Ah so, what is it about me that makes it so obvious? And now it isn’t just old ladies that are noticing. Uncle Dom, my father’s younger brother, floats unbidden into my mind. He found sobriety and Jesus in the same instance. I preferred him before, when he went around with red-rimmed wet eyes, and lamented the world as being in a permanent ‘state of chassis’。 I liked his taste for the melancholy; he seemed to walk straight out of the pages of an O’Casey/Chekhov hybrid: a frustrated, apparently brilliant man thwarted by the world and its machinations. I was his ‘little dolly’ before he fell in love with Jesus, his special little girl, and he used to love to brush my hair and sing to me. There was nothing in it, not in the way my father later interpreted, but his banishment from our house was part of him getting sober. Jesus cards arrived, addressed to us all. My father had always welcomed God in all his guises into the house, but Dom never entered our door again. I missed him, like I missed my mother’s sister Amy, a blowsy ‘floozie’ （according to Lara）。 Following a spectacular row with Lara the Christmas Eve when I was thirteen, Amy left, or was thrown out, I can’t remember exactly, but I never heard from her again. Lara orchestrated this: our insular life, where she held all the control.
The man has turned his back on me and is staring out the streaked window at the traffic hurtling past. A silence has descended in the shop and the noises from outside are amplified. The daughter’s voice rises over the rush and roar of the cars and speaks to the man’s back: ‘That will be an extra eight euro fifty.’ He hands her a tenner and says, ‘Keep the change,’ and walks out of the shop. The girl shouts after him, ‘Your pizzas are nearly ready.’ He’s gone.
I turn the card over in my hand and study it: David Smythe. A sturdy name. In his wake he has left an impression of orderliness and togetherness, though I can’t recall a single fact about his appearance. Hair colour? Eyes? Clothes? Nothing, except polished brogues and his long fingers. And cheekbones, taut skin pulled upwards. A reverberation. A voice that knows things. And a feeling of solidity, being near to him.
The girl is holding out a bag for me. ‘That’ll be the fifty,’ she says. I hand over the note and leave, my legs heavy. ‘It’s a lovely evening, T, shall we have a picnic on the green?’ Tommy is trailing his trainers along the ground, scuffing them. ‘Pizza on the grass?’ he asks Herbie, who is still subdued and tense. Whoever said dogs have no memories? I could bet every second of our time together is inscribed in that fella’s brain, and this latest incident made no sense at all of what went before. Maybe all humans are just assholes, not to be trusted. Maybe you’re right, Herbie.
The air is sweet and soft, carrying all the scents of the aftermath of summer drizzle. My senses are heightened as I inhale the smell of the grass, the damp earth, the mossy tree trunks looking like gnarled elephant skin. As soon as we reach the green I take off my cardigan and spread it on the ground for my boys to sit on. I pull off a slice of pizza for Tommy, who gives the first one to Herbie, then takes his, sinks his teeth in, his eyes closing, a parody of a grown-up experiencing a moment of bliss. One bite is enough for me, unable to deny the origins of the cheese. Tommy opens his eyes, looks at me, studies me.
‘Yaya, the black birdies will come if you don’t eat.’
Jesus, when did I tell him about the black birds of worry? I remember being told something similar. By whom? My mother? Lara? Unlikely that it was Lara, who never told me anything, except when she wanted me to know about my father’s disapproval.
‘Yaya, you must eat!’
I tousle Tommy’s hair and say, ‘I will later – promise, darling – you’re not to worry now. You enjoy your pizza.’
My stomach feels full and bloated, though it must be empty, and I’m scared I might swallow my tongue, which seems to take up all the space in my mouth. I lie back on the patch of scrub and stare at the slouchy night sky above, so low it looks as if it might fall down on our heads and cover us in a cloak of cloud. I allow myself to absorb the moment: the sound of my boys munching, the heaviness in my limbs and the realisation that something has caught up with me. My eyelids droop, exhausted by the job of framing eyes such as mine: Woe is me, to have seen what I have seen, see what I see… The crowd is hushed, awed into silence. Ophelia’s way out was always an attractive proposition, a poetic end to a life of tragedy. As a mother, my own sense of the tragic, the personal absorption in that realm, has been punctured. I have someone else to think of and this doesn’t fit with my former view of myself. I would never have been cast as the role of the mother. A famous casting director told me this. I didn’t embody those particular attributes: I was ‘too angular and febrile’。 I think this was meant as a compliment.