I ignore the visitors’ book on the table next to the coat rack, take the stairs to the first floor. At the top, I unlock the safety gate and close it behind me. Walking down the corridor, I see your friend, Lily, a tiny woman in her eighties, putting something away in her drawer, another woman pulling up her tights and a middle-aged man in a wheelchair doing a jigsaw puzzle with the radio blaring.
I knock on your door, find you sitting on the bed, dressed in layers of jumpers, your mismatched collars exposing your frail neck and collarbone. You have your pyjama bottoms on and your slippers. Not the new sheepskin ones I brought from New Zealand for you. They were lovely, you said, but far too good to wear.
“Did you bring the suitcase? I want to go home,” you say, your expression defiant, your blue eyes glaring at me.
“But you’ve only a few more weeks left now, and you’re doing so much better,” I tell you, lying. Neither I nor my sister Clara have the heart to tell you the move to the nursing home is permanent.
“I want to go home,” you repeat angrily. You get up and move towards the door.
“Did something happen?” I ask, guiding you back to your bed and sitting on the armchair opposite.
“Those fecking kids were hammering balls all night in the corridor. I didn’t sleep a wink. I’ve had enough; I’ve no peace at all.”
I know better than to contradict you. For the past couple of years, you’ve seen and heard things that others don’t see or hear, and to tell you otherwise only frightens you. This isn’t the first time you’ve said you want to go home, but even if you could leave, I wonder, would you turn right or left at the nursing-home gates, would you have the strength to walk up the last hill home, would you even know which house you were looking for? Would you see what was there, or your own distant memories of the path, just as I still remember the particular corner where Brian McCann kicked me in the shin on my first day home from convent school aged ten, or the widow Ringrose’s bed and breakfast, which has been flattened to make way for a new roundabout. How dreary suburbia looks here: the concrete walls, the monotonous front lawns, the dearth of trees, the sky – all a relentless grey.
I change the subject. “Would you like to go for a drive?”
Your expression softens. You smile as though considering it and then ask where we’d go.
“Anywhere you’d like.”
“Well, I’ve always wanted to go to Donegal. I hear it’s lovely. My uncle Eddie, Maggie’s husband, was from there. A nicer man you couldn’t meet.”
“It is lovely. Beaches that go on forever. It’s where I met Gianni,” I say.
“Who’s that?”
“My husband.” I immediately regret bringing him up. The word husband sticks in my throat, along with the omission of the prefix – ex. I haven’t told you about the divorce, or that it happened five years ago. I haven’t told anyone that it’s Aaron I’d been thinking about lately and not Gianni. It would only worry you, and Clara has enough on her plate.
“Oh, you mean John?”
“John, Gianni, Sean, Hone …”
You laugh and look at me strangely. I wonder if you think I have four husbands.
“Will it be cold?” you ask.
I’m surprised you’re still following the conversation.
“Ah, you’re always cold. Sure, we can wrap you up like a present.”
“Best of things come in small parcels,” you say, a phrase you’ve repeated many times over the years.
“They do.”
“Will we head away so?”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure, you’re not going back to Australia yet, are you?”
I sigh. “New Zealand. No, not for another few days.”
“Well then, have you somewhere else you need to be?”
I can’t help but laugh. I’m still unaccustomed to this new version of you, the you who’s lost your filter and says whatyou’re thinking, or what I least expect, or forgets what you’ve said only minutes before.
“I’ll need my suitcase though.”
“We can pick that up on the way. We won’t need much for a couple of days,” I say, quickly considering the logistics: the bed and breakfasts to book along the way, how I’ll need to extend the rental on the car, leave it at Donegal Airport so we can fly back.
Downstairs the reception desk is unattended, and the foyer is quiet. I take you by the arm, and we pass through the front door and walk to the car. It’s a cold November day. A scattering of leaves rustles and shifts in the breeze.
“Are you taking me home?” you ask as I secure the safety belt over your waist.
“No, we’re off on a little adventure.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see, ” I say and, turning on the engine, I drive down the short driveway to the gates and turn right.
A couple of hours into the journey, you wake up from a nap, look out the window, at the green fields, the bruised sky spinning by, the rain spattering the windscreen.
“Where are we, Clara? I thought we were going home.”
“It’s Grace. We’re going on a little road trip, remember? “
“Where to?”
“Donegal.”
“Why are we going there?”
“You said you always wanted to.”
“Ah no, sure I’m happy as I am, and that’s miles away.”
“It’s not that far. Only a few hours. I’ve booked us a night in Clifden, and then on to Donegal the next day.”
“Where’s your father?”
“It’s a girly weekend.”
“And Clara?”
