47

MOLLY NODS INTO THE phone, speaking as loudly as she can, to be sure they hear her from wherever they are.

‘Oh, Freya. Yes. Thank you for calling. It’s very nice of you to think of me.’

She cannot find the person, but the name sends a surge of something through her – love and worry, love and worry. Freya, Freya, Freya. There is a snagging concern about Freya, something that makes her fret. It is not Cara but like Cara. Freya is love and worry, like Cara, but Molly can’t find what Freya is – the face or the status of Freya. She must conceal this. She does not want to be found out. She does not want to be laughed at or fooled by them all. She must keep her cards close to her chest, under her chin, the backs facing out, showing only the purple clover pattern, the backs of the cards in the pack that they bought once in a newsagent, she and Dinny – and they were expensive – for a train journey to Galway, the cards they bought packed in a little felt pouch and each back the same. Rows and rows of slanted clovers, the pack piled on the rigid little table between them, and then her cards with the faces pressed into her neck and his cards with the faces pressed to his chest, bending his head low and smiling up like that while he bluffs, so that she loves him and she can’t wait until he leans over to kiss her – though she has the feeling now that there are too many for her toad-wobbly hands to hold, that her bones are rigid as ancient megaliths and the cards are slipping through like water, cascading down her body into her lap, onto the floor, the faces exposed—

‘How was your tea? Did you have something nice, Grandma?’

‘… excellent. Oh, excellent. You have no idea. Beautiful… fresh ingredients. That’s the thing. When the ingredients are fresh you can’t go wrong.’ Who is she speaking to?

‘What did you have for supper?’

Her mind grasps for it. The voice is one she loves. Like her sister’s voice. Kat has had great disappointments in life.

‘You are disappointed.’

‘What did you have though, Grandma? What did you have for supper?’

Trying to catch her out. Trying to rattle her with all these questions when she is so tired and they know she doesn’t have the answer but they want to catch her and she will not be caught.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘oh you have no idea. Beautiful.’

‘But what did you have, Grandma?’

‘Oh… I think it was a kind of soup Ka–. Very nice.’

She over-salted the cauliflower. That was it, she knew there was something. Watching Dinny’s face as he ate – and there was she, delighted with herself for getting that cauliflower, and then she saw him wince as he chewed and she knew. It was a beautiful little thing, ivory white and young tight leaves. She couldn’t really afford it but she had to have it, and she had gone to too much effort, perhaps – she didn’t want to scrimp on the salt and she had used a lot of mace too, and she had gone overboard. She should just have boiled it and tossed it in butter. Dinny ate it anyway, and that was the worst part – watching him suffer through it. She was really big by then, with their first baby, and she had heartburn and she couldn’t swallow a mouthful.

‘It’s Freya. Cara was with you earlier. It’s Freya, Grandma.’

‘Oh, Freya. Yes.’

‘Well I’m glad it’s nice, Grandma. Is there anything I could bring you for lunch tomorrow? They might let us eat together in the refectory, if I brought something?’

She knows the refectory. Decked out like a toy restaurant. White light. Red paper napkins rolled into clouded plastic cups. People wheeled to the table. Negresses wheel them in – tall with regal cheeks and funny hair like ribbons, black fingers with coloured jewels for nails, and paler on the palms, like they are holding handfuls of clean, dark earth that has made valleys hidden in the folds, so it would be easier to read their palms than hers, and in the wheelchairs the pale, balding halfwits who eat baby food, pushing at it with their tongues and the black ones catch it from their chins and spoon it back in. A dirty job, poor girls. But she too has an unpleasant task. She is to sit with the dribblers and play the hostess. She is introduced to them. She is as polite as she can be, she nods at them and invites them to sit with her, but they drop food from their mouths. She conceals her disgust with a small smile but what can she say to them? The lady with the little hat on her, black netting over her eyes, her face powdered like a death-mask, balls of pink lipstick and gravy and mash beside her mouth. Why has she come like this into Molly’s home? Molly does not remember inviting her but she is afraid to say as much, in case she has forgotten, in case the lady is a good friend, or her sister-in-law, and Molly has forgotten because she is so tired these days and she forgets.

