Yep. I have a big bag of grain and grit for you, too. Is Terence here?’
‘No. He’s visiting someone in England… the two of us will manage, Valerie!’
*
After their ordeal, the hens don’t enter the henhouse, but hunker down on the sparse grass. ‘They’ll be grand,’ says Sinéad. She throws a handful of grain through the wire and one of the hens stretches her scrawny neck in interest, then retracts it into her breast, puffing against the cold.
*
Sitting at the table in the dank back kitchen, Valerie looks painfully delicate – a large head wobbling on a little neck.
‘Can I help, Sinéad?’
‘No, no, stay where you are.’
As she moves back and forth, laying out plates and cutlery and condiments, Sinéad keeps sneaking glances at the girl, hoping to soothe the guilt of her earlier observation by finding something beautiful in her face. ‘So why did Eileen buy a bus, do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Valerie, ‘she drove to our house in it and she said we could use it to move the hens. I don’t know why, I didn’t ask…’
‘You could have fit them in a car.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Well, a law unto herself is Eileen. Who knows why she does anything?’
Eileen came back into their lives dressed like a fifties teenager, full of intimate smiles as though the years of exile had never happened. Sinéad never hated her little sister the way Aoife did. She was only saddened by her parents’ grief over the things she did, their shame. But it makes her almost squeamish, the sudden cosiness between Aoife and Eileen; and this exhumation thing fills her with a delicious kind of terror, not least because she can’t resist her own pleasure in it. She is glad they tracked him down, glad they pulled him up and took charge; she can’t help it. It feels like an exorcism. It’s when she wakes in the night with her abdomen aching that she feels it most keenly – the exquisite satisfaction, the guilt, the genius of it; that her sisters could launch this irreproachable revenge on that little ghost. It never would have occurred to her that such a thing could be done.
Valerie picks at her nails. ‘So did Mammy tell you she’s fired the carer?’
‘Has she? Well I would have thought she’d talk to me first…’
Then again, what has it to do with Sinéad? She offered to split the cost of the carer with Aoife, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Don’t be a ninny, Sinéad, she said, Mammy will pay for it. She’s already signed the cheque. That made sense, of course, but something about it makes Sinéad uneasy.
‘Apparently, she’s been drinking Grandma’s expensive coffees – you know, the filter ones she gets in the Superquinn delivery? She gets the delivery on Monday – Mum arranged it – and apparently by Thursday there was only one coffee left…’
‘You’ll like this chicken, Valerie. It’s years since I’ve made it so I hope I have it right…’
‘Oh. I’ll have a half a one, Sinéad. I’m not feeling the best…’
‘Okay. Well, taste it anyway.’
‘Thank you. That’s loads. Thank you. It looks lovely.’
‘So how are you getting on in London, Valerie? How long are you home for?’
‘Oh… well, I – I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m at really.’ The skin on her niece’s face is a green-white film of foundation, and very uniform in tone – but a terrible redness rises suddenly from her neck, making the makeup glow like a flimsy lampshade. ‘I had an abortion last week, and I just… I just wanted a rest then, after.’
‘Oh.’ Sinéad looks at the ketchup bottle – the brown-red scab around the cap. Her niece’s presence has exposed the filth in every nook of her kitchen, the grimy smells in it. She looks at the kitchen floor – in the dip of a cracked tile, a little triangle of dust and fluff and muck. She stopped trying to clean this house years ago.
She cannot look at the girl. Is it so normal now, that thing? Is it such a normal thing that people mention it over lunch? Valerie makes it sound like something that just happened to her; there’s self-pity in her voice but not a hint of culpability.
‘What does your mammy think of that?’
‘Oh, she doesn’t know. Don’t tell her will you please? She’s a bit stressed at the moment, I don’t think she’d really approve…’
‘Is it because you’re not married?’
One side of Valerie’s mouth lifts in a grin and she gives a breathy little laugh. ‘Not exactly, Aunty Sinéad… sort of, not exactly…’
Things have changed a lot. When her sister Eileen got pregnant – well, that was decades ago. The eighties, was it? The nineties? They are women now. Cara must be almost thirty, and the little one into her twenties… Eileen’s pregnancies were terrible scandals but there was no talk of abortion. Lily has been duped is what Mammy said, but had she been? Don’t make a spectacle of yourself, that’s what Mammy said to them when, as children, they misbehaved: You’re making a spectacle of yourself, or You’re making a show of me. But Eileen always loved to make a show. When the musician fellow died, Eileen seemed almost to enjoy her grief and the great humiliation of the whole thing. His ugly old bitch of a wife drove me from the funeral… those nasty little shits won’t even acknowledge their half-sisters… and so on. She must have known he was married. She must have. Oh, Daddy took that all very hard.
