“Oh, Mum,” said Connie. She was about to ask if it was true. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, but she stopped herself just in time. By the silence in her grandmother’s kitchen she knew, by the look on her mother’s face, and the loopy convent-girl handwriting. Connie had only ever seen her mum’s handwriting on shopping lists before, or on birthday cards, never in a letter, and it was the spelling mistakes that broke her heart. She had always suspected that her mother was dyslexic, a suspicion she had never had the courage to voice for fear of hurting Acushla’s feelings. It reared its head again now as she looked down at the letter in her hand.
“Oh, Mum,” she said, grasping at a small handful of words among the millions and millions that were at her disposal. There was a vast world of words out there, and Connie wanted to pick the exact right ones. It seemed tremendously important that she say the right thing.
She looked down at the letter again, not because she had failed to understand it the first time, but because she needed to buy herself some time. She leaned in over the table, tilting the page backward to catch the light, but the words scrambled in front of her eyes, and the longer she stared at it, the less sense she was able to make of it.
“It’s a good letter,” she said, looking up again. “It’s a really powerful letter.”
The kitchen was lit by a single pendant light that hung down low over the large round table. Encircled by a black linen shade, the bulb threw a small spotlight over the table, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. In the corners, piles of books rose from the floor in spindly towers, while spider plants spilled down from the side tables and cobwebs older than Connie formed a canopy overhead.
Connie’s mother, her grandmother and her aunt were sitting opposite her, their faces pale. Three versions of the same face, carved in white stone out of the darkness; Connie had never noticed before how alike they all were. As they waited for her to say something, she had the sense that she was at a job interview. A formality hanging in the air, she found herself suddenly deprived of her fluency.
“I never knew,” she said. But even as she said it, the memories were raining down on her. Little morsels of memories, like feathers, or snowflakes falling down out of the skies, they settled into the empty spaces in the story of her mother’s life. Spaces Connie had never even noticed were there, until now.
A memory of the day Ernie was born. Connie was sitting up in her hospital bed and her mother was leaning in over the bedside cot where Ernie was swaddled in a blue blanket. Acushla was wearing an oversized pair of sunglasses, which she did not remove, and behind the sunglasses Connie could see that her eyes were swimming with tears. At the time Connie had thought her a little overwrought by the experience of becoming a grandmother.
“You’ve been carrying this around with you all these years,” she said, as the understanding of it continued to fall down on her. “All these years, you’ve been carrying this around without telling anyone.”
Her mother nodded, and Connie watched in amazement as Alma rubbed her back in a gesture of support. Self-conscious as a mourner at a funeral, Connie reached across for her mum’s hand. She took the brittle fingers in her own and held on to them, so that they were chained together across the table. She squeezed them tight, by way of apology, as she remembered with a flush of shame how hard she had fought her mother’s love when she was a child.
When Connie was a child, it was her mother’s watery voice that woke her for school every morning. Her mother’s anxious face was the first thing she saw at the school gates every afternoon. Her mother’s fussing hands helped her into her pajamas at night, and brushed her hair, and with every gesture her mother poured out of her a love that was too weighty for one little girl to bear. Love enough for two children, it seemed to Connie now, and it grieved her to think how little of that love she had returned.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. Her mother’s fingers were grasping hers so tightly that they might have been bound together by a thin, taut piece of wire.
“Sure, you weren’t to know,” said her mum, mildly.
But that wasn’t entirely true either. As a child, Connie was aware that her mother was sad, but she never stopped to wonder why. No more than she stopped to wonder why her grandmother was so eccentric. Or why her aunt Alma was so harsh. That was all just part of the landscape of her childhood, along with the endless catfights between her mother and her aunt, fights that saw Connie forever being thrown into the back of the car to be barrelled away from Alma’s house as her mother babbled a litany of petty grievances at the rain-streaming windshield and other cars beeped at them and her mother started crying, again. Those arguments were always followed by reconciliations, which were followed by more arguments and more reconciliations, until the last, big argument, one as deadly serious as the others had been frivolous. (“I knew you were a fool,” said Alma. “I knew you were a jealous little cow, but I never knew you were a treacherous bitch.”) Connie never did find out what that argument was about, but those words still play out in her head, all these years later. Looking at her mother now, it occurred to Connie to wonder what else there was about her that she didn’t know.
“So, what happens now?” she asked, remembering the letter she was holding in her hand.
“Well, someone will need to type it up,” said Connie’s grandmother, rising to her feet with a scrape of her chair and moving off into the gloam of the kitchen. A cave-like place of long-exhausted bulbs and unwashed dishes, empty jam jars cluttered the counters along with small heaps of unopened bills and hoarded egg boxes awaiting a new incarnation.
“I could do it,” said Connie, turning to her mum and speaking very deliberately. “I could type it up tomorrow.”
“Excellent,” said Deirdre, her huge voice welling up out of the corner. She was fussing around in a bottom cupboard, withdrawing ancient bottles of gin, and vermouth and crème de menthe. When she straightened up, she was breathless, a bottle of sherry in her hand, grasped by the neck.
“You might want to correct the spellings while you’re at it. Your mother always was the most hopeless speller.”
She deposited the bottle of sherry on the table with a thump and Connie stared at her, wondering were these little cruelties of hers deliberate, or were they unconscious? Did she even think about these things before she said them? If anything, it seemed to Connie recently that her grandmother was becoming more sweeping in her pronouncements, and more cavalier toward other people’s feelings. She reminded her of a big old jellyfish, wafting her way through life, oblivious to the pain that was caused to others by the tentacles that came trailing in her wake.
“Macdara was the best speller of the lot of you,” she was saying. “Macdara won first prize in the spelling competition at school, did you know that? ‘Trepidatious’ was the word that sealed his victory, as I remember.”
“How could we forget?” said Alma, inclining her face toward her sister with a slow roll of the eyes.
