What Are You Like Read online

  What was wrong with her?

  ‘Mastitis,’ says Berts. Or a dead calf maybe. But,

  ‘She didn’t take,’ says John, and Ambrose goes out the back door and spits.

  ‘See that little window,’ says John. ‘At the back of the shed. A cow came out through that once, when the mood was on her, tore herself up to her back end.’

  ‘What mood?’ says Maria. And her grandmother says,

  ‘Lay the table now quick before your Uncle Amby wants his tea.’

  ‘Moooood,’ says John.

  And Maria bashes the fork down and makes the knife spin.

  ‘I’m from Dublin,’ she says, and they all have a good laugh at that.

  ‘You don’t have knives in Dublin?’ says John, and he shows her one.

  ‘That father of yours.’ They hated him. Not just for his accent and his talk of bailers, or for the back of his neck that is more eloquent than what comes out at the front of him, but for something else as well.

  ‘Will you come to the dance?’ says John. ‘Are you dancing?’ and Maria says nothing.

  ‘Wise girl,’ he says. ‘Get yourself a man with a job.’

  ‘You have a job,’ says Maria.

  ‘All in the wrist,’ he says, and the scar on his forearm shimmies from side to side.

  Maria lies in the tall grass and looks at the sky and thinks about John fencing with the dead bodies of cows, their blind eyes looking at the roof, their guts oofing and slithering out on to the floor under his old one-two. And then the old three-four that splays their legs back against the wall.

  ‘What about five and six?’

  ‘I gave them up for Lent.’

  Ambrose says not to mind him, all he does is dump guts in one bucket and brains in another, because he has neither himself, while John whittles the edge of the kitchen table with his knife. The next morning he gets the call again and he is gone, swinging into the mini-van with one clean bag and one stinking, but before he goes he kisses her and Maria knows it is not her he is kissing but his big sister that died and she feels her mother flower inside her and is proud for him and wishes she could be with him all the time.

  Maria spreads her anorak and lies down in the front meadow, although it is wet. Easter has come and gone. It was on Spy Wednesday she saw Ambrose leaning against the belly of the cow. On Holy Thursday the AI man came – before the holiday, which was probably why it was too early. It was on Good Friday that John had the dishwater thrown over him, and on Easter Saturday he told her about the old one-two.

  Sunday was an insanity of table setting and table clearing, of dish-dusting and napkin folding, until Maria felt like throwing the lot at the wall, but there was a panic deep in her grandmother that meant she couldn’t. John didn’t swear or even talk much and Ambrose read the newspaper like it was a real pleasure, shaking the whole thing each time he turned the page.

  John carried the roast to the table, his hands raw with blood that would not wash out. The bone-handled carving knife sighed as the meat shivered and dropped in slices. Then he used the flat of the blade and the bare tips of the fork to lift and dip a heap on each plate – a movement so formal and gentle it made Maria hungry for something she couldn’t name, and happy when she ate.

  ‘Lovely,’ they said.

  ‘It’s underdone,’ said her grandmother when she saw blood by the bone and she half-rose, before they pushed her back down with,

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  The blood of the joint was salty-sweet and pink, the same colour as the roses on her grandmother’s delph. There were roses on the cloth as well and roses on the wallpaper and modem roses blocked out in triangular petals on the new plastic breadboard. The men ate their way through to the china, mashing potatoes to sop up the gravy, shaking the salt, their movements obliged and tragic as they picked their way through the teacups and the tiny jug for milk. The tattered joint sat in the middle of it all, like a tear in the cloth, the only thing in the room that had no shape.

  Suddenly the plates were dirty, though it was the same food that was on them as had been there a minute before – perhaps that was what the roses were for, so you could tell the difference. It was the first time she noticed it, at any rate, this disgust that made her rise and stack against her will. But she hated her grandmother as she passed her in front of the sink. She hated Amby’s throat as he bared it to swallow his tea, before holding the little cup out for more. The others saw the cup but did not find it relevant and Maria stopped; caught by the sight of it sitting in the air like that, the absence it implied.

