No news. Nobody asking for me. It’s hard to know what Betty wants me to do next. Maybe she is like this with everybody; one minute behaving as a summer breeze, the next as a toxic fog. Whatever sort of air Betty is, she has seeped into every crack in my house and every pore on my skin.
Perilous hope begins to bubble deep within me. I hate it. And I am drawn to it. I must chase it until I catch it and bite into its neck, draining all the blood from it. Until it isn’t hope anymore, just a ruined chance. I’m afraid I can’t do anything by halves.
‘Come here to me, Peggy!’
I call outside, and we set to work making a cake to send down to Betty in the morning. It wouldn’t be my preferred way of communicating with her, but it’s something. It’s a nice evening.
—
I wake to the smell of Daddy’s pipe. Tom standing in the darkened doorway of the house, the rain coming down like bullets. Jack standing beside him, hands in his pockets. Both mumbling and sighing into the wet light of the stars. This seems to be the only way that Tom can have a sincere conversation with anybody. How many nights have I stood in doorways with Tom, listening to his lectures as everybody else sleeps? The smoke of Daddy’s pipe, propelling him through whatever difficult thing he needs to say.
As I linger in a place between awake and asleep, things come back to me. Things that I have rejected all year long: the day I learned you were pregnant, and the uncontrollable pangs of loss I felt. Mammy in her bed. Counting down to the New Year, everybody cheering and kissing. The day Peggy was born. And the scalding seconds when you were falling down the stairs. My hand reaching out for you, as regret burned up the last of the small light within me. Tom’s shouting. Andlater, his quiet voice, telling me we had to be careful. Telling me things I had done but couldn’t remember.
A sudden rush of understanding finds me on the floor. All the friends I ever tried to have but couldn’t hold on to. All of the ways I loved them. All of the ways I loved you. And the awful burning I feel for Betty. I understand, at last, what I am.
I swallow it all down and fall back into a dreamless sleep.
—
With some hesitation, Tom takes the cake away with him in the morning. And with the same hesitation, he comes home in the evening and tells me that Betty was delighted with it. There is no loaf under his arm, but I don’t take it to heart. I know better than to leave our entire relationship to bread and cake. We are taking little steps back to each other. I wonder how to accelerate these little steps. How to shake off the heavy thoughts that came to me last night, and share the truth of them with her. To get her back on my side. Right by my side. Stitched to my side, if necessary. No, I cannot bear our slow crawl between certainty and uncertainty.
If there was a way to make her understand me. To let her know that my life isn’t right for me, and that I need to get into her life, with her.
—
I can’t feel like this any longer. I’m going to sort things out now. While the lads are still asleep, I lightly get up from the floor and let myself outside.
The smell of rain on grass, February becoming March. The earth, soft and damp under my feet. Mammy would kill me if she caught me; barefoot, outdoors, at this hour.
‘A lady always wears her shoes.’
She would say, even when I was a little child, when no other little children were wearing shoes.
‘Sorry, Mammy.’
I whisper to her, and tightly fasten her headscarf under my chin. The red darkening once more as it touches the sweat from my forehead, the damp from the air.
Down at the Nevans’ house, all of the lights are off. No noise from the farm. No stars left in the sky. Quietly, I make my way to her window. I am not here to disturb anybody. Just to bask a while in her liquid darkness and think of a way to pull her back to me. A way to knock the barrier between us.
I settle on my knees before her window, watching. The thin glass pane, marbling her body. Stone-still asleep. So unlike the vivacious creature I have known. Right now, softer than anything I have ever known. How steady her breathing. How still her body. Mesmerising. A gift to have seen her this way, this soft.
So soft that I feel myself burning up from the inside by watching her. Through the mottled glass of the window, her skin is the pale yellow of a fish’s spine. How soft. Like a kiss on the cheek. Like steam from the bath. Look how she sleeps. No sweat; not a tremor. Like warm seawater in the summer. Like cold air in October. Like all I would ever need to sustain me. The only thing sweeter than this perfect, sleeping Betty is the waking Betty, taking me as she needs me.
And I realise that without me, she would go on being as perfect as she has been with me, because I do not alter her. I have never altered her in the way that she has altered me. I don’t make her a brighter, better, happier person, the way she makes me. She does not love me the way that I love her. In truth, I know, she hardly loves me at all. What a horrible thing to realise. Where she is a warm, guiding light, I have just been dull, dead air.
A new night rain begins to fall. I don’t mind getting wet. Let it fall. Let all the blue of her sky pour down on me. Let each of her stars meltand cover me. Yes, if she is the blue night sky, then let me be the day. Let her colour and consume me until the day is no more.
‘Don’t forget me, darling.’
I whisper, and hate myself for letting my own voice cut through all this precious silence. I make my way to the back door to let myself in and sit in her kitchen awhile. For the first time in so long, I feel I can breathe easily.
And just as I am settled, I see it. My heart seems to disappear from my chest. The breath evaporates in my lungs. My cake, in the bucket of chicken feed. Thrown away. Like it was poison. Like it didn’t mean a thing.
The softness runs off. Emptiness comes with hard edges and fills me. Physically, I feel her forgetting about me. How does she do it? Why did nobody ever teach me how to move on from things?
Somehow, she is reverting to the person that she was before she knew me. Bill’s wife. Ballycrea’s favourite. Gleaming, glorious Betty Nevan, who never needed me at all. Isn’t it cruel, that to me, all this time, she has felt like coming home? And to her, I have just been an inconsequential stop.
It’s clear she is no longer interested in looking after a blow-in. There may once have been something mysterious about me that was worth learning about. Gone now. I am human, like the rest of them. The light coming in through the kitchen window illuminates how endlessly ordinary I am. Once, I basked in that light.
