Thanks for the Memories

‘Dad, I’ve never called around to stay here because of mice.’

‘There’s a first time for everything. Your mother used to do that. Hated the things. Used to stay at your grandmother’s for the few days while I ran around here like that cartoon cat trying to catch them. Tom or Jerry, was it?’ He squeezes his eyes closed tight to think, then opens them again, none the wiser. ‘I never knew the difference but by God they knew it when I was after them.’ He raises a fist, looks feisty for a moment while captured in the thought and then he stops suddenly and carries my suitcases into the hall.

‘Dad?’ I say, frustrated. ‘I thought you understood me on the phone. Conor and I have separated.’

‘Separated what?’

‘Ourselves.’

‘From what?’

‘From each other!’

‘What on earth are you talking about, Gracie?’

‘Joyce. We’re not together any more. We’ve split up.’

He puts the bags down by the hall’s wall of photographs, there to provide any visitor who crosses the threshold with a crash course of the Conway family history. Dad as a boy, Mum as a girl, Dad and Mum courting, married, my christening, communion, débutant ball and wedding. Capture it, frame it, display it; Mum and Dad’s school of thought. It’s funny how people mark their lives, the benchmarks they choose to decide when a moment is more of a moment than any other. For life is made of them. I like to think the best ones of all are in my mind, that they run through my blood in their own memory bank for no one else but me to see.

Dad doesn’t pause for a moment at the revelations of my failed marriage and instead works his way into the kitchen. ‘Cuppa?’

I stay in the hall looking around at the photos and breathe in that smell. The smell that’s carried around everyday on every stitch of Dad’s back, like a snail carries its home. I always thought it was the smell of Mum’s cooking that drifted around the rooms and seeped into every fibre, including the wallpaper, but it’s ten years since Mum has passed away. Perhaps the scent was her; perhaps it’s still her.

‘What are you doin’ sniffin’ the walls?’

I jump, startled and embarrassed at being caught, and make my way into the kitchen. It hasn’t changed since I lived here and it’s as spotless as the day Mum left it, nothing moved, not even for convenience’s sake. I watch Dad move slowly about, resting on his left foot to access the cupboards below, and then using the extra inches of his right leg as his own personal footstool to reach above. The kettle boils too loudly for us to have a conversation and I’m glad of that because Dad grips the handle so tightly his knuckles are white. A teaspoon is cupped in his left hand, which rests on his hip, and it reminds me of how he used to stand with his cigarette, shielded in his cupped hand that’d be stained yellow from nicotine. He looks out to his immaculate garden and grinds his teeth. He’s angry and I feel like a teenager once again, awaiting my talking-down.

‘What are you thinking about, Dad?’ I finally ask as soon as the kettle stops hopping about like a crammed Hill 16 in Croke Park during an All-Ireland Final.

‘The garden,’ he replies, his jaw tightening once again.

‘The garden?’

‘That bloody cat from next door keeps pissing on your mother’s roses.’ He shakes his head angrily. ‘Fluffy,’ he throws his hands up, ‘that’s what she calls him. Well, Fluffy won’t be so fluffy when I get my hands on him. I’ll be wearin’ one of them fine furry hats the Russians wear and I’ll dance the hopak outside Mrs Henderson’s front garden while she wraps a shiverin’ Baldy up in a blanket inside.’

‘Is that what you’re really thinking about?’ I ask incredulously.

‘Well, not really, love,’ he confesses, calming down. ‘That and the daffodils. Not far off from planting season for spring. And some crocuses. I’ll have to get some bulbs.’

Good to know my marriage breakdown isn’t my dad’s main priority. Nor his second. On the list after crocuses.

‘Snowdrops too,’ he adds.

It’s rare I’m around the area so early on in the day. Usually I’d be at work showing property around the city. It’s so quiet now with everyone at work, I wonder what on earth Dad does in this silence.

‘What were you doing before I came?’

‘Thirty-three years ago or today?’

‘Today.’ I try not to smile because I know he’s serious.