Lining four crystal glasses up on the table, Deirdre began to pour a small measure of sherry into each. The glasses were so dusty they were almost opaque, the cuts in the crystal as black as soot. Connie took a corner of her scarf and gave the rim of her glass a discreet wipe before she lifted it to her lips. Her grandmother was struggling to untie a small plastic supermarket bag, her fingers wobbling at the knot. Eventually she got it loose to reveal an already opened pack of ginger nut biscuits. Connie stared at the pack suspiciously, thinking, Expiry date? She reached a hand out and took one, dunking it into the puddle-colored drink. The sherry tasted moldy, or was it the biscuit? She nibbled at it anyway.
“What about Dad?” she asked, all of a sudden. “Where’s Dad in all of this?”
She looked from one to the other of them. Saw the answer on their faces.
“So he doesn’t know about the letter?”
“This is women’s business,” said her grandmother. “Your father gave up the right long ago to have a say in any of this.”
And if there was a militant edge to her voice, if there was a touch of bitterness, who could blame her? This was a woman whose husband had left her for a Moroccan man half her age. If Alma was a bit tough, maybe you’d have to be tough if you discovered that your husband was sleeping with every female reporter on the island. If Connie’s mother was fragile, and prone to sorrow, well, it was very clear to Connie now why that might be. All of a sudden everything seemed very clear to Connie.
“Sláinte,” said her grandmother, lifting her small glass and puckering her lips to sip from it. The rest of them lifted their glasses briefly in response, and as they did so, Connie experienced a shudder of vertigo. A sense of the future and the past cohabiting with the present, as if the scene in front of her was only the most minute and inadequate manifestation of a vast, non-linear reality, one that her brain could only catch the tiniest glimpse of. It was only then that it occurred to her—amid the creeping spider plants and the dusty books, with her grandmother’s distinct smell of never-washed lambswool and chemist-shop perfume hanging in the stale air—it was then that it occurred to Connie that it was not a secret, this thing that her mother had told her. It was not a secret because at some level she had known it all along.
She remembers it.
A smattering of sequential happenings, like numbered dots of ink on a page. It’s only now that she realizes what it is that she remembers, now that she can join the dots.
She remembers her mother going to London. An unusual trip—even at the time she would have known that it was out of the ordinary for her mother and her grandmother to go to London to see a show. Her father was busy with work so she was sent to stay with her aunt Alma, and her mother forgot to pack a toothbrush for her so Alma had to take her down to the chemist’s to buy a new one. Later that day, or maybe it was another day, Alma took Connie and Nora on a carriage ride around Stephen’s Green, and afterward she treated them to lunch in Captain America’s. Connie ordered a banana split that came with a purple paper parasol stuck into it, and a long-handled spoon to eat it with. She still remembers the foamy taste of the canned whipped cream and the nibs of roasted hazelnuts that were sprinkled on top. She remembers the sense that Alma was spoiling her; she remembers not understanding why.
It was probably only a day or two that Connie stayed with Alma, but in her memory it seems like a week, a month, a year. When eventually Alma brought her home, it was to her grandmother’s house rather than to her own, and her mother was upstairs, resting after the journey. Of course, in retrospect this made no sense. The flight from London was less than an hour, an anomaly that Connie would not have noticed at the time. She would have been distracted by the presents they brought back. She remembers her grandmother opening a suitcase out on the kitchen floor. In it was a Hamleys bag, and out of the Hamleys bag came two baby dolls, one for Connie and one for Nora. Connie remembers Alma’s reaction, heard but not understood.
“Jesus, Mother! Isn’t that just a little bit inappropriate?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Deirdre, handing out the dolls.
Nora’s doll was dressed in a pink Babygro and Connie’s doll was dressed in a blue one, which was fine by Connie because at the time blue was her favorite color. Connie laid her doll down on the floor and went about the work of undressing it. She had difficulty getting the poor doll’s arms out of its sleeves—the arm was fused into a rigid bend at the elbow, so you had to pull the fabric of the suit to breaking point to get it free—but once that was done, all you had to do was pull the Babygro down over the doll’s belly and yank it free of the legs. Under the Babygro, Connie discovered, the doll was wearing a cloth nappy, and under the nappy, to her horror, was a small plastic penis. She dropped the doll on to the tiles as if it had caught fire.
Alma let out a squawk.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said, dry, rasping laughs coming out of her. Her hand was clasped to her chest and her eyes were streaming silent cartoon tears, tears that had been dyed bright blue by her mascara. (At that time Alma was a great woman for the blue mascara.)
“Would you stop that caterwauling!” said her grandmother, moving across the kitchen with murderous intent. “This can easily be resolved.”
She came back with a bread knife.
“Pass me that doll.”
Alma was retching with laughter. Tears leaving wet blue runs on her white skin, like streaks of toilet cleaner on the enamel of a lavatory bowl.
“No,” she was saying. “Please, no. This is too much.”
Connie remembers picking the doll up by the arm and passing it up to her grandmother. Her wailing had stopped and in its place was a sticky, breathless curiosity.
Her grandmother laid the doll down on the kitchen table and, using a rapid sawing motion, she removed the offending penis, slipping it into the pocket of her voluminous skirt. She handed the doll back to Connie.
“Now,” she said. “Problem solved.”
Connie shook her head.
“I don’t want it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s exactly the same now as the other doll.”
Again, Connie shook her head.
“I don’t want it.”
And so they stood facing each other in the kitchen, Connie aged seven, and her grandmother aged fifty-seven, and one of them more determined than the other. They would have been standing there all night if the standoff had not been resolved by Nora. Six years old and already a peacemaker, she came forward with her own doll and offered it to Connie.
And so it came to pass that Connie got the girl doll, with her pale pink Babygro and her discreetly featureless plastic bum. Nora took the poor butchered boy doll, with his blue Babygro and underneath it a tiny rough-edged crater where his little plastic penis should have been. But life would have its revenge on Connie, by visiting on her two boy babies, one after the other, as living reincarnations of that poor rejected boy doll.
Connie turned her key carefully in the front door, anxious not to make the slightest noise that might wake the boys. She slipped her feet out of her shoes and picked them up, using her fingers as a prong. With her huge fake fur muffling her movements, she swept through the living room and into the small kitchen at the back of the house. Moonlight was streaming in the back window, throwing a melancholy glow over the dinner dishes that were stacked in the sink where she had left them. A red light flashed on the washing machine where a load had finished but not been unpacked. A carton of milk stood on the counter with a spill leading away from it like a snail trail. The kettle was off its moorings and a bottle cap lay where it had fallen on the kitchen floor. Connie sighed, wondering for the hundredth time how it was possible for anyone to create such a mess heating up a single baby’s bottle.
