GRANDMA’S HANDS DANGLE OVER the arms of the chair. Cara lifts one in both of hers, runs her thumb between the bones that fan wicker-fine under the slip of loose skin, the heady blue push of her knuckles. She turns it over and kneads the palm where the flesh is full as a fish belly, lines smoothed plump by the sore swell of tissue, and presses her lips to the skin that doesn’t smell like Grandma anymore, but like piss and perfume and the sediment of breath that settles in rooms like this one, with strangers in it, and storage heaters and closed windows.
The coolness of Grandma’s body makes Cara think of frogs; the pulsing blisters of their throats.
One night, when Cara was little, she and Grandma sat and watched the mating frogs come out in their dozens to croak at the moon. Grandma sat Cara on her lap and wrapped a wool blanket around her shoulders and they listened to the flat, imploring calls, then the bald sloshing of cold-blooded sex. Afterwards, Grandma told her that some frogs can make their own hearts stop beating and it made Cara sick and frightened, as though she might slip on the muddy bank and become a grotesque and beautiful thing like them.
Megan stands close, patting Cara’s cheeks relentlessly with her warm palms. Her face smells unhealthily like snot. She is not over this cold and Cara should get her home.
‘Let’s dow, Mammy. Mimi is tired. She tan’t member us.’
Cara kisses her grandmother’s cheek. ‘We’ll come back soon Grandma,’ she says. Her voice is too public. ‘I’ll bring back your clean clothes. I’ll make you that quiche you like, with the leeks. I’ll bring it tomorrow…’
‘Yes.’ Grandma interlocks her bulky fingers with Cara’s. ‘But wait now, there’s one thing—’
Cara’s other hand is clamped in her daughter’s sticky grip. Megan leans back and pulls with the weight of her whole body, making a performance of heaves and grunts. Cara shakes her off and waits to hear the one thing that Grandma wants to say.
‘—Daddy hasn’t been home in weeks and weeks.’
‘Whose daddy?’
‘Daddy… my husband.’
The colour is seeping out even there in her famously bright eyes – the blue is greying, the white is yellowing. She trembles a little these days. Every cell in her is faltering. She is blurring into death. Cara squeezes Grandma’s shoulder firmly, as though the sensation might align her with this time and place and straighten out something between them.
‘Daddy,’ says Grandma, irritated. ‘You’re not stupid. You know who I mean.’
Her fingers tighten, and in a whoosh of panic Cara has a sense of toppling down, of being weighted into Grandma’s squeaky special chair, the stagnant feet, the muddled world she is sinking into. Cara lifts the hand to her mouth and kisses it again. Over the new smells there is a veil of scented lotion. It’s something appropriately subtle – white musk or wild rose – something expensive that one of the aunts bought her, but still the fragrance is too robust for the dusty skin and the dusty hair and the flabby breath of a body closing down.
‘You know who – Daddy. Who do you think?’ says Grandma. ‘Dinny! My husband, Dennis Kearney. Have none of you noticed he’s been gone now for weeks and weeks?’
Then she raises an eyebrow into a sneering arch, and Cara doesn’t recognise her. She is testing my integrity, thinks Cara, she is challenging me to say it: he is dead. After a pause, during which Megan gives a splutter of exasperation and plonks down cross-legged on the floor, Cara says, ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Worry? Oh no. I don’t worry. I never worry about that. We trust each other. But it is so strange, isn’t it? Still you don’t sleep. It is so hard to sleep alone. You don’t get used to that, you know. Sleeping without them. I think you understand, don’t you?’
She looks intently at Cara with a quivering stare, like the screen on an old television set that needs to be slapped into sense.
Cara tries to force Grandma’s cuticles down a little. Despite all the hand lotion, they are grafted fast to the ridged nail and threaten to split.
‘Will I paint your nails for you, Grandma?’
‘Ha. So you can laugh at me?’
‘No, Grandma.’
‘Look at this stupid thing!’
She lifts her hand to show the plastic ring Aunt Aoife has furnished her with; a wad of mottled blue plastic set in sharp alloy, where her turquoise ring used to be.
‘Stupid thing. Do they think I’m some sort of eejit?’
From across the room, a nurse who is administering tea smiles at her encouragingly, as at an act of charity. Cara kisses her grandma – her face and hands and shoulders. She strokes her hair like a lonely child with a much-loved pet. To the nurses all these grandmothers must look alike. They don’t know what Grandma is; her harsh beauty, her dark eyebrows and sensual lips. All the life there was once in this dying body that has menstruated and sweated and given birth and howled with grief and tugged Cara’s mane violently into a too-tight French plait. Someone removed the painting that Grandma brought here with her – a small oil portrait Grandad made of her when they were young and living in Soho. It was taken down off the wall of her little room and replaced with a clip-framed print. The nurses couldn’t know, from that dull print, the life in that work, the sense of breath and sound, the disconcerting glossiness of her belly and the crimson shadows of her thigh.
Cara kisses the yellow-padded fingertips. She rubs the old palm vigorously as though to stimulate the tired waters and all the oily secretions of a living body.
‘Mammy, tum ooooon!’
Cara swipes at Megan’s nose with a tissue from a big box on the coffee table, but there is no satisfaction in it – the snot is endless. Does she take proper care of Megan? Does she get enough iron? And B vitamins?
‘That child’s not healthy-looking. Blue mouth.’
‘Megan’s got a bit of a cold, haven’t you, darling?’
Megan sits on the floor, glaring up at her. There is a purple tinge beneath her eyes, and her lips are pale.
‘Well, she doesn’t eat enough,’ says Cara, ‘and she can’t eat eggs. You know I read you can use chickpea flour as an egg replacement. You can even make quiches with it. I bought chickpea flour and I’m going to try it. Megan might like them.’
‘Is that right.’
‘Yes. I’ll bring you one to try. I have to go, Grandma. I’ll see you tomorrow…’ She kisses Grandma briskly, ‘Bye bye.’ But she is tugged back by the hand like a wayward puppy on a lead—
‘What’s that?’ Grandma points.
‘There’s a baby in my tummy,’ says Cara. ‘A baby girl, they think – another one!’ She laughs to try to make Grandma laugh at her for having lots of girls, but she gives a raspy sigh and raises her eyes to heaven.
‘Oh. You think this is funny? I will not get one, you know.’
‘One what?’
‘One of those. I will get nothing in my belly now, will I? We had one once, our little boy, but I will never make anything now.’
‘But you have three children, Grandma. Aoife and Sinéad and…’
‘So you say. Did I tell you Daddy’s been away, for weeks and weeks and not a word? Nothing. And nothing on the news. Not a word about him. Ah no. I’m not worried though.’
She taps her thick fingernails on the arm of the chair with a slow, muted panic that demands an audience.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says, ‘but… well, you know yourself, Cara. It’s the night. It’s the night. At night it’s hard. It’s hard to sleep without him.’