school photos 48

‘For God sake keep an eye on her so she doesn’t so something silly.’ Auntie Caroline was washing the dishes in the bigger of the kitchen sinks and handing them to the second youngest sister Teresa, the one with the unfortunate twist to her left eye that never came nor went. She was patting the dishes dry with cloth she’d cleaned the table with and walking, the long route, round her sister Caroline to stack the dishes in the cupboards. Teresa was also the one that went away to be a nun, but didn’t like the idea of being married to God very much and married wee Charlie instead. He was said to be the only one blinder in the family than Teresa. Her black NHS specs were so thick the plastic that kept the lenses together had to be reinforced and had a tendency to mumble. With so many people in the house and the telly left on in the living room Aunt Caroline had to strain to hear what she was saying about Jean.

‘She’s the saddest face, I’ve ever seen.’ Auntie Teresa swept a few Digestive crumbs from the second bottom shelf, before nudging a mug aside and putting one cup inside another to save space, ‘like she’d drowned and the tide had left its mark’.

Aunt Caroline kept washing and rinsing, holding a chipped plate mid-air, wondering what to do with it. ‘You’re right,’ she added. ‘She could do with some filling out.’ There was something calm about her bulk and her ways, but it wasn’t contagious, every other sister seemed a bit jumpy.

Later, Jean lay in bed, her toes stung with the cold. She missed the warmth of Joey’s feet, the  weight of Joey’s arm on her shoulder to slow her thoughts down. She felt the urge to sit up, to get up, but the futility of that left her flat. Dying yet unable to die. Living for the girls.  People had been kind, so kind. Their condolences bland, reassuring words, the polite half-smiles of a car salesman. She longed for people to get drunk,  to hear laughter, stupid jokes, not ‘Sorry, Sorry,’ as the mumbled  punch line, the sober normality was too much. She nodded off for a few seconds,  struggled with what Joey was saying and not remembering, because it made no sense. Her hand struggled for his in the bed beside her.

Milkmen passed the back window in the early hours, sorting through the doorsteps with clinking bottles; the pad of the boy’s running feet in the dark. Seconds, minutes, hours slipped the noose of time without relief. Morning broke into the house, creeping through the windows. The echo of worker’s feet hurry-scrurrying on the streets and  pavements below was a relief, because it meant she could finally give up wrestling sleep and roll out of bed.  

    For most of the day she sat on a hardback chair feet tucked in below the kitchen table,  blocked off from everyone by the door opening from the living room onto her bony knees.  Time slowed to sips of tea filling her mouth,  to a length of tobacco, King Size  Embassy Mild,   filling the kitchen with her second- hand gaspers. She avoided her visitor's eyes, worn out with carrying the weight of  sorrowful stares,  truncated conversations. Joey took up too much space in her mind to think of anything else. Their first kiss. The way her legs went all googly and she’d laughed out loud.

‘You alright?’ her sister Caroline had asked.  

Jean nodded-- she was. Lines on her forehead and round her eyes giving her the haunted look of someone that buried too much in their heart.

‘You want tea?’

She’d shook her weary head-- she didn’t.

Jean mustered enough energy to look up and smile, to show she was glad her sisters had come in and taken over her life. Auntie Caroline brought tears and manful hugs. Auntie Ruth brought her well-mannered ways, her well-cut dark skirts and matching jackets and a business brain that made arranging a funeral child’s play. The other sisters brought their husband and children. Living room, kitchen, and three bedrooms was a playground with a  fog of smoke, sweaty bodies, people’s endless jawing. In the evening, whisky was reserved for the men and vodka or wine for the women. Tongues were sharpened and let loose. Little Ally and Our Jo were plied with so much Coke and Lemonade they began to long for the days when someone would tell them they’d drunk too much, couldn’t have another glass, and they didn’t have to wait in a queue for the toilet and hear women moaning about bursting, all over the place.

Manny, Ruth’s husband, found Jean in her usual spot in the kitchen. ‘That’s the undertakers outside. They’ve brought your husband home, as you asked.’ His beard was an untidy grey. He'd got so excited by the importance of  what he was saying words came out flecked with saliva. ‘It’s a closed coffin,’ he added.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to see him. I want to hold him for one last time. I want him to know I was there for him.’

‘I don’t know, if they’ll allow that.’ He searched for his wife, for anyone else to help him out.

Her voice pinned him in place. ‘I’ll bear that in mind, that you don’t know. They let him  get squashed like a bug under some big fucking beam, nobody thought to secure, yet I’m to be protected from him. Get a fuckin’ life Manny. Get a life. Joey regarded a cold as an insult and flu as leprosy. He was gullible in that way. I’m not. I want to see my husband. I want to be with my husband. And I don’t really care what you, or anyone else thinks.’