She crept up the stairs, stopping on the landing to peek into the boys’ room, where, by the blue light of the nightlight, she saw Oscar asleep in his cot. With his knees pulled up under his chest and his bum in the air, he looked like a Muslim at prayer. Ernie was splayed out in his little bed with the covers thrown off him and his dinosaur pajamas all a-tangle. His hair was matted with sweat and in his right fist he was clutching a small plastic figurine he had found in the playground—a miniature Woody from Toy Story. He had refused to let it out of his hand ever since. Connie stood for a moment in the doorway and watched her sons sleeping. She would have liked to kiss them, but she was afraid of waking them. Softly, she stepped back out on to the landing, leaving the door of their room ajar.
The light in her bedroom was on but Emmet was fast asleep, an open copy of a book about Lance Armstrong slumped facedown on his chest—Connie had given it to him for Christmas but he never seemed to be able to get past the first page without passing out. She plucked the book off him, closing it and sliding it on to his bedside table. She shrugged her coat off and then her cardigan, climbing out of her leggings and tossing them on to the chair in the corner. Without even bothering to put on a nightdress, she climbed into the warm bed in her T-shirt and knickers, pulling the bobbin out of her hair and dropping it on the floor before reaching out to turn off the light.
She had only been out of the house for an hour or two, but she felt as if she had returned home from a long journey. The echoes of the evening’s revelations lapping over her like waves, a sense of clouds and sky over her head, a feeling of water moving all about her, she could have been lying on a darkened beach, or in the bottom of a boat, instead of in her own bed.
She curled over on to her side for comfort, and Emmet fell in behind her, nuzzling his chin into the curve of her collarbone. Connie was reminded of those fortune-telling fish that you hold in the palm of your hand. The way they curl up is supposed to tell you something about yourself. She lay there trying to remember what it was those fish were supposed to tell you, but she was so tired that she fell asleep without ever remembering.
At some point during the night, Connie wakes to the sound of a small boy calling out in the dark. She cocks her ears and listens out for which of them it might be, identifying the cry as Ernie’s. Glancing over briefly at her husband, who is fast asleep (or pretending to be), she leaps out of the bed, anxious to get to the child before he goes and wakes his brother.
Ever since the boys arrived—one after the other in the space of less than two years—sleep has become the dominating force in Connie’s house. Sleep, and the lack of it, is what governs Connie and Emmet’s relationship. It has become the currency of their marriage—a small stack of casino chips that they barter with each other, exchanging an extra hour in bed for a sexual favor or a night on the town. Like water that has become dangerously scarce, what little sleep that is available is measured out between them with meticulous precision, each of them guarding their own share with a primitive ferocity.
In the four years since they became parents, there has been only a handful of occasions when they have both slept through the night. Between the colic and the teething, between the nightmares and the head colds and the barking dogs and the mating cats and the car alarms going off out on the street, there is seldom a night that one or the other of the boys doesn’t wake up. And while at first Connie and Emmet took it in turns to get up—in the beginning, Emmet even helped with the night feeds—now that he is trying to finish his book, on top of teaching full-time, Connie feels in all conscience that he needs his night’s sleep. So, tired as she is, when she hears Ernie calling out for her in the dark, Connie hauls herself out of bed and staggers into his room.
The room is sealed off from the world by blackout curtains, the night-light throwing outsize fish shapes across the walls. Ernie’s eyes are wide open, his pupils pinned. “There was a wolf,” he says. In Ernie’s dreams, there is always a wolf.
“There aren’t any wolves in Ireland,” whispers Connie, settling herself down on the bare floorboards beside his bed. Her back against the clammy wall, she slides her hand under the duvet to reassure her child.
“It’s only a dream,” she says, closing her eyes and using her own breathing to still his, her own hand to cool his; whether it works or not she doesn’t know, because she falls asleep before him.
Some time later—Connie has no way of knowing how long, but it’s still dark outside—she wakes to find herself sprawled on the floor. A crick in her neck; her shoulder hurts where it’s been resting on the wooden boards. Her nose and toes are frozen to snapping point. Terrified of waking the boys, she crawls out of the room on her hands and knees, aware even as she is doing so of the absurdity of the situation she finds herself in. Nothing matters so long as she makes it back to her own bed without waking them.
“Mum.”
She keeps her eyes closed for a few seconds, maybe even for as long as a minute, as some hopeful part of her brain clings to the possibility that he might go away again if she doesn’t open them.
“Mummy,” he says. “Mummy. Wake up.”
He’s pulling at her arm now, using all the weight of his stocky little body to haul on her, as if he were attempting to pull a large boat out of the water.
“Stop it,” she says, opening her eyes to glare at him. “Get off me.” In her irritation, she sounds like a small child herself.
“Mum, I’m hungry.”
“I’m coming.” she says. “You go on down and turn on the telly.”
As she passes out of the room, she looks back and sees that her husband is curled up on his side. His face buried in a mound of pillows, he is sound asleep. In Connie’s head, a stopwatch begins to count the seconds that he remains asleep while she herself is awake. She pads down the steep stairs to the living room, awarding herself a point for every creaking step. With every toy she stoops to pick up, with every movement of her exhausted limbs, her sense of martyrdom grows. When she steps on a small piece of Lego, the pain only serves as proof of her misery.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she says as she rubs the ball of her foot. The boys’ eyes stare at her sideways from the couch. Another second and their eyes slide back to the TV.
Moving across the room, Connie trips over a phone charger and curses again. She bends down and yanks the charger out of the wall. A temper raging in her, she wants to throw it across the room. Instead she slams it down on the desk, shocked to find herself up against the limits of her own personality. Forbearance, patience, calm—Connie understands these things now. She understands why they are virtues.