“She couldn’t make it, ” I lie. “She’d a wedding to go to.”
“Oh, I love weddings. Who’s getting married?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“I don’t remember my own wedding. Isn’t that terrible? I still remember the day you were born though.”
I could say that the story you will tell me now, the one you’ve always told me, of you giving birth to me is not yours to tell, that it’s a fabrication, but I imagine it’s so embedded in your memory that you’ve forgotten the lie you manufactured forty-two years earlier.
“You were such a big baby,” you continue. “Came out in a flash. Two and a half-hour labour. And you never gave a moment’s trouble until you got your feet on the ground, and then you were into everything. You could never stay still.”
“Will we put on the radio for a bit?” I suggest, changing the subject.
“Joe might be on.”
‘Joe?’
“Joe, the fellow who everyone calls up and complains to,” you say.
“Oh, Joe Duffy?”
“That’s the man.”
No sooner do I put the radio on than a call comes through from Clara.
“Grace. They can’t find Mam in the nursing home,” she says, her voice full of concern.
“Oh, she’s with me. I’m taking her away for a couple of days.”
“Jesus, Grace. You could have told me.”
“Well, she said she fancied a drive, and she’s cooped up all day in that place. She’s going mad.”
“But you can’t just …”
“Why can’t I? It’s not like I’m kidnapping her. I won’t be here much longer.” There’s a pause. I can hear her sigh down the line before she continues.
“Grace, they have protocols, you should have signed her out.”
“Ah, feck the protocols. She’s dying of boredom in that room. She hates the place. You can talk to her, if you like?”
I put the call on speakerphone.
“Mam?”
“Yes, love. I’m off galivanting.”
“Are you all right?”
“I am, of course. I’m grand.”
“Where are you off to?”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you. Where are we going?”
“Donegal.”
“Jesus, Grace, that’s miles away. She’s never been a good traveller, you know that.”
“It’s not that far, and we’re only half an hour from Clifden now, and I’ve booked a lovely bed and breakfast.”
I’d swear I hear Clara gritting her teeth. “I’ll call the home then and let them know.”
“Right you are. I have to go. I don’t want to miss our turn-off. I’ll call you later.” I hang up before she can say anything else.
“Bye now,” you call after Clara. “Bye-bye, love.”
*
We stop in a hotel in Clifden for an early dinner. You choose a table closest to the fire, and as you tuck into your meal you tell me it’s gorgeous, that the food in that place you’ve come from isn’t fit for pigs. I look at you, the expression on your face benign, content. Every so often, you look around at a customer approaching the bar or a waiter delivering a steaming-hot meal to a table. You’ve always been curious about people, eager for small talk with strangers. You turn your attention back to me and ask your routine set of questions, questions you’ve asked me several times in the past couple of weeks. How’s John? Gianni. Fine (I have no idea). And work at the university? Fine (I’ve been told my contract won’t be renewed next year). Have you enough money? I do (enough for a year at best. I don’t tell you I’m thinking of leaving Wellington).
When a young waitress comes to clear the table, you tell her it’s the best meal you’ve had all year. The girl smiles but is slightly embarrassed, doesn’t look either of us in the eye. I’d like dessert, but I also want to avoid repeating the scene a couple of weeks earlier when you’d shouted at me for ordering one. The tone you’d used, like I was a wayward child, the way you’ve always tried to control my choices, made me so angry I told you to shut up. We didn’t speak for the rest of the day. When I mentioned what had happened to Clara, she said I needed to be more patient, that you weren’t yourself, that you didn’t know what you were saying. Clara and my father, your great defenders.
It’s dark when we arrive at the bed and breakfast. The room is spacious and warm, the hostess friendly but not overly curious. I turn on the electric blanket and help you undress. It’s been years since I’ve seen your body under the layers of jumpers, polyester slacks, thermals, thick woollen tights. Laid bare, you’re a shell, your shoulders and back narrowed and curved, your breasts sagging. Your muffin top, or extra tyre as you’ve always called it, deflated. The only part of your body that you’ve ever liked, your legs, have lost their muscle tone, your calves like two baseball bats. As I help you into your pyjamas, you stroke me on the cheek, tell me I’m looking tired.
“Do you remember when you’d sleep with me when you were small? When your father worked nights?” you ask.
“I do.”
“I could never sleep with Clara. She was always twisting and turning but you …” She leaves the sentence dangling and unfinished.
I ask if you’d like to take a shower, but you tell me you’ll wait until the morning, that it’s time to say your prayers.
The water is tepid when I get in, the pressure little more than a dribble. I wonder if you still include me in your prayers.
