Bend for Home, The (27 page)

Jazzing, says my mother, just jazzing.

He gave Babs the eye in the tent, Maisie continues. And if she didn’t give me the elbow. And when we were going home he stepped out from behind one of the caravans and without a by-your-leave took Babs’s arm. Then out came the other acrobat in a lovely suit and says to Babs,
Your friend is very nice.

More jazzing, says the mother.

She wanted to square me off with him but I wouldn’t go.
What next?
said Rose Smith,
Duffy’s Circus, no less!

You walked down the town with them, I say.

I did not.

You did.

Were you there by any chance, she asks, with a scolding eye, at the turn of the century?

No.

Well I did not, she nods firmly. I let him go to hell. I was afraid Aunt Jane would hear all about the carry-on.

Look at the giraffe, I say.

I like the frog. They’re harmless. Betty Ronaghan put a pair of trousers on one once. Lord above! She sniggers, and turns back to the box. There’s the elephant again. And look at the small elephant. He’s making his way, the poor thing.

I farted.

Who’s blowing? Maisie asks with happy eyes.

We watch zebras drinking from a stream.

And people pay to see them, she says. Isn’t it wonderful.

I’m going, says Mammy.

And a whale is so huge. Did you ever see one, Dermot, out there at the sea?

No, there’s no whales in that part of the world.

No whales, says Maisie sadly.

Eileen, says my mother, put out another drink, then she leans over and nips me.

I will.

I have a pain in my head, she says, else I’d do it.

I know that, Winnie, says Eileen.

My mother claws the air.

I have a pain in my head!
she screams.

God sent a message down to say you have no pain in your head, I say loudly.

What? asks the mother.

I said
God says you have no pain.

She watches me strangely.

Your son has a line to God no less, says Maisie. You put me in mind of the Bible. What does it say? It says death is like the sea. Make room for me, says the sea, and it comes in and out.

Whispering Rufus, snorts Mother.

Look at all those birds, nods Maisie. When you come to think of it.

There’s three thousand barnacle geese fly in over the house in Sligo every day and then in March they go home.

They know, says Maisie nodding.

Wow! shouts Mother.

They know when it’s time to go.

Wow! Wow!

Wow! says I clapping a hand to my mouth, we have an apache in the fucking house.

The mother smiles, then she says: It’s all right for you.

Eileen brings Mother a cup of tea.

How many children have you? asks Eileen.

Three and one overseas, she answers promptly.

And was Dermot a good boy?

He was. I’m going.

And what does Dermot like?

She studies me a moment. He likes wandering around.

God bless us, says Maisie.

Up!
mother screams.
And stop the interrogation!

Maisie laughs across at Winnie.

The queen is having her problems too, she says.
Weary is the head that wears the crown.
Then she taps her cheek with a finger.
Where’s heaven now?
she adds.

Where did that come from? I ask.

Where’s heaven now?
the astronaut said when he stepped out into space, declares Maisie.

Did he?

He did. Oh yes, nods Maisie, he did indeed, and reclining on her arm she turns towards the TV to catch the news. Two Catholic workers have been triggered into eternity, states a priest. Dick Spring appears with a formula for peace. Just more Irish blarney, announces John Taylor, Unionist MP.

At four in the morning I woke to find her wandering the house nude except for her blue blouse. All the lights are on. The carpet beside the commode is wet and her slip that she’d managed to take off is wet also.

Take it away, she said.

I redressed her and put her to bed. Just as I was lying down I heard a door open. I slipped out and found Maisie about to set off on her travels. Her painted fingernails came round the jamb.

Where are you off to, Maisie?

What is the cause of all the illuminations? she asked out of the darkness of her room.

It’s Mother, I said.

She appeared in a wide flowing red nightdress to her ankles and a white cardigan over the top.

And who is going to pay the bills?

It was Mother walking the house, I said louder.

Oh, she said, I see.

Timidly she closed the door.

At six I suddenly woke when the light in the room came on. My mother’s hand with its painted fingernails was on the switch while she stood out of sight in the corridor. Then the head appeared.

Will there be food?

There will. Soon.

