The Fall Girl (8 page)

‘Not hungry?' my mother asks.

‘Not any more.'

‘I'll wrap a couple of slices in tinfoil. You might feel like having it for your supper.'

Licking the custard-coated spoon, I shake the die in the cup and throw it on to the Ludo board – two. I move the yellow counter – that's Lily – two spaces.

‘Who's winning now?' Aunty Lily asks.

‘Still Mammy,' I sigh.

Then I take my mother's turn.

The following Sunday morning, my mother and I are clearing up after the breakfast when the doorbell rings. It's Aunty Lily and she says she's coming to Mass with my parents and me in Crosslea chapel.

My mother sweeps her eye over her sister's outfit. ‘Is that all you're wearing?'

‘Yeah.'

‘You'll be skinned alive. There's fierce cross-winds up at that chapel. It's a day for a coat and scarf.'

‘It's April, Rita.'

‘April or not, you'll catch your death in that flimsy get-up.'

‘It's a trouser-suit.'

‘Oh, is that what you call it?'

My father comes in from the shed with a full basket of briquettes.

‘What do you think, Joe?' Aunty Lily asks, twirling in the middle of the kitchen floor.

‘Oh, very swish, Lily, very swish,' he splutters, looking over his shoulder at her as he slams the back door shut with his foot.

‘See, Rita – even Joe approves,' she says, lifting a slice of leftover buttered toast from my side plate and taking a bite.

‘Spit that out,' my mother shrieks. ‘What about Holy Communion?'

‘Arragh, it'll be all right; it's only a scrap of toast. Besides, I'm starving.'

‘Well, you've broken your fast now. You won't be able to receive the Host.'

After leaving the basket of briquettes by the living-room fire, my father comes back into the kitchen to wash his hands.

‘It's time we were making tracks,' he says.

In the hall, my mother, tying her headscarf in a knot under her chin, looks down at Aunty Lily's feet. ‘Them narrow heels will make an awful clatter going up the aisle.'

‘Isn't it a good job I'll not be traipsing up to the altar for Holy Communion so?'

Sometimes when my father is busy gardening, my mother and I get the bus into Castleowen.

‘No Joe today?' Xavier asks, and I know by the way his voice drops on ‘today' that he's disappointed.

‘Arragh,' my mother says, ‘I don't like to disturb him when he's half-way through a job. It's as well let him get a good run at it while the weather lasts.'

One afternoon, early in autumn 1971, Xavier doesn't ask about my father and Aunty Lily isn't calling me into the kitchen to give me my usual bar of chocolate. Instead, Xavier tells my mother that her sister wants to have a private word with her upstairs. I don't mind because Xavier gives me a glass of orange and a plate of biscuits and my mother isn't there to say ‘You've had enough' after two. Then he lets me help him with the ‘Spot the Ball' competition in the
Sunday Press
and promises to split the winnings with me.

There are two pink spots on my mother's cheeks when she comes back down to the kitchen and her eyes are swollen. Aunty Lily looks just the same. But then I don't see her again for several weeks and I don't win ‘Spot the Ball'.

I'm not sure what exactly is wrong with Aunty Lily, only that she's sick. And because my mother is helping Xavier nurse her, she can't always stay with me during my Irish dancing lesson. But that's good, because I get to play with Lesley. When I tell her that my aunty's sick, Lesley says that she's probably up the pole.

‘Don't forget your night prayers,' my father says when I bid him goodnight. ‘And offer one up for Lily.'

‘Is that because she's up the pole, Daddy?'

He shouts at me not to be so impertinent and threatens to give me a clip on the ear if I don't get out of his sight.

At school on the Monday morning, I tell Attracta Reilly that I think my aunty is up the pole and she tells Master Fitzgibbon in front of the rest of the class.

‘My mammy said her aunty has cancer and had one of her tits cut off,' a sixth-class girl says from the back of the classroom.

When I burst into tears, Master Fitzgibbon takes me out into the corridor and says that, as far as he knows, my mother's sister has had an operation and is recovering well, but why don't I talk to my parents about it? But I don't because if I say ‘tit', I'll surely get a telling off. Besides, my mother says that as soon as Aunty Lily is out of hospital, we'll go to see her together, so I'll know myself soon enough if the tit thing is true or not.

