Scéalta Page 13

  The picture shows my Aunt Esther’s house and all the trees that surround it; dark curly evergreens and the spindly brown bones of those in full moult. The Dublin Mountains are mauve in the background, the dip of Chapelizod village; yellow and red, its rooftops peep over the Payne’s grey wall of the Phoenix Park.

  The deer I have relocated from the far side of the Acres where they sleep in their little scoops under the trees. Now they are sleeping on the hill beside the house. It’s a bit of a cheat, but my uncle says it’s all right to cheat for the sake of the picture. He says he doubts the deer would mind. My uncle knows the deer so well, when he strolls through the middle of the herd they don’t scatter, just lift their sturdy necks to watch him pass by with black steady eyes. When I’ve finished the picture I make my signature in the corner so as Mother will always know who it came from. My uncle puts a frame around it, then wraps it in four sheets of crisp brown paper. I call my picture Esther’s House.

  It helps me to put in the days of the last two weeks of my stay.

  In the evenings I sit by my aunt while she bashes the piano. This is after we have visited the swans and are up out of bed. I used to turn the pages for her, but I stopped doing that ages ago. She never looks at the music anyway.

  While she plays I am walking myself in my mind through our house in Capel Street. I can see Mother and Carolina then, what they’re like at this hour of the day when it’s time to put the lights up and when they’re always together. I follow them both as they move through the house, room-by-room, corner-by-corner, flight-by-flight of all our stairs. Everywhere they go they leave light behind them.

  * * *

  When I get home only Farley is there. He tells me Mother has gone out and that I’ve only just missed her.

  ‘Gone to the train station to see off them bloody Eyeties, doubt she’ll be back for a while yet. A swank tea they were having before setting out. In the Shelbourne, or maybe she said some place else?’

  Then he tells me Father is with his bookkeeper and he’s not to be disturbed. But there’s no need for him to tell me this, as I have no intention of disturbing my father, and hadn’t asked for him in the first place.

  ‘Your sister is up in the sitting room.’

  ‘Where’s Carolina?’

  ‘Day off.’

  I go up to Mother’s bedroom thinking I’ll leave the picture there for a surprise, maybe hide myself behind the curtain until she finds it, pick the right moment before popping out. This plan makes me so giddy I nearly trip up the stairs.

  But there’s no room for the picture in Mother’s room. The bed is bumpy and bright with laid-out clothes she has been trying on. Her dressing table, packed with little bottles and boxes. The mantel over the fireplace crowded with cards and ornaments. Hatboxes all over the floor. I try leaning the picture against the wardrobe door but it slides down off the mahogany surface.

  There’s a funny smell in the bedroom. Not just the vaguely farty smell of my father but a new sweet smell that I don’t recognise, oranges and perfume maybe. There are things in the room I’ve never seen either, vases stuffed up with flowers and a neat fat bunch of Parma violets lying on the chair. A box of figs is open on the floor. Sorrento figs, so the lid says. There’s a photograph poked into the corner of the dressing mirror; a profile I’ve never met, a deep black signature scrawled over one shoulder.

  In the end I just leave the picture on the floor, then go to the window pulling the curtains around me.

  The windowpane holds a glaze of my face, dark and devilish. It shows years I haven’t yet lived, scars I haven’t yet earned. It shows every minute of every day of the last six week of my life.

  A ginger-haired boy and sneery-eyed cats; the shape of my aunt’s bed, my boots on the floor; my uncle drifting through herds of deer. These are the images that fill up my reflection, edging in and out, swelling and shrinking, then melting slowly into my face and my chest.

  I stay where I am, waiting for Mother.

  VONA GROARKE

  Cubs

  Four fox cubs had been hung from the gate with green twine. She stopped the car. She couldn’t touch them, but they were definitely dead. Their heads were faced away from the road in the direction of her house, in line with each other and all the one size. Four small bodies set by a farmer’s hand into this one, choreographed death scene. Newborn. Their colour was sharper than the few remaining leaves on the two beech trees. Killed the same day. Today. While she’d been at work.

