I find myself with the two people in the world I have always felt safe and secure with.
My grandparents live in a small, always overheated, flat in sheltered accommodation close to the city centre. They’ve lived there for more than ten years now and even though I wish they had somewhere with a little garden to potter about in, or somewhere just further away from the sometimes anti-social activity of the city centre, they seem happy.
They’ve done their best to make the one-bed flat their own; crammed as many of their possessions onto shelves or into cupboards so that there is still an air of the house I used to visit as a child about the place. Pride of place on the wall of their living room is a large framed photograph of my mother and me.
Professionally taken, in the early nineties, it looks dated. A heavy wooden frame. Soft blurring around our faces. My mother’s hair, teased and backcombed. Her lip gloss a shiny pale pink – I can still remember the sweet smell of that gloss and how it would leave sticky marks on my cheeks when she kissed me. I’m there, all of three years old, hair much curlier than it is now, tied in two pigtails with pale blue ribbon, and a pretty, flouncy, completely over-the-top party dress. We are looking not at the camera but at each other, and we are both grinning.
I wish I could say I remember the day it was taken, but I don’t. Still, every time I see that picture in my grandparents’ flat, part of me feels like that day says everything that needs to be said about my relationship with my mother.
I’m looking at it now, sitting on a small brown two-seater sofa, while my grandparents, perched either side of me in their armchairs, look between me and each other, waiting for me to speak. My granny has wrapped me in a blanket after roughly towel-drying my hair. She gave me her housecoat to wear while she hung my coat, dress and tights around the various radiators in the flat, adding to the stuffy, humid feel of the place.
I’m wearing a pair of my grandad’s thick woollen socks and I think my teeth have finally stopped chattering.
They know Joe’s funeral was this morning, but neither of them are in good enough health that they could attend. My grandfather is now entirely immobile. His days are spent being hoisted by carers from his adapted bed to his hospital-issue bed and back again. He is a prisoner in his own house and, increasingly, a prisoner in his own mind. There are days when he doesn’t so much as utter a word, Granny tells me. Other days he gets agitated wondering when ‘his Natalie’ will come to visit.
Today, he is staring at me through cloudy eyes, his jaw slack. He is trying to place me. To remember who I am and what I am to him, and I’m reminded once more of just how cruel life can be.
Granny does her best to be positive, but she is broken. She has been broken since the day my mother died. I do as much as I can to help them, but over the last few weeks that has been very little. Still, they never make me feel guilty. I think they carry their own guilt at not being able to take care of me after Mammy died. We, all of us, are weighed down by guilt.
When I arrived at their door I was barely coherent. My grandmother didn’t ask questions. She just pulled me in through the door and set about making me feel better, looking after me as if I was still that scrappy little girl who had clung to her legs on the day my mother was buried. I don’t know how I’m going to tell her about Mammy’s grave. I don’t know how she will react. I decide just to blurt it out.
‘Granny,’ I start. ‘I’m really sorry, but I have some bad news. They put him in Mammy’s grave with her.’
I start to cry and I can’t even bring myself to look at my grandmother’s face. I hear a sharp intake of breath and a whispered ‘Jesus, Mary and St Joseph’ and that tells me what I need to know.
I lift my head. ‘I don’t know how it happened. I know you were both to be buried with her. I don’t know if Ciara did it to spite us all, but she says she didn’t and I’m just so sorry …’ I crumple.
‘Hush, pet.’
My grandmother’s voice is soft. I feel the gentle pat of her hand on my knee.
‘I don’t want you getting upset over it. I suppose he’d every right to be buried with her.’
She is trying to soothe me, but I can’t help but notice the defeated tone in her voice. Her hands are shaking just ever so slightly, enough to give it away that she is struggling. As if her life isn’t hard enough already.
I know that I will never, ever tell her just why he had no right to ever be near to my mother again. Why he should never, even in death, be allowed near another person again. It would kill her.
If she knew – God, if she knew what had happened it would destroy her altogether. She deserves to believe she did the best she could for me all those years ago when I was left in his care.
For the first time ever, I’m grateful for my grandfather’s dementia. None of this can touch him now. But my poor granny.
She wraps her arms around me. Everything about her embrace screams comfort and security. The familiar smell of her talcum powder, the softness of her jumper. The feel of her skin, warm and soft. I let her rock me and I revel in the kisses she places on my head, and how she tells me that everything will be okay over and over again.
‘You poor pet,’ she soothes. ‘You’ve not had it easy, but you have to focus on the good things now. On Alex and that wee baby of yours. Don’t be fretting on behalf of your grandad or me. We’ve been through enough battles to know we’ll win the war as long as we have each other.’
Her words should soothe me completely, of course, but all I can think is just how awful all this is. I’m not going to let them get away with this. Ciara is not going to get away with this. I’ve had enough.