‘I see, well… Are you okay?’ says Sinéad. What does her niece want from her? Kissing her cheek, touching her shoulder like that, telling her this terrible, terrible thing.
‘Oh yes, it was fine actually. It was really simple – I just took the tablets and then it was just like a bad period. They have to monitor you for a bit, you know, in case it doesn’t work – if it doesn’t work they have to go in and take it out. I was really afraid of that. But it worked. It was fine actually. I just feel a bit tired now. I feel like I need to take stock… I shouldn’t have let it happen, of course. Stupid. Imagine being so stupid…’
‘Well. That’s good. Good that they didn’t have to go in. What age are you now, Valerie?’
‘Twenty-nine,’ she says, running a fingertip over the tarnished tines of an old silver fork. ‘Twenty-nine.’
*
Valerie isn’t touching her food. The food that Sinéad planned and so carefully prepared. Instead, she’s picking at a patch of thick polish on her thumbnail. She rips off a big flake and it takes a sheath of nail with it. Something sore and unkind is gathering in Sinéad’s belly – it’s her niece’s presumptuousness, sitting there at her table, telling her this – the unfaltering voice, the – what is it, what is it that’s making a terrible rage fill Sinéad’s belly, her chest, her skull? – entitlement. Entitlement is what it is; as though all these choices are hers to make. ‘So stupid,’ repeats Valerie, inviting Sinéad to contradict her. What right has Valerie to tell her this? She is implicated now, in this terrible thing, because she cannot stop her compassion for the girl anymore than she can stop her rage. What is the girl doing? Living over there in London, having careless intercourse and disposing of the consequences? Choosing to tell her this terrible thing, and not eating the food that Sinéad took such care to make for her?
‘… I was there crying away in the surgery, you know, looking at this tablet – you take one the day before, so like, there’s no going back actually, and then you go in and take another two – one orally and the other up there, you know?’
‘No,’ says Sinéad, ‘I don’t know about those things. I didn’t know that. This is – this is all stuff we knew nothing about, growing up.’ No doubt Valerie will have children in the future, as soon as she wants to, no thought for the miracle of it at all.
‘Well that’s what it is, anyway, and she was really lovely, the lady. It’s an Irish thing, I suppose, there’s a bit of a stigma still, isn’t there? The lady said it’s normal. She said, like, it’s not only Catholic and Muslim girls who find it hard, your body finds it hard too; your body has one idea, and you have another. “There’s no great choice in this situation,” she said, “only a better and a worse choice.” And that made sense to me. I felt better then. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Sometimes there are no nice choices, only less bad ones.’
Sinéad realises she’s been holding her breath, afraid to break whatever spell is making Valerie talk like this. She exhales slowly, and touches her brow, dizzy with revulsion. What a world. What a world this is.
It was something she thought about a lot, after that last pregnancy. She could lie awake relishing the memory of those images she had seen on Grafton Street – for years there were a pair of unwashed old ladies to be seen shuffling up and down, holding pictures of aborted foetuses – and she wished she had seen her miscarriage when it came out; she wished they had shown it to her so she could have known what it looked like, how big it was, whether it had the right number of heads or finger nubs or whatever; why it had just stopped like that.
The hysterectomy was over twenty years after that last miscarriage, but it started her wondering again. The evening she got home without her womb, she went on the internet to find out what had happened back then, but there were no answers. She looked up ‘nine-week-old foetus’ on Google Images. The pictures she got were nothing like those posters – a nine-week-old foetus was a hard-looking little prawn of a thing, all gristly spine with seeds for eyes. She looked at picture after picture of the little globs. One of them was lying on a woman’s palm – it was no bigger than her thumbnail but there was a tiny knitted hat on its head and a tiny knitted blanket around it. Sinéad couldn’t believe that there were knitting needles so small. All that was visible of the foetus was a pinkish jelly bump with those blind black eyes in it.
*
Valerie finally eats her half chicken breast, and then accepts the second half, dipping each forkful in a little heap of ketchup. Then Sinéad makes a pot of tea and Valerie talks and talks. She tells her every detail – the pregnancy test and the first appointment at the abortion clinic, and the way the blood looked when it came out. Although Sinéad can do nothing but sit in bamboozled silence and pour tea, Valerie thanks her for listening.
‘Why didn’t you have children, Sinéad?’
