The Language of Remembering, page 12
‘Well, as you know, you’re marrying into a rather opulent family.’
Brigid frowned and stretched her cheeks. Kathleen rolled her forefinger and thumb round each other.
‘Money, Brigid, they have money! Anyway, we have let them know that you and James and the baby are more than welcome to stay at our house for as long as you need.’
Brigid knew her mother was waiting for a reaction but in her mind that was always going to happen, it wasn’t news.
‘Thanks mammy,’ she said, as an offering.
‘Yes, yes. Well, the real news is that James’ parents have finally decided to part with some of their gold and have agreed to build a house for you on the land they own. Now before you start getting excited, remember, they shall be your neighbours. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, not alone my daughter. But that is the situation.’
Brigid felt instant relief. She went to thank her mother but Kathleen was smiling at her own comment and nothing more, and when Brigid did go to speak, Kathleen interrupted.
‘Drink up, we’ll have to leave soon. I have some things to do before we go back for your dress.’
Brigid now had lost track of time while brushing her teeth and it was only the sound of her mother knocking on the bathroom door that brought her back to the moment.
‘Hurry up in there, you’re not the only one who has to get ready.’
Brigid opened the door and her mother looked her up and down.
‘What a sight! Go downstairs and get something in you, then you can shower.’
Kathleen moved past her to the sink and Brigid walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. Tommy was at the table with a mug and a clean-shaven face.
‘Morning,’ she said, walking to the sink and filling a pot with water.
‘Morning. Did you sleep well?’
‘Not really.’
‘Make sure you eat up, it’ll be a long day.’
‘I will. Do you want anything?’
‘I’ve already eaten. There’s bacon cooked in the pan there.’
‘Thanks Da.’
He got up and walked to Brigid, who had her back to him. He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed the top of her head.
‘You’ll be alright,’ he said and walked out of the room.
She cut some bread and pasted it with butter, put the cold bacon on top and ate it like that while slurping her tea. The rest of the morning gave her no time to think. She finished her breakfast, then showered and went to put on her dress only for her mother to laugh and say, not yet, Jesus Brigid, you’ve got to get your face and hair ready first, and with that Kathleen took the wedding dress with her and walked out of the room. There were knocks on the door and Sarah-Kate and Gwen came up the stairs holding their dresses over their shoulders and laughing. Brigid hadn’t invited them, it must be Mammy’s doing, she thought, but was happy for the company.
They got ready together and there were times that Brigid wanted to talk about the baby but she didn’t want her parents hearing. She wasn’t allowed to be proud or excited yet. She hoped that after today she’d be able to talk about it openly at the table, that she could tell her parents the names she’d been drawing in large, curvy letters in her mind.
‘Where’s the dress then?’ Gwen spoke, sitting on Brigid’s bed. ‘I’m going mad to see it!’
‘Ma took it, must be in her room. It’s nothing special now. I liked it in the store but amn’t too sure now.’
‘I bet it’s divine,’ Sarah-Kate said, ‘sure you could wear anything anyway and you’d be gorgeous.’
Brigid looked at the clock in her room and it was already half past midday. They’d have to be leaving soon. She was ferociously hungry. She walked out of her room and shouted down the stairs.
‘Mammy, you wouldn’t make me up a sandwich, would you?’
‘What a time to be thinking about food!’ Came the response from the kitchen. Brigid walked into her parents’ room and saw the dress hanging in a plastic cover from the door of the wardrobe. She picked it up and folded it over her arm and brought it into her room.
‘Oh, is that it?’ Gwen asked, standing up from the bed.
‘Open it up,’ Sarah-Kate said, joining Gwen.
Brigid heard her mother on the stairs, and then the door creaking open.
‘Sandwiches for her highness.’
Kathleen put the plate on the desk that was scattered with blusher, lipstick and hair clips, and then took the dress from Brigid and hung it up from the door frame.