‘Quiz.’ He nods at the kitchen table where he has a page full of puzzles and quizzes. Half of them are completed. ‘I’m stuck on the number six. Have a look at that.’ He brings the cups of tea to the table, managing not to spill a drop despite his swaying. Always steady.

‘“Which of Mozart’s operas was not well received by one especially influential critic who summed up the work as having ‘Too many notes’?”’ I read the clue aloud.

‘Mozart,’ Dad shrugs. ‘Haven’t a clue about that lad at all.’

‘Emperor Joseph the Second,’ I say.

‘What’s that now?’ Dad’s caterpillar eyebrows go up in surprise. ‘How did you know that, then?’

I frown. ‘I must have just heard it somwh—do I smell smoke?’

He sits up straight and sniffs the air like a bloodhound. ‘Toast. I made it earlier. Had the setting on too high and burned it. They were the last two slices, as well.’

‘Hate that.’ I shake my head. ‘Where’s Mum’s photograph from the hall?’

‘Which one? There are thirty of her.’

‘You’ve counted?’ I laugh.

‘Nailed them up there, didn’t I? Forty-four photos in total, that’s forty-four nails I needed. Went down to the hardware store and bought a pack of nails. Forty nails it contained. They made me buy a second packet just for four more nails.’ He holds up four fingers and shakes his head. ‘Still have thirty-six of them left over in the toolbox. What is the world comin’ to at all, at all.’

Never mind terrorism or global warming. The proof of the world’s downfall, in his eyes, comes down to thirty-six nails in a toolbox. He’s probably right too.

‘So where is it?’

‘Right where it always is,’ he says unconvincingly.

We both look at the closed kitchen door, in the direction of the hall table. I stand up to go out and check. These are the kinds of things you do when you have time on your hands.

‘Ah ah,’ he jerks a floppy hand at me, ‘sit yourself down.’ He rises. ‘I’ll go out and check.’ He closes the kitchen door behind him, blocking me from seeing out. ‘She’s there all right,’ he calls to me. ‘Hello, Gracie, your daughter was worried about you. Thought she couldn’t see you but sure, haven’t you been there all along watchin’ her sniffin’ the walls, thinkin’ the paper’s on fire. But sure isn’t it only madder she’s gettin’, leaving her husband and packing in her job.’

I haven’t mentioned anything to him about taking leave from my job, which means Conor has spoken to him, which means Dad knew my exact intentions for being here from the very first moment he heard the doorbell ring. I have to give it to him, he plays stupid very well. He returns to the kitchen and I catch a glimpse of the photo on the hall table.

‘Ah!’ He looks at his watch in alarm. ‘Ten twenty-five! Let’s go inside quick!’ He moves faster than I’ve seen him in a long time, grabbing his weekly television guide and his cup of tea and rushing into the television room.

‘What are we watching?’ I follow him into the living room, watching him with amusement.

‘Murder, She Wrote, you know it?’

‘Never seen it.’

‘Oh, wait’ll you see, Gracie. That Jessica Fletcher is a quare one for catching the murderers. Then over on the next channel we’ll watch Diagnosis Murder, where the dancer solves the cases.’ He takes a pen and circles it on the TV page.

I’m captivated by Dad’s excitement. He sings along with the theme tune, making trumpet noises with his mouth.

‘Come in here and lie on the couch and I’ll put this over you.’ He picks up a tartan blanket draped over the back of the green velvet couch and places it gently over me, tucking it in around my body so tightly I can’t move my arms. It’s the same blanket I rolled on as a baby, the same blanket they covered me with when I was home sick from school and was allowed to watch television on the couch. I watch Dad with fondness, remembering the tenderness he always showed me as a child, feeling right back there again.

Until he sits at the end of the couch and squashes my feet.

ELEVEN

‘What do you think, Gracie – will Betty be a millionaire by the end of the show?’

I have sat through an endless amount of half-hour morning shows over the last few days and now we are watching the Antiques Roadshow.

