Saltwater Page 4

  My father built a garage in the bottom of the garden for his tools. It smelled of damp and dirt and I loved it. He nailed together cabinets with tiny drawers and filled them with washers and screws in different sizes. I spent hours pressing his yellow spirit level against surfaces with my tongue between my teeth, eager to see the magic bubble resting perfectly in its case, indicating that everything was in the right place.

  He poured wet cement around the garden and pressed his fists into it to make paw prints.

  ‘Luce, come see! There’s a family of bears living behind the garage.’ He showed me the claw marks. ‘See?’ I was saucer-eyed in my flowery wellies. My hair bobbles bounced.

  ‘I’d stay away from there if I was you. They eat little girls for tea.’ He poked me gently in my stomach to emphasise his point.

  I squirmed. ‘Bears do not eat little girls.’

  As soon as my parents’ backs were turned, I scraped my knees over branches and breeze blocks and crawled behind the garage. I saw plenty of paw prints but there were never any bears. There were rows of empty Foster’s cans lined up among the detritus.

  ‘Do bears drink beer?’ I asked my mother.

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  When my brother and I were children, my mother blew a bubblegum-pink bubble and kept us safe inside of it, where sharp reality could not pierce. I never once heard her say the words alcoholic or depression.

  As an adult, it feels liberating to name things; to push them out of my body like long, sharp splinters and mould them into words. Naming things gives them shape and form, which means they can be picked up and taken away.

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  You wipe a ketchupy smile from my mouth and tease mashed potato from my hair. I breathe you in. White musk and face cream. I like you best in the mornings when you are naked, your face lightly lined and your skin red and blotchy, belonging to me before the mask of your day. Freckles tucked into soft dressing gown, pink and hot from the shower.

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  Our house was in the corner of the cul-de-sac, so we had a proper garden. All of the other kids from around the block used to come and play in it. Summer passed in a trickle of paddling pools filled with water from the kettle, bits of grass worming their way inside our Little Mermaid swimming costumes. We had a Crazy Daisy that spun in drunken circles, soaking our hair as the sunlight dripped through our jelly shoes. We ate sausage sandwiches outside, slurping butter from puckered arms and sitting on old bedsheets in the grass like magic carpets. I woke up first and climbed to the top of the slide in my strawberry-print shorts, learning the quiet shape of morning.

  One afternoon, a couple of women from the local church came to our front door, rustling leaflets and rattling donation buckets. My mother invited them into the garden and they drank cups of tea with delicate sips, sliding around on sun-stained cushions that were too small for our plastic patio furniture.

  ‘Are these all your children?’ they marvelled as we squealed and threw water balloons through the sky.

  ‘Oh, no.’ She smiled. ‘Just the one. The rest belong to the neighbours. I end up with them all in the summer, ’cos we’ve got a big garden. The rest of them have only got backyards.’ The women nodded approvingly and daintily nibbled the edges of digestive biscuits.

  ‘And your husband?’ They presumed. ‘Is he at home, too?’

  ‘He’s at work,’ she lied. He had been missing for days. The women smiled and wobbled their heads and thanked her for the tea.

  ‘Best be on our way, then. God bless.’

  They appeared again a couple of hours later and found us in ball gowns, spinning in circles through the flower beds and transubstantiating beetles into ducklings with tinfoil wands.

  ‘Everything alright?’ My mother frowned as they squelched their way across the grass towards her.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ They beamed. ‘We’re on our way back to the church but just wanted to call in again. There is such a feeling of love here.’ My mother bit her lip and blinked back tears because they were right. There was so much love.

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  The cottage has a real turf fire. I spent a few evenings watching it splutter pitifully and feeling pathetic for being unable to do something so basic and elemental, but after a few days I had the hang of it and the flames crackled into life.

  I ordered some bags of turf from a local farmer. He turned up on a tractor with fifty full sacks and a wild mountain look in his eyes. I came to Ireland with just two weeks’ worth of pub wages, and the turf cost almost all of them. The exchange happened quickly, before I had a chance to protest.