In the kitchen, she heats some porridge and serves it up to the boys in front of the TV. She cleans off the kitchen counter and sweeps the kitchen floor. In her mind she’s totting up all the jobs she’s done in the house already today, measuring her tally of household chores against Emmet’s. Every time she puts out a garbage bag, every time she bends over to pick up a pair of dirty underpants or wipe the pee stains off the toilet seat, the resentment sloshes around in her heart. Even as she’s hating him, she hates this in herself. Never in her wildest dreams did Connie think she would ever turn into this kind of woman.
Connie, who always preferred the company of men to that of women. She couldn’t wait to get out of school, smothered by that all-girl environment. It was only when she got to college that she found herself in her element. As a student of history and politics, she was one of the few women in a class full of earnest young men, and she reveled in being one of the lads while delighting at the same time in not being one of them. She made a point of sitting in the front row of the lecture hall, taking copious notes in green ink, before swinging her neat little bum back up the auditorium steps, pretending not to notice the effect she was having on the boys. Her shining hour came during a presentation on the causes of the American Civil War, when she set out a complicated analogy likening the countdown to the conflict to a game of strip poker between North and South. And if the mention of strip poker by a twenty-two-year-old Connie—wearing her tight black polo neck and her tartan miniskirt—if the mere mention of the word was enough to cause a rise in the temperature of the room, and a few coughs and splutters from the shyer boys, well that was something Connie would have taken no heed of. At that time she was of the view that there was nothing to separate the men and women of her generation.
“The only difference between the men and women of our generation is that the men pee standing up and the women pee sitting down,” she argued at a college debate (even though she and a girlfriend had once managed to subvert this rule at an outdoor concert where the queue for the ladies’ Portaloo was unmercifully long). Speaking in support of the motion that “Society no longer has a need for feminism,” Connie declared that the women of her generation only had themselves to blame if they failed to take up their rightful place in society. Afterward, in the college bar, between shots of tequila and the flagrant chain-smoking of Marlboro Lights (when Connie looks back on her college days she sees herself always in a cloud of smoke), she made the same case to her class tutor. While her tutor slid his hand up her skirt, Connie told him how future generations would have no need for special courses on women’s history because women would be out there making history for themselves, an argument that seemed only to heighten the tutor’s admiration for her, driving his hand farther up her thigh and his tongue into her ear.
The boy wonder of the history department, he was just back from Oxford with his newly earned PhD (a study of the Irish chaplains who served in the First World War). With his never-brushed hair and his murky green eyes—eyes the color of an empty wine bottle with the light shining through—Emmet brought a touch of rock-star glamour into the fossilized atmosphere of the history department. Heavily made-up girls lined the front rows of all his lectures; the same girls were to be found leaning against the wall outside his office, or sitting cross-legged on the floor waiting for him to come out, while back in his rooms Connie lay naked in his bed. That was where she spent most of her final year, smoking cigarettes and reading novels and listening to Emmet’s music collection, when she should have been in the library. When her final results came through, she had earned herself not the first she had once hoped for, but a bare 2.1. But by then she and Emmet had moved in together, taking a one-year lease on a small flat above a Lebanese restaurant on Camden Street, and the loss of that elusive first seemed a small price to pay for love.
Oh, Connie, she says to herself now, as she stuffs another load of his dirty socks and knickers into the washing machine, slamming the door so hard that for a minute she’s afraid she’s broken the catch. Connie, Connie, Connie. How could you have let this happen to you?
“Hey,” he says, when he comes down the stairs just after nine.
Freshly showered and wearing blue jeans and a white shirt, with a pea-green lambswool sweater his mother gave him for his birthday, he smells of peppermint toothpaste and suds, his hair wet and dark. He comes into the kitchen and picks an apple out of the fruit bowl for his breakfast. He looks so handsome, and so clean, that Connie can’t help but fancy him. In her oversized cardigan and her grubby T-shirt, she feels like a slob. Hair unbrushed, mascara down around her cheekbones, her hands are in the sudsy water, fondling last night’s dishes.
“Well?” he says, teasing her with his eyes.
“Well,” she says, determined to match him monosyllable for monosyllable.
He comes up behind her and slips a hand under her cardigan, taking hold of her right bum cheek and squeezing it. He snakes the other hand round her waist, sliding it up the front of her chest and taking her right breast lightly in the palm of his hand, with his fingers splayed on either side of her nipple, and his lips worrying the back of her neck. Hands submerged in the warm, wet sink, she’s shackled by him. She closes her eyes for a second, breathing in the smooth, clean feel of him.
“How about a ride?” he whispers into her ear.
“How about an elbow in the goolies,” she says, pushing him away from her with her hip as she takes another plate out of the sink and stows it on the drying rack. Drip, drip, drip. She hears him laughing as he moves out into the living room. He’s gathering up his papers and stuffing them into his laptop bag, in preparation for the day at his mother’s house. His mother has created a special workspace for him in her dining room. She stocks up on the coffee he drinks and the biscuits he likes, all in the service of the great book. A book he needs to write if he’s ever going to get tenure—if he’s ever going to make professor, which is what Emmet fully intends to be.
“You could always take the day off,” says Connie, leaning her head back and throwing her voice after him. “It is a Sunday, after all.”
Of all the days that she spends alone, it’s the Sundays that she finds the hardest.
“Come on, Connie. You know I can’t.”
And of course, she does know. She knows that his deadline is only six months away. That the book has to be ready for next year’s centenary of the start of the war. That it would have been written years ago if it wasn’t for her and the boys…
“I know,” she says. “I know.”
He hovers in the kitchen doorway.
“So, what was the drama?” He has his laptop bag in one hand, his bicycle helmet in the other. “Last night, what was the big drama?”
“Oh,” says Connie. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.”
As he leaves, she hears him call out a goodbye to the boys. She hears the door close behind him and is overcome by despair. The day ahead of her seems impossibly long. The task of filling it impossibly arduous, a task made all the more difficult by the boys’ racing reserves of energy. By her own epic exhaustion.
