POINTED BUDS, GLASSY AS boiled sugar, scratch weakly at the bedroom window. Sinéad wakes to the shriek of the wind, like the cry of a banshee.
Was she asleep? It’s hardly even a dream she’s been having. It’s only a vague memory – the smells and the tastes of Mrs Brereton’s house: boiling potatoes, that big drooling dog, the oily, scalpish dust of the cloakroom, salted porridge.
When Mammy was in hospital having Lily, she and Aoife were sent next door to Mrs Brereton’s for a few days. Mrs Brereton made her porridge with milk and salt and it had a flabby skin on the top. It so shocked Sinéad’s palate that she gagged. Aoife spoke at her through her teeth, ‘Eat it.’ She raised the spoon again to her lips; it tasted like phlegm. In a moment of pure mercy, Aoife took Sinéad’s bowl, swapping it for her own empty one, and ate the disgusting porridge for her.
There isn’t much she remembers about those days. The garden, yes – picking peas and raspberries, planting bulbs. Her sister Aoife, that time by the shed, the pain in her face as she watched the slugs suffering in Lily’s potion.
*
Sinéad folds the blanket under her feet. Where is that cold air coming from? And how can Terence sleep through it?
She wants to wake Terence – she wants him to know about the porridge that time, about the good things in Aoife.
She wants her big sister, suddenly – her certainty, her pragmatism. But it’s the Aoife of their girlhood that she wants, not this new, cold woman, all quiet rage. The morning after Sinéad’s hysterectomy, Aoife arrived to the hospital room, ears red and her eyes watering. They wouldn’t let her in with flowers, she said. They had made her leave them at the nurses’ station.
Sinéad is fond of flowers, but only in the earth. As a child, she loved the daffodils in the Breretons’ next door; how they spread silently in the dark of winter, re-emerging higgledy- piggledy spring after spring, and the way they withered in the autumn, the slimy brown stems bending willingly to earth.
‘I didn’t scrimp on them either,’ Aoife said, ‘only to be ordered by some little madam to leave them outside!’
This was because of the pollen, of course, but at the time Sinéad, in the haze of anaesthetic and painkillers and the possibility, however vague and sanitised, of death, assumed that flowers were banned out of a kind of discretion. A bunch of cut flowers seemed an insensitive thing to place beside people like her, struggling to stave off their own decline, having bits of themselves removed and supplemented, bandaged and consoled. Flowers, with their inevitable wilting, sitting by the beds in plastic paper and plastic vases, fed by water and chemical food sucked up through the wounds in their stems, would make a mockery of all these efforts at health.
‘Really, Aoife, I’m just glad you’re here. I don’t need flowers…’
Aoife’s rage was too much for Sinéad. ‘I’m very tired, Aoife. I need to sleep now…’ And yet she had been filled with loneliness and disappointment when her sister finally left her bedside. They had agreed not to tell Mammy about the procedure – it might worry her. But Sinéad was not ready to be this grown up. Her sister’s presence had made her crave the intimacy of her own flesh, and as that night in the hospital wore on, the absence deepened it into an raw ache.
The part they had pulled out was a place in herself that she had never seen. But the surgeon had looked at it, touched it, snipped it loose and – what? Passed it to a nurse, probably. And what did they do with her womb then? She saw a film once about the Magdalene laundries, where the nuns fed afterbirth to the pigs. But that’s different, of course.
*
She hasn’t really slept for days now. There’s a natter in her head, something tapping at her, on and on – something that won’t let her rest.
Terence came home yesterday. As he came through arrivals he looked so like his father – a crusty old man with nostril hair and ear hair and tufts of facial hair on his cheekbones, ‘buggers’ handles’, he calls them. He kissed her beside her mouth, his breath slightly bad.
‘Every morning she writes “do not resuscitate” on her chest,’ he said. ‘Poor Aunt Toots. I think that’s it. I don’t think I’ll ever see her alive again.’
His body in the bed disturbs her – he sucks up the air, he snores, his skin secretes a grimy substance into the sheets. He was handsome once. Now that he is like this, who would choose him as a lover? In sleep he tries to reach for her – to reach for someone – and his touch only makes her feel more keenly the big lonely shape of herself.
She shifts away from him and lies on her back at the edge of the bed, looking up through the dark at the ceiling, a huge flake of paint sagging loose like a discarded chrysalis.
No, it’s not Terence that’s bothering her.
Davitt Dunlin is dead.
It was Aoife who rang her with the news. Is it since then she’s had this feeling like a clock in her bones, bubbles in her veins, butterflies in her fingers? Perhaps it’s her thyroid acting up.