  ‘Your uncle wants another cup of tea,’ said her grandmother, shocked. And blushing, big-arsed, she, who was not let near the teapot at home, crossed the room and poured tea for her uncle, who did not notice and waited for milk.

  She was in the middle of strangers. Maria looked around the table and no one took any heed. She looked at the jug. He could squeeze the milk out of a cow’s wrinkly teats, but he couldn’t squeeze it out of this. She picked up the jug. She poured, and the milk smelt of everything. Behind her, she felt her grandmother stir with relief.

  All of that before he wanted sugar. All of that before she was left drying the dishes by the sink with her grandmother, who said,

  ‘They’ll be yours, someday.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, wiping the plate and grateful for this, the one cracked reference they had made to the blood between them and her mother who had died.

  When Maria gets into the car, pride of place beside Berts, her grandmother sprinkles the whole lot of them with holy water for a safe journey, and her grandfather turns his face away.

  ‘Don’t leave it too long,’ says Ambrose who shakes Berts hand and waits and watches until they are gone.

  During the drive back, she asks Berts where he met her mother.

  ‘We were climbing the pigeon house chimneys one Sunday afternoon, she was on one of them and I was on the other, and we waved to each other when we got to the top.’

  ‘I’m too old for that,’ says Maria.

  ‘So I see,’ says Berts and he switches on the radio.

  Maria looks at the flooded fields. The Shannon has burst its banks and spread like a mirror around Atlilone. The fields are full of sky, pierced with grass like frozen, upside-down rain. She sees a swan sailing into the dark mouth of a shed, and the sun comes out at Ballinasloe.

  Maria closes her eyes and remembers the cow. She was lying in the front field, tracing a tree on the inside of her eyelids, when she heard a monstrous chewing sound, a broken-hearted swallow. There was a cow leaning over her – four more were swinging their way across the field, their heads lowered, apologetic and huge. The cow dipped down to her bare legs and snuffled – vast quantities of air sucked up through the meat of its nostrils, then blown back out again, wet.

  ‘Ghkgh!’ said Maria. Because you need to draw breath, before you can scream. The cow flinched back, like a house in a nervous breakdown. Everyone paused. Then they all wandered forwards again.

  ‘Hup,’ said Maria and she lurched back, sidled forwards. Curiosity mixed with dread – as if Maria was some kind of atrocity, a terrible truth that this stupid cow just had to see.

  ‘Hup!’ They could do this all afternoon.

  That was Monday. On Easter Saturday, there was the rain.

  Maria had never seen rain before. She had never seen rain that started a mile away, a high smudge under the clouds. It looked different to everything – like the bit of a drawing you tried to rub out with your finger.

  Soon I will be inside that rain, she thought. I will be there.

  When she turned round, it was closer again. It was hitting the ground now, a curtain of water shcing, drop over drop, towards her across the land. She raced into the barn, climbed into the high hay and watched as it whispered up, spattered, then loosed itself like a thousand pencils dropping on the roof. She turned and sprawled on her back, flinging her arms wide.

  ‘I am the king,’ she sho
uted. Then she jumped up and ran to where the hay met the back wall. If I fell down there, she thought, I could die in the hay. Ambrose would pitch me out with his fork. His fork would crunch into the hay and then into something else. The corpse in the hay. He would pitch me out over his shoulder and shout as he saw me flying over him in the air, grinning and floppy. She stuck one leg down to try it, all the way to her thigh, then she pulled it out again. She ran down the hay, high up under the stunned roof, shouting ‘La lah lah’ while the rain glazed the sides of the barn in three wet sheets and the smell of dead grass began to rise.

  Maria buzzed around the barn, and itched where the hay caught her. If you had asked what she was then, she would not have been able to tell you. Out in the rain she would have been wet, she would have been a girl from Dublin caught in the rain, but here in the barn she was anything at all.

