What Are You Like Read online

  The next day she could not find the courage to go out on to the street. She looked at the floral wallpaper in the hotel room and traced the faces she found there. She listened to the sounds outside the window. She watched the BBC. She imagined another life.

  At seven in the evening she dialled the number, trying to picture the house at the end of the line. The phone rang four times. She felt the silence after the click of connection, as the receiver travelled through the air.

  ‘Hello?’ it was a girl’s voice. ‘Hello?’ and all Rose could say was,

  ‘It’s me. Marie.’

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ said the girl, and then shouted off the line. ‘Mom!’

  The phone went down with a clatter. Rose could hear a distant radio playing. A sister. She had a sister, who knew all about her. Her whole story was being stolen and spoiled.

  She held the handset over the receiver, but could not put it down. A woman’s voice.

  ‘Maria? Maria? Is that you? Hello?’

  Rose put the phone back to her ear. There was nothing to say. She held her breath for as long as she could, because this silence was all she had to give.

  Lungs

  ‘SHE RANG. I think she rang.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  That night Evelyn got up to go to the toilet and when she got back to bed, saw that Berts was not there. She decided not to let it bother her, but the thought of him keeled over and dead somewhere in the house would not let her sleep.

  She got up again and put on her dressing gown. The lights were all out. He was in the sitting room, gutted as it was. He was sitting on the sofa in a little nest of newspaper that fanned out around his bottom like a butcher’s display.

  ‘Come to bed,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about my wife.’

  ‘I’m your wife,’ she said.

  But he told her anyway.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’ She put her hands on her knees and pushed herself up off the chair.

  ‘Right,’ she said again. Evelyn put her hand to her head. The bone of her skull was singing.

  ‘I’m your wife,’ she said.

  After she left, Berts looked at the room, and hissed.

  ‘Hssssss.’

  There was a bit of tobacco stuck to his lip, and it pulled a piece of skin with it when he scraped it into his mouth. He chewed it even after it was gone, rolling it with his tongue even after he had swallowed it. He pulled his mouth down at both corners, and blew the smoke out with a disgusted lift of his face. This was what happened after Evelyn went to bed. Berts lifted his face to the ceiling, and fitted the cigarette to his face, and swallowed the smoke into his lungs like water to a drowning man.

  ‘Hssssss.’

  He stubbed the cigarette out on the bare boards, then stood up and walked across to the window. He looked out into the darkness at the tree his wife had not seen for twenty-five years. It was nearly as tall as the lamp-post now. It waved across the streetlight in the wind; all black, with a shifting mess of green.

  Berts lit another cigarette and leaned his head against the window.

  They had wanted to give the child oxygen, they said, but there was something about it that would damage the mother. He could not understand. Either the child would drown inside her, or she would drown in the pure air.

  So they had given the child oxygen and his wife had died.

  He had gone in to see her, but he was not sure she was dead. She looked very quiet, but he wasn’t sure she looked dead. They told him she was dead and he had to believe them, but he still felt he should talk to her, give her some noise. The air was pushed into her by a bellows and there was a machine bubbling on the floor.

  They checked the baby by the hour. The room was full of students, and a man came down, all the way from Belfast. He said,

  ‘This child is a miracle,’ and he lifted his stethoscope from her stomach. Berts thought he could have warmed it first.

  Joan came in with some clean clothes for him. She took one look at Anna on the bed and left the room.

  Then the cleaner. The cleaner came in and banged her bucket and hit her mop against the bed and didn’t even apologise. After the cleaner, he knew she was dead.

  His wife was lying in the bed. Her chest was pushed out with air, like a fist, the tubes up her nose were choking her, the wires to the heart monitor were shocking her into a pulse. There was another tube in her hand and a nurse came in to coax it every now and then, ran the pad of her thumb up and down a little disc at the side and tut-tutted, something to do with pressure, he assumed, the pressure inside her body and the pressure of the fluid in the tube. The nurses brought him cups of tea. He wanted tea all the time, was mad for tea. This was one of the best hospitals anywhere, they said, for the infant survival rate, better than America, better than Germany.

