Alice had
head lice
?
‘Mrs Fitzpatrick? Hello? Are you there?’
Helen blinked. ‘Yes.’
‘You really need to keep an eye on Alice’s schoolbag.’
Keep an eye on her schoolbag? Did it have lice too?
‘Miss O’Keeffe sends notes home on a regular basis, Mrs Fitzpatrick, dealing with various topics, one of which is to remind parents to check for head lice. She puts these notes into the schoolbags personally. Maybe you’re not aware of this.’
Notes? Alice had made no mention of notes. Helen couldn’t remember when she’d gone through her schoolbag. Never, probably.
‘Thank you,’ she managed. ‘I’ll see to it.’
She hung up while Sister Aloysius was still bleating, the little voice becoming fainter and fainter as the receiver moved further from Helen’s ear. She returned to the kitchen, her head buzzing with anger, although who it was directed at, she couldn’t have said.
Alice, who didn’t bother passing on notes. Or Sister Holier-than-thou Aloysius, who no doubt took great pleasure in telling another woman that her child’s head was full of lice. Or buck-toothed Miss O’Keeffe, who probably warned the other children in
the class not to get too close to Alice Fitzpatrick, with her dirty hair and her careless mother who didn’t bother cleaning it.
But of course she herself was the one at fault. She was the mother who’d never bought a fine-tooth comb, despite dim memories, now that she thought about it, of her own mother drawing one painfully across Helen’s scalp on a regular basis.
Jesus
, she should have thought of a bloody fine-tooth comb: what kind of mother didn’t even own one? Useless, she was useless.
She pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit it with trembling fingers. She paced the kitchen tiles, puffing angrily.
Christ
, to have that thrown at her at ten in the morning, for her not to have noticed that Alice had lice. Her insides heaved at the image of the tiny squirming things living on her daughter’s head, maybe for weeks.
How had she missed Alice scratching? She must have scratched, with a head full of lice. How had she not seen them when she’d washed Alice’s hair on Saturday nights, Alice whingeing that she had suds in her eyes, that Helen was scrubbing too hard? She
did
scrub hard, for Christ’s sake. How had the little buggers survived?
And if Alice had them, wasn’t there a chance that she did too? Her scalp crawled at the prospect. She scratched furiously at it –
Jesus
, that was all she needed. A trip to the chemist as soon as she’d put her face on: deadlines could go to hell.
She stamped upstairs and wrenched sheets from beds, pulled pillows out of cases, yanked towels from rails. She brought her load back downstairs and dumped it in the twin tub. She attached the washing machine’s length of rubber hose to the kitchen tap and began to fill the drum, blood still racing. Where the hell was Malone when you needed someone to yell at?
When the water was heating, she took the last of her toast to the bin and flung it in, on top of Sarah Flannery’s sugary-sweet
letter. No lice in that household, you could bet your last cent. Checked her little darlings’ heads twice a week at least, had whatever necessary bottle or tube tucked away in the bathroom cabinet, just in case.
She reached abruptly into the bin and pulled out the notelet and its envelope. She brushed away crumbs and sped through the purple words again. She dropped the notelet back on top of the crusts and grabbed a sheet of paper from the bundle that sat by her typewriter.
She typed fast, without pausing. When she’d finished, she yanked out the page and read it rapidly, eyes darting along the handful of lines, before scribbling her signature at the bottom. She found an envelope among the scatter of magazines and newspapers on the table, and a stamp in the cracked cup on the windowsill.
She’d post it right away. She’d drop it into the pillar box around the corner from the chemist. That should
shut the silly cow up.
S
he sat alone in the blessedly quiet kitchen. The table was piled with haphazard stacks of plates holding half-eaten sandwiches, and little wobbly pillars of coffee-stained cups, lipstick crescents daubing several rims. Just about every glass in the house was out too, along with the remains of the various cakes and tarts that her neighbours had delivered the day before, when the news had filtered out. Showing their sympathy with a Victoria Sandwich, saying sorry with a fresh cream flan or pear crumble.
