She never tired of telling them; she drenched them with love from morning to night. Neil said she smothered them, but she didn’t care. She was their mother: she had every right to tell them how much they meant to her, every opportunity she got.
It
frightened her sometimes, this overwhelming love. Its power terrified her. She would study other parents, in the supermarket or the doctor’s waiting room, or in a queue for the cinema, and she would wonder if they felt the same crushing weight of love for their children that she did whenever she looked at Martha or Stephen.
She wondered if Helen felt it for Alice. It didn’t come across in her letters: Helen rarely said anything positive about her daughter. In fact, her comments about Alice, who admittedly sounded like a handful, were mainly disparaging, but Sarah assumed that was just Helen’s way. Of course she loved Alice – what mother didn’t love her own child?
As she was taking the marmalade from the fridge, a sudden smash made her wheel around. Martha’s cup lay in fragments on the floor, in a puddle of milk.
‘Oh, what happened here?’ Sarah cried, dropping the marmalade on the worktop and reaching for the dustpan and brush. ‘What did you do?’
‘My jumper just knocked it by an accident,’ Martha said, her voice wobbling. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose, Mummy.’
Sarah shovelled the shards into the pan. ‘I know you didn’t, pet, but you need to be a bit more—’
‘Morning, everyone!’
All three turned. Stephen’s chubby face lit up. ‘Nory!’
He reached his arms towards her – and Sarah tamped down the stab of jealousy as Noreen slipped out of her coat and crossed the room, laughing, to gather him up and hug him.
‘Haven’t you finished your breakfast yet, you scallywag?’ Without waiting for his reply she sat on his chair, set him on her lap and began spooning up the remaining yogurt – and he, the traitor who refused to let Sarah feed him, took it from her uncomplainingly.
‘My cup falled down,’ Martha told her. ‘It got all broke. Mummy putted it in the bin.’
‘Oh dear … Sarah, leave that, I can do it when you’re gone.’
‘All done.’ Sarah took the dishcloth to the sink and squeezed it out. ‘Neil might be back early, he’s not sure.’
‘No
problem.’ Noreen regarded the two children. ‘So what’ll we do today? How about a picnic in the park?’
‘Yaaay!’
Cycling to work a few minutes later, her nose pink in the February chill, Sarah tried to recall what life had been like before Noreen’s arrival. Hard to imagine how they’d coped, given how invaluable she’d become to them.
She turned up without fail each morning and stayed until either Sarah or Neil got home, and timing was never an issue. In between keeping the children fed and entertained she somehow managed to deal with whatever household tasks were outstanding. She emptied the laundry basket and pegged out the washing, she cleaned windows, made beds and ironed shirts. She’d even mown the lawn once, laughing when Sarah had protested the following morning.
‘What else would we be doing? Martha was a great help, emptying the grass box for me, weren’t you, dote?’
The children adored her, and Neil approved of her too. Sarah had come home from work on one memorable occasion to find the four of them sitting cross-legged on the sitting-room carpet, each holding a tiny plastic cup. A tea towel spread on the floor between them held a miniature milk jug and sugar bowl, a normal-sized plate of real biscuits and the small, battered metal teapot that Sarah used for her single breakfast cup if Neil had left the house before her.
Martha wore one of Sarah’s aprons, doubled over several times at the waist. Stephen scattered biscuit crumbs on the carpet as he munched.
‘Tea party,’ Noreen had said, straight-faced. ‘You’re just in time. Martha, anything left in that pot?’
And Martha had poured her mother a cup of ‘tea’, and Sarah had sat and eaten biscuits, and given thanks, for the umpteenth time, for Noreen.
Shame that she didn’t make more of an effort to smarten herself up, though. No makeup, no attempt to disguise the white strands scattered through her reddish hair. Out-of-date clothing in pastel shades that didn’t suit her pale colouring, shoes that never seemed to match what she was wearing. And that awful brown canvas bag, winter and summer.
Clearly,
she needed help – which was why Sarah had come up with her plan. Their birthdays were days apart at the end of October, with Noreen almost exactly ten years older. Sarah hadn’t given this year’s birthday too much thought – who wanted to be reminded that a milestone birthday was on the way? – until Christine had suggested a party.