‘Eat those first and then you can put on the dress. Imagine, butter and crumbs all over it.’
Kathleen sat on the bed while the three of them ate sandwiches. Gwen said how tasty they were and Sarah-Kate said they were just delicious. Kathleen looked at the dress hanging, unaware of the girls’ chatter.
‘How I wish my mother had been there when I got married.’
The girls stopped talking and Brigid swallowed the food in her mouth. She looked at her mother and there was a thin glaze on her eyes.
‘Are you ok Mammy?’
‘Oh fine,’ she said, shaking her head a little. ‘Just lost in memory is all. Now, how about we get this dress on you.’
Gwen and Sarah-Kate made sounds of enthusiasm and Brigid took another bite of a sandwich before wiping her hands on a towel and taking the dress in her arms. She didn’t want to undress in front of her friends, now acutely aware of the slight bulge at her belly.
‘Mammy, will you come with me in the bathroom?’
Kathleen didn’t answer but stood up and walked with her.
Brigid took off her clothes with her back to her mother. She unclipped her bra, both hands fiddling with the clasp behind her back. Kathleen took the dress from the plastic and held it up straight with both arms, admiring it or questioning it, Brigid couldn’t tell. Brigid held onto the wall as she lifted one leg over, using her other hand to shuffle into the bottom of the dress until her foot touched the floor. Then put the other leg in. Her mother lifted it, shimmying it until Brigid’s breasts were against the fabric. She turned around and Kathleen zipped up the first part of the dress to her waist, and then fastened the buttons, forcing Brigid to breathe in tight. She turned to face her mother. Kathleen was smiling; it stuck between her cheeks as she tried not to cry.
‘My little girl,’ was all she said before kissing her lightly on the cheek and making her way back downstairs.
You slide chopped carrots, onions, garlic, rosemary and thyme into melted butter in the wok and listen to the hiss as you breathe in the smell of your mother’s cooking. Cohen half sings, half speaks to you, a million candles burning for the help that never came. You imagine the church where you did your first communion, how your mother gave you some spare change to go and light thin, waxy candles that had already been lit and blown out. You were meant to light them for your grandfathers but instead made wishes that never came true.
As you stir in the minced meat, Cohen sings that there’s a lullaby for suffering, and a paradox to blame, and you agree, know this is true, but cannot label this truth to anything that makes sense. You add tomato puree, a tablespoon of flour, and stir. Ailish is at your legs. Daddy need help? Not now and be careful, the oven is on and is very, very hot. Too hot, she asks. Yes, too hot.
You’ve been speaking more and more English to Ailish lately. You worry about her Portuguese, about her tie to her grandparents, her aunties and cousins, to Brazil. You haven’t called Nina today and know she will be waiting. Stuck up in Dublin for a few days of meetings, a city she dislikes for its greyness, and the accents she still cannot understand. She has been up to Dublin most weeks and never just for the day. You have had to calm your mind from the war it rages. She hates being needy and will be waiting for you to call so she can vent about being fed up with her colleagues, with the traffic, with the cold. You will stop yourself from asking boyish questions. You will call her on the way to class.
You turn off the hob and add freshly chopped parsley. Pour it from the wok into a large, glass oval serving dish. Take the mashed potatoes with aged cheddar cheese and dollop it on top of the meat mixture. Your mother’s arms were constantly burnt and scarred from leaning across naked flames or reaching into the darkness of the oven. She never listened to music or the radio but hummed songs her mother used to sing to her.
When she did sing, the lyrics were always as Gaeilge so you would only understand a few words, croí, bás, brón. You remember when you were very young, and your grandfather was alive, the language made sense to you. You’d listen as they all spoke around the fire with large mugs of tea. It was like listening to music, the words were all known, but put together in adult talk they became obscure or inscrutable.