  After the farmer left I climbed up onto the top of the turf pile and cried with my face in the dirt. I felt angry at myself for wasting the only money I had left. The fat mounds of turf sulking in their white plastic coats seemed like impossibly heavy symbols of all the cold nights I will be spending here alone. I called my mother and she laughed at me.

  ‘It’s a good thing, Lucy!’ she said. ‘At least now you don’t have to worry about being cold.’ I am so afraid of having too much.

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  Now bigger. Growing taller wanting rollerblades and bicycles, toes turning blue beneath swimming costumes. Goosepimpled flesh and socks pulled down to catch the thrill of the street at night. Fizzy cola bottles, strawberry bonbons hard and powdery, breadcrumbed dinosaurs, alphabet spaghetti. There are never enough letters to spell both our names. Your hands washing and scrubbing. There are burn marks on your arms from the oven. I can see your scars now. Stubble on your legs all black and prickly and you tell me that’s what ladies do. I touch my own, downy white with summer. I am light and you are dark. You are freckles and sunspots where I am tracing-paper thin. I want to be full and alive like you. Flip over handlebars all cuts and bruises. Wrapped up in arnica, bitter and sweet. Calpol kisses with a biscuit and a glass of milk. I can’t sleep at night in my vest and knickers, blanket pulled off and cheeks all red. You come straight to me. I breathe in your jumper, perfume and cups of tea and the smoke from his cigarettes, lovely and horrible all at once.

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  My mother posts me the Laura Ashley curtains with a handwritten note. ‘Found these in the back of the wardrobe. Thought they’d be nice in the cottage.’ I hang them up at my bedroom window. As a child I spent hours lying upside down on my mother’s bed, coaxing ladies with long hair from the wisteria pattern. I wake every morning as the light falls through them but I cannot find the faces any more.

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  I spend days wondering what exactly I am doing in Donegal. I am so drawn to difficult things. I am always travelling far away from the people I love. I am constantly searching for something that I cannot articulate, uprooting and disappearing based on an abstract feeling in the pit of my belly. What if it was not the right thing to leave London? What if this is not the right way to live? Perhaps it is better to want tangible things, like bodies and objects. Everything I want is invisible. Do invisible things have worth?

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  My mother and auntie spent their childhood sitting on other people’s walls in off-white knee socks, picking pink pieces of Wham Bar from between their teeth. They made up dance routines in the middle of the estate and pulled the wings off insects with dirty fingers. They ate boiled potatoes for tea out of a china dish painted with tulips and played Kissy-Catchy with the boys across the street.

  ‘Your dad’s a fucking paddy,’ hissed a boy with a runny nose, poking them in the ribs until they shared their rhubarb and custards.

  ‘At least he’s not a mackem like yours,’ they said, pointing their pink tongues at him.

  They shared ice cream floats in Toni’s Caff, sliding down glittery seats in plastic booths as he gushed, ‘My sugar plums!’ across the counter. There was a jukebox and they pushed hot pennies into the slot, coolly choosing Elvis and swirling their ice cream with faraway faces.

  They went to a Catholic girls’ school run by nuns. On Fridays as they skipped out of the classroom, crumpling paintings and trailing daisy chains, their teacher handed
them each a peach-coloured raffle ticket, folded like a pursed pair of lips.

  ‘Now, I’ll be collecting these at mass on Sunday. I hope you’re all going to be there.’ Those who still had their tickets on Monday mornings got a wooden ruler whacked across their knees as they trembled in front of the blackboard. My mother held séances in the stationery cupboard.

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  Hot wet on your pillow and new pencils for my homework. Fresh and polished patent leather. You crease everything clean and I soap-powder scuff along schoolyards in T-bars. Smack as my knees hit the ground but I don’t cry. I’m a tough girl now. Poster paint on my elbows and rice pudding down my pinafore. You wipe me clean and rinse out our suds. Creamy Cussons soap caught in my cuticles. There is something new in your eyes, dark and lurking.