‘You really should – when do you get a chance to dress up? I’ve already warned Brian I’m going to have a big bash for my fortieth. And you’ll get lots of gorgeous presents.’
And the more Sarah had thought about it, the more the idea began to appeal. Why not celebrate the fact that at forty she was happier than she’d ever been, with two beautiful children and a wonderful husband? Why not mark this milestone by dressing up and eating cake with friends and family? It was only a number.
And then she thought of Noreen, hitting fifty a few days earlier. Why not make it a joint party? Why shouldn’t both of them mark their birthdays? And to make it more of an occasion, why not invite Noreen’s friends in secret and surprise her on the night? Even though it was still months away, where was the harm in planning ahead?
‘She has a sister,’ Christine said, when Sarah put the idea to her. ‘I could get her number from Brian’ – and, just like that, the plan was hatched. The sister, whose name was Joanna, had been briefed and had agreed to help. Everything was set.
And the best part, the part that Sarah had told nobody about, was that she’d also come up with a man for Noreen. Single, of course – never married, as far as she knew. Not handsome in the strict sense but terribly nice, and only a few years older than Noreen, ten at the very most. Sarah would invite him to the party and make the introductions, and Noreen would be looking her best, and hopefully they’d hit it off.
As she approached the gates of St Sebastian’s, the man in question appeared behind the wheel of the familiar yellow minibus. Sarah raised a hand in greeting and Dan, the nursing home’s driver and general handyman, waved back before turning onto the road and moving off.
S
he
sat in front of the television and watched as Nelson Mandela walked to freedom after being locked up for twenty-seven years. She looked at the beaming face of his wife Winnie, walking hand in hand with him. She listened to the loud cheers from the crowds of South Africans, black and white, who had gathered to witness history, and she could feel the hope that here, at last, was the beginning of the end of their struggle.
When the newsreader moved on to another item she got up, leaving the television on. She left the room and climbed the stairs. She opened the door to Alice’s empty bedroom and stood on the threshold.
The single bed was unmade, the covers carelessly thrown back: in all her eighteen years, had Alice once made her bed? The art books, always piled higgledy-piggledy on the floor by the radiator, were gone. The top of the dressing-table was bare, except for a single lidless lipstick wand and the tiny curl of a silver earring back.
Alice’s records were gone too, her Smiths and her Bruce Springsteens and her Pet Shop Boys, all vanished from the wooden crate under the window that she’d stacked them in.
Helen crossed the floor to the narrow wardrobe, on whose top sat Nelly, the blue elephant that Breen had sent to heal a long-ago broken wrist. She opened the door and saw a clutch of wire hangers. Was there anything as dismal as the clatter of empty hangers? Nothing, not even a shoe, not even a goddamn insole.
She
opened drawers in the dressing-table and found a used postage stamp, still attached to a raggedy piece of envelope, a paperclip and one green ankle sock, balled in on itself.
She slipped off her shoes and got into the bed and pulled the rumpled blankets up around her. She closed her eyes and pressed them to her face. She breathed them in.
Alice.
Her torment, her scourge. The battles that had been fought between them, the doors that had been slammed. Alice, the cause of countless sleepless nights, grounded for half her life. Stubborn, sulky Alice, her precious rebel child.
‘Don’t forget to feed the cat,’ she’d said to Helen the day before, looking unbearably young in her red plastic raincoat, the last bag slung over her shoulder as she’d stood waiting to pack it into the back of Jackie’s battered van. ‘His bowl is under the hedge.’
‘I know where it is.’ Helen, with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, biting the inside of her cheek to stop her mouth trembling. ‘Ring when you get there, OK? Doesn’t matter what time. Find a phone. Reverse the charges if you can’t get change.’
Off with two other art-college dropouts, the three of them having decided, after a single term, that working for nothing in an eco-something-or-other outfit in the middle of Wales was preferable to getting a proper qualification. Nineteen in a few weeks: what could Helen do except give her enough money to ensure she didn’t starve and wave her off?
‘So …’ Alice had stood uncertainly in front of her, and Helen had reached across and given her a quick kiss on the cheek. No hug: a hug would have undone her. No declaration of anything: they’d never learnt how.