You open a bottle of wine and pour a glass. From the kitchen counter you lean around the door into the sitting room and Ailish is talking a mix of words and sounds with a doll in either hand, and the sight of her, leaning forward on her knees, living another world inside her head, makes you feel warm and yet you fight the urge to cry. It is so easy for her to communicate, with you, with the doll, with the very air around her, which she talks to when it is too cold or too hot. The sounds she can make, the notes and tones that are not quite words but contain all the meaning in the world. You understand her sighs, the sticky thud she makes with her tongue on her palate when excited. There is no language needed, no syntax, no agreements.
In the second or third class is when the words stopped making sense to you. The Irish language became shapes and noises, and, even for a time, English became a fuzz of black and white. You stopped reading. You stopped being able to write your name. You remember your mother on the phone downstairs calling friends, relatives, repeating questions, scraping pleas from the back of her throat. She didn’t have the money for the doctors needed, the ones whose names she whispered; now with her husband in the ground, she didn’t have the time.
You remember your granny pacing in the kitchen. You were playing games in the sitting room but the door was open and you pretended not to be listening.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake Brigid, just ask them, don’t be so adamant, especially when you’re wrong.’
‘I won’t mammy, I won’t. Not after what they said, I mean after all these years!’
She brought you once to a centre where the waiting stretched out like the rows of plastic chairs. When your name was called, a tall woman with very large glasses asked your mother to wait and you went with the woman into a room where there was a sofa and lots of toys to play with. She spoke some words in Irish to you, they sounded like grass being cut. Then she asked you your age in English and what you liked to do. You reached into one of the boxes and pulled out a plastic telephone that had the ring of numbers and you put your finger to the hole of number four and pulled it round and listened to it click click click all the way back into its place. It was your favourite number; your father’s favourite number. You wondered what happened to numbers that wanted to be words.
She asked about your father and you told her how your mother came into your room to tell you he had gone and how you thought of how the word ‘go’ still had an association with ‘where’, ‘place’, ‘return.’ She told you that your mother told her it was you who had been with him, sitting out in the garden. When he fell from the bench, clutching at his chest, his eyes open looking up at the ballooning grey clouds. It was you who were with him. Maybe, you said, could be. I don’t remember. She told you it had been a short time ago, and you said yes, maybe, could be. But it feels like so much longer.
Later she opened a book and asked if you liked it. You nodded and looked up from where you were sitting into her eyes, which were magnified by her glasses so she looked cartoonish. Why don’t you read it to me? The words were beautiful shapes that scattered down the page like black rainfall. There was a design in the white spaces. You imagined a tiny little ball falling in between the cracks trying to get to the end. You squinted and the words looked like tiny birds flying against clouds. You closed the book and handed it back to her and walked out of the room without being able to say, thank you, or goodbye, or sorry. You felt the need to apologise but for what you weren’t exactly sure.
You take the glass of wine and sit on the sofa in the sitting room and Ailish climbs up next to you and puts her arms around one of your arms and her head on your shoulder and clicks her tongue. If this is not language then you don’t know what is. She leaves the room quickly and you hear her feet on the stairs. She has gone up them and down them a million times yet every time you still see her fallen at the bottom of the stairs, head twisted to the wrong side, eyes agape, blood at her mouth. Her legs shuffle against each other as she comes back in with The Gruffalo and sits back down and opens it up. You read it and she reads along even though the letters don’t make sense to her yet – she has it all in her head, a pre-language of sorts.
Your mobile rings. While finding it you think of how the mouse fools them all, and you wonder if you can fool your own mind into remembering your dad, the bench. The nurse talks in hurried, breathy phrases. In the nursing home they speak like this. You know they must have a list of similar calls to make. Suddenly you miss Mary, wonder why you never sent her a hamper like you said you would. You talk back. Yes. Tomorrow, ok. Lunchtime. No, just me. Then you hang up and walk into the kitchen and look into the oven without checking to see if the potatoes are browning and the cheddar is melting and starting to crisp. You hope it will be ready before you have to leave for your class. You try to remember the word for daughter, for mother, for hope.
