FREYA SHAKES OUT ONE of Baby Peggy’s vests, smooths the ridge made by the clothes horse, shapes it slowly into a neat square. Her sister has not inherited their grandma’s knack for housekeeping. The laundry is pilled and stiff – too weakly wrung and too slowly dried. The whites are grey or yellowish; the coloured things are faded. None of it has ever been ironed. There’s a sour, brackish smell off it.
Freya puts the folded vest in the stack by her elbow. She pulls Jem’s pyjama top from the clothes horse – little blue robots on a faded crimson background. She puts her face into it. She can smell him through the detergent and mildew. These pyjamas are getting too small for him. The cuffs are frayed; buttons are missing.
She shakes it out, folds it neatly and lays it on his pile.
That’s it. There’s nothing left to fold.
She leans back against the wall, legs crossed, not yet ready to face the empty house downstairs. Being up here amongst her sister’s clutter makes her feel safe and like a child again, too small for the vast, curious jumble of Cara’s mind.
Cara is a hoarder – that’s the word for it. There are little hills of leaves and shells on the floor, unwashed coffee mugs, Grandad’s encyclopaedias, loosely fastened papers stacked up against the walls.
She feels bold approaching the desk – transgressive.
Cara’s sketches are covered with an old, paint-stained rag with faded pictures on it, of a girl and a boy walking. The girl has a wicker basket over her arm, and an oversized ribbon in her hair. The desk is big enough to hold a trove of inks and pencils and junk: a heap of unremarkable stones, the fragile shell of a snail, a dead ladybird, mute red. At the far corner, filled with roughly hewn cubes of sugar, is the little cork jug that belonged to their grandad. Freya lifts it by the handle, cups her hand around the pale, perforated cork. The cork has a living quality, always warm to the touch, as though it breathes through the holes. It has always given Freya the creeps; a suggestion of human skin in the swatches of cork, the inside glazed cool and smooth as a worn bone. Grandma loved it. Freya remembers her giving it to Cara, touching the cork, turning it over and tracing the rough signature at the bottom. ‘It’s cork, you know. Handmade. A beautiful object.’
It gives Freya a little rush, to be up here alone with Cara’s work. She could pull the cloth off her sketches; she could look.
Cara’s illustrations are busy compositions that fill up the whole page with tiny, hidden details. She gave Jem a hand-painted book about a donkey once. Every second page has a full-page illustration, and opposite it, on the text page, there’s always a little grasshopper or a dandelion or something in one of the corners, or crawling along the letters. One page has a hatching cocoon dangling from the end of the letter Y. That’s what Freya loves about Cara’s books; the tiny, beautiful things you almost miss. She can spend hours flicking through them, swallowed in by the vast world of small things that her sister can make.
She lifts the corner of the sheet. The page is disappointing – nothing but ghostly shapes plotted around the page; vague human figures. Cara rarely draws humans.
Cara. Her faulty sister. It’s some little madness that makes her draw with such earnest intensity. She has worked the same way since she was a teenager – first with light HB pencils, before pulling those fine black architect’s pens from her dressing-gown pockets, or one of the jars she keeps on her desk, and rendering the final lines slowly, lovingly, her hand trembling, lips almost touching the paper, dribbling sometimes, in concentration; drawing every scale of a fish, every whisker of a mouse. As a child, Freya was mesmerised by it, and she would beg to be allowed to watch Cara. She would sit cross-legged at the end of her bed, as silently as she could, while her sister sat at their dressing table and drew friendly and anatomically perfect little snails, or smiling toads in top hats and bow ties, or pointy-eared pixies with ‘Cara’s special pens’, which Freya was not allowed to touch. Cara used to snap at her for breathing too loudly behind her, and Grandad used to send her away. ‘Leave Cara be, Freya. She can’t concentrate with you there. Go help Grandma.’
Freya thought Cara-at-work was something magical and magnificent then; something she was grateful to be near.
Is it over now, the magic? Is Cara too tired now, too thwarted and disappointed? There is a hardness along her jaw. There are long, violent creases around her eyes.
Every morning, from the spare room, Freya hears her mount the stairs at five o’clock. She hears the wheels of her chair on the floor, the crossing and recrossing of her feet. She stays up here until eight, when it’s time to wake the children. Sometimes she works at night too, if she has a deadline. So, she is always tired. And now that she is pregnant again, her face seems rubbed and smudged all the time, as though she cannot muster the energy to hold her features solid, as though there is no room for stillness in all the actions she needs to perform and all the worlds she needs to create.
Freya sits at the desk. She does a spin on the chair. It’s only that she hits it with her foot, or she wouldn’t have noticed it – the big hatbox that she took from Grandma’s.
It was during those few days after they’d got rid of all the carers and before they put Grandma in the home. Freya had been sitting by Grandma’s chair, telling her about Jem – a topic that used to make her beam and rattle on, repeating the same anecdotes and chuckling at them. Grandma began to list all the things she wanted Freya to take – nice glass jars she had kept for jam, a milk jug, her ‘zoom zoom’ for making soup. Freya brought a cardboard box in from the utility room and put it on Grandma’s footstool. She placed in it everything Grandma told her to.
When the box was full, Grandma looked past her. ‘Go upstairs,’ she said, ‘to my bedroom. Go to the wardrobe and up high – pull a chair over to stand on – and there is a box there full of the most beautiful cotton yarn. Bring it to Cara will you? She can knit them some warm vests from it. I will never use it now, my wrists hurt if I knit, and who knows what will happen to all my things. People passing through. People rifling through everything, dividing it up. That beautiful cotton will be wasted – who appreciates good cotton anymore? They will throw it out. I think sometimes that we might have spoiled our children. That’s the problem. Give it to Cara, tell her to make something useful with it.’