An exhaustion that lies in wait for her every morning when she wakes up; it follows her around all day, hanging like lead weights off the hem of her clothes, constantly trying to pull her down. She recharges herself with coffee, enjoying a brief burst of energy before she goes flat again. She eats, and experiences a short sugar burst, which dips again after half an hour, leaving her more tired than she was before. Like a woman in danger of being washed away by raging flood waters, she grabs on to any piece of driftwood she can find to steady herself. A mug of tea, a bar of chocolate, a sneaky cigarette. Anything that might give her the strength to muddle through another hour of another interminable day.
Keep swimming, she tells herself, channeling Dory in Finding Nemo. Keep swimming, keep swimming. Sometimes it seems like all she has in her head these days are cartoons.
She was folding the washing when her phone rang. Her mother’s number on the screen—as soon as Connie saw it, she wondered had her mother changed her mind. Too late if so, the e-mail was already gone—Connie had typed it up and sent it off ten minutes ago.
“So, they rang me.”
“Okay,” said Connie. “We were expecting that. What did they say?”
“It was a woman. She wanted to know if the letter was genuine.”
“Well, that’s fair enough. Did she ask you anything else?”
“She asked me if your father knew about it.” (Always “your father,” never Liam.)
“And what did you say?”
“I said I would prefer if he wasn’t told.”
Connie had a vision of the news conference, and the discussion that would inevitably take place.
“Was that it?”
“No. Someone else rang me back afterward.”
“Probably a reporter.”
Acushla’s voice broke through with a question, as tentative as a puff of smoke.
“Do you think they’ll print it?”
Connie paused, not quite sure how to answer. A confession from the wife of a former minister that she had traveled to England for an abortion, in contravention of the protection accorded to the unborn by the constitution? Of course they would print it. Just try and stop them. She began to wonder did her mum have any idea what she was getting herself into?
“Oh, they’ll print it all right,” she said gently. “There’s no question, Mum, but they’ll print it.” (They would run a news story too, most likely on the front page, but Connie thought it better not to mention that yet.) “You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”
“No,” said her mum, with too much emphasis in her voice. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “No, no. I want to do this.”
Connie wedged her mobile in between her shoulder and her ear so that she could get on with folding the dry clothes while she was talking.
“Okay,” she said. “Because it’s not too late to pull out if you don’t want to.”
She was holding a pair of Ernie’s trousers up against her belly, running the palm of her hand over them to flatten out the kinks. She folded them over once, twice, and set them down on the kitchen table, taking care to keep them well clear of the jam spill she had failed until now to notice.
“No, I do want to,” said her mother. Her voice had a disjointed quality to it, which led Connie to think she’d taken a Valium. “It’s just… I don’t know. It’s just that I’m nervous, I suppose.”
Connie plucked a T-shirt of Emmet’s off the clothes horse as she listened. She pinned it to her chest with her chin. Taking the sleeves, she doubled them toward the center. Folded the T-shirt over twice and set it down on the table.
“I don’t know how people will react,” her mother was saying. “I’m a bit nervous, I suppose, about people’s reactions.”
Connie reached deep inside herself, trying to find the energy to give her mother the encouragement she needed.
“I think you’ll be surprised,” she said, “how sympathetic people will be. You’ll get great support from people once they know.”
She picked up a pair of Emmet’s boxer shorts, fastening the single button on the crotch before folding them over.
“When are they going to publish it?”
“They’re talking about tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day.”
“What about Dad? Are you worried about how he’s going to react when it’s published?”
“No!” said her mum defiantly, her voice skittering off the word. “No, I know how he’ll react. He’ll hit the roof.”
And whereas before it had seemed to Connie that there was fear in her mother’s voice, and trepidation, whereas a moment ago she had sensed a pitiful anxiety about how people would react, the mention of her father seemed to have invoked a spirit of brinksmanship in her. It occurred to Connie that perhaps her mother’s newfound activism was not about women’s rights, or women’s freedoms and men’s role in suppressing them. Perhaps it was just about one man and one woman, and the endlessly unhappy dance they were leading each other, a dance that would continue, most likely, long after this storm had passed. The thought of it made Connie feel sad and faintly sick.
After her mother had gone off the line, she stood in the kitchen for a moment, with the phone cradled in the crook of her neck. She wondered what to do with the stray sock she was holding. Three times already this sock had gone through the wash, and still Connie couldn’t find its partner. Holding it with the tips of two fingers as if it were a dead mouse, she dropped it into the bin.
One thing about living with three men is the amount of socks they have. Another thing is the amount of shoes. You’d swear you were living with a family of octopuses. Octopi? Whatever. Connie seems to spend her life putting away shoes.
Everywhere she looks there are runners strewn about the floor. A pair of small red wellies abandoned inside the front door. A single sandal peeping out from between the cushions of the couch. There are slippers in the log basket and Crocs in the toy trunk; a pair of Emmet’s leather brogues sitting neatly side by side on the floor at the foot of the armchair, as if the person who was wearing them had spontaneously combusted, leaving only their shoes behind them.
In a frenzy, Connie goes around the house piling shoes high in her arms like firewood. When she’s gathered them all up, she finds there’s nowhere to put them. She stands in the middle of her tiny house, trying to create by sheer force of desire some new storage space where none exists. Walking over to the playpen, she bends down, releases her arms and a cascade of shoes tumbles out.
The idea of the playpen was that the boys would play happily in it and Connie would sit at the table and do some work, but it has turned out the other way around. Often of a morning Connie will climb into the playpen with her laptop while the boys have the run of the house. Her latest innovation is to upend a box of cornflakes on to the kitchen tiles and let them turn the cornflakes into a quarry, running their diggers through them and shunting them around the floor, grinding the cereal into dust with the knees of their corduroy trousers. The cost of a box of cornflakes is less than two euro. The clean-up time, ten minutes of vigorous sweeping or five minutes with the hoover. The time bought, as much as an hour. If she’s focused about it, she can get her blog written in the space of an hour.
Connie writes a weekly blog, which she distributes to her modest Twitter following. She produces the occasional feature article for one of the national newspapers, where the editor is someone Alma knows. She conducts potted interviews by e-mail, quizzing minor celebrities about the silliest of things (What items are always to be found in your fridge? What’s your favorite smell?). And while it’s not exactly the career she once had in mind for herself—a career with a regular paycheck, and colleagues, and lunch—the cost of childcare makes it unfeasible for her to work outside the home. With a house in negative equity to the tune of two hundred thousand euro, and four people to feed on a junior lecturer’s salary, Connie’s career is a luxury that, for the moment at least, they cannot afford.