Betty is seventy years old, from Warwickshire, and is currently waiting with anticipation as the dealer tries to price the old teapot she has brought with her.

I watch the dealer handling the teapot delicately and a comfortable, familiar feeling overwhelms me. ‘Sorry, Betty,’ I say to the television, ‘it’s a replica. From the eighteenth century. The French used them but Betty’s one was made in the early twentieth century. You can see from the way the handle is shaped. Clumsy craftsmanship.’

‘Is that so?’ Dad looks at me with interest.

We watch the screen intently and listen as the dealer repeats my remarks. Poor Betty is devastated but tries to pretend it was too precious a gift from her grandmother for her to have sold anyhow.

‘Liar,’ Dad shouts. ‘Betty already had her cruise booked and her bikini bought. How do you know all that about the pots and the French, Gracie? Read it in one of your books maybe?’

‘Maybe.’ I have no idea. I get a headache thinking about this new-found knowledge.

Dad catches the look on my face. ‘Why don’t you call a friend or something? Have a chat.’

I don’t want to but I know I should. ‘I should probably give Kate a call.’

‘The big-boned girl? The one who ploughed you with poteen when you were sixteen?’

‘That’s Kate,’ I laugh. He has never forgiven her for that.

‘What kind of a name is that, at all, at all. She was a messer, that girl. Has she come to anything?’

‘No, not at all. She just sold her shop in the city for two million to become a stay-at-home mother.’ I try not to laugh at the shock on his face.

His ears prick up. ‘Ah, sure, give her a call. Have a chat. You women like to do that. Good for the soul, your mother always said. Your mother loved talking, was always blatherin’ on to someone or other about somethin’ or other.’

‘Wonder where she got that from,’ I say under my breath but just as if by a miracle, my father’s rubbery-looking ears work.

‘Her star sign is where she got it from. Taurus. Talked a lot of bull.’

‘Dad!’

‘What? Is it an admittance of hate? No. Nothing of the sort. I loved her with all my heart but the woman talked a lot of bull. Not enough to talk about a thing, I had to hear about how she felt about it too. Ten times over.’

‘You don’t believe in star signs,’ I nudge him.

‘I do too. I’m Libra. Weighing scales.’ He rocks from side to side. ‘Perfectly balanced.’

I laugh and escape to my bedroom to phone Kate. I enter the room, practically unchanged since the day I left it. Despite the rare occasion of guests staying over after I’d gone, my parents never removed my leftover belongings. The Cure stickers were still on the door and parts of the wallpaper were ripped from the tape that had secured my posters. As a punishment for ruining the walls, Dad forced me to cut the grass in the back garden, but while doing so I ran the lawnmower over a shrub in the bedding. He refused to speak to me for the rest of the day. Apparently it was the first year the shrub had blossomed since he’d planted it. I couldn’t understand his frustration then, but after spending years of hard work cultivating a marriage, only for it to wither and die, I can now understand his plight. But I bet he didn’t feel the relief I feel right now.

My box bedroom can only fit a bed and a wardrobe but it was my whole world. My only personal space to think and dream, to cry and laugh and wait until I became old enough to do all the things I wasn’t allowed to do. My only space in the world then and, at thirty-three years old, my only space now. Who knew I’d find myself back again without any of the things I’d yearned for, and, even worse, still yearning for them? Not to be a member of The Cure or married to Robert Smith, but with no baby and no husband. The wallpaper is floral and wild; completely inappropriate for a space of rest. Millions of tiny brown flowers cluster together with tiny splashes of faded green stalks. No wonder I’d covered them with posters. The carpet is brown with lighter brown swirls, stained from spilled perfume and make-up. New additions to the room are old and faded brown leather suitcases lying on top of the wardrobe, gathering dust since Mum died. Dad never goes anywhere, a life without Mum, he decided long ago, enough of a journey for him.