There were two boxes. She took down the botched hatbox first, thinking that the yarn was in there. When she lifted the lid, it let off a dry, kittenish smell. There was a mixture of objects she vaguely recognised: a child’s sampler with a hard vein in it where some dropped stitches had been retrieved by an adult and tightly picked up; a pair of white lace socks; a birthday card with shiny hearts stuck on the front. She put the lid back on, and rushed out to the car with it. She stole it. Why did she do that?
She put it in Cara’s attic storage without even looking in it again. Cara must have taken it out when she took out the Christmas decorations.
She kneels on the floor and pulls out the box. She opens the card. There’s a pop-up chicken in the centre fold, a speech bubble saying Happy Birthday Grandma You are a Spring Chicken ha ha. Under the card is a school project she once did on Irish bridges, and one Cara did on butterflies. She lifts them out one by one and lays them on the floor. She got five stars for the bridge project – she remembers that – and she felt like a fraud because Cara had helped her to draw the bridges. She takes out a flimsy cardboard creation; some sort of rabbit or mouse made from the inner tube of toilet paper rolls, with a coiling tail and a pompom nose and the eyes and whiskers drawn in great detail. Along the tail, tiny letters spell for grandma love Cara and Freya. There is a small, brown-skinned baby doll with a tiny hand-knitted dress, and an O in its mouth where it must have had a dummy once. There are two books – the first is a big book, The Three Little Kittens, with pictures instead of certain words, like a pair of mittens for ‘mittens’ or an S-shaped scarf for ‘scarf’. The pages feel waxy, and there are strings running through it, like raw silk. The binding is loose and some pages are missing. The only thing Freya recognises is a copy of Charlotte’s Web. The pages are frayed and soft and fragrant. On the inner cover Cara has written her name in pencil, the joined-up letters pressed carefully and with deliberate neatness onto the paper so that the lead shines dense like magnetite. Beneath Cara’s name, her own is written in a lighter, shakier hand, FREYA.
Freya holds the book in both hands. She puts her lips to it. She wants it; those parts of her life with Grandma and Grandad and her sister that have been pried quietly away.
At the bottom of a box there’s an envelope of very thin paper. A Polaroid photo of her mother with Cara and a white-haired baby – the baby must be her. They are outside. There are yellow flowers in the background. Cara has a pink nose and slightly pink eyes and her dark hair is in two ponytails. She is a little too close, reaching for something behind the camera. Their mother’s cheek is pressed to the baby’s. She is smiling broadly, beautifully. She loves them.
Something painful moves up like vomit from Freya’s stomach.
The things she knows – are they the fabrications of a sick mind? Have she and Cara made it all up, about their mother? And even if they haven’t, what did she really do that was so bad? In a court of law, with her hand on her heart, what would she say?
Their mother was frightened of Cara. She thought there was something bad in her. Freya can remember that; she can remember how her mother lied to the police woman that time; how she dragged Freya into the lie, how it tasted in her mouth – like blood. But she can remember other times too, when Cara’s wrongness seemed very real to her. When it was she and her mother battling the darkness, and she can remember how good that felt, how strong and happy she felt, the togetherness of that.
Strangely, she remembers very little of what happened after that – when Cara was gone and it was just Freya and her mother. There is a different colour to those memories, as though the lights were lower, as though they are submerged in dark water. She believed in her own illness; and she believed in her mother’s cures. Her mother used to make her drink glasses of oil mixed with grapefruit juice, held the bucket under her chin while it came back up. ‘Good girl… poor Freya.’
Freya rubs at the photograph with her thumb. She is crying but it feels like the crying is forced; like she is performing.
She knew The Lily once – she really knew her, and she knows her mother believed her own stories, her own lies, even as she covered them up. Perhaps she really believed it would do Freya good to vomit three times a day. Freya can remember the diarrhoea all through those months, and big green globs that came out of her, like things belonging to mysterious oceans, or nuclear experiments. They were toxins, her mother said; they were negative entities she had absorbed from Cara.
Was it abuse, the way the social worker said? Or some quirky alternative health fads? There is no unpicking the past – knots form, the yarn crimps and frays – there is no way of reconciling it all, of pulling out the stitches and weaving things back together.
She knows it is dangerous to pity her mother; it is dangerous to second-guess herself. Freya will need to do away with this photo; that’s all. With difficulty, she folds it twice and stuffs it into the pocket of her jeans. She will get rid of it in some thorough and final way.
She can feel the photograph, sharp in her pocket when the doorbell rings. She is thinking about it as she opens the door; about how to destroy it, about what would be the least creepy way to destroy it. If she leaves it in bright sunlight, the image will simply grow whiter and whiter until it is gone.
On the doorstep there’s a man with a clipboard. He’s dressed in very clean blue overalls. Behind him, a van, another man in the same overalls opening the back of it.
‘Hi,’ says the man. ‘Am I at the right house? Cara Kearney?’
‘Oh. Yes. I mean, I’m not her but this is the right house.’
‘I have three dishwashers here for her.’
‘Three?’
‘Three Bosch dishwashers here for her. Is that right?’
‘She didn’t say anything.’
‘They’re new models. They were pre-ordered. They were ordered a good few months ago. A delay… She might have forgotten. They would have sent an email, but she might have forgotten…’