When we sit down for breakfast, you say you’re not hungry, but when we’re offered porridge or a full Irish, you choose the latter and polish it off in less than fifteen minutes. I look out the window, at the glimpse of blue to the east in an otherwise grey sky, the trees on the hill swinging from side to side in the wind. It’s raining. Before leaving the dining room, the hostess offers us brochures on things to do in Clifden and the Connemara region, recommends we see Kylemore Castle and Abbey, the latter which has been run by the Benedictine nuns since the 1900s.
After breakfast we drive to Letterfrack, where you admire the multi-coloured terrace houses in pinks and lemons and green, the old stone walls, the sheep grazing in the gorse-lined fields. By the time we reach Kylemore Abbey, the rain has eased, and I park as close to the entrance as I can. You complain about having to walk, say your arthritis is killing you. I tell you the abbey’s walls are three feet wide in places, that the granite came from Dalkey in Dublin, the limestone from Galway. I don’t think you’re listening. You’ve never been particularly interested in history.
Despite your whinging, you’ve picked up your pace, eager to get out of the cold. Beyond the granite archway door, the ceilings are high and cavernous, the walls wood panelled. I pay the entrance fee, and we start the tour at a gallery called The Benedictine Order: from Ypres to Connemara. Large information panels recount the history of the nuns, how they fled Belgium for Ireland after World War I when their convent was destroyed by bombing. There’s a smattering of tourists in canary-yellow and moss-green raingear, with American accents or speaking German and French. I watch as you glance at the paintings of long-dead nuns in their black veils, white bandeaus and coifs, their pale faces a mixture of stern and serene. We admire the artefacts in the glass cabinets; you particularly like a Victorian bible encased in silver. I read about the 1959 fire that destroyed the west wing: ‘the tower bell melted into thin air …the leaded roof was no more; stairways, dormitories, guest rooms were in shambles …’
When I look around, you’re not there. I walk to the next room, find myself surrounded by another gallery of nuns. I can’t help feeling as if I’m back in school with Sister Rita scowling at me for not knowing Pythagoras’ theorem. There’s no sign of you. I’m vaguely panicked but reason that you couldn’t have gone far. Then again, there are enough rooms in this place to get lost for days, and if I lose you, Clara will kill me. I hurry past a small tour group, catch a sentence about the Henrys, the first family to live in the castle in the 1860s. I walk from the library to the drawing room, from the morning room to the saloon hall, and am about to return to the entrance and announce your disappearance when I see you standing at the end of the front hall in conversation with a nun.
As I approach, I hear you say the words Ursuline Order and twelve years. I’m surprised you’re telling this nun, this stranger, what you’ve always sworn us to secrecy about: that you were once a nun, and although you never said it overtly, leaving was the biggest failure of your life. But you never really left – you still say your Divine Office every morning, and growing up, Clara and I may as well have been your little novices, with all the rosaries and Holy Hours, the fasting and daily Masses at Lent, the pilgrimages to shrines.
I’m greeted with smiles, and you say, “This is my daughter Clara’s eldest child, Grace. She lives in New Zealand.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I imagine all the blood draining from my face. I feel like you’ve punched me in the stomach. The nun offers her hand, and I shake it limply.
“There’s Mass in the chapel at midday, and the sister has invited me along,” you say, excitedly.
“You’re welcome too if you’d like to come, dear,” the nun says. She reminds me a little of a kind and funny nun at school, Sister Miriam, with her red cheeks and bottle-thick glasses. I look at you, the hopeful expression on your face. I could protest and say we need to be on the road, we still have a three-hour drive to Donegal, but I can see you’ve already made up your mind.
“I’d like to have a look around the grounds, thanks. I’ll come find you after,” I say, straining a smile. I can see you’re disappointed, but I don’t care.
Outside it’s drizzling. I vaguely take in the Victorian garden, the manicured lawns lined with plants, the amber chestnut leaves sodden along the gravel path, visitors taking photos. I sit on a bench, feel the wet seeping through my jeans and into my legs. Four missed calls from Clara, but I can’t talk to her now. I can’t tell my sister – really my mother, who had me secretly when she was fourteen – that the Cleary family secret is out in the open. The shame you, my supposed mother, have concealed for decades has been revealed, and the irony: if I were to ask you in a few hours, you probably wouldn’t remember, you’d say you didn’t know what I was talking about.
In the car, you tell me how beautiful the Mass was and the chapel, how lovely the nuns were, that you wished I’d come along. I turn on the radio to Lyric FM. You’ve always liked classical music. An hour into the drive, you tell me you’re feeling stiff from sitting. I pull into a carpark overlooking the Atlantic.
“Will we go for a walk on the beach so?” I suggest.