The funeral is on Saturday.
Mammy always liked the Dunlins; she liked that they were family friends. And she liked it when Aoife married a solicitor. It used to make Sinéad bristle to hear her refrain, ‘It’s good to have a solicitor in the family.’ But she was right. When the HSE woman came snooping, it was very lucky there was Brendan to know what to do, and it was a blessing that Davitt had their backs.
Now the HSE lady will have to give up. If she rings again, Sinéad will say, ‘Davitt Dunlin is dead. Leave us alone.’
When she got the call from that Bernie woman, back in the autumn, Sinéad stayed on the phone to her longer than she should have. Sinéad thought she was lying at first. Aoife hadn’t told her about the nanny cam. Davitt put it in perspective: ‘Forget about the camera business,’ he said. ‘Don’t put another one in but don’t try to defend it and if they ask, say it’s gone. Say as little as possible. About the house sale, tell them you don’t know what they’re talking about. Freya has made it up, tell them. They’ll need all kinds of paperwork before they can actually insist you furnish them with any proof. Keep refusing and they won’t have the funding to keep at you.’
Davitt was alive then, saying that, and now he is dead. His liver was already cancerous then, and chemo had reduced his hair to fluff, and he was trying to stay alive. Did he know, then, that he’d be dead before Mammy?
Sinéad is not used to lying, but by the time they met with the HSE woman she was prepared. The words ran out as easy as a rhyme, and it made her feel loosened from some foolish thing, soaring in a space where her words made the world. ‘Property? A house, where?’ she said, her heart rustling up her throat like something startled. ‘I can’t help you there… ah, it’s my niece who said all this, no doubt. She’s never been right. She was a teen mother, had my mother’s heart broken…’ And her big sister had another tactic; a stroke of genius and the kind of thing Sinéad would never have thought of – she threatened to sue. It made Sinéad grin with solidarity as Aoife played the woman at her own game. She said her mother was terribly upset at being visited by a stranger and asked all sorts of stressful questions. She said her mother hadn’t been the same since; they were worried that the stress would kill her. If it happened again, they were going to sue the HSE, she said, the social worker would lose her job. You are mistaken if you think you can walk all over us… and Sinéad rejoiced when Aoife came out with the one that used to make them all cringe and laugh at her. My husband is a solicitor.
No, it’s not just Davitt’s death and the encroaching death of Terence’s Aunt Toots, of Mammy, of them all, that makes her rush around all day, avoiding silences, flinching from her face in the mirror. When she wakes at night it’s with a terrible thought.
*
Sinéad pulls the cover off herself. Her belly looks so foolish – a wonky mound under this nightdress. There’s a bitter cold rushing up from the floorboards. The walls are damp, bleeding dirty water like a cold sweat. She pulls on her socks and a big itchy jumper. She’ll go and sit in the morning room with her daddy’s paintings. She’ll take a whiskey in and sit with them.
*
Twenty-two of her father’s paintings are down here, leaning against the mouldy walls and the dust-sheeted furniture. They should be somewhere drier, but at least they are safe from the grubby paws of her nieces. She and Aoife will split them. Perhaps she should feel guilt about that?
Sinéad pulls the oilcloth off the couch. She folds her feet under herself, pulls her arms into her jumper, takes a sip of her drink. It is warming. It is a relief.
The day Cara came to Eileen’s, rubbing her big belly, sprigs of black hair escaping from her ponytail, Sinéad felt the real badness of herself. She was jealous. That was it. How is it that her niece has gone on having children? How is it that her skin glowed that day with all the life it had, and her hair so wild it couldn’t be tied up? And she sat there so pleased with herself, so self-serious, so high-and-mighty it made Sinéad feel nauseous. ‘I’m leaving,’ she kept saying. Boundaries. That generation are all about their boundaries.
She couldn’t have wanted to punch her niece, could she? Right in the belly. She wanted to pull her hair, slap her. She took delight in the way her face turned red and she muttered as Aoife spoke to her, the way she shrank when Eileen touched her hand.
The memory of that soothes her. If she’s wrong, it’s only a little crime. That girl has more than she deserves in life. So what if she and Aoife are taking matters into their own hands? So what? Those two have taken more than their share of Mammy.
It’s only at night, only in the silence, that the thought comes creeping into her – they have done the wrong thing.
She has done a wrong thing, yes; a little wrong thing, but she can’t regret it. Those girls will be fine; they might even find it a blessing, a kind of tonic, to be released from the shadow of inheritance. The tapping will go away, the nagging feeling like something caught in her tooth, the shriek of the wind coming in through all the crevices of this old house.