Blue Mercy: A Novel. (19 page)

"Not any more, you're not."

"Oh God, oh God, oh God," wailed Rose. "Stop. Let's all be friends."

"Come on, Mom."
 

My father let a guffaw. "Would you listen to them? Should they stay or should they go? It's our house you're talking about, or have you forgotten? Go. Go on. The free hotel's just closed its doors."

Star was in my room, waiting for me to finish packing, when Rose came in.

"Oh, no," she said, seeing what I was doing and Star's case, already packed, on the bed beside us. "Please don't leave. He doesn't mean it, honest to God he doesn't. You should have heard him before ye came. He was all excited. Come back and let's sort it out. Or let him sleep on it. He'll be grand in the morning. We'll try again tomorrow."

Star looked at me as if to say,
don't you dare
.

"I'm sorry, Rose. I left here because I couldn't put up with the likes of that. I'm certainly not going to let him turn it on my daughter."

"Oh, this is terrible, just terrible."

I zipped my bag closed. "I'm sorry."

She saw I meant it. "I better go back down, so," she said.
 

"Of course. Goodbye, Rose. Thank you for everything."

"He's not as bad as he makes himself out to be."

"I know," I said.

Star snorted.

"Did you take the dress?"

"Dress?"

"Your m... The blue dress, from the other wardrobe."

She saw from my face that I hadn't.

"Have you room?"

"Yes."

"Then please," she said. "I want to think of you having it."

She slunk away, back to her kitchen.

We hefted our cases down the wooden staircase and outside to the car, feet crunching on the gravel. Then we stood on the doorstep for a little while but my father did not appear.
 

"What should we do?" I said to Star.

"Let him go to hell," she said. "Come on."

I thought of the last time, sneaking away by night with Brendan. "No, I'd better say goodbye. I'll regret it if I don't."

"What did you ask for if you didn't want my opinion?"

I pushed open the door, and stuck in my head. He was in his seat at the head of the table, where we'd left him, his back to the door. "We're off then," I said, my voice grating with falsity. "Goodbye and thanks for having us."

"Goodbye and good riddance."

Rose moved towards us.
 

"Stay put, you!" he growled, stopping her in her tracks.
 

"Goodbye, Rose," I said, a sort of apology, as I closed the door behind.

Looking back through the rear-view mirror as I drove away, my vision split. I saw the house as it was now and also how it seemed to me when I was small. Into the chasm between those two tumbled all the years I should have had -- saying goodbye the first time, returning afterwards every year or two for a visit, to warm hellos and sad departures, observing the changes in the place, little on little, year on year, giving me smaller pangs of loss. Bearable pangs. Shakespeare's sweet sorrow of parting, not this wrench that somehow must be endured again.

"Are you all right?" Star asked.

"Not really. But I will be. You?"

She nodded. "I am now."

A moment of accord. A silver lining. Next to what went on in that big old farmhouse, our little three-bed in Santa Paola seemed a model of family feeling. At least now she understood what he was like and why I kept her from him. It wasn't quite the reunion I'd hoped for when we were setting out but it was something. A bond of sorts.

"
Go up and hide in your rooms and wait until tomorrow
," Star said in a silly voice, a bad imitation of Rose. "
When he's had his sleep he'll be a pussycat, a little lamb.
Is she mad?"

"I know. Poor thing."

"How does she bear it? He's absolutely awful to her. And she never says a thing to his face..."

"I'm sure her answer would be that she loves him."

She did, poor Rose, but only because she did not love herself. She was able to live with my father, to -- in Star's words -- bear it, because beneath his bad behavior, she sensed the torments that drove him. She was more attuned to his suffering than to her own.

Shando says I shouldn't write this. This is Mom's book, he says, not mine. I am to be her editor, as requested, to ensure that what she wanted to say is said, clearly and unambiguously. No more.

I think he's wrong. I think she expected me to "write back".
 
She all but said so on that last day in Laragh churchyard. "It's your story too," she said.

