Disquieting days bring strange nights. I lay for hours in the pitch-dark, knowing that the eaves were above me but not able to make out their shape. I had his postcard under my pillow. Mary, I may call that way at some point. John. No frills, no dates, no times, no hope. I knew he’d get sick of wandering about eventually. The place is part of him: he loves it like I love it, with all of his heart. I will the words under my head to rearrange themselves and say something different. They might speak at any moment so I wait and wait but they still don’t tell me what I want to hear. He is coming back for his land, his fields, his trees and ditches, the bone-chilling Cloon waters. And nothing else.
The sun rose at five-thirty and I rose with it, aching and tired. Mammy calls around midday and I walk up, get the Deep Heat on and get out. The big white wall of the orchard welcomes me home. I cross the floor to the range and put the kettle on to boil. The silence soon drives me back out to the front stoop. I can breathe easier outside my empty house than in.
Inside smells like him, my errant husband, it’s like choking on nectar. And I can sit against the ancient granite wall, warmed by the heat of the day, and be able to feel for five minutes that nothing can harm me when I have solid rock at my back. I watch the river field, jumping with heavy cream meadowsweet, the lilac of cuckooflowers, the yellow dots of buttercups and the ball dance of midges.
For decades it had seemed to me that my life was a truck that roared past showering me with muck, then I realised that I was driving the bloody truck! It’s because I’m a different girl now; I grew up about a year ago! Whoosh! Bam! The scales flew clean off my eyeballs and I could see that I had my hands on the wheel all along! What a fool! Soon I would be a fool without a home because he’s coming back, coming back to winkle me out.
Will I be able to secure myself just one more chance? My lungs or is it my heart plays up when I allow myself that question, flapping about like a fish on a riverbank taking in the horror with its right-side-up fish eye that it’s just air between it and the sky for evermore.
Ginger looks up at me from the sunlight dancing on the granite slab we laid down to mark Brandy dog’s grave and shows me the back of his dark little throat with an extra-wide yawn. I’m not leaving you behind, I tell him with a sob.
After John binned me in Belfast, he wrote to say he was going to lease the herd as he knew that the beasts would be too much work for me when all the boys would soon be gone. Waynes don’t last forever, Mary, you need to find something else to do with your life! True to his word, he set the wheels in motion within days and Scrumptious Connolly – who had dried out and rediscovered God all in the same afternoon – showed up to appraise the cows and walk the fields and inspect the drains and inform me it was never too late to go back to Jesus. Jesus!
The decision was made to leave me with the hill field, the river field and the back field. All I could see was a lot of space opening up around me. Johns Farm and The Hill always seemed small, like fields that could be gathered in one hand; now they were vast, green spaces rolling forever in front of me. Auntie Eileen took a leaf out of John’s book and leased her farm in the same week. Two of us can play at this retirement lark, she said.
I wept when the last of the cattle were walked past the half-door of Johns Farm on their way to greener grass on Aghabovey. At least this time I said goodbye.
When Daniel went to university in Liverpool the September after John left me, I cried so much that I thought I would drown. Until then I had had Son Number Four to focus on, him to cook for, him to love. He had to prise my arms from around his neck at Belfast airport. I had never been on a plane and the thought of him being lifted up, up and away was brutal.
I cried all the way down the M1 while Eileen roared at me to for God’s sake, get a grip, it was only fucking England not fucking Mars! We wouldn’t have to get on a rocket ship to see him, just a plane which took sixty minutes! Only sixty fucking minutes! Bernie kept passing the tissues through from the back seat ’til the box was empty. When she growled at me and gave me a good hard bang on the head with the empty box I howled some more.
His father had gone straight from Belfast to Serena in London and after a fortnight sightseeing he had taken off for Australia. The twins followed him within weeks ‘just to see how it was’. I cried and cried and cried. When I stopped crying for five minutes I found enough energy to cry some more. My face was like a baboon’s backside.
Auntie Eileen threatened to get Doctor Joe Loughrey to have a look at me and the shock of that finally stopped my nonsense. Joe Loughrey listening to my heart? Joe Loughrey shining a light in my eyes? Joe Loughrey trying to ascertain the state of my mental health? No Siree Bob! I snapped to and came up with a plan of sorts on how to survive on my own.
I had all this land lying around me going to waste so I started growing ever more vegetables and fruit. The orchard was always great for apples and plums, Victoria and damson, but I have low fruit too: gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants all planted now and ready to give up a fine crop next year. I had such plans for that harvest. I conserve it and distribute it to the shops in a thirty-mile radius, but not by myself. Auntie Eileen and Bernie are here three days a week and we have become Bridie’s Jams & Pickles. I think Bridie would love having her name put to such a sweet joke. I hope I’ve done her proud. I am still hers and always will be. The thought of her makes the possibility of having to return to The Hill a hundred times worse. At least here I feel she’s still near me, still able to eat me up and not even need sugar.
We have huge boiling pans set up in the milk house; Eileen and me wash and rinse and cook and bottle and Bernie puts the labels on like she has an internal spirit level – she’s a pure angel out of Heaven. Daddy drops in every day as he likes to feel he’s on hand for any heavy work and us only stewing fruit. I feed him up and he sits on the stoop and smokes himself blind while Ginger purrs fit to burst at his feet.
– Will I empty this into that, Mary?
– That would be a great help, thanks, Daddy. Sure, I don’t know what I’d do without you!
– Have you anything to lift, Eileen?
– No, Frank! But I could lift a mug of tea to my lips now that you’ve mastered boiling the kettle!
– I’ll make a pot.