Neil was gone with her father, driving him back to the house where he would live alone now until his turn came to die, or until he became unable to live on his own any more, and moved in with one of his daughters.
Christine had wanted to stay and help, but Sarah had insisted she go: ‘I’ll be fine. Neil will be back in a little while.’ This wasn’t true – Neil had been instructed to stay with their father for the rest of the evening, make him tea, pour him a drink, watch the news on television, anything – but Christine had Aidan to feed and put to bed, and Sarah had nothing else to do but clean up.
For now, though, she sat at the table in the silent kitchen, her mind replaying the last heartbreaking week. An aneurysm, the doctors had said, no way of predicting it, her mother’s blood pressure normal
at her last check-up just a few months before. It happened like that sometimes, they had been told.
The past few days had blurred into one another, with Mam lying unconscious in a hospital bed, tubes pumping air and food and medicine into her from various beeping machines, and the three of them taking it in turns to sit with her, overlapping their visits to talk in whispers across the bed, as if she might hear them if they spoke any louder.
Nothing much to do during Sarah’s evening shifts at the hospital but work her way through
To Kill with Kindness
, which, even in her distraught state, she could recognise as not very accomplished at all. She wondered how on earth anyone had thought it worthy of publication – what could they have seen in it? Helen O’Dowd’s assessment, she had to admit, had been pretty accurate, even if she’d worded it a little strongly.
When she’d finished, Sarah had felt obliged to respond to the woman who’d sent her the book, although in her present state she had little enthusiasm for the task. Still, manners dictated that she acknowledge the book’s receipt and give her honest feedback.
She’d written for the second time to Helen O’Dowd as she’d sat late at night in the too-warm hospital room. The following morning she’d given it to Neil to post on his way to work – and just a day after that, her mother had died.
This evening sixty-three-year-old Martha Kelly lay in a wooden box at the top of the local church, and tomorrow they were lowering her into a hole in the ground, and Sarah couldn’t think about that. She got to her feet and began gathering plates and cups and bringing them to the sink. She turned on the radio and ran water and squeezed in washing-up liquid.
Over the next forty minutes she emptied and refilled the sink several times, washing and drying and putting away, blocking out her thoughts with Fleetwood Mac and The Boomtown
Rats and The Undertones.
When a handful of plates remained, she ran out of washing-up liquid. She dried her hands and went to the pantry for a new bottle – and saw the envelope, propped on a shelf.
This morning it had come, as she and Neil were leaving the house to go to her father’s. Her name and address had been typewritten, with no return address, no indication of its sender’s identity or whereabouts, apart from the Dublin postmark. She’d put it on the pantry shelf, out of the way of the busy day she knew was ahead, and she’d forgotten all about it.
She took it off the shelf and considered it. Not a bill: she knew what they looked like. Not a letter of sympathy, nobody wrote those on a typewriter.
She sat at the almost-cleared table and slit open the envelope with a buttery knife and pulled out the single sheet.
Dear Mrs Flannery
Many thanks for your advice about writing a book review. I’ll bear it in mind for the next time. In the meantime, I have some advice for you. Take your half-baked manuscript and tear it up – better still, burn it. If, as I suspect, you think it’s possible to write an interesting, credible book without anything bad happening, you are sadly mistaken. Bad things happen, Mrs Flannery – disease happens, rape happens, infidelity, terrorism, vandalism all happen in this real, ugly world of ours – and like it or not, it’s generally the bad stuff that makes for an interesting book. Therefore I suggest you take your little goody-goody clichéd characters with their happy little lives and stamp them out, Mrs Flannery, choke the life out of them before they send the readers of the world
to sleep.
And in future, if you don’t agree with one of my book reviews, despite not having bothered to read the goddamn book, I suggest you turn to the gardening page, or the cookery page, and try to forget all about it.
H. O’Dowd
When she had finished reading it, Sarah remained still, her gaze fixed on the scrawled signature. How could anyone be so cruel? Why would someone who’d never even seen Sarah’s manuscript advise her to burn it? Had Sarah made Helen O’Dowd so angry with her criticism that she’d felt compelled to write such a horrible letter in response?
