GRANDMA’S BODY IS FULL of liquid, the life forced into it through a glucose drip. She is propped at an angle but still there is a terrible flatness and weight, as though gravity has a special claim on her. Every slow breath shudders her ribs and sends sounds of drowning out through her lips. Her face is still, the skin drawn taut over her forehead and down her cheeks. One deep crinkle by her mouth bends and flutters and deepens when she inhales, betraying a great effort to heave up out of death and hold herself here.
Cara kisses Grandma’s heavy hand. There’s a purple hue under the overgrown cuticles, as though the pigments have lodged under her skin, soaked into her from all the years spent mixing colours like potions for Grandad’s work. Her nails are glossy and thick. But Grandma is dying so there is no use in nails. And her eyelashes – why are they still there frilling her eyes? Why are they still dark and curled, and her brows still arched in a nod to beauty? Her skin smells like her, a smell like opening petals and browning butter, though there is no reason why that should be; it is so long since the hands have done the things that could fragrance them like that. It seems all wrong, this growing and scenting for nothing. Then it occurs to Cara that Grandma still has four of her teeth and that seems absurd, now. It seems like an insult.
She lays her head against Grandma’s, and kisses her temple. Her hair smells like her pillow used to when Cara and Freya were allowed to sleep in her bed as children; a smell like soap and warm, new sweat. How? After months of nappies and disinfectant, how does she smell so suddenly like herself? There is no room on the bed to climb in with her. The metal bars press into Cara’s keen belly and the foetus shifts – a foot under her rib, buttocks and thigh pushing up against her liquid-and- acid stomach where the avocado is curdling. Cara shuts her eyes into her grandmother’s hair, and forces hot quiet tears to no relief.
‘Grandma,’ she says quietly, feeling stupid and phony and too tired for her own grief, ‘Grandma…’
Grandma’s head turns slightly and the eyelids flutter for a moment, showing a flash of white and overwhelming effort. Her mouth opens for a moment before she sinks back down on the bed and pulls a big breath in.
It feels foolish to speak, but it is the nearest they will ever be again to talking. What does Grandma want to hear from her? If sounds can be shaped to words in her mind – what is needed now, at this time?
‘Grandma, everything is fine now,’ Cara says, so quietly, in case the aunts come to the door and hear her, and sneer. ‘Aoife and Sinéad and Mammy… they are all fine now. Mammy is better now. We all love each other…’ and she is embarrassed before death and before Grandma; that her imagination stretches no further than this. That she can think of nothing else that could concern Grandma now but herself: ‘And I am so happy. I have a wonderful husband and I will look after my little girls, Grandma. I have three little girls and another coming any day now and they are beautiful and I promise I will look after them. I cook them that soup you taught me – when we were little we called it Grandma’s soup – do you remember? And Jem, Jem is a lovely boy and he is growing big and strong and he loves Grandma’s soup. And I sieve it every time. Everything is fine now, Grandma. You have nothing to worry about. We are all fine now. We will all be fine now.’
Perhaps worry is the hook suspending Grandma here in life.
‘Thank you for looking after us, Grandma.’ Cara dismisses the cringing in her chest, the curling thing writhing and shrinking like a slug in salt.
‘Grandma,’ says Cara.
*
A nurse enters, irreverent in her busyness, followed by Aunt Sinéad, whose high brows and long forehead express a forlornness belonging to young mammals left alone. She is unsteady on her feet, clutching her side, and around her the space yawns as though unwilling to cradle the wobbly form of her. Then come Aoife and cousin Valerie, shuffling in unison.
Cara stands up and backs away from the bed a little.
‘Hi, Valerie.’
‘Hi, Cara.’
Aunt Aoife turns to the nurse. ‘So you see,’ she says, her voice deep, her words bending along strange vowels like a child trying to sound grown up, ‘you see she seems to have a lot of liquid…’
‘She seems a bit bubbly alright,’ says the nurse. ‘Too much water. That’s all that is.’ She marches efficiently towards the bag and locates a little tap beneath it. ‘I’ll turn it off.’