My legs feel like mush as I climb the stairs on my way up to see her. She's propped up in her bed, her hair combed back and tied in a ponytail. Her knees are bent and the blankets are pulled up under her armpits so I can't see her shape. When I sit down beside her, she holds my hand and I play with her rings the way I always do when she comes to Mass with us in Crosslea chapel. She asks me how I'm getting on with my dancing and I offer to do a reel for her.

‘Not today, Frances,' my mother says from the bedside chair.

‘Let her dance away,' Aunty Lily says, waving a dismissive hand at my mother, so I slide down off the eiderdown and
start one two three-ing around the bed. The floorboards are creaking underneath the carpet and my mother insists that I stop before I knock the chandelier off the sitting-room ceiling below.

‘I couldn't care less if the stupid thing smashed to smithereens,' Aunty Lily hops off her. ‘I'd rather see her dance.'

From Christmas on, I see less of my mother and more of her friend Nancy, who looks after me until my father comes home from work. There's talk of doctors' visits, hospital appointments, holy water from Lourdes, miraculous medals and green scapulars. But, despite it all, they're still frowning, whispering or pulling handkerchiefs from their pockets. And it's those quiet things that bother me most.

I don't ask if Aunty Lily is dying. Instead, I think of reasons why she couldn't be. She's way too young for starters. All the people I know who've died are old. Hasn't my mother dragged me to all their funerals? She rarely misses a local funeral. We have a drawer full of in memoriam cards in the dresser to prove it.

I take them out and examine them one by one –
Aged 72 RIP
and a horrible wrinkly face to prove it,
Aged 79 RIP
and looks like a skeleton,
Aged 82
and not a hair on his head,
who died on 3 February 1970
; no age given here, just a face that tells you – I have all my living done. Then I think of Aunty Lily's face and smile.

After I go to bed, I hear my father make a call to Australia to tell my grandfather that Lily's suffering will be all over in a matter of weeks.

Better in weeks! Sure that's no time at all.

It's a Saturday. I'm surprised to see my mother coming in the hall door to collect me after my dancing lesson. I'd been expecting my father. She sits at the end of a bench and doesn't speak to Miss Jackson. I take down my coat from its hanger and walk over to her.

‘Where's Daddy?' I ask, sitting next to her.

‘At Aunty Lily's house,' she says. ‘Stand up till I button up your coat; it's very blowy out.'

When she's finished, she loops my hair behind my ears, pulls my hat out of my coat pocket and puts it on me.

‘There,' she says quietly, ‘we're all set.'

Hand in hand, we walk down to Main Street and through the town. A pair of nuns from the Mercy Convent greet us with a nod as they pass and I nod back twice, once for myself and once for my mother because she's looking at the ground and doesn't see them. When we turn the corner into Sycamore Street, the wind catches my breath and makes me cough. My mother lets go of my hand to push back a strand of hair that's escaped from under her headscarf and is flapping across her face. I take off down the footpath, dancing through the wind with an empty brown paper bag that has blown out of a dustbin. I stop at the yellow door, but don't ring the doorbell because Aunty Lily might be sleeping and, anyway, my mother has a key.

‘Here she is now, pet,' Xavier calls out to his wife when he hears us enter the hall.

I like the way they always make a fuss of me.

‘Frances,' Aunty Lily says, holding out her arms.

She's sitting in an armchair by the fire with a blanket over her lap and her feet resting on a pouffe, but even with all that cosiness, she still looks uncomfortable. When I bend down to give her a hug, she grabs my wrists and pushes me down on
her knee, and I think her strength must be coming from her head and not her arms because they're as thin as sausages. There's panic in her eyes as she pulls off my hat, scans every inch of my face and combs my hair back with her fingers. I can hear my parents and Xavier talking in the kitchen.

‘You're up today,' I say.

‘I am.'

‘Are you better?'

‘I always feel better when you're here.'

We talk for a while about ordinary things: school, homework, dancing.

As soon as I mention dancing, she asks, ‘How's the girl who dances like the French tart doing the cancan?'