‘Well, I hired some very good girls to help the halfwits to eat. They can be very nice and just as efficient as you or me.’

There was a little restaurant she was in with her sister once and they had rabbit and then some very nice coffee with a plate of four fine biscuits, each one different, and there was a French name for what they were. Her sister was there and they laughed together.

When her own children were young there were black babies starving and they used to knit cardigans for them, though Molly thought that couldn’t have done much for babies starving and parching under the crackling sun.

She paid.

Molly paid, because Cara is only young and has children and she worries about how she pays for things and she likes an excuse to buy things for her. She said to Cara, ‘They can train them to do all sorts of things. Amazing how they can learn things so quickly. They have brains alright, same as you and me.’ And Cara looked angry and ashamed of her, but then she laughed at Molly and kissed her, and then she told people afterwards beside the Christmas tree. She told everyone and they laughed at her and shook their heads and her face burned but she had a glass of champagne also and they said, ‘Your nose is red, from the champagne!’ They liked to tease her but it was not to be cruel. Molly is no racist. She thinks it is terrible what was done to the blacks. She likes Black Power. Malcolm X, when he calmed down at the end. Muhammad Ali. You can’t blame them for their rage, sure who wouldn’t be raging after what was done to them all, women and children and all? She liked Orson Welles being Othello that time. Very attractive. But don’t talk to her about Americans. She wants nothing to do with Americans. Don’t talk to her about Americans. They took babies from their mothers, sold people like cattle at the market, men to work to death and women to pleasure themselves with. Now they even buy their babies like dolls to make believe with. That was the worst. To take a child from its mother. The thought that her Sinéad could do such a thing… ‘We might adopt,’ she says. No. No, Molly wouldn’t have it. There were rich ladies in France who took black babies from their mothers so that the milk could be used for their own babies instead. Dinny told her that. The corners of his eyes jittering back tears. Those ladies were disgusting. They weren’t ashamed of giving another woman their babies to feed while they lay back on a chaise longue. They had a very ugly time of it, the black women, and the men too. They must have felt ashamed to see their women like that, suckling another’s child while their own perished on a boat. But there was black like the girls she hired to wheel the halfwits – black that was on the skin and not black but up close really brown, brown skin like her skin, cocoa-brown to protect against the sun. Full lips too. Fuller lips, usually. Lips that would be beautiful to paint if you mixed the colours right.

That was negro people. That was people, dark-skinned people, darker than the Spanish gypsy skin. But then there is another dark in the night; not people at all – shadow people in the night and they are another kind of black; black that is no colour. Black like a space in the world, like a string of paper dolls cut out of the night, their skulls a hole where teeth and eyes glint like pebbles by the moon. They have no skin because they are made of something else. There is black in the night and strange words in the night. In the night figures cut out of the air come marching and they are made of no-matter. They come carrying sacks of sand to stack up against the walls and block out the day. They walk in lines like shadows on the walls outside her windows and she hears them stack the sand against the back door and they have guns and they plant bombs and they throw babies at the fireplace and let their little skulls crack. She is fortunate to have no such beliefs as the lady in the netting and hat with her rosary in her fingers, muttering like a mad woman, shrieking suddenly, ‘fruit of thy womb.’ Fruit is an apple, isn’t it? Cut into wedges for the children. Womb is where they turn in the dark and emerge into life and are slashed in the face. It was all for nothing because all the love and all the joy cannot be reeled back in because he lay dead like that, laid out in a cardboard box because they hadn’t the money for a white one – she washed him and laid him out like a gift for the earth and they asked her what words she would like and told her they had a priest who would do the funeral like charity as though they could give her anything after he was dead and as though she could give him anything now with words that the priest would say.