I lead her back to bed. This time she had the blue cardigan on over the blouse and she had on her slip-on shoes. She’d done well. I tuck her into bed. She watches me strangely.

At seven-thirty I find her seated in her room at the bottom of her bed struggling with a button on her cuff. The teeth are jutting out of the left side of the mouth. One eye is partly closed. When she sees me she proffers her wrist.

Una, she says.

Yes, I reply.

You’re a good girl, she says. You’re all I have, God bless you.

I button the cuff. We tiptoe to the bathroom. I fix her face. Across the corridor Maisie moans, calling on God. We sit in the half-dark of the dining room like it was an early school morning. As I make tea she calls me.

Dermot!

What?

Bring us dessert.

Yes.

Dermot!

What?

Where is the proper room?

This is it! And Helen will be here this evening. In her car.

Helen?

Yes.

That’s good. For dessert, dessert is all I want.

I light a roll-up.

Lovely, she says and smiles. Then she points to the table where the new dressing is laid out for the nurse when she comes.

Get the thing out of the weight, she says.

I nod.

She beckons me.

I hate being with Maisie, she says. She cups her mouth as if she’s said something wrong. Whispering Rufus! she says gaily. And so we have only you, you bugger you.

Later, after the paper arrives, I lead her through the headlines. I put my finger under the words and she reads them out:

Only the photograph of the witches draws a response. She laughs and points.
Witches,
she says. The rest of the items are only words. More words. What they once represented is of no significance. I open the front door and slowly she moves her head from side to side, like some small seabird. She checks where the milk should be, then she withdraws, staggering.

In Maisie’s room the Travelling Wilburys are playing.

At last we hear Helen’s car.

The mother stands and takes her hand.

How are all your people? Winnie asks.

They’re fine, says Helen.

But they’ve left the drapers, confirms Maisie.

They have.

And why wouldn’t they? You can’t be a slave to the public all your life.

So how long are you staying?

Till Sunday, says Helen. We’ll go back Sunday.

We, says Maisie, what do you mean
we
? And she throws me a terrible eye.

You’re abandoning us, says Maisie when I tell her I have to leave tomorrow.

Una is coming home, I say.

That doesn’t matter, she says crossly.

But she’ll look after you.

I don’t need looking after.

I make you your breakfast. Your dinner. Your tea.

Eileen can do that, thank you. She slaps the table. I don’t need you. She slaps the table again.
Your mother needs you.

But Una will look after her.

You are abandoning your mother.

I need to go home.

This is your home, she says and her voice rises.

I have things to do at home.

There’s nothing you do there that you
can’t do here.

Stop fighting, says Helen, the two of you.

This is his home, shouts Maisie, and this is where he should be, and she turns resolutely to the TV.

I feel like I used to when I was young, guilty and terrified of her temper. Mother sits there silently watching these things happen.

Are you going away? she asks.

Yes.

Why?

I have to.

Then I’m going to bed.

Why?

I don’t want to watch the sorrow.

You see, says Maisie, bitterly.

On Sunday I sleep till twelve and Helen feeds the dolls. I go to the pub and when I return dinner is over. I’ve done everything wrong.

I sit with Mother.

I’ll be sad when you go, she says.

I’ll be back in two weeks.

You promise?

I do.

Stay till tomorrow.

I can’t.

What are we going to do?

She takes my hand.

Please.

No.

She goes to get up.

Where are you going?

To the toilet.

I bring her. When we return Maisie is on the sofa.

There yous are, she says quietly.

Yes, I reply.

But you’ll be back soon?

I will, I say.

Good.

We watch the snooker. Helen sits down.

Maisie, she says, got three numbers up in the Lotto.

Go on.

And do you know what she wanted to do if she won?

What?

To hire a spacecraft and go to the moon.

But the moon is not the moon anymore, says Maisie, since
those crowd
got there. It used to mean an awful lot more.

That’s true, says Helen.

My mother reaches for my hand.

Take me to bed.

So I do. She slips beneath the pink sheets in her purple dress. She watches me. Soon Una arrives with tales of New York and Canada. Mother totters in and smiles.

America, she says to her daughter.

Yes, says Una. How are you, Mother Healy?

