‘Oh mum,’ she wailed. ‘I can’t do them.’
‘Really? You could try and just see how you get on?’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t make me. Please don’t make me.’
‘First thing’s first, I’ll call the school and chat to them. Miss Byrne for one, okay?’
‘I can’t do them,’ she said. ‘I’m going to fail everything.’ And she began to cry again. ‘And I’m never going to go to Trinity. Or do a stupidinternship. Dad’s going to be so mad.’
‘No, he’s not… he’ll be fine about it.’ I hoped he would, anyway.
‘But, Mum, I didn’t actually want to go anyway. I don’t want to do Law. It’s not me. It never was. But Dad’s never shut up about it. Ever.’
‘He just wanted something nice for you and this is what he thought was something nice.’ Bloody Michael, I thought, though. Not only has he compoundedher stress and panic by talking incessantly about Trinity and the following in the Fogarty footsteps, but he was never around. He hadn’t actually taken a proper interest in how she was going to get there. ‘Well, thank God for that,’ I said. ‘It took this, all of this, for you to admit you don’t want to go to Trinity to do Law. Bit of an elaborate way of going about it…’
‘Yeah…’
‘I got stuck,just like you have, once. And you think that you are never going to be unstuck or even how on earth you are going to move on… is that how you feel?’ She nodded. ‘I think finding that way of writing something down, like you did, was really clever of you, because I didn’t do that, when it was me. I just stayed indoors for weeks and weeks.’
‘What happened?’ Her eyes were wide, listening.
‘Oh, itwas a long time ago. A really long time. Before you were born. But it changed me, that experience. Reshaped me. My life wasn’t the same again. Couldn’t be.’
Before
Nora was at home with me, taking care of me as I lay in bed, facing the wall. She’d never been particularly maternal before and neither of us knew if she even had it in her. Seemingly she did.
‘Red phoned,’ she said. ‘I told him youwere out, like you said.’
I didn’t respond, just stared at the intricate flower patterns on the wallpaper, the curls and curlicues, the swoops and sweeps of colour. Rosaleen had chosen it before it became my room. It was in her colours, the greens and the turquoises.
‘He sounded really upset,’ she said. ‘In tears.’
The feel of the ruffle on the pink bedspread against my face, the sound of thestarlings gathering in the tree in the churchyard behind the house. The nothingness, the emptiness, the deadness in my belly.
*
Where do you start, how do you even tell you daughter this thing that happened? How do you put it into words that she might understand, that might explain who you are to her but will certainly make her feel differently from you?
‘Rosaleen was ill for at least a yearbefore she died,’ I began. ‘She was diagnosed with cancer and initially she didn’t tell us. We noticed she was getting thinner and paler. And she stopped going swimming. She’d head down to the Forty Foot, get changed and then just stand there, on the top step, and let the sea wash over her feet. “That’s enough,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll go any further,” as if she was talking about her own life.But then when Nora and I were told, we assumed she’d get better, as you do. We were certain she would be fine because Rosaleen always was. Somehow. Anyway, Red and I had both finished our teacher training…’
She sat up a bit. ‘Red, as in that man Red? Who brought the book round?’
‘Yes. As in that man Red.’ I half smiled at her.
‘You were goingoutwith him? I thought it was a bit of an odd thingto do, bring a book to a stranger’s child.’
I nodded. ‘There you go…’
‘And you never told me? I didn’t know any of this!’ She was half-shocked, half-thrilled with this previously classified information.
‘Ro, I didn’t tell youthenbut I’m telling younow… So Rosaleen was dying, but I was meant to be going to San Francisco with Red so I stayed just to see her back on her feet again and I wouldjoin him later. But her dying, well, it kind of put a spanner in the works…’
‘You were going tolivetogether?’ Rosie was delighted with this idea of her mother. ‘You and Dad didn’t, did you?’
‘Red was different, okay? It was an entirely different relationship.’
‘Obviously,’ she said.
