Читать книгу He Is Mine and I Have No Other - Rebecca O'Connor - Страница 9

Mam and Dad seemed in no great hurry to put Gran to bed when they got in. Dad sat himself in his usual chair, straining slightly to one side towards the television, half listening to the news, half waiting to hear one of us speak – like he did when Mam had visitors over. Mam sank into the cushions of the settee. The veins on her hands, palm down on her belly, shone bluer than usual against her pale skin. The skin around her nails was all chewed.

‘And where were you earlier, Lani?’ she asked. ‘I was looking for you. To see if you wanted to come to town with me.’

‘I just went up the road . . .’

‘What have I told you about going up there on your own, Lani?’

I didn’t answer. I knew she wouldn’t expect me to.

‘Things are going to have to change in this house . . .’

She’d been threatening that as long as I could remember, but nothing ever did.

‘Your father and I were over at the Reillys’. You know what they’re like. You can’t leave without taking a drink, and then you can’t stay without having a second, and then they’re highly insulted if you refuse a third.’

‘Aye, it’s vicious,’ my father piped in.

Mam got up to put the kettle on and swayed suddenly to one side.

Dad hopped off his seat and went and took hold of her elbow. ‘Take it easy, love.’

‘I’m okay,’ she said, flashing him an awful dirty look. ‘I’m okay. Let go of me.’

That night I lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, then the sound of Mam cajoling Gran and Lazy Bones up the stairs to bed, followed by their plodding steps.

That room of Gran’s was where I’d go to get away. All her things – the caked make-up in her pearly white vanity case, its gold-plated clasp rusted and broken; the crystal jewel box stuffed with cameo brooches and rings, bent kirby grips. Drawers filled with thread spools, dented snuff boxes, hair nets, baubles, perfumed powder puffs, old letters and postcards from Bettystown and Lourdes. A creased photograph of her other daughter, the one in England, ‘Celia, aged nine’ written on the back. Earnest-looking. And skinny as anything. It was the same one Gran had had at her house, before she got ill.

The kitchen in that house had always smelled faintly of gas and burned sausages, and the cutlery was spotted brown with rust. And in the living room she’d have small heavy-bottomed glasses of whiskey and ginger for adult guests, red lemonade for me and the neighbours’ children. And this girl who was my auntie, who I never met, peering down at me from the mantelpiece.

There was a hatch between the kitchen and the living room. I loved to pass things through that hatch, shutting the doors, opening them again. It’s funny how I can remember those doors more clearly than most things – the oily feel of the paint, the slight jamming on the sill, the way the light was shut out so suddenly, or let in on a bright day.

It had been near a lake, that house. Next to a jetty that I remember sitting on, watching the coots murder each other.

There was a silver-framed picture of Gran in front of the three-way mirror of her dressing table, propped against the jewel case. She must have been only my age. She looked so different, her elbows perched on a card table, her head resting on her hands. Eyes dark as raisins, dark hair, straight mouth determined to give nothing away. I liked the company of this young girl. And when Gran wasn’t there these things were all mine. I could sit before my reflections, soaking in the musty smells and the view through the window over the fields at the back of the house.

I couldn’t sleep that night, couldn’t think of anything else but that boy. I didn’t want to think of anything else.

It was only the next morning that I finally drifted off, dreaming I was on the swing in the back garden, swinging right over the river, my feet bare, my hands outstretched, the air filled with white flowers, and the sweet, buttery smell of whin. I looked down and saw that the seat was gone, the rope was gone, and I was floating – right over the river and into the fields beyond the house.

My skin was goose-fleshed when Dad called me for school, as if the blood had curdled right up to the surface.

‘Lani, would you ever eat with your mouth closed?’ Mam pleaded with me at the breakfast table, her breasts slumped low in her flowery dressing gown, hands cradling a mug of tea.

I burned my fingers uncapping my boiled egg, gave Mam my upturned empty, like I always did. She ran her fingers absentmindedly round the rim of her mug.

The sun bounced off every surface. It was the wrong way round somehow. I felt like it should be dark. I had a fondness for the darkness just then, I can’t explain it.

It was better when I stepped outside and felt the prickling of the cold at the back of my nose and throat, the frost tightening the skin around my shins, my wrists, the air lifting me out of myself. Dad revved the car up the driveway. The engine stalled, the car rolled back a little, then jolted to a stop.

‘Is Mam okay?’ I asked.

‘She wasn’t feeling too hot last night, love, but she’ll be grand . . . Probably one too many egg sandwiches over the way.’

Mam was never ill, except when she’d been ill with me. But that was different. She couldn’t hold anything down for months. Then once she got me out of her I couldn’t hold anything down for months. I was a great spitter and dribbler. So she’d tell me – and of how she’d piled on the pounds, and had to spend the rest of her life weight-watching. Every pound and ounce she’d watch. She’d eat nothing but banana sandwiches for lunch until she couldn’t look at another banana, then nothing but baked potatoes and beans, then Ryvita and cottage cheese, and on it went. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays she’d speed-walk around the hospital grounds with Mary Reilly from over the road, or with one of the ladies from the office. There was a bit of a craze in town for speed-walking. You’d never see a jogger or a stroller – just groups of middle-aged women swinging their arms and waddling their arses round certain well-worn routes. You’d hear them coming before you’d see them, the swish of their shiny tracksuits. Then heading down to Weight Watchers in the town hall every week to be weighed in front of everyone, like the prize pikes you’d see in the local paper.

Anyway, she was fine, Dad said. I thought nothing more of it, is the truth. I’d other things to be thinking about. All those hours spent the night before trying to conjure up this boy. A boy I’d only ever seen far off and in the evening when the light was poor. He was from the school down the road: he wore the uniform of dark grey trousers, white shirt, navy tie, grey jumper. He was a boarder, for sure – not just because he was always in uniform, but because no one around our neck of the woods seemed to know who he was. I’d surely have heard one of the neighbours mention him, if only to say they’d offered young so-and-so a lift, or they’d seen young so-and-so on the road.

I was trying to put him together in my mind’s eye – tall, hair dark brown, skin pale – but I was at a loss as to the shape of his hands or the colour of his eyes. Or to what it was had changed about him or me that night that I could never be the same.