The duvet cover is the newest introduction. New, as in, over ten years old; Mum purchased it when my room became the guest room. I moved out a year before she died, to live with Kate, and I wish everyday since that I hadn’t, all those precious days of not waking up to hear her long yawns that turned into songs, talking to herself as she made her verbal diary with Gay Byrne’s radio show on in the background. She loved Gay Byrne; her sole ambition in life being to meet him. The closest she got to that dream was when she and Dad got tickets to sit in the audience of The Late Late Show and she spoke about it for years. I think she had a thing for him. Dad hated him. I think he knew about her thing.

He likes to listen to him now, though, whenever he’s on. I think he reminds him of a precious time spent with Mum, as though when we all hear Gay Byrne’s voice, he hears Mum’s instead. When she died, he surrounded himself with all the things she adored. He put Gay on the radio every morning, watched Mum’s television shows, bought her favourite biscuits in his weekly shopping trip even though he never ate them. He liked to see them on the shelf when he opened the cupboard, liked to see her magazines beside his newspaper. He liked her slippers staying beside her armchair by the fire. He liked to remind himself that his entire world hadn’t fallen apart. Sometimes we need all the glue we can get, just to hold ourselves together.

At sixty-five years old, he was too young to lose his wife. At twenty-three I was too young to lose my mother. At fifty-five she shouldn’t have lost her life, but cancer, the thief of seconds, undetected until far too late, stole it from her and us all. Dad married late in life for that time, and didn’t have me until he was forty-two years old. I think that there was somebody that broke his heart back then that he has never spoken of and that I’ve never asked about, but what he does say about that period is that he spent more days of his life waiting for Mum than actually being with her, but that every second spent looking for her and, eventually, remembering her, was worth it for all the moments in between.

Mum never met Conor but I don’t know whether she would have liked him, though she was too polite ever to have shown it. Mum loved all kinds of people but particularly those with high spirit and energy, people that lived and exuded that life. Conor is pleasant. Always just pleasant. Never overexcited. Never, in fact, excited at all. Just pleasant, which is just another word for nice. Marrying a nice man gives you a nice marriage but never anything more. And nice is OK when it’s among other things but never when it stands alone.

Dad would talk to anyone anywhere and not have a feeling about them one way or another. The only negative thing he ever said about Conor was, ‘Sure, what kind of man likes tennis?’ A GAA and soccer man, Dad had spat the word out as though just saying it had dirtied his mouth.

Our failure to produce a child didn’t do much to sway Dad’s opinion. He blamed it on the tennis but particularly on the little white shorts Conor sometimes wore, whenever pregnancy test after pregnancy test failed to show blue. I know he said it all to put a smile on my face; sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t, but it was a safe joke because we all knew it wasn’t the tennis shorts or the man wearing them that was the problem.

I sit down on the duvet cover bought by Mum, not wanting to crease it. A two-pillow and duvet cover set from Dunnes with a matching candle for the windowsill, which has never been lit and has lost its scent. Dust gathers on the top, incriminating evidence that Dad is not keeping up with his duties, as if at seventy-five years old the removal of dust from anywhere but his memory shelf should be a priority. But the dust has settled and so let it stay.

I turn on my mobile, which has been switched off for days, and it begins to beep as a dozen messages filter through. I have already made my calls to those near, dear and nosy. Like pulling off a Band-Aid; don’t think about it, move quickly and it’s almost painless. Flip open the phonebook and bam, bam, bam: three minutes each. Quick snappy phone calls made by a strangely upbeat woman who’d momentarily inhabited my body. An incredible woman, in fact, positive and perky, yet emotional and wise at all the right times. Her timing impeccable, her sentiments so poignant I almost wanted to write them down. She even attempted a bit of humour, which some members of the near, dear and nosy coped well with while others seemed almost insulted – not that she cared, for it was her party and she was crying if she wanted to. I’ve met her before, of course; she whizzes around to me for the occasional trauma, steps into my shoes and takes over the hard parts. She’ll be back again, no doubt.

No, it will be a long time before I can speak in my own voice to people other than the woman I am calling now.

Kate picks up on the fourth ring.

‘Hello,’ she shouts and I jump. There are manic noises in the background, as though a mini-war has broken out.