The Gruffalo is on the floor and your daughter runs to your legs again, holds you and says, I love you too much. You say, my girl, my girl. She looks up and smiles the most perfect little teeth and says, my daddy, my daddy. You know there is nothing more beautiful that language can offer. You sit on the sofa with her and tell her you have to go out tonight but Katie will babysit and you won’t be long. She doesn’t say anything but licks her lips and fiddles her thumbs together and curls her fingers as if stretching something between them, casting an answer in the air. I know, you say, but I have to, I won’t be long.
You take the Cottage Pie from the oven and let it cool on the counter. You will eat when you get back. When Katie arrives your daughter sulks but you turn on the TV for her and say she can watch two full episodes of Paw Patrol before dinner. She half smiles and blows you a kiss as you walk out the front door. In the car you practice words in your head, little phrases. You wonder what good it will do, knowing how to say it is sunny, or that you are hungry, or that you are thirty-five years-old, when what you really want to say is too convoluted for any language.
You are one of the first to arrive and the seats are in a circle and there is a ball in the middle and the teacher, Seán, walks to meet you and puts out his hand and says, conas atá tú inniu, Oisín? You smile and feel awkward and say táim ceart go leor, táim ceart go leor. Even though you are not, even though the word for what you are is cemented somewhere inside of you. You imagine whatever it is being pulled out and you hear it clatter into a metal, surgical tray, echoing.
As you sit down you remember getting your deviated septum fixed, how on the first visit to the doctor after the surgery, he lay you back on his chair and shoved the cotton on the end of the forceps into each nostril, pushing them inwards and upwards until you felt them by your eye sockets. Then he cut at hardened things inside your nostrils and used the forceps again to pull the soggy, crimson cotton free. It was such an invasion you thought you’d pass out. Then afterwards he asked you to breathe through your nose and you felt clogs of blood squirm down the back of your throat. Then there was so much air. You would like to be able to breathe like that again.
The game begins when the rest of the students arrive. The objective is to say three things about yourself, two of them are true and one of them is false. Then you throw the ball to someone and they have to guess which one is false. You are nervous because you cannot think of what to say and really want to use these classes to find the words you have to say, but it is week seven and still you haven’t said máthair, cuimhne, bás.
There is a woman with a pointy face who starts, you cannot say what exactly it is that makes it pointy because when you focus on her nose or her chin, they do not look overly pronged, but the umbrella of all of her features makes her look indignant and aciculate. She throws the ball to you and you can only understand one of the things she said, which is she lived abroad for a year, and even though you think it’s true you say it’s false, but can’t remember the word for false so just say it in English, and then she answers no, that it is not bréagach, and that she actually lived in France and speaks four languages. What was false about her was that she had once owned a bakery. You didn’t know the word for that, bácús.
It is your turn and your heart thickens. The sensation reminds you of being a teenager, afraid your voice would break while having to read Heaney’s Digging aloud in assembly one morning. It had been a punishment for something and you had read the poem a hundred times before having to stand up and read it aloud, and each time you read it you thought of your father, his pen scrawling letters in leather bound notebooks. You wonder where they could be now and think of asking your mother again, and even though you know the word for notebook you do not know if you could put it in a question. Anois, bain triail as, Seán says and smiles at you. Well, you say. Well, you say again and for the life of you, you cannot think of any truth you feel like sharing. The only lie that comes to you is that your father is still alive but that doesn’t seem appropriate. Sometimes it feels like a truth. You think he is alive somewhere for his death is a memory that is not complete and therefore not completely real. At so many moments through your life you have imagined him just too far away, and when you, on the rare occasion say, I wish my dad could be here, in your head you imagine him alive, elsewhere, wishing too that he could be there. Tá iníon amháin agam, you say and picture your daughter’s face, probably getting impatient already, refusing to go to bed without you. You have one daughter, which is the truth, but seems like a lie. You think of the stillbirth, your baby boy, who had the name of your father.