  Margaret had been watching the mother for the past few weeks. As her body got bigger and her steps less prompt, she had ventured closer to the back of the house, and Margaret got used to keeping an eye out for a dash of auburn along the ditch that slumped to the back of the house. She’d wondered if she should put milk out, but what would happen then when the cubs were born and suddenly there’d be a whole litter of them prowling at her door? No, better left alone.

  It must have been raining. There were still some drops on the fur of each of them. Had he killed them before he strung them up with that sickly, green twine? They were too composed for struggle and they had the look of animals that had not known to refuse anything in their foreshortened lives.

  Their tails hung like pointless exclamation marks. Margaret’s hand was extended towards the tip of one. She was thinking how silky they were, and what the colour reminded her of, when she noticed the flattened grass in front of her foot. A larger imprint than her own and lined across, the way the soles of Wellingtons are. He had stood here, so. Probably had thrown the bodies on the ground just to her left before dipping down to choose another to sling into the twine. Did the sight of them, or the feel of them – still warm? – relieve his sense of all the harm they’d manage, left to live? Did he have them in a sack, or had he carried them in his own arms? Did his jacket smell, even now, of their small death? Would the mother pick it up in his wake and follow him to this, her cubs arrayed with such a clean hand on the gate?

  Her mother had a stole one time with a small fox-head at one end. For Christmas and funerals, and that one time they’d gone to a dinner dance. Margaret had brushed her mother’s hair for her, and had helped set the fox stole down on the silver dress with the satin pink ribbon. Beautiful. Except for the black, dreadful eyes that seemed to follow hers around the room. They were, she remembered, the colour of the clutch bag her mother had bought especially, that was still in the wardrobe of the back bedroom, that she had meant a few times to throw out. She used to keep such things for her own daughter. But now she had no daughter, and no son either, and the bag was fusty and no longer smelled of perfume and compliments. Only the small fox eyes would be unchanged, wherever they were, overwhelmed by darkness, watchful as ever for that one rupture of light.

  Such small heads. One would fit, almost exactly, in her palm, snout to the tip of her fingers, ears back where the thumb would cock a warning to the air. Run. There’s so little time. And I can’t help you now.

  No blood on the bodies, however he’d managed it. Would she know at once, or would she think, coming over the field, that they were waiting for her? No.

  ‘We can’t leave them there. It’s wrong.’

  Margaret found she wasn’t that surprised.

  ‘I know.’

  The voice was right behind her, maybe one step to the left. Margaret didn’t turn.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They say they spread disease, and they can kill if they have to, too.’

  ‘But why here, like this?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I haven’t seen it done like this before.’

  This isn’t mine. I didn’t do it. Don’t ask me to explain.

  But she did know. The sight of them deserved, at least, the words. She turned.

  ‘To keep the mother away. She won’t come here after this.’

  Sarah. Her name was Sarah. No surname offered, none required. Margaret knew who she was. Or bits of it, gathered up like a paper trail, clues that had established her since the day she had arrive
d.

  She’d had one suitcase, the same colour as her coat. It was not the kind of coat you saw often in Classen, its odd squares stitched together with comic book excess. The suitcase too was oversized, and Margaret noticed from her front window that the woman opposite had set it down with some relief. Her body had stooped in the direction of the case for a few seconds after its release, before straightening like a metronome needle fingered into place.

  She’d been very still in front of a door that, even from across the road, Margaret knew was flaked with dull neglect. It had been many winters since that door had opened on anything but obsolete air and four hunched rooms that had nothing, not even furniture, to speak of.

  From the look of the coat and the hair tied back in a lumpy ponytail, Margaret had figured she was young, much younger than herself. She stood then like a study in shades of brown by an artist with a taste for the picturesque. She stood as though the door would open at any second to admit her to the life she had once wished for, but had never bothered to expect.

