her with the notion that that hand was not her own, but my dead grandfather’s.
Lazy Bones, she called him. She was forever complaining about his nails that dug into her while she slept, leaving sores on her belly and hips that Mam would have to clean and bandage.
An empty sherry glass sat on the nest of tables beside her, the half-empty bottle underneath. Blue was sleeping fitfully by her feet. I switched on the light and pulled an armchair towards the fire, close to hers. She woke with a jolt.
‘Switch over if you like, love,’ she said. ‘I’m not watching this.’
But I couldn’t sit still. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, Gran,’ I said.
She patted her hand and said one for her and one for Lazy Bones please.
‘Sure you can share,’ I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me.
The kettle was still warm. I stood looking at my reflection in the dark window pane as I waited for the water to boil. I tried to look through the glass but couldn’t make anything out. There wasn’t a sound from outside. No wind. The cows had moved off to the hollow corner of the field, furthest from the house.
That boy walking home in the dark. He wouldn’t be scared of the dark as I was. He’d cock his ear to the animal sounds, turn towards the sudden beams of car lights, pulling himself slowly onto the mucky verge and gingerly stepping back onto the glistening surface of the road once all was quiet. It was difficult to imagine what that boy might be thinking as he walked home. And wrong for him to be spending his evenings as he was. That’s what I thought as I let the tea bags in the pot brew to a dark pulp.
Gran liked her tea sugary – three, four spoons sometimes. I made it extra sweet for her.
She’d slouched further into her chair. I set down her tea and tugged at the pillow at the base of her back.
‘Why do nails grow on dead people?’ she asked, clicking the nails on her left hand. I wasn’t sure if it was me she was talking to or herself.
‘I put lots of sugar in your tea, Gran,’ I said.
She needed to sleep, but I couldn’t be doing with the removal of the false teeth, hauling her out of her clothes and into her nightie. So I ran up the stairs and turned on her electric blanket instead, then waited with her until Mam and Dad returned, flicking from channel to channel while she dropped in and out of sleep. Blue twitched her back leg as if she was trying to bury something.
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.