I’m fine.

The bell rings in the dusk. I answer it to find this group of children dressed up as Halloween spectres, in masks and black dustbin bags, jingling boxes of coins.

Come on in, I say.

My mother watches them anxiously.

Witches, she says and she darts a hand to her mouth.

Sing, says Maisie.

We can’t, they say.

Wren boys, says Mother pointing.

Whoever heard of wren boys that can’t sing, says Maisie, scornfully.

So one of them starts The Town I Loved So Well, but the song breaks down after the first verse. Then eventually a girl plays
Eileen a Run
on the flute and my mother shakes her feet in time. Another calls out Trigger Treat! – an ominous sound since that’s what a killer called out the night before in a village in Derry before shooting seven people dead. They all stand around while money is found. The dustbin bags crackle. The kids spill out the door. We sit a while longer talking and going through the routine with Una. Then we put our bags in the Mini Metro. I kiss the mother’s cheeks, then Maisie’s.

Your beard is going white, says Maisie, you’d want to have something done about that.

Like what?

Put some colouring in.

Goodbye you, says the mother. She pats her hair and passes the mirror from the Breifne without looking into it.

She closes her eyes and kisses me again on the doorstep of the house. Una steers her out into the November night. She watches Helen reverse the car, then suddenly goes in without looking behind her.

It is the week before Christmas ’93 and Mother has not eaten in over two weeks. She rarely recognizes anyone but Una, sometimes Joe, sometimes myself. More often than not I have become Joe. Una becomes Grainne, her daughter. Or Grainne becomes Niamh, her sister. We have all become representations of each other, no one person dominates, and this is perhaps how it should be.

I slept last night holding her hand through the bedrail. She is about to go, like her husband before her, in the festive season.

We feed her 7-Up and Ballygowan water through a syringe. Eileen and Una get her out onto a chair for a few minutes at the beginning of every day. How are your people? she called out to Helen once as they washed the mother down. It was one of her last complete sentences. Her body has shrunk. Her feet are deathly pale. The toe-nails are like those of a corpse. Yet her face is still pink, but getting smaller everyday.

Her sleep is a series of regretful sighs, and sudden moans. When she wakes she reaches out, pushes the quilt off, then pulls it back again. She is too weak to fight now when the nappy is being changed.

During the night snow fell. Una and myself slept at intervals in the room. All night long the mother kept pushing the quilt back, nearly fanning herself with it, her knees tucked up against the bedrail and her hand cupped in mine. I had terrible dreams. Leapt out of a car before it went down a cliff.

A couple of weeks ago she fell in her room while I slept across the hall. I was struggling to wake up, eventually I did, and listened and heard nothing but knew something had happened still the same. And yet couldn’t get out of the bed. Something clicked in my brain. A small sound went off. A sharp bone sound. And still I couldn’t get out of the bed. I imagined that I had run across the corridor and found her head bashed in where she’d fallen.

And when I did at last get up and throw open her door I found her on the floor, shivering wildly, her legs shaking and her right eye a mass of painful purple.

She must have struck her temple off the chest of drawers. She looked terrible. I gave her tea and bathed her forehead in the dining room. She sat in her chair looking across at her reflection in the mirror. She rose a hand to her eye.

The hurt is there, she said, in that person.

She pointed over at herself.

There, she said.

If we have changed into other people, even she herself has become someone else. But she knew something bad had happened. Now I knew we could not go on like this. So that day I put the iron bed in her room, clamped a bedrail to it that I got from the hospital. Then too late for the shops remembered nappies. So that evening for the first time I put her into nappies loaned to us by a woman up the street suffering from MS.

She cried bitterly as the nappies were put on. I lay her down and closed the cage around her.

I’m helpless now, she said.

She watched me sadly from her cage and turned away.

At night she’d try to pull the nappies off. Eventually even the false teeth were gagging her. They had to go. Then the earrings. From that day on the mouth and the spirit collapsed inwards.

