Half

WHEN I GET back, Stephen is nicely insane. How can I tell you half the things he said?

‘Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he said that a few times.

‘Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen.’

‘Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen.’

‘Dia dhiobh a dhoine uaisile agus failte roimh.’

The whole house smells of depilatory cream, the maddest smell I know. Stephen has acquired himself a tan and some more teeth.

The washing machine has been going for a week and the place is full of sheets. Stephen cannot fold them on his own. I pick one up and am amazed. He has never folded a sheet with someone else. He has never stood at one end of the room, with two corners of a sheet in his outstretched arms, never brought the ends together, held one arm high and dropped the other to pick up the fold. He has never walked the length of the sheet and handed over to the person at the other end, stooped to pick up the new fold, walked half the length again, handed over again.

We get tangled. He hands over the wrong face of the sheet to me, the left corner in his right hand and the right in his left. He doesn’t care that when he stoops, there is only a knot, swinging by the floor.

There is nothing I can do. I am two years old again. I want to lie down on the clean sheets and show him my stomach. When he walks across the room I want to take his hands, walk up his legs and do a somersault.

He takes me upstairs and shows me what he has written. He has made a list of errors.

Errors:

No. 1) That Isaac couldn’t tell his kid from a goat.

No. 2) That the Isle of Man is bigger when you are on it.

My mother rings. She asks to talk to me and I take my thumb out of my mouth.

‘Hullo?’ I say into the receiver as though there might be a big mystery in there.

‘So how’s Grace?’ she says.

‘Hullo?’

‘Yes,’ she says, a little testily. ‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ I say.

‘Are you all right?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t leave your father,’ she says. ‘Put me on to Stephen’, as if he hadn’t started all of this in the first place.

‘No.’

‘Can you get some sleep?’ she says. ‘Are you sleeping?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Try and get some sleep.’

‘OK.’

‘Will you?’

‘OK.’

‘Will you?’

‘I said OK.’

‘How’s work?’ she says and then changes her mind. ‘Try and get a bit of sleep’, and I hear my father calling and a sigh as she puts the receiver down on the table. I hang up. But I don’t know when she does. I hang up but I suspect the line is open all night.

I dream about wetting the bed and after the water goes cold I wake up and find myself in the dry.

‘There’s no point blaming me,’ says Stephen.

So I blame my mother. I blame her because that is what mothers are for. I blame her for the wig and for middle age, for the small corpses she hid behind the sofa and in the wardrobes. Which is to exaggerate, of course. Which is to exaggerate. My mother loved children and welcomed each of us as we came in the door. Still there is something wrong with all this talk of swimming and of babes that strode in smiling through the wicket gate of her heart.

I was a normal birth. Which means that blood and a hole torn out of your arse is normal. Peekaboo.

No. I was not a normal birth. How could I be? Mine was a slow, angry delivery. My mother held on to me like a pervert. I know, because I was there.

So there I was, three weeks overdue. And there was my mother, frightened of what might come out of her. I felt like I was smothering. I would have held my breath but there was no breath to hold in the little wet tea-bags of my lungs (little bags of desire). My hair was grown, my nails were grown, I scratched myself and graffitied her and it must have been the blood-smell that triggered me to—there is no other way to put it—piss myself.

And so I poisoned my mother, nearly killed my mother, who let me go, astonished, violated and clawing at the anaesthetist. I was shot out in a spasm of disbelief that any child could be so ungrateful. We had reached, you might say, a premature understanding.

And holding on to my heel, says Stephen, as Esau held on to Jacob, was my twin brother, whom I dragged out behind me, dead.

‘No,’ I say.

‘Why not?’

‘Too easy,’ I say. ‘Too like original sin’, even though as a foetus, you would never call me polite.

‘So what am I doing here?’ says Stephen.

‘I don’t know.’

‘And what about your mother?’ he says. ‘Why you were never enough for her, with your seven hundred eyelashes, all your toes and too many teeth.’