Out in front of the house there’s a stagnant river, and between the house and the river there’s a green area, and it’s there that Connie brings the boys to burn up some time. With a mug of tea in her hand and the sun on her face, she watches them at play, a warm weight settling over her like a mosquito net, creating a thin veil between her and the world.
A dog emerges from one of the houses and the boys make a beeline for it.
“Wait, guys. Be careful,” says Connie. But her voice sounds thin and unconvincing, like Willy Wonka. Stop. Don’t. Come back.
Already the boys are throwing a stick for the dog. The dog fetches the stick and comes back with it and Ernie tries to wrestle it from his mouth while Oscar tries to mount the animal like a horse. Connie calls out to him.
“Oscar. Don’t torment that poor creature.”
But her words might as well be thoughts for all the impact they have. They might as well be speech bubbles, floating away in the air. Above the river wall the seagulls are wheeling, letting out heartbroken cries as they plummet. A woman on the bridge is throwing bread for them, and above the woman’s head sits the stadium, like a big hair dryer hood. “The bedpan” the locals call it. But then the locals have a name for everything.
“Nice day for it,” says Connie’s neighbor, stepping out of her house and yanking her shopping cart over the threshold after her. A birdlike woman with twig-thin legs that end in big bird feet, she is well into her eighties but still as fit as a fiddle.
“Amazing,” says Connie, smiling up at her.
“They’re saying we’re in for a good summer,” says the neighbor.
“We don’t get good summers.”
“I’m telling you. The fella was on the radio this morning. He says the good weather’s here till September.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” says Connie. “After everything we’ve suffered these last few years, a proper summer is exactly what we need, seeing as none of us can afford to leave the country.”
Five years since Connie has had a holiday, and she finds herself craving the heat.
“Well in anyway,” says the neighbor, tucking her chin into her neck, “it’ll save on the gas bills.”
The neighbor trundles off down the road, dragging her cart after her, and Connie closes her eyes to savor the sunshine. With her eyes shut, the light becomes liquid, pooling around her. From what seems like very far away, she hears wailing. Is it Ernie? she wonders. Or Oscar? It takes her a second to decide. She opens her eyes to see her youngest falling across the grass toward her.
He tumbles into her arms, his skull as hard as a nut under her chin, his tears big wet smears on the skin of her hand. Wrapping her arms around his squidgy belly, Connie feels so full of love for him that she could burst. She pulls him into her, burying her face in the hollow at the back of his neck and kissing him there over and over again. It’s only when he’s had a fall that she gets to kiss him like this.
“My baby,” she says, breathing in the powdery smell behind his ear. The word sends a jolt through him. He stiffens and fights to get free of her.
Connie wrinkles her nose.
“Ah, not again,” she says, bending down to inspect the soles of his shoes.
“Shit,” she says, without a trace of irony. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
She prizes his left shoe off him and carries it into the front garden. Picking up a toothbrush that she keeps on the windowsill for this very purpose, and holding the sole of the shoe under the outside tap, she begins to work the dog shit out of the grooves of the runners. Her movements are driven by rage. Rage against the faceless dog owners who don’t pick up after their dogs; rage against Dublin City Council, who don’t enforce the fines against the dog owners who don’t pick up after their dogs; rage against her husband, who at this moment is sitting at his desk in his mother’s house eating chocolate biscuits. Fucking asshole, she says to herself, as she scrubs the side of the shoe and holds it under the tap, turning her face away to avoid the fine spray of shitty water that bounces back off its surface. Asshole, she says again, addressing her husband in her mind. For some reason, it seems clear to her that this is all his fault.
A beep sounded loud and close and Connie looked up to see her mum’s car rolling up to the door.
“I thought we’d get some coffees and go to the playground,” she said through the open car window. “I need to find some way of putting in the day.”
Not for the first time, Connie was grateful for her company.
“Hang on,” she said, dashing into the house to grab her handbag. Keys, spare nappies, baby wipes… She pulled the door behind her. Already the boys were scrambling into the back of their granny’s car, clambering over the large overnight bag that was there. Opening the passenger door, Connie had to move a leather vanity case that occupied the front footwell along with several pairs of shoes.
“Why am I getting a Thelma and Louise feeling about this?” She looked sideways at her mum and saw her eyelashes wobbling away behind her sunglasses.
“I thought it might be best if I stayed with your grandmother for a few days.”
She was looking up at the rearview mirror as she pulled out. Her nails were displayed like pale pink shells along the steering wheel; the large dress ring she was wearing on her right hand threw off shards of colored light.
“Is that Grandmother’s ring?” asked Connie, even though there was no doubt in her mind that it was.
“Oh,” said her mum, still looking into the mirror as she answered. “She gave it to me. She can’t wear it anymore—her fingers are too puffy.”
“Right,” said Connie, thinking uneasily of the picture her grandmother had given her the last time she visited—a print by a well-known Irish artist. Connie knew it to be of some value so she had tried to refuse it, but her grandmother had insisted. “I want you to have it,” she had said, in a high, airy voice. “Who knows who might get their hands on it after I’m gone.”
“You don’t think she’s losing her marbles, do you? It’s very unlike her to be giving stuff away.”
Connie’s grandmother had always guarded her few precious possessions so fiercely. Only once had Connie and Nora ever been allowed to play with her jewelry, and even then she had hovered over them making sure nothing went astray.
“I suppose she’s just getting old,” said Acushla, with a shrug in her voice.
From the back of the car Connie could hear Ernie counting cars. Oscar was pretending to count too, repeating the numbers he’d heard coming out of his brother’s mouth but in a random sequence. Connie closed her eyes to quell the sense she had of some nebulous dread.
The playground was swirling with children when they arrived. Connie opened the gate, and the boys disappeared in among them. She bolted the gate behind her and followed her mum over to a picnic table.