Aunt Sinéad flinches. ‘But won’t that… Doesn’t she need it?’ Then she glances at Aoife and puts her hand to her mouth as though trying to prevent herself from speaking
The nurse lowers her voice. ‘We’re not – we’re not letting her go by turning off the water. You can always have it on again in a bit. There, you see. She’s already more comfortable.’
Cara makes a weak gesture with the chair she was sitting on. ‘Do you want to sit down, Sinéad?’
‘No. I’m alright.’
‘Aoife?’
‘No.’
‘She can probably hear you,’ says the nurse, ‘if you want to talk to her.’
The nurse’s eyes flicker away from them, and Cara feels a fool suddenly, and she knows that Grandma cannot hear them. It is professional kindness to say such a thing, that’s all. Aoife and Sinéad stand and look at Grandma, whose ageing has turned their faces into the same middle-aged lady – sagging cheeks, long neck, heavy, square chin. Aunt Sinéad clutches a bit of pink blanket at the end of the bed. Her eyes widen as though she is falling.
Grandma’s breath comes drier now, no spittle at her lips, no drowning sounds.
‘I have to get on,’ says the nurse, looking at them softly each in turn and then, head to the side and the clipboard tight against her chest, she takes a moment to look at Grandma with an expression of bemused respect, as though gazing at a celebrated painting that she cannot draw meaning from.
Newborn babies, thinks Cara, all look the same to everyone but their mothers. It is the same with the old, the nearly-dead, only their mothers are long gone. It is up to their children to tell them apart, or to stop holding them apart – to let them die.
*
They stand around the bed. They wait in the silence between Grandma’s exhalations and her next breath. Each one sounds like the last.
*
Aoife reapplies her lipstick, avoiding her own eyes in a small pocket mirror. Then she moves up towards Grandma’s face, opposite Cara, and strokes Grandma’s forehead firmly. ‘It’s Fee, Mammy, and Valerie is here too, Mammy. Valerie is here Mammy… Go over, Mammy.’
Then Valerie makes a sound like a muffled bark. There are grey mascara tracks down her whitened cheeks. Cara notices tears trickling on her own chin.
‘You come over here, Valerie,’ whispers Aunt Aoife. ‘You come and sit by her head. Why should she be the one…?’
‘Oh Mammy,’ says Valerie, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand: ‘stop, Mammy.’
*
They grow bored of crying and tired of thinking of things to say. At last they all sit quietly in the room and listen to the difficult breath, the feet rushing past the door, the shrill throb of hospital machines in all the hospital rooms. They need a ritual, thinks Cara, a chant or something – a death song, or a death dance, something to release her.
Aunt Sinéad clutches hard at her side as though to trap a pain in her palm. ‘Will we say a Rosary?’
‘Do you want to sit down, Sinéad?’
‘No thank you.’
The women begin to recite Hail Mary under their breath:
‘Our Lady, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb…’ The Rosary trails off.
*
Sinéad looks at the stubborn life grappling uselessly in her mother’s old body. All of her parts seem cumbersome suddenly, bigger than they need to be, and sadly foolish. Soon she will be only those parts; she will be only matter. Sinéad will be next. Most likely she will be next. Then her sisters, then her nieces and then their children. Their children can’t protect them from it. Even the foetus swelling up her niece’s belly like a declaration against death – it will grow, perhaps, but it will die. Valerie begins to smile. ‘Grandma hasn’t said the Rosary for over sixty years…’
Her grandmother’s body, so heavy there under the covers, it could be putty all the way through. The arms lying on the sheet, the hands, the ears are all too dumb, like stage costumes up close, without the right light or the right set. Off stage and with no one there to play along, they are exposed for their composite parts – like nylon stitching, like cardboard corsets.
‘Well,’ says Valerie’s mum. The rouge is sitting frankly on her cheeks, like a snide joke. Her hands clutch the bedrail. ‘We might get her the last rites all the same… they say it helps people over all the same.’