  ‘The best for tea anyhow,’ he said.

  His wife did not move. He thought of the baby drifting inside her, floating, wired. Its pulse was confused, but real. While hers was not real, they said, because she was dead. Berts found he avoided looking at her stomach. He sat staring at the light shifting across the floor. It was afternoon light, very open and uncertain: it moved like it didn’t want you to know it was moving at all. But Berts was patient. It is hard to fool a patient man.

  He saw a kick in the corner of his eye, the slightest thud hitting the underside of the counterpane, and now he found he could not take his eyes away from her bump. He leant forward so her face was hidden by the curve, as he waited for the next shiver in the cloth. He did not want to see her wince: there might be a spasm, something that looked just like she did, when she was surprised inside. Berts watched for a long time: waited for the baby to kick her alive. He looked away. He watched again. The light turned. He started to hate this thing, who knew he was watching and hid from him, who played him at this waiting game.

  You killed her, he thought. You killed her.

  Skin

  ROSE GOT INTO a taxi and showed the driver the address.

  ‘How much to go there?’ she said.

  ‘About six quid.’

  ‘That’s fine. Thank you.’

  But when the taxi stopped at a set of lights, she found herself wrestling with the door. She threw what was probably a five-pound note on to the front seat, and fell out on to the road. Then she picked herself up and started to run. She ran down the street, wanting to bump into people as she passed, to bang into them and make their shopping spill on to the ground.

  She was finally halted by the smell of roasting coffee and went into the café to calm down. When she heard her English voice, the girl behind the counter looked at her as though she did not exist.

  Rose sat at a table and looked around for something she could steal. A bowl full of sugar. A small jug of milk. She could just drink it and slip it into her bag. She could just drink it straight from the jug and then tuck it into her bag.

  No one in this city cared.

  ‘I am looking for my father,’ she wanted to say. ‘Isn’t that a laugh?’

  She was going to see a man who did not want her. She should drop him a line, tell him not to worry – she did not want anything from him, not even love. What she was actually looking for was something of her mother: a photograph, or some piece of her, a film she liked, or a book she had read. She just needed to know if she had smelt of lavender, or rosewater, or Wright’s coal tar soap. And whether she could sing. And where her grave was.

  Rose finished her coffee and looked at herself. She was wearing jeans. She should wear a suit, something frightening. She would wear a soft dress, in jersey or in wool. She should wear something rich and plain, something that said, ‘It’s me.’ She should walk into her father’s house naked, as he had left her, twenty-five years before.

  Rose went into a shop across the street, and checked the colours on the rails. There were no plain
dresses. There was a black suit that looked promising, in linen that would crease. She took it off the rail and slung the hanger on her index finger and walked into the changing room.

  ‘One,’ she said, holding it up for the shop assistant to see.

  ‘One,’ said the shop assistant, and looked at her.

  7

  ANNA

  Lists

  I WAS BORN in the middle of the Emergency in the townland of Dunskeen, which falls west from the Letterkenny road to the sea. As a child I thought the Emergency was the place that all babies came from. I thought that babies were like oranges – you couldn’t even imagine what they were like, until you got one yourself When I was told that the Emergency was the whole Second World War, I didn’t know what to think. It was a big place to come from – and not even our own. But the idea persisted as a family joke and so I remember it when other things are forgotten.

  It is hard, then, to describe my early life, without other jokes to remember it by. My name was the same any way you looked at it, AnnA AnnA, and sometimes I said it backwards to myself, all day long. Once my father said he was going to Killapig and when I asked him where it was he said, ‘A mile west of Gweedore,’ which was a town on the coast. The pig made a terrible noise when it died, but even as we were eating it I was thinking of the map on the wall at school, with blue sea stretching west of Gweedore – as if ‘Kilapig’ could be drowned somewhere under the waves, or hidden under the block of blue that said ‘sea’.