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  My best friend Rosie and I squeezed into pastel leggings on Saturday mornings and pirouetted around a cold dance studio, desperate for the lesson to end so we could swipe sticky Drumstick lollies from the plastic jar at reception. We took part in competitions and my mother stayed up for nights sewing constellations of sequins onto my leotards. Her fingers were bloody from the needles.

  When we arrived at the venue she tied my hair up in shiny ribbons and smudged glitter carefully across my eyelids. I watched the older girls flit across the wooden floor in their iridescent ballroom shoes and flesh-coloured fishnets. Opulent feathers bloomed from their shoulders and their breasts were encrusted with cubic zirconia diamante. They moved like tropical birds.

  ‘Mam,’ I breathed. ‘I want a costume like that.’ She pulled a grip from between her teeth, hairsprayed me into a silver cloud.

  ‘Have you seen how much they cost? They’re too expensive, sweetheart.’ I slid off the staticky chair and sulked my way through the warm-ups. My mother’s patient knots were itchy on the wrong side of my leotard. With every twist I was prickled with the image of her small hands stitching through the dawn.

  Each October, the local council put on a festival. We could see the lights being strung between lamp-posts from our school desks and a ripple of something cold and fresh sneaked under our cardigans. We rushed home to wolf down our tea then my dad took us to the fairground. On the first night everything was half price and we clamoured for two-pound coins, enjoying the smug weight of them in our Puffa jacket pockets. My favourite was the hook-a-duck. I was seduced by the goldfish quivering in pools of neon and the glittery promise of, ‘Win a prize, every time!’

  The most white-knuckle ride was the sticky wall. We stood with our backs against the wall until the cylinder began to spin. The floor dropped as we gathered speed and gravity took hold. People were sick and it stuck in their hair. My father laughed at our queasy faces.

  ‘What did you think, girls?’ Lights from the waltzers flashed across our bodies in bursts.

  ‘Brilliant, Dad.’ Rosie and I held hands as we walked home through the park, faces looming in the dark. Girls with orange cheeks in push-up bras brushed past us, smelling of the future.

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  Look at me dance. Look at me twist. Look at these things I can do with my body. I put on my leotard and ripple like silver. I have a best friend now. We cut open our wrists and smush blood together. We want to be joined forever. We dance intricate steps and feel we are made from air but then there are tap shoes, glitter and stamp. Cartwheels in the grass. Handstand elastic band, who can stay up the longest? You do my make-up for the dance competition. I love the thrill of your hand on my cheek. Our hair pulled back in buns so tight they stretch our faces. Aren’t they little angels? Aren’t they gorgeous?

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  I thought that perhaps here, away from everything that is familiar, I might become the most absolute version of myself. I watch cold days bleed into dark nights as lights flicker across the sea on Arranmore Island. Every twilight has a different texture. I am beginning to suspect there are no absolutes at all.

  It gets dark very early and there is nothing for me to do in the evenings but light a fire and read. I have read so many books and articles that they have all begun to blur into one. I can’t remember who said what, which is a problem.

  I read somewhere that art, science and politics are all shades of grey, that nothing is concrete and we will never reach the glistering thing at the centre. The article said that all we can do is blindly feel our way around things with visuals and signifiers, occasionally skirting the edges.

  Here, at the edge of the country, things aren’t grey at all. They are brown and gold and shocking, violent red. I used to think that cities were the centres of the world, but here there is a power, a kind of ancient I have never felt before, deep in the dirty ground.

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  When my father would go missing, my mother made up stories as she squirted Johnson’s shampoo onto my scalp and it ran down my back like honey.

  ‘He’s working on a desert island,’ she told me, rinsing clouds from my shoulders with a plastic jug.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Very far away. He has to get a boat and it takes a long time.’