“Ah no, Clara, it’s a bit too cold for me, I’m grand here. You go ahead and enjoy yourself.”
“Grace. My name is Grace.”
“Sorry, love, I’m not very good with names these days. You know who I mean.”
I get out, stand a few metres from the car, look at the ocean below, at the jagged cliffs, the small offshore islands in the distance. I’d like to run down the hill to the beach, but I won’t. Despite your urging, I’m familiar with the tone of your voice and your expression – how your eyes darted around you when I suggested the walk, assessing: the remoteness of the place, the wind picking up, the surging grey sea. I know right now you’re conjuring all kinds of disasters: how I might trip walking down the hill and hurt myself, catch a cold from the wind, be swept away.
A few minutes later, when I get back into the car, as if reading my mind, you ask, ‘You wouldn’t swim in the sea today, would you?’
“I wouldn’t,” I say, amused. “It’s the North Atlantic in November. I’m not bonkers.” Mam is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t say it.
I know it doesn’t matter if I say I won’t do something or deny it. You don’t trust me. I have a history of concealing things; you taught me well.
Virgin Mary grottos dot the narrow, twisting roads into villages, cows and sheep graze on lumpy land, pitted with tussock. By the time we arrive at the bed and breakfast in Donegal, it’s just gone five o’clock. I help you into bed. You pull the blankets to your ears, until I can just see your face, your mouth withered from the lack of dentures. Your index finger rests on the bridge of your nose, your fingers spread over your mouth and chin as if you were trying to stifle yourself from speaking. I kiss you on the cheek.
“I’m going to go for a quick walk. I won’t be long.”
“Grand,” you say. “Take your time. Wrap up now, won’t you? It’s very cold.”
The sky to the northwest is broodier, the sea calmer than earlier, the last of a faint sunlight playing hide and seek behind a sweeping caravan of cloud. There’s no one on the beach, though the sand stretches for miles. Although the air’s brisk and the wind invigorating, I’m exhausted. Maybe it would have been better if I’d stayed with you and had a sleep myself, but I sensed that familiar feeling sneaking up on me: my patience draining, like I’m being bled slowly. I promised myself that I wouldn’t argue with you.
I walk closer to the shore, play dodgem with the waves. If I screamed here, no one would hear me. I pace up and down a few metres, trace my footprints over and over again. I’ve been fantasising about leaving Wellington for Great Barrier Island since I got notice at work, my thoughts drifting back to a summer twenty years before, when the husband you knew nothing about, Aaron Brouwer, took me to his family home there. When I told you I was going to New Zealand, you thought it was another one of my half-arsed, ill-thought-out travelling schemes, like the time I went to Africa and had to come back early because I’d caught malaria.
That summer, Aaron had shown me a world that was as natural to him as concrete and rain had been to me, teaching the awkward suburban girl he’d met in London that I could do anything. He taught me to swim and fish, to gather stream water and light fires. Some nights, when it was too hot to sleep, when the click and buzz of the cicadas was relentless, we’d run down to the beach and dive into the silvery-black sea, float in the waves holding hands, gaze at the starry dome of sky and feel as if we were the only two people in the world.
When we weren’t helping his father on the farm, we’d roam the tracks around his family’s old bach, and he’d show me something new: the old pā site with food pits in the grass like craters; the spindly mānuka beloved to bees; the papery bark of tōtara I always imagined leaving tiny, folded messages in. He’d identify bird calls: tūī and kākā, kororā after dusk. We even had our own little bird, a banded rail we’d called Bertie, who’d gingerly approach the compost looking for food. We’d play Scrabble in the evenings, fall asleep wrapped in each other’s limbs as the ruru called out under our window.
We were married almost a year, when, on a weekend away with some mates, he died in a freak boating accident. He was only twenty-three. Even then I couldn’t tell you about him, couldn’t articulate the words – he’s gone. You begged me to come home, couldn’t understand why I’d stay away when I’d said I was going for only a year, but I couldn’t leave. I still can’t. I look out at the Atlantic. In the time I’ve been pacing the shoreline, it’s turned dark, the stars no longer visible as a front comes in with heavy rain.
I’m drenched through when I get back to the car. I miss the turn-off to the bed and breakfast, feel as if I’ve been driving in circles, crisscrossing dark country roads as illegible to me as hieroglyphs. My chest tightens, my thoughts swing from one branch to another. I’m a simian acrobat, unable to settle, skittish. I can’t think straight. I pull over, the headlights illuminating a steel gate, the rain hammering the car slantways. Breathe, I tell myself, just breathe. Stop catastrophising. The worst possible scenario: I might have to spend the night in the car. I’ll be cold and uncomfortable, but I’ll be all right. But that isn’t the worst possible scenario; that’s you in a room in a strange place, waking up and not knowing where you are and wondering where the hell I am. I have a vision of you standing at the front gate of the bed and breakfast, soaking wet in your pyjamas, walking the roads barefoot looking for me.