‘Joyce!’ she yells and I realise I’m on speakerphone. ‘I’ve been calling you and calling you. Derek, SIT DOWN. MUMMY IS NOT HAPPY! Sorry, I’m just doing the school run. I’ve to bring six kids home, then a quick snack before I bring Eric to basketball and Jayda to swimming. Want to meet me there at seven? Jayda is getting her ten-metre badge today.’

Jayda howls in the background about hating ten-metre badges.

‘How can you hate it when you’ve never had one?’ Kate snaps. Jayda howls even louder and I have to move the phone from my ear. ‘JAYDA! GIVE MUMMY A BREAK! DEREK, PUT YOUR SEATBELT ON! If I have to brake suddenly, you will go FLYING through the windscreen and SMASH YOUR FACE IN. Hold on, Joyce.’

There is silence while I wait.

‘Gracie!’ Dad yells. I run to the top of the stairs in panic, not used to hearing him shout like that since I was a child.

‘Yes? Dad! Are you OK?’

‘I got seven letters,’ he shouts.

‘You got what?’

‘Seven letters!’

‘What does that mean?’

‘In Countdown!’

I stop panicking and sit on the top stair in frustration. Suddenly Kate’s voice is back and it sounds as though calm has been restored.

‘OK, you’re off speakerphone. I’ll probably be arrested for holding the phone, not to mention cast off the car-pool list, like I give a flying fuck about that.’

‘I’m telling my mammy you said the f word,’ I hear a little voice.

‘Good. I’ve been wanting to tell her that for years,’ Kate murmurs to me and I laugh.

‘FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK,’ I hear a crowd of kids chanting.

‘Jesus, Joyce, I better go. See you at the leisure centre at seven? It’s my only break. Or else I have tomorrow. Tennis at three or gymnastics at six? I can see if Frankie is free to meet up too.’

Frankie. Christened Francesca but refuses to answer to it. Dad was wrong about Kate. She may have sourced the poteen but technically it was Frankie that held my mouth open and poured it down my throat. As a result of this version of the story never being told, he thinks Frankie’s a saint, very much to Kate’s annoyance.

‘I’ll take gymnastics tomorrow,’ I smile as the children’s chanting gets louder. Kate’s gone and there’s silence.

‘GRACIE!’ Dad calls again.

‘It’s Joyce, Dad.’

‘I got the conundrum!’

I make my way back to my bed and cover my head with a pillow.

A few minutes later Dad arrives at the door, scaring the life out of me.

‘I was the only one that got the conundrum. The contestants hadn’t a clue. Simon won anyway, goes through to tomorrow’s show. He’s been the winner for three days now and I’m half bored lookin’ at him. He has a funny-looking face; you’d have a right laugh if you saw it. Don’t think Carol likes him much either and she’s after losin’ loads of weight again. Do you want a HobNob? I’m going to make another cuppa.’

‘No, thanks.’ I put the pillow back over my head. He uses so many words.

‘Well, I’m having one. I have to eat with my pills. Supposed to take it at lunch but I forgot.’

‘You took a pill at lunch, remember?’

‘That was for my heart. This is for my memory. Short-term memory pills.’

I take the pillow off my face to see if he’s being serious. ‘And you forgot to take it?’

He nods.

‘Oh, Dad.’ I start to laugh while he looks on as though I’m having an episode. ‘You are medicine enough for me. Well, you need to get stronger pills. They’re not working, are they?’

He turns his back and makes his way down the hall, grumbling, ‘They’d bloody well work if I remembered to take them.’

‘Dad,’ I call to him and he stops at the top of the stairs. ‘Thanks for not asking any questions about Conor.’

‘Sure, I don’t need to. I know you’ll be back together in no time.’

‘No we won’t,’ I say softly.

He walks a little closer to my room. ‘Is he stepping out with someone else?’

‘No he’s not. And I’m not. We don’t love each other. We haven’t for a long time.’

‘But you married him, Joyce. Didn’t I bring you down the aisle myself?’ He looks confused.

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