  Margaret remembered how she had closed her eyes, thinking that when she opened them, there would be no woman at the house across the road. No suitcase, no house. The same artist would have decided instead on a natural scene, all grey and flitting shades of brown, unmoved by human life. That would be easier, Margaret had thought. Then I could get off to work.

  But she was not gone. Her arm, without a trace of briskness to it, was in the act of picking from the front left pocket of the copious coat, something that was probably a key. She’s tired, Margaret thought. She has come a journey and the end of it is damp and dank and has no welcome for her.

  And she will not stay.

  The house across the road had been withering for years. Perhaps as a rebuke to its decline, Margaret’s house contained itself in clean lines and definite ambitions. The front door was a smart, bright yellow and she had the gutters cleared out every spring. The garden read like a poem for children, with nothing wayward or surprising there.

  From the road, Margaret’s life seemed ruthlessly organised. In fact, it was not, but nothing about the polished door lock and moss-free roof would have given that away. This was a strategy; Margaret believed in a smooth exterior. She had made a life out of thinking herself tasteful, relevant and discreet. If pushed by the right person, she might have admitted that you could get away with a lot more if you didn’t present to the world at large (or at least the world at Classen), a catalogue of pressure points and bruises.

  Which was partly why the house opposite presented her with a personal insult. This was what happened when your life had snags in it, small clumps of darkness that were on show to anyone who cared to shift their view. The house was the result, the inevitable result, of throwing open your life, and if Margaret was sure of anything, it was that exposure of this kind meant very little but mould where it shouldn’t be and breathless air that wasn’t going anywhere.

  Far better to make a life that had only the most obvious chinks in it: childlessness, a dead-end job, dyed hair that should have been those two tones darker. Nothing with implicit drama, just the commonplace lacks that were so general as to never need to be observed or remarked on.

  That way, you never had to find yourself on the step of a house that should probably be knocked, that had loose slates and windows that wouldn’t prise open, that had sycamore shoots pressing out under the walls, that nobody had thought of once since the trailer had pulled away with a bedstead, a green couch and two mattresses about four years ago. That hardly had an owner any more, unless it was the woman whose hand was even now moving upwards towards the lock.

  Perhaps she had bought the place and had arrived to shake it out and breathe into its absences, a life.

  Perhaps she was thinking better of it now. Certainly, she was in no great hurry to take possession of the place. If she had picked up her suitcase, turned tail and gone back towards Athlone, Margaret would have put her down as smart enough to give mistakes their due.

  But she’d gone nowhere. She hadn’t exactly slotted her life into the business of the place, but she was here, and it didn’t look as though she planned to leave.

  From that first day to now, not a word had passed between them. This was the first time Margaret had heard her voice. She guessed money from the accent. Dublin, the best schools. A way of letting the words seep into each other, like they weren’t hers, like she couldn’t be held accountable for whatever they might change.

  She was standing now between Margaret and the cubs. Faced towards them. Even saying the words, Margaret realised, had made her seem complicit. One of them. She spoke anyway.

  ‘I’ll untie this side. You do over there.’

  ‘What will we do with them?’

  Indeed.

  ‘Will we put them in the ditch?’ Even saying it, Margaret knew she sounded pinched, ungenerous.

  ‘They have to be buried.’

  Of course. Her voice was very sure of what it said now Margaret had nothing to match it with. Bury them. A shallow pit, the bodies in their hands, soil on their fur. At least she was not alone.

  ‘But where? He owns both the fields, he’d never let us bury them in there.’

  ‘In your garden?’

  Oh god, no. Not that. Their four heads underneath her soil. Every colour a shade of their heads, a way of knowing how death would still their efforts and their claims.

  ‘Could you not …?’

  ‘It’s not mine. I promised I wouldn’t change anything.’

  ‘Say nothing, so. The weeds will keep your word for you.’