  I don’t think I was a peculiar child. But I did not see my life in any way you could write down – ‘the grass is green, the sky is blue’. When I was a child the sky was either raining or not, and grass was just what it was. The only list I could make is of the things I did not notice. I could list the things I did not notice and I would remember them only as the words I use to describe them by: the rain, the grass, the milk in a bucket, the blood in a bowl, the dress I had of scalloped crochet, which I grew old enough to hand down to my doll.

  My mother was a great maker of lists. She had the mother’s feeling that she had forgotten something, that there was one thing that had slipped her mind, but she never wrote things down, perhaps because paper was something then. My mother’s lists were things that she shifted around the kitchen; the tea cosy placed on the table for more tea, the lid of the bread bin propped open for flour, the cat’s saucer upside down beside the door when we needed polish for our Sunday shoes. The whole room was a reminder to her. There was no telling, when you touched something, what it might mean. ‘Who moved the sweeping brush?’ she would say. ‘When we haven’t a sausage in the house?’

  And so her exits were full of things to trip her up, a stick across the threshold, a prayer turned to the wall. I worried about her in the shop, looking at the shelves, with the kitchen shifting and dancing in her mind’s eye. When I was old enough I wanted to do the messages for her and she might let me. She would sit at the table and check the room and I would hold the list of things translated in my head as I ran down the road – which was a long road – repeating them over and over: a twist of baking soda, sugar, a wick, two wicks, a bar of soap cut down the middle so it leaves itself on the knife.

  Now, if I were to list the things in my life, that is the way I would like to do it; moving things from place to place and knowing what they meant, not just a string of words – the shopping list bouncing in my head, my own breath cutting it short at every step. You move the tea cosy from the pot to the table, you move it to the side of the range, you turn the cosy inside out. I am stricken, here in my grave, by what the smallest things meant.

  When I was dying, I thought I should write things down, but the words made no sense. I thought that if I could write I would not die, but that made no sense either. There is no story to living and then dying. There is no story to living, and having a child, and dying. Not for me. No matter what order I put them in. So I put vegetables in the wardrobe and buried my clothes. I turned the hoover on itself, all the way up the flex. I rolled along the wallpaper, like Cleopatra coming out of a carpet, and I wrote lists on the floor. Don’t get me wrong. I was not reared for display, of any kind. I was reared to be proud, but not proud of myself. I am terrified, here in my grave, by words and what they might want.

  Mother. Father. Brother. Sister. Home.

  My parents had two families one after the other, because the first lot went wrong and had to be replaced. I was second in a family of three, that was followed years later by three more. Valty, my older brother, was dark and big-boned. He ran away from home and it broke my mother’s heart. Brendan, the brother who came after me, was never right and died when he was four. Although I have no memory of his death, I do remember my brother Valty at that time. It is an embarrassing memory but I can’t help that.

  I would like to have a picture of my small brother alive or dead, the shape of his face or the colour of his hair. But I do not even know what killed him or if I tended him, as my mother said that I did. There must have been a wake, with neighbours and food. They must have laid him out, very small, on the table; the adults drinking, the children escaping to play outside. I can make up the picture of this from other wakes, but maybe Brendan was too small for all that fuss.

  Because when I think of that day, all I can remember is the front field, and Valty handing me a packet wrapped up in a dock leaf that was warm and heavy. Valty was very wayward, but I loved him in a way that could not tell between us – until then, I suppose. I suppose feeling the heat of the thing, and catching the smell of cack, I realised he was not part of me at all.

  I think it was Brendan’s death that turned my brother astray. So when I try to find reasons for all the troubles that came after, my dead mind sticks there in the front field, with the feel of a leaf in my hand and the curious warmth. And when I try to find Brendan, his little death, or his face, I feel that Valty stole him from me then, just as he stole the years that followed, with all the trouble he made.

