The phone rang loudly through the silent house. Margaret listened but didn’t move. Twice already that morning the phone had rung, but when she picked it up there was no one there. So she sat where she was, on the floor in Mary’s bedroom, a pile of coloured leotards on her lap. Mary had left them, discarded, when she rushed out of the house that evening. ‘I’m late, I’ll tidy my room tomorrow,’ she had called back over her shoulder as she grabbed her bag and slammed the front door.
Margaret had picked up the scraps of cotton and Lycra. Red and blue, purple and green. Like the flowers that Persephone gathered the day Hades stole her away to the Underworld, she thought. Six months before Demeter saw her again. Six months of every year that the world mourned the loss of her daughter.
Four days since Mary had gone. Margaret buried her face in the soft pile of clothes. Mary’s familiar smell surrounded her. She breathed in deeply. How long would it be before the smell would fade, before all trace of her would be lost? She slipped sideways onto the worn carpet and curled into a ball, conscious suddenly that the phone had stopped ringing and the house was silent once again.
A new routine had taken over her life. Normal time had been suspended. She measured her days now in accordance with the change of shift in the Garda station. She allowed herself one phone call for each eight hours. Six a.m. to two p.m. Two p.m. to ten p.m. Ten p.m. to six a.m. She played games with herself, worked out ways of delaying, set up arbitrary rules. I’ll have a cup of tea first, then I’ll phone. I’ll read the paper, then I’ll do it. I’ll make sure Mother takes her pills, then I’ll dial the number. She ate sparingly, intermittently. Cups of coffee and pieces of bread and cheese were her staple diet. Sleep was haphazard, snatched in minutes rather than hours, never in bed, sometimes at the kitchen table or on a bench in the garden. Once in the rocking chair in her mother’s room. Outside the sun shone, a perfect ball of fire glittering in a sky that mirrored the cornflower blue of the sea below. The little beach at Seapoint was packed. They straggled down the road past her windows from the DART station, the mothers and children, friends and lovers, a brightly coloured caravan of happiness. She stood at the gate and watched, so close she could have reached out and touched them, yet a million light years from the cold dark world in which she was living.
Around her flowed the business of the house, dominated by her mother’s illness. She had cancer, first diagnosed eight years ago and treated. A radical mastectomy followed by six months of chemotherapy. Now it was back. A tumour on the spine. The first time a letter had sufficed, but this was different. She had lain in her bed, twelve thousand miles away, listening to Catherine’s sobs, and thought, it’s time to go back. To say goodbye properly, to lay the ghosts.
Now her cheek rested against the floor. She closed her eyes. She could feel the movements in the rooms below, travelling up through the house. The Hoover trundling backwards and forwards over the faded rugs set up the steady, rhythmic vibration that rattled Mary’s jars and tubs of makeup on the dressing table. Nellie must be here, she thought. Poor old Nellie, as Catherine called her, not realizing that Nellie who had worked for them since she was fourteen was considerably younger and healthier than she. The doorbell rang twice. She lifted her head slightly, then dropped it back again. The familiar rumble of the doctor’s voice. Catherine’s favourite. The youngest recruit to the local practice. Came to see her every day. Sometimes brought her flowers or chocolate. Flirted with her, responded to the coquettish glances she gave him through her sparse eyelashes, pretended not to notice her smudged and smeared lipstick and powder. Who else would come on this bright morning? Perhaps Father Lonergan, with his gracious smile and long, well-tended hands. Maybe one or other of the neighbours who remembered when Catherine was the best-dressed woman in the parish with her handmade shoes and tailored suits.
Margaret rolled onto her back, and folded her arms tightly around the bundle of clothes. Sunlight moved and shifted across the room. As it had when she was a child. An apple tree grew up the back of the house, right against her bedroom window. Many times she had crawled out over the sill and scrambled down its arthritic branches, jumping the last few feet to the lawn below. Mary had done it too, in the first week after they arrived. Just to see, she had said, if all the things you told me were true. O ye of little faith, Margaret had chided her, as she stood on the grass looking up at the window. Be careful. You don’t want to hurt yourself. But Mary was as light and lithe as she had been, landing on her toes on the mossy grass, then spinning away from Margaret’s outstretched arms, her feet placed precisely, her body aligned perfectly, a succession of jetés carrying her effortlessly onto the stone terrace where Catherine sat, a large gin and tonic in front of her on the slatted table.
Margaret sat up, slowly. Beside her was a wooden bookcase. She turned her head and checked the titles. All her old medical texts. Vander, Sherman and Luciano’s Human Physiology. Davidson’s Medicine, Gray’s Anatomy. How to fathom the mysteries of the human heart she thought, as she pulled them out one by one, flicking through the yellowing pages. Her handwriting, surprisingly childlike, decorated the margins. Passages underlined, further references to be consulted and then, sandwiched between a line drawing of the inside of the knee and the muscles of the thigh a scrap of cardboard torn from a cigarette packet. ‘I love you’ was printed in careful capitals, the black ink faded.
Tears came then, running down the creases beside her nose, gathering in the corners of her mouth, dripping onto her hands. Silent tears, and again, another sound, insistent. The phone, ringing. Again and again. No longer a summons she could ignore. She got to her feet, folded the cardboard carefully in two and pushed it into her pocket. She walked down the stairs to the hall, wiping her face with the back of her hand. She picked up the receiver. She held it to her ear. Beside her the grandfather clock chimed midday.
‘Hallo,’ she said. Silence. She spoke again. ‘Hallo.’ Still silence. Then the sound. An intake of breath.
‘Please, speak to me.’
And another sound. Whistling, high, clear. A tune. For the first few moments the notes seemed unconnected, disjointed. Panic flooded her body. What did it mean? What was it? Then a voice rose up from the silted layers of her memory. Her father calling her to his side.
Listen, Maggie, listen to this. My mother, your granny, loved this record. Listen. Hands fumbling with the crackling brown cover on the hard black disc. Be careful, Maggie. If you drop it it’ll break. Careful, now. Put the needle down very gently.
And now the same tune, whistled.
Bring flowers of the fairest, bring blossom the rarest
From gardens and woodland and hillside and dale,
Our poor hearts are singing, our glad voices bringing,
Our praise of thee, loveliest Queen of the May.
O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.
The whistling stopped. Silence again. And coldness, sweeping over her body. The muscles in her legs weakening. Sweat breaking out on her palms, on the soles of her feet. Hairs standing up on the back of her neck. And a sudden pain, deep in her heart, forcing her down onto the floor, to bang her head, again and again and again, until that was all she could remember.