Is that not right? Can't I, too, hold a pen? So let me say that when my grandfather's time to go came, he didn't go easy. His body twitched and shuddered in its resistance and his breath scraped in and out of him. "The death rattles," Mom called it, and I hated her quiet ghoulishness at the words.

Once, as he slipped in or out of consciousness, he called for his own mother. "Mammy!" A shout that was prayer, entreaty and accusation, all in one.

Mom saw my face at this. "You take a break for a while," she said.

"Are you sure?"

"Step outside, get some fresh air. You don't need to be here all the time."

"What if...?"

"Don't worry, I'll call you."

He was lying still now, except for the sound of his tortured breath, in and out. I didn't know whether he was awake or asleep. Sleep had become a thin, worn blanket for him and it was hard to tell the difference.
 

When the time came, Mom called me in. But still he clung to life. On the bedside locker beside him was his jug and tumbler of water, a box of tissues, a roll of mint sweets, the pill box, half full...Mom smoothed some petroleum jelly on his lips and I moved my breath to match his: in, out, in...Steady now, not as jagged as earlier, but louder than was natural, and rasping and slow. So, so slow. I felt as if whole minutes were going by between breaths, waiting for him to let the air in or out, so I could do the same. In. Out. In. Out.
 

Until his stopped. The sound of this silence brought me back, out of the daze the slow repetitive breathing had induced. He made another, different sound, something like a dog makes when it's startled, a growl deep in the throat, fear and menace together:
Grr-uh-uh-uh
.

Mom took his hand and held it as a shudder shook him, from core to skin. How could she bear it? The same sound again --
grr-uh-uh-uh
– and one more inhalation.

I waited for the exhale, waited and waited, then I knew it wasn't coming. She realized it at the same time and released his hand. She laid her forehead down on the bedcovers. He was gone and it was so strange, how it was still his own face, yet there was nothing of him left in it.

"Mom?" I said. She lifted her head and her eyes began to clear. I could see her coming back into herself from a long way off, remembering I was there too.

"He's dead," she said.

"I know."

"I'll go and call Pauline." She stood up, brushed down her jeans, like she was brushing off crumbs. "She'll know what to do next."

the process of being reincarnated or born again.

the action of reappearing or starting to flourish or increase after a decline; revival.

*

Chekhov says that writers lie most often at the beginnings and endings of their stories, but where I am most tempted to fictionalize, to improve and alter and just make it up as I go along, is here, right in the middle. Good stories demand reverses and turnabouts, so I should like to be able to say that, after our trip to Ireland, Star's bad behavior improved, that our moment of connection as we fled my father's house heralded a new way of being together.
 

Alas, no. The turbulence and tribulations continued and -- as it is impossible to stand still in life -- because it wasn't getting better, it was getting worse. I was reminded of how it was when she was a small child, the way in which I'd just get on top of one phase as she was already in the act of launching herself onto another. Trotting behind her, trying to keep up.

No longer out till 3a.m. but now five or later or, sometimes, not home at all. No longer just refusing to pick up her things or help out in the house but calling me names for daring to ask. No longer finding "Cow!" or "Idiot!" released her ire, but moving onto "Bitch!" and "Retard!" and "Fuck off." It was the drink and drugs talking, I knew that, but it didn't make it any easier to hear.

You shouldn't stand for it, people said.
 

No child of mine would speak to me like that.
 

It's disgraceful.
 

I knew it was disgraceful, I tried not to let her away with it, but it was what I got anyway. Reason, sanctions, kindness, punishment: none of it made any difference if Star decided to play the tyrant.

Spoilt, I was told.

A bully.

Selfish.

And yes, all of that was true, but it was not the whole truth. Other words described what lay beneath. Lost. Troubled. Lonely. Confused.
 