“So,” she said. “I suppose there’s nothing for us to do now but wait.”
Her mother sat with her shoulders slumped forward, her hands hugging her coffee cup. An oyster-colored pashmina was draped elegantly over her shoulders. Her eyes were blinking shadows behind her sunglasses.
“I feel a bit bad,” she said. “Sneaking out on your father like that.”
“Oh, come on, Mum. It’s no more than he deserves.”
The more Connie thought about it, the more it seemed to her it was the very least he deserved.
Her mum sighed. “I suppose.”
“I feel like such an idiot,” said Connie, “for taking his side all those years.”
She cringes with shame as she thinks of it, what a daddy’s girl she was.
“You adored your dad,” said her mum with a weak smile. “It was never my desire to come between the two of you.”
“I know,” said Connie. When the truth was that her mother never could have come between them, even if she had wanted to. There was nobody could have come between Connie and her dad.
In her mother’s presence Connie was a serious child, imperious and bossy, but as soon as her father came in the door, he brought a sea breeze with him, whipping Connie into peaks of giddy froth. The less time he spent at home, the more Connie delighted in his presence. On the many, many nights when he was out at some constituency event or other, Connie would insist on waiting downstairs for him, falling asleep on the couch in the breakfast room while her mother moved about the kitchen completing her chores. The next thing Connie knew, her father would be scooping her up in his arms and carrying her up the stairs. As he slid her into her own bed, she would curl up between the cold sheets like a little guard dog who was finally off duty now that her master was home.
In later years her dad used to take her on his rounds of the doorsteps on Saturday mornings. She would hand out election leaflets, and nod and smile as he promised to help someone skip a hospital waiting list, or dodge a prison sentence by grace of his intervention. The evident devotion of his daughter was a subtle vote-getter, and something that would not have been lost on him, not for one moment. When he was appointed to Cabinet for the third time, it was Connie who accompanied him to the start of the new Dáil term. She got a new dress for the occasion and a new pair of patent pumps, and her picture was in all the papers the next day. (Her mother was at home in bed with a sore throat—an excuse that in retrospect seemed a bit thin to Connie, but then in retrospect there were so many things that suddenly made sense.)
“Oh, God,” she said. “I was such a little misogynist!”
Remembering how she loved being with her father. How she preferred her grandfather’s company to her grandmother’s. It was Connie’s grandfather who taught her to play drafts, challenging her to epic tournaments that swallowed up entire rainy afternoons, while Sam sat by the window painting. He always had a stash of chocolate in the top left-hand drawer of his desk, and it was he who taught her to dip the end of a Time Out into her mug and use it as a straw. (“I don’t normally subscribe to these new-fangled confections,” he would say, “but I have to make an exception for Time Out. It’s a magnificent addition to the repertoire.”) Connie has such happy memories of those lovely, languorous afternoons at her grandfather’s dining table, with a large Latin dictionary wedged in under her bum, and her shoes hanging like lead weights off her dangling legs, with her grandfather’s old-time music swirling in the air and his smirking blue eyes watching her as she huffed him. A sense of comradeship between them, as if they were on the same side in the game of life.
And they were on the same side, that was the truth of it. Before she even knew there were sides, Connie had sided with her grandfather. Treacherous little girl that she was, she had sided with her father. She had sided with the entire male population over the female. Because women, it seemed to Connie, were always complaining about something. They were always bickering with each other, or bitching, and if they weren’t crying about something they were mounting a silent protest, one that only they knew the logic of. And it seemed to Connie that there was some disposition to unhappiness in the women of her family, some determination to be unhappy that must be located somewhere on the second X chromosome. The men seemed so much happier than the women, and so much more fun to be around.
“Mum—” she started to say, but she was interrupted by the sound of a child calling out to her.
“Mum!” It was Ernie, from the top of the slide. He was standing gripping the handrails with his little fists. His solemn face searching out hers for approbation. Connie gave him a circus smile and a thumbs-up.
“Ah, God,” she said as she turned back to her mum. “Wouldn’t that melt your heart.”
“He’s a darling,” said her mum, and it seemed to Connie that in their love for the boys they were in perfect tune with each other. All the little things that mattered to Connie—the visceral fear of a fever, the momentousness of a newly glimpsed tooth, the joy in kissing the velvety sole of a baby’s foot—her mother understood all these things. Her mother supported her, slipping her small gifts of cash to pay for makeup or a haircut. She helped her with babysitting, taking up the slack wordlessly whenever Connie needed her, whereas her father seemed to be talking to her in another register, about all the things they used to talk about before she had babies, things that were so remote to Connie now that she could barely hear him…
“You know you’ve been a great mum to me,” she said, leaning forward to search out her mother’s eyes behind her sunglasses. “You do know that, don’t you? Nobody could have been a better mum.”
Her mother tilted her head to one side and sighed.
“I do my best,” she said. “Just like you do, darling. You try to be the best mother you can be…”
And Connie was about to answer her when something occurred to her.
“Hang on,” she said. “Where’s Oscar gone?”
A moment of playground panic; a second went by, and then another second, before she located him, waiting for a little girl to vacate a swing. He had his hand down the front of his trousers to fondle himself. (“Captain Elastic” Emmet liked to call him, because he seemed never to tire of stretching his little penis out like bubble gum, to see how far it would go.)
“Oh, Jesus,” said Connie, covering her mouth with her hand. “Would you look at my son.”
Her mum took in the sight of Oscar, and bit her lip and smiled. As she turned back to Connie, the smile turned into a laugh, tears forming in her eyes as she shook her head helplessly from side to side. Connie began to laugh with her, the two of them shaking with speechless laughter so that at first neither of them noticed that Connie’s phone was ringing. It was hopping up and down on the surface of the picnic table. The screen displayed a photograph of Connie’s father’s face. A red receiver icon and a green receiver icon, inviting her to accept or reject the call. Still breathless from laughing, Connie reached out to reject it.
It was early afternoon by the time they got back to the house.
“Can we bake?” asked the boys as soon as they were in the door.
“Jesus, lads. We’re only just back from the park. Would you not think of having a nap?”