Journeys get mixed up in my mind. Journeys to Cootehill and journeys back to Sligo. Una’s anxious voice over the phone. Guilt and anxiety and helplessness plagued us. I began to hate that road to Blacklion, the turns at Glenfarne, the potholes round Clones. Into the sad bungalow where a grieving Maisie stood on her steed outside Mother’s bedroom door peering in at her in the bed. Then back again to the shunting sea at Dooneel, to the asses roaring at dawn for their winter feed. Removed from the company of the two ladies I could barely remember them. I could see them physically but could not hear their voices.

It’s as if I had removed myself from some relationship that was so intense my conscious mind would not consider it.

I’m home, and yet I’m not home. My home is in their minds, among their nuances, memories, chatter, repetitions, but now I’m at one remove. I’ve lost responsibility for them. Then suddenly my mother’s face will rear up like a sign. With a shudder of shame I recall holding her down in her chair. We were talking of private nursing homes, or the County Home. Home became the key word. But they are really all places pretending to be home. For Mother home is an illusion.

Joe rang to say things are looking bad. I packed the car for the morning and went down that night to see Jimmy Foley, a man of eighty-two who lives alone down the road in a three-roomed cottage without electricity. Salt was pouring over the banks. The bothered sea was rolling hard against the gravel. I tapped his window and shouted out my name. He was inside playing the box to himself. He put the accordion aside and we sipped a glass of whiskey in the dark.

He dipped a finger in the whiskey and Victor the dog licked it. We lit Woodbines. He stirred the fire.

Do you ever get lonely? I asked.

Lonely, he said, pondering the word. No, he answered eventually, I know that
I
am here.

Next morning at six, hungover, I head off in the car through a sea mist. Clifford the cat is in my lap. It takes for ever to reach Cavan.

Maisie gets onto her steed and visits her sister.

Winnie! Winnie! She touches her cheek. Winnie will you not get up and come out to the sitting room. Winnie! It’s not the same without you.

Maisie puts her steed aside and sits in a chair by the bed and holds her sister’s hand.

I’m going home, says Winnie in a pleasant way.

What did she say? Maisie asks me. Did she say she was going home?

I think so.

Winnie! Tony is coming to see you. Isn’t that good? She presses Mother’s hand. And you are all style. You’ll be delighted to see Tony.

Mother looks at her and her lips move.

Why won’t she speak to me? asks Maisie.

She’s talking to you, says Una, but you can’t hear her.

Winnie! Now, Winnie. Maisie looks at us.

No answer, she says.

She’s mumbling to you, says Una.

I suppose she is.

She’s restless.

She is. What is she saying? Maisie inclines her head. What love? What are you saying pet?

Mother tries to get death over with, through not eating, and now, through not drinking. Una wants to wash out her mouth with glycerine but she fights her off, waving her hands like some ghostly conductor. Only a dab of 7-Up on a cotton stick for cleaning ears is keeping her alive.

Then we lose Eileen because her husband Bennie falls sick and a girl called Anne-Marie arrives to take her place.

Tony comes from Canada and, jet-lagged and disorientated, takes up his position by her bed.

We all want to hear our names on her lips, but the only name she calls is Una, her constant companion to dances in the White Horse, parties, shopping sprees. Tony sits there, his hand in hers, waiting on a flicker of recognition. Then Miriam takes his place.

Mother, she says, it’s Miriam.

It’s a strange phenomenon, this wish of ours that the dying should know who the living are. Then there is too a type of competition between us for her final favours. Who will be there when she finally lets go? But the truth is, the reason you sit there, that one person replaces another, is that when the moment comes the others will be called.

The past flies by in great whirling, giddy spasms. I make a stew in the kitchen. The young priest visits. Brief moments fix themselves and are gone. And sometimes grief turns to anger. We lose control.

She purses her lips for a kiss. I kiss her. She lifts her head a little, then settles again.

You sit there by waiting for the next person to come and relieve you.

I slept alongside her last night, not all the time holding her hand, or feeding her 7-Up, because it only makes her gag, but sleeping till she woke me with a screech.

I forgot she was dying.

Instead I took her hand in mine through the bedrail and lying in our two beds we commenced whispering like children who, not only have been allowed sit up late with the grown-ups, but have been given permission to sleep together, that is, if we stay quiet. So here we are with everyone else asleep, in a strange house, and snow falling.