He knows he’ll never be seen down here in the hollow of Johns Farm doing such a cissy thing so it’s safe enough for him to venture into the kitchen. Serena designed the labels for the jars with a white longhouse with a red tin roof and all the front of the house is covered in red fruits. I finish them off with red gingham cloth covers. Red is still my colour. I’m waiting to hear from a big distributor in Belfast who supplies supermarket chains with ‘niche organic foodstuffs’, or jam as we call it in County Tyrone. It’ll be hard to tell them my plans have changed.
That’s all the postcard said: Mary, I may call that way at some point. John. What if I have to give up my little business and get a job? A job in a shop or a hospital? I’m not qualified. I’ve never worked a day in my life closeted in one of those horrible airless places.
Lizzie Magee will give me pointers on how to survive if that happens. I’m so glad she’ll be home soon, though the last time she was here wasn’t easy on either of us. She wanted to surprise me and she certainly did. She’d found me howling like a banshee in the vegetable patch. Every time I thought about my little Roisin-that-never-was the blue waves of longing would crash over my head and nearly drown me. Lizzie knew about her but I’d never been able to put into words how much I missed her. She had been so real, so complete in my mind, that I could never put her from it.
After a stiff whiskey each, with an even stiffer whiskey chaser, Lizzie found the strength to tell me something, a thing she has wanted to be able to say out loud for what feels like a hundred years. She does know how I feel. She also knows why she’s childless. She’s always known.
She had had an abortion. Dessie had driven her to the boat and given her a handful of money covered in engine oil. She’d never seen so much cash, it must have been a whole month’s takings at the garage. After the terrifying boat ride from Larne to Stranraer and the never-ending coach trip to London overnight, she’d found the place and committed the sin of all sins. All alone with nothing but a packet of painkillers she’d done the return journey in under three days. She forced herself to eat Mars Bars and Twixes at every service station because it was still a day out.
She was eighteen and hadn’t found the ‘man of her dreams’. It was the week after she’d driven up to Johns Farm and I had Serena on my hip and tall tales of how great married life was. I had looked so happy, she tells me, looked so lovely standing outside my little house with my gorgeous girl and with John Johns in the bag; she thought she would die of jealousy. She’d been feeling sorry for me and missing me and all along I’d been doing more than fine without her. I was living our schoolgirl dream of being in love and having a husband.
She just couldn’t wait another day to catch me up. She couldn’t wait any longer for a ride! If she waited one minute more she’d be on the shelf forever. She was behind the times; no one was a virgin any more. Green with envy, she went off to Bundoran with none other than Scrumptious Connolly. She kept him out of the bar long enough to get herself and him into a caravan in the Star of the Sea camping site and took every precaution known to womankind, rubber johnnies included, and still got herself knocked up.
Sheila and Dessie sent her to England for ‘the treatment’ when she went crying to them. They turned into strangers, into statues; she couldn’t get through to them! She kept telling them it was okay, Mary had a baby and it’s okay, I saw her! But it was not okay for Sheila and Dessie, not okay at all.
They had only been letting on that they didn’t mind because I was nothing to do with them. The muck all stuck on me. She had never even seen them in a bad temper before; she was so shocked, she could hardly believe what they were telling her to do. It has never been discussed since.
All through the IVF, the constant heartache and the little babies who only stayed for a few weeks, it was never referred to: a non-event. Sheila and Dessie blamed Lizzie for her stupidity and never took an ounce of responsibility for their part in covering it up.
– I’m surprised John Johns didn’t tell you, she says, he took me home when he found me doubled up with cramps at the bus station. I nearly bled to death. I had on white jeans, can you bloody believe that? I wanted to look nice on the boat!
– Oh, Lizzie!
– I was so mortified. John had to half-carry me to the front door. He never said a word but he knew exactly what was going on.
My husband would never have given her away, even to me. There’s no one who doesn’t make a mistake at some point or another, he often said to the children. I never agreed or disagreed, too busy agitating the shadows. No, he would never dob her in, his Saint Lizzie of the Polished Nails.
That’s all the postcard said: Mary, I may call that way at some point. John. In the end Serena calls. She’s heard from Dada and he does want to look over the farm. He’s not sure what the future holds for him. He’s really loved being away in Australia; Marius and Eugene and him did a bit of travelling, camping out and such. Her Uncle Mick joined them at some stage but he didn’t take to the auld camping; he’s a vet who doesn’t like bugs and prefers the air-conditioned comforts of his surgery and home.
The bugs there are huge and the spiders are monstrous, Dada told her, enough to make a grown man run for cover. Imagine Dada being afraid of something! she roars. It’s too preposterous. Seems Mick has a very nice man living in his house, not that he verified anything. I’m glad he has someone to keep his night terrors away, someone to hold him.
Australia also has something called Blue Sky Syndrome which sounds bloody awful! What good is a pure blue sky to anyone? Why is half of Ireland’s youth there getting bitten and burnt when we have a perfectly good country here which is practically empty? And no bombs, bullets or ballots flying? Sometimes it seems we were all just fighting to clear the blockades on the road to the airport. Anyway, Dada is now considering his options, one of those options being to put me out on the street when he comes to view his farm. She doesn’t say this last part but I hear it anyway.
– What are you going to do, Ma?
– About what?
– About him!
– What about him?
– He’s coming home, Ma, he’s going to be landing on the street any day now, you’d better have something to say for yourself!
John and me hadn’t spoken for three hundred and seventy-three days now and counting. I had no clue what was in his mind or his heart. I needed Lizzie Magee to stop hoovering up the local wildlife in Africa and to get her ass back to Carncloon right away, we needed a pow-wow! We needed to compare notes, we needed to come up with a plan, we needed to make sure we got it right this time. I didn’t know where to start without her. The clock was ticking. No matter how hard I pushed it down, the hope that he wouldn’t hate me outright rose up in my breast, the eternal flame to my sacred heart.