There were things she loved in mass, things she missed – the part with the shaking all the hands, and the part with the bread. When she heard the mass in English for the first time, she was already a grown woman and a heretic (though it was only Dinny knew it) but when she heard it that time – oh, oh, the poetry of it. The priest lifted up the holy bread in two hands, saying, ‘He took the bread, broke it, gave the bread to his disciples and said, “Take this all of you and eat it. This is my body, which is given up, for you.”’

This is my body – the way he said that made a little chink in her, and he cracked the bread in two, and she felt a sweet tearfulness sweep up over her face – which is given up, for you.

The lady on the phone wants to sell her something. They all want something now. They all want her to sign things.

‘No. Thank you. I am very happy with the service. I am very happy with my belief I do not want your religion, thank you.’

Molly will go happily to dust and let that be the end of it.

‘I have to put Jem to bed, Grandma, but I will come in the morning to see you.’

If Molly can only push her mind a little bit, she knows she can understand what the voice is saying, but she is so tired and she cannot do it.

‘Yes, yes, we will make an appointment. Okay,’ she says, and drops the phone.

She is supposed to hang it in its cradle. Stupid woman. Stupid old woman she is now. Did you ever? Shouldn’t she be ashamed of herself? It is dangling somewhere beneath her. It should be beside her. She pulls the spiralled wire and she feels the receiver bounce on the end but she cannot find it.

Molly’s granddaughters must be clever things – going to university like that; flying along. She saw the library once – Freya brought her in to see all the books there were there in Trinity College Dublin – a long room with high walls like a cathedral; balconies and books stretching to the ceiling. Was it a jealous feeling she had in there, or pride, or what, or just the beauty of the place, she didn’t know but a tearfulness leapt up in her. There are so many things Molly is never going to know now, but what of it? We all know different thing, isn’t that it? The smell of books in there too, of old pages, careful letters, crispy spines. And polish. Floor polish and wood polish. A fine place.

She uses her hands to heave her legs off the bed, but she cannot stand. Her body feels too heavy. Then she remembers – she needs to be helped to the bathroom now because she has broken her leg or something from hopping over fences with Dinny. Stupid goose. At her age to be hopping over fences. But such fun she wouldn’t miss it. She pulls the cord with the red toggle, but they don’t come.

*

There are kind negresses and small Oriental girls with heart-shaped faces and straight black fringes and sweet high voices. These are the women who wash her, and paint her nails, and she is glad to have these women with her at this time, not men or nuns who could be hard sometimes, and could be disgusted by things. She cannot wait much longer here for Dinny… but what else can she do? She cannot leave without him. She must warn him to look after their little boy because it would be terrible for anything to happen. She could not bear it if anything was to happen. She must ring Freya and tell her to sieve the child’s food before she gives it to him – press it through a sieve and squash any lumps out.

Her neck is very sore, very stiff. She must lie down to sleep because her neck is sore from bending down into her chest. She pulls the red toggle and hopes they will come soon. She hopes Dinny will come soon before they start with the heavy sacks, blocking up the back door and the front gate so that he won’t be able to get in, stacking them up one on top of the other like the bodies of soldiers until there is no light at the window anymore. Black and Tans black in the night and the inhuman things they could do… The boy who was touched forever after, walking up and down Manor Street, muttering to himself, because they threw him like that and his little skull cracked. And Kat with the great ugly scar down her cheek. She pulls and pulls and is becoming angry because she needs them to fetch Dinny and she must be clean before he comes. She is very, very tired and it is getting dark and she cannot sleep without him.

Molly presses on the button now because it’s serious now and there are electric cries and beeps from the corridor and all the rooms full of drooling ladies in black mesh hats and on the wall Dinny’s paintings are sinking out of colour and flattening and she knows that when she looks at her legs there in the painting there is not so much realness as once there was because she is blanching now the way photographs do when the light shines on them too long and the way asparagus does when you throw it in boiling water and she is limp now too, and white and wrinkled like an over-soaked thing, and she closes her eyes and she wants sleep to come soon, but not before the girl has come with her little boy so she can see that there has been a mistake, that’s all foolish old woman with your spooky dreams, here he is, smiling, here he is. And Molly will see that he is alright, after all.