Mother?

She turned her eyes towards me, as if to say, That’s right.

That’s right.

She was speaking not in words but sighs that were strangely lucid. The sighs were animated, her breaths hurried, the tone everyday. We spoke of mundane stuff, agreeing, it would appear, about many things and not too bothered by what was beyond our ken. It was the sort of casual chat you might have with someone in passing.
Someone in passing.
We’d crossed some threshold, and wondered where the things were, and what was needed. Out of me came these long articulate sentences that you are only permitted every so often, and she’d answer, though none of the words articulate, in an understanding way.

It all made sense. It was comforting.

I tucked her in. She was very cold. I called Una who was sleeping across the hall.

Is she all right?

She’s cold, I said.

I went to have a shower. As I was drying myself in the bathroom I heard a gang of people passing by the door like a herd of cattle.

Who’s there? I called.

Miriam, said a voice.

Then I heard more shuffling. I ran through the house and found that Una had called the family, thinking death was imminent. She was so cold. But there was another day to go. I went in and sat by Maisie.

How are you? I asked.

I have my regrets, she said.

Tell us one.

Well, she said, I would have joined the acrobats if I hadn’t so much lead in me arse.

I fall apart laughing.

Well, I said, I love you.

She appraised me.

Are you sure? she asked.

I am, I said.

Tony appears and fills himself a brandy, tips it smartly into his gullet with the precision of a soldier saluting on parade and then sits by Maisie, whose face is very drawn. Broken veins cluster on her cheeks like measles.

Will we take a walk to town, young fellow? he says.

Watch the drinking, Una whispers in an aside to me.

First we chanted, my cousin Ernie and I, some mantras.

If you don’t cut out the singing, said Joe, we won’t know when she’s gone.

Then we sent her out on a wave of prayer. All the family were there. The sign was her hand began to sweat in mine as I held her beneath the blanket. For hours I breathed alongside her, up and down the incline, then when Joe heard the sign he called the others.

Una started a makeshift rosary and she and Tony took the mother’s hands. We found it hard to finish a decade because we’d all forgotten the Glory Be to the Father. Now it really snowed. Her breath dropped, when we finished the prayers, into a softer key. Her eyes were seeing straight in front of her when the next breath never came.

Anne-Marie was called. She tied up the mother’s skull in a head scarf and sat for hours with a finger on each of her eyelids. Get the teeth, she says to me. She closed the mother’s lips into a smile. Then she ordered Tony to open the window to let the soul out.

Mother died on 23 December 1993, at twenty to five in the morning. Maisie died a year later on 26 December 1994. She, too, fell against one of the blasted radiators and was found by Grainne, who slept as her companion in the bungalow. She died from that blow a while later. At Mother’s wake, prepared by the people of Kill and Cootehill, Maisie
stayed up all night and would not sleep. She was indomitable. We carried Mother out of the house on our shoulders; her coffin, for such a nimble gal, was strangely heavy because our heights were all uneven. Both funerals left Cootehill and stopped first, for a moment, outside the Milseanacht Breifne on Main Street in Cavan town. The Breifne is now a building society. Locals wondered who had died. Both funeral parties were held in the same hotel, the Crover House, overlooking Lough Sheelin, the lake where the ladies went boating as girls. Both were buried in the same plot in Castletown graveyard, my mother with my father, and Maisie beside her, with her aunts and parents.

On the far side of the lake from Crover, up the Inny river, is the village of Finea where both hearses stopped a second time for a moment outside the old family home, where my father’s funeral had paused for a moment thirty-one years ago before going on. Uncle Seamus carried all three coffins. The day my mother was buried the fields were filled with snow. After we took the bend round Myles the Slasher’s monument the house looked cold and damp and unlived in. All the trees had been cut. The ivy that used stir round the windows at night was gone. Aunty Nancy, the last surviving sister, turned away. We stopped, went on. As we climbed the hill over the lakes the Fineas joined the cortège and Brian Sheridan, who had been in Babies’ Class with my mother, came out of his one-room mobile home, tipped his cap to the funeral, and took a kick at his dog to keep him away while he fed a heel of bread to a swan he’d recently tamed.