I saw less and less of her, as she spent more and more nights with friends. Along with worries about her welfare, there were financial burdens. Soon -- how had it come round so fast? -- she was going to start college, if she managed to get a place; she was a bright girl, but her grades were slipping. College or work, soon she was was going to be launching herself upon adult life. Leaving home and living without me. The thought crammed me with fear. I was so uncertain of her ability to cope -- no, rather I was so certain of her
inability
to cope -- that I had to visit a doctor and get chemicals to put in my own body each night, so I could sleep.

For some reason my daughter had a very fractured sense of self. She felt the need to armor herself with fat and belligerence to get through life. But why? Yes, she had to grow up in "a broken home" but it wasn't as broken as some of the ones I'd seen with a father still in situ.

"You're barking up the wrong tree," said Marsha one night over a late night glass of wine. "She's had nothing but love in this house. It's our toxic, sexist, over-sexed society. Girls are falling apart all over the place. It's the corporates."

"Huh?"

"The way they've cheapened and degraded sex."

"Isn't that our fault too? We're the ones who threw off our tops and danced around maypoles in the People's Park."
 

Drop the hypocrisy,
we'd cried.
Make love not war. Let it blossom, let it flow.
 

Oh innocent us.

"That's nothing to do with it. Porn's just porn when it's kept in its place. But they've taken it
 
mainstream. Moved it out of fantasy fodder for men and turning into a paradigm for women."

"
Paradigm
? Jeez Marsha, this isn't Women's Studies class."

"You think of a better word, then."

"I know she's doing things she's going to regret," I said, trying to bring the conversation back to Star.

"Of course she is, poor love. And telling herself she's finding freedom all the while."

"Oh Marsha."

"I know. People who work with child abusers call it 'grooming'. Using porn to convince their victims what they want to do is dandy-o. Well, that's what we're doing to all girls now. No two kids come together now without a woman-despising, porn-driven blueprint of sex already in their heads. Star is a victim of that. Don't tell me she isn't."

Could this be right?

"And that girlfriend of hers too."

"Ginnie?"
 

Marsha nodded, vehemently. "Calls herself
Venom
? Looking like that?

I knew what she meant. Ginnie's new look was peroxide hair and false eyelashes, low cut tops and push up bras, polished nails and half-dead eyes.

"More like Bambi Woods."

"Who?"

"You know,
Debbie Does Dallas
."

"No, I don't know," I said. "And frankly my dear, I'm shocked that you do."

"Don't tell me it's a coincidence that this is emerging in the wake of the women's movement. 'You want out of the kitchen, honey? Okay, get into the bedroom then."

"Oh, Marsha."
 

"It's true, Mercy. And it's damaging us all, men as well as women."

"Marsha, please."

"Sorry, I'm ranting. I know. But I hate to see you beating yourself up about poor Star when you've done everything –
everything
– a mother could do."

August turned to September, bringing flaming hoops of fire to the hills and Star had -- despite my fears -- secured herself a place in college. Not just any college, UCLA. I sat on her bed watching her do her final packing. She was nervous, I was nervous and neither of us was admitting it.
 

Snap, snap:
she closed the clasps on her suitcase and looked around at her black walls covered in posters of Siouxsie Sioux and Lora Logic, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, the Stooges and Suicide, the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls, all cut and pasted into enormous, explosive collages. Clothes in piles, all over the floor and on every free surface. Surfaces were dusty and stained and covered in cigarette burns or make-up marks and all smelled, pungently, of smoke and despair. Another struggle I'd relinquished.

She still hoarded what looked like trash, though I knew the layers of paper and trinkets and gewgaws and junk were precious to her. Ticket stubs from every event she'd ever attended. Notes passed in school. Jewellery she never wore and never would war. Clothes in a variety of sizes. The small ones she hoped to grow back into, the ones from when she was even larger than now. Clean and dirty, heaped together. Photos of nights out that she though hilarious but that to me looked like sad, wasted girls on too many sad and wasted nights. I couldn't wait to get stuck into cleaning it.

"Don't change anything while I'm gone," she said, reading my mind.