  Then she saw Ambrose, his shoulders slumped in the wet, his cap pulled down. Ambrose was the patron of bees and the rain dropped around him, grey and golden in the light. Ambrose was the beekeeper, he was sweet and stingy, and when he moved he moved altogether, in a swarm. His skin was warm and tiny muscles danced under it, and when he walked in the rain, the drops fell between all the separate pieces of him, and kept him dry.

  He stood inside the barn, pushed his cap back and wiped his face with his hand while Maria watched him from the top of the hay. This is what people are like when they are on their own. She waited for him to do something strange, but Ambrose was always on his own, even when he knew you were watching him. His eyes did not get glassy and happy, like Uncle John’s, pretending you weren’t there.

  Maria took hold of the swing, leaned back, then swooped across the barn. She saw Ambrose jerk past. Then she saw him break into a run, so that by the time she had slithered down off the high hay, he was there to take her by the collar, and swing her around. His free arm chased her, then hit her like a board on the backside. Maria stopped laughing. Ambrose hitched her up by the collar until she was standing, and for a moment she knew exactly what was going to happen, before his hand caught the back of her head, sending her sprawling into the hay.

  ‘Shush now,’ he said. ‘You gave me a fright, is all.’ Holding his hand away from his side, and shaking it, as he walked to the cowshed door.

  But, as far as she could tell, Maria wasn’t even crying.

  That was Saturday. On Sunday there was the book.

  After dinner, Maria opened the door of her uncle’s room by-accident-on-purpose and looked in at the two beds. One bed was not made, the sheets wrinkled and exposed; pink brush nylon, and ‘Oh,’ she thought, ‘oh.’ The room was full of her uncles’ lives, years and years of it. Ambrose asleep night after night – there wasn’t a single night that he didn’t sleep. John at the weekends, coming in after a dance maybe, his brother stirring at the sound of his shoes dropping in the dark.

  Maria walked in and opened a drawer. It was full of brown envelopes and bits of paper done up in elastic bands. She realised that she was looking for a picture of her mother so she went to her grandparents’ room instead. But there was a chair inside the door, with a potty fitted into the seat, and there was something in the potty, so she could not pass.

  Maria went into the front parlour and checked the china cabinet. She found a Bible with a thick page at the front, printed in red and gold. Along the dotted lines, someone had written a list of names and dates, in spidery black ink.

  Valentine born: 1928 died:

  Anna born: 1929 died: 1965

  Brendan born: 1929 died: 1934

  Ambrose born: 1935 died:

  Catherine born: 1936 died:

  John born: 1938 died:

  Maria whispered the names aloud. She tried to learn them off by heart, but they kept sliding around.

  ‘Who’s Valentine?’ she said to John.

  ‘Where did you pick that one up?’ he said.

  ‘Who’s Catherine?’

  ‘Catherine,’ he said and sighed. ‘It was Katie. She’s your Auntie Katie in London. Or she’s in America now.’

  ‘And who’s Valentine?’

  He slashed at the grass with his scarred left hand.

  ‘Will you come to the dance?’ he said. ‘Are you dancing?’ but Maria said nothing.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Lost,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. He was no good.’

  Maria sits in the car with her eyes closed, the hot trees flicking across her eyelids. She is on the road to Dublin. Two days ago she could not even imagine school, now she remembers the homework she has to do. Hard stuff: the Aimsir Gnathchaite. We always used to. Didn’t you always used to? The Past Continuous – always, always, in the past. Or, at least, all the time.

  ‘Mammy, didn’t you always used to? Didn’t you always used to walk down that road, when you were little? Didn’t you always used to clear the china, and stand at the back of the milking parlour at night? Always like that? Always, when your father did the milking? And wasn’t it always by hand?’

  ‘Yes, always.’

  ‘And what else did you used to do, always?’

  ‘I always used to go into the front field. I always used to like it.’

  And Maria is on her way home, the road unravelling behind her.

  Because her mother was there once, but now she is gone. Her mother walked down the avenue once, in her summer dress, or once in her coat, or once with her schoolbag: she walked in her bare feet or her Sunday shoes or her winter shoes, sad or happy or singing or silent, but always down the avenue. And each time she walked, she was already gone. There was no ‘always’ in it – just a kind of repetition.