  ‘Is he a pirate?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Is he a bad pirate?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Can I be a pirate?’

  ‘If you’re very good at school then maybe, one day.’

  He took plastic bags filled with cans of beer and slept under trees in parks for weeks, allowing the wife and mortgage of his life to evaporate with the dew. My mother fretted around the telephone, wondering how many more days would pass before she should call someone.

  He always came back eventually with red-rimmed eyes, his skin sallow and his fingernails rimmed with dirt. He crawled under the duvet and stayed there for days. I mooned around the doorway, creeping into the dark when I dared, to marvel at his drool on the pillow.

  ‘He smells like the sea,’ I whispered, tasting his sweat as it caught the back of my throat. I burrowed my face into the duvet, dreaming of shipwrecks and electric eels.

  ‘Go away,’ he groaned from the deep.

  Often he would have eaten so little and drunk so much that he would have to go to hospital to be put on a drip and be rehydrated. His whole body shook and blood dribbled down his arms as my mother ironed her heart into the creases of my school shirts.

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  One night, my mother and my auntie woke to smashing and clattering pounding up the stairs. They held their breath as the bed shook and shouts leaked between the floorboards. The next morning there was a strange metallic smell in the kitchen.

  ‘Your bloody father!’ My grandmother strained a smile over toast and jam. ‘Lost it and started flinging a tin of beans around. Thought he was going to put a hole in the flipping ceiling. Had visions of you two coming down on top of us in that bed!’ The girls looked at each other. They imagined a pair of ruby slippers sticking out from underneath their house and clicked their heels together under the table.

  Their friend Frances broke her leg roller-skating and stayed off school for a whole month. The girls went to visit her and eyeballed the stacks of magazines and the purple smirk of chocolate bars shimmering on her bedside table. They watched her dad kiss her mam on the top of the head, and overheard her mother in the street saying, ‘You know, it’s funny, like. Having our Frances at home has changed him. He’s so fucking gentle.’

  My mother went into her parents’ bedroom one afternoon and climbed onto a chair to reach the box of razor blades my grandfather kept on the top of the wardrobe. She carried them reverently into the kitchen where my auntie chipped ice cubes from their plastic holders. They wrapped the ice in a tea towel and held it on their arms until their skin goosepimpled. When the ice pooled they each picked up a blade.

  ‘I’m scared, Suze. What if we get in trouble?’

  ‘It’ll be fine, man.’

  My auntie furrowed her brow.

  My mother rattled the box. ‘Don’t you trust me?’ They pressed the razors down into each other’s arms. They gasped at how easily t
heir flesh sliced open, as though they were made from margarine. My grandmother found them ashen on the kitchen floor, their pink dresses smeared in wet red blood.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ she asked them later, bathed and bandaged in front of the fire.

  ‘We wanted to stay off school like Frances,’ my mother said sweetly, as she dipped a bourbon biscuit into a glass of milk.

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  I find it difficult to sleep in the cottage. I think it is because I don’t have many people to talk to, so my thoughts get trapped under my skin like blisters. There is nowhere else for them to go and they drift around my body as I lie in bed, rubbing against my edges.

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  My mother started wearing a terracotta turtleneck that bloomed over her stomach. People turned up their eyes when they saw her in the street and cooed and whispered over my head. She pursed her lips together and forced a smile.

  We were leaving Asda one day with a trolleyful of heavy shopping bags when she paled and clawed at her stomach through her coat.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I looked at her from behind my Mizz magazine, fresh from the plastic wrapper.

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘A cry. There was a baby crying.’ I pressed my cheek to her stomach.

  ‘Your baby?’ I looked up at her. She was pale and confused.

  ‘I. No. No, of course not. Must have been someone in the car park. Be a sweetheart and put the trolley back for me. You can keep the pound.’ I wheeled the trolley through the afternoon, resting my weight on the handle and slotting my feet on top of the wheels, flying over concrete without touching the ground.