‘Fine.' I'm not sure if I should say any more. What if she tells my mother?

‘Do ye have fun?'

I nod.

‘What kind of divilment do the pair of ye get up to?'

I hesitate.

‘Go on,' she nudges me, ‘tell me. I'll not breathe a word to your mother. Don't forget: I know her better than anyone; the woman wouldn't know a good time if it came up and bit her on the arse.'

After we share a conspiratorial smirk, I tell her that Lesley is teaching me a new reel for the
Feis
at Easter, and about how sometimes the two of us stay out in the car park and dance in the rain.

‘Oh, how I'd love to see that.' She cups her hands around my face and plants a kiss on my forehead. ‘I love you,' she whispers.

‘I love you too.'

‘Do you?'

‘Yeah.'

‘How much?'

‘Loads and loads.'

‘That's good. Cos I love you more than … more than anyone could love anyone. Remember that, won't you?'

I nod, because I don't think my voice will work.

Lowering my head to hide my teary eyes, I lean in on her bosom and now I know that the tit thing is true after all.

I look up at her when I feel her chest shudder beneath my cheek. There are tears in her eyes too, but they don't fall. I hear a moaning sound. It's coming from within Aunty Lily, barely audible at first, like the drone of a faraway ship. Her lips are closed, but quivering. I touch them, run my forefinger over them, trying to comfort her. She begins to rock, slowly at first. Rock and moan. Slowly and quietly. Getting faster, getting louder. I feel frightened, sad. She's squeezing me so hard, my bones are sore.

‘Oh God, oh God,' she cries out, resting her head on mine. Whatever she was going to ask God for, she's changed her mind because she knows that there's no point and I know it too, just like I know that this is our last goodbye.

Years later my father tells me that while my mother went to collect me at my dance class, Xavier and he carried Aunty Lily downstairs to the armchair in the sitting-room specially for my visit.

‘She said she didn't want you to remember her as the woman who was always sick in bed,' he says. ‘I swear she'd have done a jig with you if she'd had the strength. As soon as you left, we carried her back upstairs to bed. She was exhausted. Not a single word did she utter for the rest of that day.'

Aunty Lily is gone but not forgotten.

It's Saturday, a bustling day in the village. My mother has allowed me to go out the front with my skipping-rope. These days she seems anxious to get me out from under her feet. I'm sticking to the rules and staying between the butcher's shop, which is fifty yards or so to one side of our house, and Scully's shop and post office, which is roughly the same distance to the other. I like watching the comings and goings. People stop to chat with me, especially the older women. Some days they buy me sweets or, if it's sunny, an ice cream. So far today, I haven't got anything, even though I've smiled and said hello to everyone. Nuddy Neary's bike is parked outside the butcher's. He's a nosy old bachelor who lives alone out the back of beyond, wherever that is: I've never been. He cycles into the village at least twice a day to catch up on the latest gossip and then spreads it round like a heap of manure.

The butcher's shop door is open. Nuddy is inside spinning a yarn and making tracks in the sawdust with his wellies. The other customers are laughing.

‘Jaysus, you're a gas man, Nuddy,' the butcher says. ‘If you hung around for the day, I could charge the customers an extra few bob for the entertainment.'

‘At least I'd give them val-ya for their money,' Nuddy says, ‘not like you, ya dear cunt ya.'

They're all in stitches, even the man he has insulted. He
has to step away from the meat-slicer to regain his composure.

Everyone says Nuddy is harmless, except for my mother, who claims he's dead fly and not half as simple as he looks.

I turn round to look up the street when I hear a car coming. It's Xavier's. He's driving much faster than usual. Madeleine, his daughter who's been over from London since the funeral, is in the passenger seat. My mother isn't expecting them. When I think they can see me, I start waving. I don't bother speaking to the man who's passing by. With the visitors arriving, I'm sure to get my sweets now. Madeleine is waving back, but Xavier isn't. It's as if he doesn't see me. He looks odd. His hair is untidy and his eyes are glassy, like marbles. When he goes to get out of the car, Madeleine puts her hand on his shoulder. She's trying to tell him something, but he won't listen: he can't get out quickly enough.