*
There is a rap at the door but no one speaks. Then another timid rap and Sinéad reaches for the handle. A man dressed in an awkward navy suit enters in a dipping tip-toe. He says he is a Minister of the Eucharist. He apologises that there is no priest around.
‘That’s okay,’ says Aoife, ‘she wasn’t very religious… isn’t.’
The minister is long-necked with a carefully shaven gullet and glossy acne running down under his collar. He wears a lustrous blue tie. ‘Ah, the poor dear,’ he says. ‘So you think it’s the end, do you?’
‘We don’t know,’ Cara says.
He looks at Cara’s belly, where the baby is pressing down on her bladder, twisting a foot against her lungs.
‘Ah.’ The Minister of the Eucharist makes a circle in the air with two hands. ‘The great circle of life here in this room… isn’t that lovely?’
Aunt Aoife scoffs audibly. Valerie’s cheeks flush.
‘We don’t know,’ says Valerie. ‘Mum called the whole family because they thought… but we don’t know.’
‘So you’re all here with her. Well, isn’t that lovely now?’ The Minister of the Eucharist rolls his hands over one another.
‘Well – most of us,’ says Cara.
‘Where’s Freya?’ asks Valerie. ‘Is Eileen coming?’
‘Freya’s at work. I haven’t been able to reach her. I messaged…’
The minister cocks his head the way the nurse did, and sighs.
‘Ah the poor dear… Well, only The Lord God Our Father knows when he will receive us in his arms. I’ve given up guessing. For every one I get right, I get one wrong!’
Grandma exhales again, a big emptying from deep in her papery lungs. They wait for the next breath. The minister clasps his hands. ‘But it seems like it, doesn’t it?’
‘We’re okay now,’ says Aunt Sinéad. ‘I think we are okay now. We don’t need the Eucharist…’
‘Well, I can stay and just be with you so; there’s no pressure.’
The next breath comes, pulling audibly into Grandma.
The minister stays. He makes small talk about economic recovery and the weather, lifting the intimacy with his intrusion. But then the women stop responding. He sighs loudly.
‘So was she born in Dublin?’
‘Yes,’ says Aoife, ‘she grew up in Stoneybatter. But my father was an artist – Dennis Kearney, the painter?’
‘Oh yes. I know that name.’
‘And they spent some time in London and in Paris, too.’
‘Did they?’ Cara never heard about Paris.
‘Quite a life so.’
‘Yes.’
‘A full life so… Stoneybatter. What age is she now?’
‘Nearly eighty-six.’
‘My grandfather grew up in Stoneybatter. They had a lot of bother from the Black and Tans.’
‘I think Mammy missed all that.’
‘Terrible business… yip,’ he says, more a suck of breath than an utterance. ‘Ah dear. The poor old dear.’ And as he sighs again, he takes Grandma’s toe that is sticking out from under the sheets and wiggles it gently.
Cara glances at her cousin. Two little red poppies flower just under Valerie’s eyes. She is biting her lip hard to keep from laughing. Cara smiles at her, and they both begin to giggle like girls.
‘Valerie,’ says Aoife, ‘let’s go down to the canteen for a cup of tea…’
Valerie looks at her mother. A shaft of light cuts across Aunt Aoife’s face, catching the powder-thickened fur along her jaw.
‘Okay,’ says Valerie.
Aunt Sinéad looks up in alarm.
‘I’ll go with you…’
‘I’ll wait for the others then,’ Cara says.
Aunt Aoife ignores her and waves her phone. ‘I’ll text the others,’ she says, ‘and tell them where to find us…’ She picks up her handbag – a designer thing with a stiff handle and a clatter of flaps and zips – puts the phone carefully back in it and takes out her compact again. Just like Grandma, Aunt Aoife over-powders her nose, as though to blot it out of sight.
‘Sometimes,’ says the man, sleeking his tie with both hands, ‘you know they say sometimes that we need to let them go.’ Nobody responds. He sways back and forth on his heels.