She sat on the hard kitchen chair and forbade herself to cry. They were strangers to one another. Helen O’Dowd meant nothing to her, and Sarah wasn’t going to give her the power to upset her. She had enough to cry about right now without wasting tears on a spiteful, vindictive letter.
Easier said than done. A drop splatted onto the page. Sarah brushed another away before it had a chance to fall, and squeezed her eyes shut. If Helen O’Dowd had any idea of the work Sarah had put into the book, if she knew the hours that had been spent on it, the dream Sarah had of one day seeing it sitting on a bookshop shelf, surely she wouldn’t have been so cruel about it.
She opened her eyes and folded the letter, left it on the table and went back to her washing-up. She worked until every plate and cup and glass was clean and back where it belonged, the fridge was filled with leftovers and a pile of dishes and platters that didn’t belong to her was sitting on the table, ready to be returned.
She went out to the garden – still bright at almost nine o’clock – and placed the mound of half-eaten sandwiches on the bird table that Christine and Brian had given her
on her last birthday. Back inside she wiped down the draining-board and swept the floor.
She undid her
apron and draped it over the side of the sink. She sat at the table again and unfolded Helen O’Dowd’s letter, and forced herself to read it through a second time.
I suggest you take your little goody-goody clichéd characters with their happy little lives and stamp them out.
The characters weren’t goody-goody, far from it. Mrs Hastings the housekeeper had a really sharp tongue on her: look how she regularly reduced poor Betsy, the under-housemaid, to tears. And Lord William Delahunty was a proper philanderer – that was obvious from the way he’d seduced Betsy in the woods, having proposed to Lady Penelope Smith just the week before—
She stopped. It wasn’t exactly bursting with originality, she knew that. She wasn’t writing the next
War and Peace.
She didn’t for a minute imagine she was going to set the literary world alight. She was writing a gentle story, a comfort read if you like. Something you’d reach for at the end of a trying day—
She came to another stop. Gentle story. Comfort read. Even to her own ears, it sounded like she was writing the literary equivalent of a hot-water bottle.
She looked down at the letter again.
Clichéd characters … send the readers of the world to sleep …
The characters
were
clichéd. She’d read countless novels with identical people in them, blunt-spoken housekeepers and timid, vulnerable housemaids and upper-class cads who took advantage when they got the chance. She was addicted to period dramas, and all she was doing, all she’d been doing for what seemed like forever, was regurgitating various scenes and characters and storylines from books she’d already read. There was nothing new in what she was producing; there wasn’t an ounce of originality or creativity in it.
Helen O’Dowd was right. Without having read a word of Sarah’s book, without meeting her or even speaking to her on the phone, she’d hit the nail on the head.
Trouble at Thornton Manor
, or whatever title she might finally have settled on, would do nothing but send readers to sleep. It was as lacking in originality and freshness as
To Kill with Kindness
had been.
Sarah sat
for a while longer, as the fridge gave its every-now-and-again bubbly whirr, and a sudden dribble of water fell from one of the kitchen taps, and a dog barked sharply a few gardens away.
At length she got up and left the room. She climbed the stairs and opened the door of the smallest bedroom. She stared at the thick bundle of handwritten pages that lay on the desk she’d brought with her from home, and she thought of the hours she’d sat there, the countless words she’d written and scribbled out and rewritten. The pages she’d discarded, the scenes she’d replaced. All worthless, all for nothing.
She lifted the bundle and brought it downstairs to the kitchen. Someone was singing about matchstalk cats and dogs on the radio. She took the lid off the bin and began tearing the pages into quarters, a dozen or so at a time, and tossing them in.
It took just a few minutes. She didn’t think about what she was doing. When she’d finished, she replaced the lid and left the kitchen without looking back.
S
he reached
out and checked the luminous face of her watch again: five eleven. This was ridiculous, her third sleepless night in a row. Not good, and not normal. Most of the time she slept like a stone, had to drag herself awake in the mornings, cotton-woolish until her first coffee. Even while Cormac had been sick she’d slept through most of the nights, despite the horror of their situation waiting to tumble afresh into her head each morning.