A car passes with a Donegal licence plate, and I pull out, hoping that if I follow them, they might at least lead me to a main road. At a T-junction, I see the sign for the bed and breakfast, and for the first time in years I thank baby Jesus and all his saints. I’d planned on going for an hour, and I’ve been gone two and a half. When I creep into the room, your bedside lamp is on, and it looks as if you haven’t moved positions since I left you. I expect you to say my name, to ask me how my walk was, but all I hear are your quiet breaths. I turn off the lamp. It takes me a while to fall asleep.
The next morning the sky’s an almost cloudless blue. There’s been a hard frost overnight, the temperature’s dropped a few degrees. You don’t want to get out of the car, tell me again that it’s too cold, but I insist. You can’t come all this way and not take a few steps on a Donegal beach, I tell you. Reluctantly you agree, put on your hat and gloves, take me by the arm as we walk slowly to the shore. We can see Inishkeel Island in the distance.
“At low tide it’s possible to walk to the island in spring, to see the sixth-century monastic ruins and church,” I say.
“Ah, Clara, I can’t walk that far, it’s miles away, my auld bones are killing me,” you say, stopping and turning to face me, your eyes pleading.
You’re not listening. “It’s two-hundred-and-fifty metres away, and besides we can’t do it now, the tide’s too high and it’s autumn.”
“Oh, thank God for small mercies.”
“I thought you’d be interested in that kind of thing.”
“Well, not if it means drowning to death.”
“St Conal Cael’s buried on the island,” I tell you, changing tack. “According to legend, he was exiled to the island for murdering his father in a fit of rage, forbidden from leaving until he was calm enough for a bird to nest in the cup of his hand.”
“He never calmed down so?”
I laugh. “He founded a monastery in 598.”
“God, he must have been freezing,” you say. “I’m freezing. Can we go back to the car now, please? The beach is lovely, but I’ve had enough. I want to go home.”
I don’t answer you immediately, and then I ask you where’s home?
“Have you gone mad altogether, Clara? You know well, where your father and me live.”
“Grace. I’m Grace. Where’s home?” I ask again.
“Carrigeen, of course,” you say, looking at me as if you don’t recognise me.
Carrigeen. The one place I can’t take you. The house where we lived when we were small: Clara and me; the cottage with a rose garden out front, crows cawing day and night in the fields behind us. The house that was converted to a modern two-storey several years ago.
“Can we go home, please? I want to go home now.” Your face is cross, your tone petulant.
“But we’ve a couple of hours to our flight yet,” I say, trying to reason with you.
“I want to go home now, do you hear me, Grace? Will you do what you’re told for once in your life?”
We walk back to the car in silence. I enter the address for Donegal Airport into the GPS. I can’t look at you now. I don’t know what to say.
When I was small, you’d wash my hair every Saturday in the kitchen sink. On special occasions, you’d massage an egg white into my hair, said it made it extra shiny. I remember this now as I comb your hair on the morning of my departure. You’re always quiet when I’m about to head back, tell me it’ll be the last time you see me, that you don’t think you’ll last much longer, that you hope you won’t. I’ve never understood your hunger for the afterlife.
When I’m finished combing your hair, you squish up your face and make a funny expression, your mouth collapsing into itself without your dentures. You look into the mirror and tell me that I’ve done a grand job.
“You’ve enough money now, don’t you?” you ask again.
“I do, thanks.”
“Would you not think of coming home?”
“I am home. New Zealand is home.”
“Ah no, home is where the heart is, Clara.”
“Grace, it’s Grace.”
“Oh, I know, love. Grace. Hail Mary full of grace, blessed are you among women …”
My phone rings. Clara’s waiting downstairs to take me to the train station.
I have to go now, I tell you, but I’ll be back again in a year or so.
Your eyes fill with tears as you look at me. You hold me in your arms for what feels like an age.
“And when you do come back,” you say, letting me go, “we’ll go to Donegal. I’ve always wanted to go there, you know.”
“We will, Mam,” I say. “I promise. “
Taken with kind permission from the excellent new short story collection Islands Ever After by Majella Cullinane (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $37.50), available in bookstores nationwide. The stories span the 18th century to the present, and are primarily set on islands across Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand, such as Dunedin’s Quarantine Island. Another story was inspired by the sinking of The SS Wairarapa on Great Barrier Island in 1894.