Their two little faces turned up to hers in expectation of disappointment. For weeks she’d been promising them they could bake. For weeks she’d been postponing the promise. Maybe later, she would say, maybe tomorrow. Hoping they would forget about it, but of course they didn’t.
“You promised us we could bake.”
“All right,” she said wearily. “Let’s bake.”
So here they were, standing precariously on a pair of kitchen chairs, with adult-sized aprons tied twice around their bellies and wooden spoons in their hands. Flour in their hair, and in their eyebrows and their eyelashes, flour in every crevice of their clothing. With their cheeks flaming and their eyes wide and serious from the task at hand, they were blithely unaware of the spectacle they presented.
Connie was just about to put the tray of cookies into the oven when she saw a sudden movement in the corner of the room. She froze with the tray in her hand. She saw, but did not react. For a second, maybe two, she stood and stared at the rat. The rat sat and stared back. Connie dropped the cookie tray and screamed.
In one swooping movement she hooked a child under each arm and climbed up on to the couch. She managed to reach for her mobile, which was on the table. Stabbed at Emmet’s number; the phone rang three times and went through to voice mail. She rang his number again, and again the phone went through to voice mail. Again and again she rang, picturing the tally of missed calls mounting on the face of his phone, a measure of her growing hysteria. Seven calls she made, and still the rat sat in the corner of the kitchen, picking away at a stray crumb of cookie dough.
Connie decided to make a run for it. She hefted a child on to each hip and made for the door, her bare feet barely touching the floor, as if she was running through a pit of flames. She slammed the front door behind her and threw the boys into the back of her little car, climbing into the front seat herself and starting it up. The soles of her feet naked on the pedals.
On the way to Emmet’s mother’s house, she kept trying his number. With each unanswered call she chalked up another black mark against him. By the time she had pulled up outside the house, she had scored twenty-seven unanswered calls. She rang on the side door, but again she got no answer. She bent down and retrieved the spare key from under the mat, letting herself into the dark hall. Turning the boys loose on their granny’s fridge, she made her way up the stairs to the first floor, driven now by fury. The interconnecting reception rooms were deserted, sunlight streaming in through the back window, throwing a lopsided rectangle of light across the pale carpet. The dining room table was piled high with Emmet’s books, but there were no signs of recent industry. No coffee cups, no loose notes, no uncapped pens. With something approaching relish, Connie crept up the stairs to the second floor. Past the framed portrait of Emmet in his graduation robes, his parents standing proudly on either side of him. Past a mosaic of family wedding photographs. She took in her own with a single withering glance as she charged by.
She found him in his old room. The bedroom door was ajar, and through the opening Connie could see the bottom half of his body lying on top of the single bed in all his clothes. She could hear the television, with a sound coming out of it like a swarm of angry bees; she recognized it as the drone of racing cars looping a track. Gingerly, she stepped around the open door and saw that he was fast asleep, the remote control lying on his belly and his hand placed protectively over it.
“At least he was on his own,” said her friend Orla, palm clamped to her chest with relief. “I thought you were going to tell me there was another woman in the bed with him.”
A pale dream of a girl, Orla’s skin was stretched so thinly over the fine bones of her face as to be almost transparent. Delicate colors moved beneath the surface. At one time a coral-pink flush would show, high up on her cheekbones; another time it was the blue veins you would notice, marbling her eyelids and her temples, and again, the purple shadows under her eyes.
“But that’s the worst of it!” said Connie, putting her daiquiri glass down on the low table for a moment and looking around at her friends. (It seemed clear to her that the only thing to do under the circumstances was to get drunk.) “I think I’d have preferred to find him in bed with another woman. For all the action he gets these days, I’d have understood if he was sleeping with another woman. I’d have understood if he was sleeping with another man. I swear to God, I’m so knackered, I wouldn’t care. It’s the fact that he was sleeping alone, that’s what I can’t forgive. The thought of all that delicious sleep. I don’t see how I’m ever going to forgive him.”
“Hard to see,” said Rachel, shaking her head. The only one of them who was still single, Rachel could be relied upon to take a hard line against male transgressions.
“I’d kill him,” said Trish. “If Ross did that to me, I’d murder him.” (Ross who can’t keep his hands off other women when he’s had a few drinks. Ross who once asked Connie did she like it up the arse. I’d want to kill him too, thought Connie. If I was married to Ross, I’d happily kill him.)
“The only problem with killing him,” said Orla, in her reedy voice, “is that you’d be left minding the boys on your own, which would be a bit of an own goal.”
“Oh, I’ve no intention of killing him,” said Connie, with all the command of a hanging judge. “The punishment I have in mind is much slower and more painful. I intend to make him pay me back for all the sleep he’s been stealing from me.”
Bending down to pucker her lips over the tip of her straw, she drained the last of her frozen daiquiri in one long slurp, sending a glacier at breakneck speed through the cavities of her skull. Even as she was gasping with the pain, she was raising her hand to order another round.
“There should be some kind of warning,” she said, after they’d moved on to the next bar. They were standing outside on the street, smoking Rachel’s cigarettes, even though the rest of them were supposed to have given up. “They should have a public health campaign,” she went on as she lit up. “People should be warned about the dangers of marriage.”
“It’s not possible for men and women to live together happily,” she said to Rachel in the nightclub. The others seemed to have disappeared, leaving just the two of them slumped side-by-side on a velvet couch. “I don’t know a single couple who manage to cohabit happily.”
She was stunned by the clarity of this thought.
“I swear to God, I can’t think of anyone I know who has a happy marriage!”(Her grandfather was the only person Connie could think of who was in a happy relationship, which said something in and of itself about relations between men and women.)
“What about your parents?” asked Rachel, confused. “I thought your parents were still married.”
“Ah,” said Connie, thinking of the reams of newsprint that must even now be reeling off the great printing presses in the west of the city. Corralling her slurred thoughts into line, she made a mental note to buy the newspaper on her way home. She imagined how she would wobble into the Spar while her taxi meter ticked away outside. She would squint at the small print in the dark backseat of the taxi, not sure if it was the darkness or the drink that was preventing her from reading it. Already she could imagine exactly what it would say.