‘Mind
yourself. Take care. Don’t do anything stupid.’ Helen rubbing her hands together just to have something to do with them, all her effort concentrated on not falling apart. ‘Get in, you’ll freeze. Ring me.’
Alice had clambered into the van’s single front seat beside Dermot, whose girlfriend had dumped him at Christmas and who was probably planning to console himself with his two travelling companions once they’d got to Wales. Jackie had ground the gears, and the van, which surely wouldn’t take them as far as the end of the street, let alone Wales, had spluttered off. Helen had turned abruptly, before it was out of sight, and gone back into the empty house.
She pushed back the blankets and got out of Alice’s bed and left the room. She closed the door softly – no more slamming now – and walked slowly down the stairs and back into the sitting room, where she stared unseeing at the television screen.
Alice’s phone call had come several hours later. Well past midnight, long after Helen, sitting halfway up the stairs with an empty whiskey glass, had decided that the van had burst a tyre on a Welsh motorway and smashed into the central barrier, killing the three of them instantly.
She’d stumbled down and picked up the phone, sure it was the police, expecting an unfamiliar, concerned male voice asking in a singsong accent if he had the right address for Alice Fitzpatrick.
‘Yes?’
‘Mum?’ Alice had sounded wide awake, and far away, and very much alive. ‘I’m on a pay phone. It’s gobbling money so I can’t stay long.’
Relief had flooded through Helen. She’d closed her eyes. ‘Where are you?’
‘We’re here – we’re at the centre. We’ve just arrived. We ran out of petrol about twenty miles away. We left Dermot minding the car and Jackie and I hitched a lift to the nearest petrol station, and then we asked a lorry driver we met there to bring us back. His accent was gas.’
She’d sounded happy. Helen had decided not to dwell on the image of her climbing into a stranger’s car, not to mention a strange lorry driver’s cab. She’d leant against the banister, suddenly bone weary.
‘Go
to bed now,’ she’d said. ‘It’s late. Drop me a line when you get a chance. Ring if you need money.’
After hanging up – keep warm, she’d forgotten to say keep warm – she’d refilled her glass and brought it upstairs to bed. This morning she’d woken with an impressive headache and a mouth as dry as straw. Forty-eight in a fortnight, and still giving herself hangovers.
She turned off the television. Nothing but bad news, apart from Mandela; nothing but wars and famines and terrorism, Ceauşescu and his wife shot to death in Romania on Christmas Day, two pensioners put up against a wall and riddled with bullets. More bombs in the North, no sign of peace after more than twenty years of bloodshed. People crushed to death at a football match, the ground splitting open in San Francisco. Who needed to have all that thrown at them night after night?
She lit a cigarette and sat alone in the sitting room. She listened to the ticking of the mantel clock and thought again about her daughter. Left home, the Irish Sea between the two of them now. No qualifications, nothing to show for thirteen years of education.
Artistic talent certainly, but what use was talent without something to harness it and structure it and make it work for you? What good was being able to draw if you’d thrown away your chance to channel it into some kind of career?
Listen to her: she sounded like her parents so many years ago, scandalised when Helen had refused to go to college, horrified all over again when she’d thrown up her job to marry a musician and raise a child. And yes, she could see their point now, damn it. If she’d done a course in journalism after school she’d have been well established by the time she’d met Cormac, could have made a proper career out of it instead of living from cheque to cheque like she did now. No savings to speak of, nothing put aside for the future, when younger writers would push her aside.
Maybe
Alice would go back to college. Maybe she’d see the attraction of a qualification and a decent job when the novelty of living on brown rice and lentils had worn off.
Helen stubbed out her cigarette wearily. This was it then. This was her life now. Watching for the postman every morning, waiting for the phone to ring. Drinking a little more each evening, telling herself it did no harm, until she woke up one morning on the kitchen floor.
Oh, for Christ’s sake. ‘Get a grip,’ she said aloud. She left the room and went out to the back garden. She called the cat and he came padding slowly towards her from under the hedge.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘You’re better than nothing.’
Back in the sitting room she pulled a writing pad from the drawer under the television. The cat jumped lightly onto an armchair and sat regarding her solemnly as she began to write.