  Nothing happened in that place that had not happened before, that would not happen again. The lifted teacup. The joint sitting there, like a tear in the cloth. The four fingers and a thumb sticking back into the glove, tickling the blood, like an udder that had run back into itself and would not come right.

  Everything there was like a memory, even as it happened. No wonder they didn’t talk about her. No wonder they didn’t talk about anything at all.

  Her grandfather leaning his face towards her.

  ‘You might have died inside her. You have your father to thank for that.’

  He said that on Holy Saturday. On Easter Sunday, they went to Mass.

  Berts stops the car for lemonade. They eat the sandwiches by the side of the road and he takes out the bottle of tea her grandmother gave them, with the milk and sugar already in it. He slings the bottle across the ditch.

  ‘They wouldn’t know a flush toilet, that lot,’ he says. ‘If it jumped up and bit them on the backside.’

  Maria laughs, but when they get home, something unfair starts to happen to her. Her chest starts to go all stupid and so do her eyes. She has a feeling like there is someone always coming around the corner, who never arrives. The sight of crockery makes her so mad, she would smash a dish sooner than wash it.

  ‘No one said it was easy,’ says Evelyn, who gives her a plastic bag full of meshed-up cotton and safety pins for no reason at all. But her little brother Cormac is delighted.

  ‘Girl,’ he says. ‘Girl, girl. Girly girl girl. Girl girl, girly, girly, girl, girl.’

  The Country of the Lost

  New York, 1985

  OUTSIDE HER WINDOW, the city started to hum. It wasn’t so much a noise as a tightening of the air that you forgot and lived in for the rest of the day.

  Anton seemed to make a decision in his sleep, he turned on his side and Maria held her breath. It was bright now. He was sleeping the thoughtful sleep that day brings. He was back in the room.

  If he opened his eyes now, he would see her sitting there, a bloody foot, a stained thigh. A blunt knife. A dark crotch.

  Maria wanted to leave this picture for him, somehow, when he woke, but she didn’t want to be there herself She slipped out of the chair (leaving herself in the chair) and put on yesterday’s dress. Her bloody foot slipped and stuck to her sandal as she made her way across the floor.
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  She looked back at him, before she shut the door, and at the melodrama of the empty room. What a joke. She listened for the soft thunk of the cross-bar as she locked him in. Then she walked down the stairs.

  It was 6 a.m. in New York. People were on their way to work, their faces heavy with the night before. They seemed so real and automatic. Maria walked by them, dizzy in the thin light, all those brute human beings, with their muscle and lymph and bone. They walked down a street in Manhattan like a herd of bison, quiet and astonishing in the fact of themselves.

  Maria floated by, checking the ghost of her reflection in shop windows, looking at the fragments of her face that bulged and swung past in the fat bonnets of cars. She expected, at any moment, to see herself – her real self – turn a corner and wave, and say hello.

  In Washington Square, she sat down on a bench and waited and watched. A woman walked by with a Spanish greyhound. She was expensively dressed and running to fat. Behind her the dog barely touched the ground. It was spring-loaded, a grey question mark. The arch of its loins was so high it looked like its bollocks hung down from its back.

  Later, she found herself outside an Italian bakery on Christopher Street watching a film being shot on the other side of the road. A man stopped at a vegetable stall to check out a melon. Another man passed by. A couple came out of the shop door, laughing.

  They did it four times and still Maria couldn’t tell what the story was. She couldn’t tell who was really in the film and who would just keep walking out of frame.

  It started to rain and people ran around with sheets of plastic. The actors rushed together under the canopy of the vegetable stall. They chatted, as though they had known each other all along. The smell of fresh pastry rose from the shop behind her. Maria turned around and walked in the door.

  Inside there were three small tables and a high glass counter the length of the room. The people behind it were laughing, as if no one was there. Maria pointed out a pastry to a middle-aged woman who reached for it, and swung her backside to the left, dodging the tea towel a younger man flicked at her backside.