‘It never happened,’ says Sinéad. ‘Barren, I suppose. They can do things for you these days – things if you don’t want it, and things if you do. Interventions. Back then it was the luck of the draw.’
‘So, you would have liked children?’
‘I thought I’d have them. I used to talk about it, before I got married. Three girls and a boy.’
*
After that last miscarriage she had bad days, when all she could do was drive to her mother’s house and stand, weeping on the doorstep. What if they got it wrong Mammy? What if the machine was broken? The first few times, her mother held her, rubbed her back, wiped her cheeks, but then she grew impatient: Pull yourself together, she said, and; You’re not the first disappointed woman in the world! You think miscarriage is the worst thing that happens to women? Grow up child! Grow up my girl. She behaved foolishly for those months; her mother was right.
Nowadays people start babies in their forties, but back then thirty-six was old enough to be called barren. After they had taken the last miscarriage out of her, the word clung; whispering in her skin and glaring out from the great sanitary napkins they sent her home with – huge long, fat things, sterile white. It was the word on her dry palms and tremble-tender belly: barren. She was barren now.
She had lost pregnancies before but that last time was different – no spotting, no cramps; and three periods missed. The morning of the appointment she had vomited four times. Everyone said that was a good sign; she had been so sure of herself that she had even told Aoife about it. Once, resting on her back in bed, she had felt it ripple under her skin – could that be true? Or was it a lie that had come into its own?
Truth or trick, she remembers how it felt – soft petals, tiny fleshlet skimming quick as light beneath her surface.
It was the first time she’d made it to the twelve-week mark, but at the hospital they said it had probably been dead for weeks. They said it was her head keeping it in. Now that she knew it was over, it would start to come out.
But a week later her belly was so swollen she couldn’t wear trousers, and even on the way to the appointment Terence had to pull over three times so that she could vomit onto the road. She felt sure they had made a mistake. Mistakes happened. When they went in with their metal tools and scooped it out of her, one of the nurses would spot a tiny fairy-child, wriggling there in the bright bucket, and they would know they had made a mistake but it would be too late. That’s not the kind of thing they’d ever tell you, of course; they would never say sorry.
They’ve made a mistake, she said. Terence, they’re wrong; they’ve made a mistake.
That must have been hard on Terence. It must have frightened him to see her eyes wild like that, the frothy yellow bile coming up out her lips. He said it was just because she was fasting – she always felt sick when she fasted – and the hormones could be making her paranoid.
He was right, of course he was right. After listening with the trumpet and shaking her head, the nurse made her an appointment to see a man with an ultrasound machine. Then Sinéad had seen it herself there on the screen, a little black shadow, no bigger than the last one. The man pushed and pushed with the scanner on her belly, but the shadow was stubbornly still, stubbornly dark; ingrained like a stain into the fabric of her. The man switched on the sound, searching for a heartbeat. It sounded like being under water; the whoosh of her own body, nothing more.
Who did she think she was fooling? Inside her it sounded like an empty sea. There was nothing in her that could emerge to a new thing. Me, she thought. I am full only of me.
The man switched off the sound. Terence touched her hand but she flinched to a fist.
She’d had a dilation and curettage before – a ‘D and C’ is what it was called – and lots of women had them. It would give her the best chance, said the doctor, of conceiving again.
She had to bend into the foetal position, and an elderly nurse with a Donegal accent stroked her arm. ‘Think of something nice, darlin.’ All the nice she could think of, though, was the little baby booties she had allowed herself to crochet, the tiny tumble of creation; a whole flower-fish world unfurling inside her.
*
When her niece has left, Sinéad stands in the drizzle, fingers hooked in the wire fencing, watching the hens waggle their bottoms into the soil. She listens to the creaky sounds they make. They still haven’t entered the henhouse.
She tries to call Terence, but he’s not picking up. She realises very suddenly, with a mixture of relief and terror, that she is alone in the world. In her waterproofs and wellingtons, she makes her way down the sludgy field to the boathouse, where she places her mobile phone on the table and pours herself a whiskey.
There is a low wind starting, and the lake meets the windows in dark, mulchy sloshes. A small croak escapes from her throat, then a long, high whimper bouncing off the walls of the little boathouse, the low ceiling. She is alone out here. There’s nothing alive in the water. Everything has gone south.
Even the eels are gone.
Terence says eels are mysterious. No one knows how they mate. They are all born somewhere in the sea, beneath impassable waters. They go there to mate and they go there to die in cool, deep privacy.
The dark lake tongues at the glass. Rain pecks at the roof.
Mammy is going. It has already started; she is ebbing out.