  He was meant for big things – university maybe, and a job in Dublin – and Brendan was meant for the farm. When Brendan died they had to start over again, I suppose, though who is to say what brought them together or split them apart in the night. The new children started to arrive when I was eight, one after the other: Ambrose, my best darling; Katie, who left; and John, my best darling as well.

  We ignored Valty, and avoided the strap. We were brothers and sisters, which is to say, we drew our heights on the jamb of the door and spent the years trying to catch each other up. We compared the colour of our arms, the colour of the inside of our wrists, the bruises we got and the books we took to school. We were jealous of everything: a ruler, a rubber, a broken bone. We were Kennedys. Katie, who was dark like Valty and full of badness; Ambrose, who had red hair but was steady even so; John, who was just lovely. Which one of us was clever? Valty was clever, Katie was too clever by half, and I was clever in my own way. Who did we take after? Valty got his mother’s fine eyes. Ambrose got his red hair from a passing tinker, and Katie looked like her grand-aunt Maggie, who was so big when she died, they had to pull the house down around her, just to get her out of it.

  I met Katie in the station in Dublin when she was leaving for England. She was arriving in Heuston, and had to get across town to catch the boat train at Connolly. I brought some sandwiches for her journey and hoped that they would choke her. I was going to bring a miraculous medal so she could pin it to her vest, but just the word ‘vest’ made her seem dirty to me. There might have been boys involved, but that was not the point. In her letter she had written, ‘I have to get away from that woman, and everything to do with her.’ I did not understand. I loved my mother, as only the eldest girl can. She was a friend to me. All through my life, from a small child, she had shown to me a proper pity.

  I saw Katie on the platform, her face stuck behind strangers’ faces, and was surprised to see how young she was. As she walked towards me I noticed all the things she had done to make herself look ridiculous: a new ribbon tie
d under an old collar, fresh lipstick on a face still dirty from the journey. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to tell her how she was wrecking her chances – that too many men is no man at all, and no money, ever. I remember her as she walked towards me, not smart as Katie Kennedy was smart, not clever either, her fine ankles only ankles, her good blue coat only a blue coat, her family just people, her father no one at all. I remember her walking towards me because I did not have a good word to say to her then, or afterwards.

  She wrote to tell me she had met a man in England and married him. And all I could say to Berts was that Englishmen would take anything. I did not like him when he laughed, but the fault was mine, so it was no use complaining.

  Because she made Berts look like something else to me, not the man I had danced with and would stay dancing with, because he had asked. She turned him into one man among many and I wished her to hell as the train pulled away.

  Katie had it easy. She was all daughter and daughter again, because she had our own mother and she had a little mother in me. I had none of that. I remember the day when my childhood ended. I came into the kitchen and told my mother I was dying.

  ‘Look around you, child,’ she said. ‘It’s everywhere.’

  She sat down a second and wiped her eyes, then she stood up and shook me by the shoulder, warning me off men from one end of the room to the other – not hard, but fierce enough and even.

  ‘Blood is nothing,’ she said. ‘Remember that.’ But for tea she made me a special little cake and when the others started to whine she said, ‘That’s our secret, that’s between ourselves,’ handing it to me with a new kindness, because we were in this together now.

  So Katie had it easy. I think it must have been hard for her to grow up, finally, when she was too old and too far away. Still, as we walked towards the boat-train that day, I could not open my mouth to her and let her carry her suitcase by herself. She said that she wanted a drink and we went into a pub. I am glad I did that at least, though I did not know where to sit or what to ask for. We made our way through the men, who seemed sober enough, and sat in the snug, and Katie seemed pleased with all she knew – how to sip a drink and flick her eyelashes up at you, when the glass met her mouth. Looking at her then, in her old blue coat with a new ribbon at her throat, I wished that I believed in God, so that he would look after her.