  When she came back with the spade and shovel from the garden shed, Sarah had taken off her coat and set it on the grass. The bodies were muffled in the deep brown of the winter coat.

  ‘Will it not be ruined?’

  What?

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I can brush it off.’

  She can brush off death. She can show up behind me and talk like we were always friends. She can put her life down in that cottage, between damp walls and fetid air. She can do anything. She can show me how.

  ‘Will I take this end?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So polite, between them. No loose ends.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now.’

  There was no weight in them. The furthest corner from Sarah’s cottage was a small clump of vetch and weeds. They dug behind it, a thin hollow that didn’t seem to grow deeper no matter how thickly they dug. The last of the light was stacked up in the west behind Sarah’s head. Margaret noticed a line of sweat beading the other woman’s upper lip. She was too hot herself, but Sarah had no coat on, only a light shirt, (a man’s shirt?), and some jeans. Her hair was filthy, and even in this cold, Margaret could smell acrid sweat every time the other woman shovelled out a cusp of earth and dropped it on the neat heap by the wall. Of course, there probably was no shower in the house. Or hot water, either, unless she boiled it up.

  ‘You won’t see it from the house. It’ll be behind the weeds.’

  ‘I’ll remember it.’

  Matter of fact. The voice parched of feeling and any depth.

  ‘Will that do?’ She knew they should go deeper, but she hadn’t the stomach for any more of this. They were only small. What they’d done would do.

  ‘The rest is rocks.’

  Was she crying? The way she said ‘rocks’ had a hill in the middle of it, and two sides, both of which were in full darkness now. Margaret couldn’t see her face, the way she turned away a little towards the cottage. She should have asked her to go in and put on the light. But she was not in charge here. This was not her house, and those were not her half-breaths that could have been sobs, or were maybe just a sign of exertion when you were only used to sitting in a house in darkness, doing god knows what.

  ‘We’ll lift the coat over and tip them in.’

  Margaret’s earlier impulse to touch the bodies was gone. They’d be so cold.

  Sarah said nothing, but lifted the cubs off her co
at and laid them, one by one, in the shallow pit. She lay them as they had hung, close together and facing to the right. Kids in a sleeping bag, Margaret was thinking. When the messing is finished and tiredness has kicked in.

  Sarah had started on the infill: rhythmical, close strokes that spread darkness over them. Darkness that was hardly different now from the dark of the road, or what was splayed in the branches of the ditch. Sarah too had been claimed by its edgy grip. Margaret felt the whole world around her was slipping away, and only she could see where it all would fall.

  The heap they had made at the side had levelled out. Margaret had done hardly anything but watch. She patted the mound with the back of her spade and Sarah looked over at her in a gesture of surprise. Margaret clutched at a few of the weeds that had seen out the frost. She lay them on the grave. They looked ridiculous, but she couldn’t exactly stoop to pick them up.

  So what?

  What now? Ask her over for coffee? Hardly. See does she need anything?

  Sarah was pulling up her coat from the ground, shaking out whatever she could loosen from its cloth. She didn’t put it on herself, but folded it over her arm and, looking at it still, said, ‘Thanks.’

  As though Margaret had been only the helper and Sarah the one who had really suffered. Margaret, perennial handmaiden. Living alone in a house she never earned.

  She went back to move her car. The frozen stuff in the boot would be thawed by now, the pizza base soggy and the peas shrivelled up. Too late for coffee anyway, or she’d never get to sleep. She sat in the car without quite turning the key.

  There were no lights in the cottage either, and the whole road and both the gardens were consigned to darkness now.

  REBECCA O’CONNOR

  St John of the Miraculous Lake

  For fear of the sound of his own voice. This smooth-skinned, nettle-eyed child won’t open his mouth for fear of the sound. He goes up to the old hospital and throws seven boy’s names, six girl’s names, five fruit at the wall, jumping and spinning each time before catching the ball. But the words stay in his head.