But I know my twin, who also had hair, who also had a tooth. I know how he stayed where he was, even as she let me go. I know how she hoarded him without knowing, how he grew in the dark until they dug him out and put him in a jar. The size of a heart.

I feel my eyeballs start to swell, and it occurs to me, that maybe I cried instead. Maybe it was my tears that bucked her womb and let me go. Maybe I cried with my overdue, opaque child’s eyes, saddened her from the inside out, slid into the world oiled with regret. Because I am crying now.

*

‘It’s not my fault,’ she says. ‘You only remember the bad things.’

I look at the photograph. My mother is beautiful. She is in love. She looks like the sort of mother you are supposed to remember. It looks like the picture you grow up with. My mother was beautiful and laughing and kind. I cannot fit it inside my head.

I do not remember my mother, how beautiful she was, or how plain. None of us do. She is not that kind of woman. We are not that kind of family. The photo is a lie.

Downstairs, she slices and splits an avocado, squeezes one half to loosen the stone, then slides the skin off intact, with the back of a spoon. She is easy with food, as a mother should be, but the mad-looking green of the avocado makes her hands look old. The other half comes away with a surprising, gritty sound and my mother leaves the empty skin on the table, rocking slightly, like a little coracle holding the stone.

‘You sound a little better,’ she says.

It is difficult to be angry with an avocado, but I make the effort. It is fairly annoying, sitting there, with the easy significance my mother gives to things, that I cannot figure out—whether it is the way it lies in two halves, or the hole in the middle. Maybe it is the emptiness of the skin or the smooth size of the stone, or the way one sits inside the other, both tear-shaped, both opposite and the same. Or maybe it is that my mother does not care. She has always had this ability just to be.

‘He is sleeping a lot,’ she says. ‘He seems to be sleeping all the time.’

‘Really?’

‘He is making it up the stairs again.’

‘Oh good.’

I go up for a bath though I don’t trust the water here either. I pass the pictures on the way and nod at us when we were young. My father must have seen them by now. I feel sorry for him. Maybe he has forgotten himself and thinks it is someone else, up there on the wall.

In the bath I look at the ceiling and at the thin crack in the plaster that has opened its way through successive layers of paint. Its shape, every known wander and divide is known to a part of me that I myself have forgotten. My body changed and grew in this bath. I feel hopeful again and when I get out to dry myself I am too big for the room.

The water runs out quite slowly. There are hairs in the plug hole. Even though they are family hairs, I do not take them out. They are long and grey.

My mother dyes her hair a polite sandy colour that is kind to her face. The colour is real enough. It may not be the colour of real hair, but it is the colour of a real woman’s hair, once she has reached a certain age. My mother also keeps a clean house. These are my father’s hairs in the plug hole and she has let them be.

I realise that I never really thought about what was under my father’s wig. His head, for all I knew, might have been bright green.

Perhaps I thought his baldness was unhealthy, that the hair was just giving up and jumping in patches off his scalp. I was wrong. His hair hung on and grew, helplessly over the years. He must have cut it himself, badly, by touch. He must have swept up after himself, taken strands out of the bath, burnt them perhaps. Now he is sick, my mother pretends that they are not there.

Under his wig, my father is grey. It is a moving colour. I thought these hidden hairs might be the same vicious brown as the ones he wore on the outside; but they grew in the dark, turned silver in the dark. I lift one out to have a look and it curls as it hits the air. It is fine and wet and clings to my finger. I shake my hand and it sticks to my leg. I shake my leg. I hit my thigh. The hair sticks to the base of my thumb before, mercifully, falling to the ground.

As it falls I remember my father with his head jammed in under the sink, newspaper on the lino and the U-bend on the floor. He was probing the pipe, vigorously and precisely, with a wire clothes hanger. There was the sound of ripping from the pipe, a dreadful sound. It reminded me of fake violence on the television, how tough the body really is, how hard to tear. Out of the pipe came a clot of hair which he wiped off on to a piece of newspaper folded around the tip of the hanger. The smell was the only smell that my childhood revolted against. Most other smells, I quite enjoyed.