an otter? More ferocious. Like a ferret. How many minks? You got a coat like this from ten, twelve animals, she thought, checking the pockets automatically. Nothing.
The things they’d done in this coat! She slipped it on and sunk her hands into the pockets lined with satin. She gave a little curtsy for no reason, and noticed in the corner another rail of clothes balanced between a rafter and the housing for the water tank. She hadn’t looked at those in years. Among the trench coats and sheepskin jackets and leather skirts, she came to a plastic bag on a wooden hanger, filled with exercise books. She worked the bag off the metal hook of the hanger and pulled out the tired orange and blue exercise books.
Liz Donnelly. P.4 English. P.4 Geography. P.4 Maths. P.4 History.
Judith opened the English book to a story written by the eight-year-old Liz from the point of view of the town of Ballyglass. Such imagination!
Each step round the chimney took her further into the past. Boxes of their own wedding presents from forty-two years ago were stacked here, and boxes of books and crockery from Kenneth’s parents’ house in Ballyshannon. There was too much of it. It overwhelmed. She moved back into the lit part of the attic, pushed with her slippered foot a plastic crate of old candles and Christmas decorations under the eaves, making a passable trail from the door to the chimney stack. The bookshelf leaning against it held all the books in the house. Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. Frank O’Connor’s The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland. Dick Francis. That was Kenneth’s, and unread. Jeffrey Archer. He turned out to be a shyster, didn’t he? His poor wife. What were those boxes? Oh, the Hummel plates—they’d bought one a year for the first twenty years of their marriage. History of Hummel Plates, circa 1972 to 1994.
It hadn’t been easy. God knows. They’d fought and fought. She’d moved out once, moved into the flat above the agency for a night, and taken one of the girls with her. He was a terrible thorny old bastard sometimes, no doubt about that. Things you think you’ll always love you don’t. You really don’t. She’d wanted a nice home with nice things. On the farm there was never enough of anything. Except for work. There was enough of that.
She didn’t want the children to have to go through the boxes—she’d done it with her own mother’s things, few though they were. All her mother’s clothes had fitted in two bin bags. She found she was hugging herself now, hugging her fur-coated body. She wanted to sift her life through her fingers, to weigh the thing and not find it wanting. To find that everything was worth it in the end.
Liz would be home in nine hours—eight. She must remember to cut some hydrangea from the garden and set a vase of it in her room. She lifted Liz’s exercise book and tugged off the attic light. Back in the guest room she sat on the bed and read:
As towns go, I’m not the best looking. My spine is one big wide street running along for over a mile, dead straight. I have shops all down me and you can tell how well the shop owner did a hundred years ago by the highnesses of the building. I sit at the foot of a mountain, Slieve Gallion, which wears its white cap in winter and in summer time is brown. I was born in 1645 as a marketplace, a meeting place for all the peeple to come and buy and sell vegtables and animals, cows and pigs and horses. I was burnt down and built bak up, and burnt down and built back up. My name is also An Corr Crea, from the Irish for Boundry Hill.
There has been a lot of fighting. Everybody wants me. My MPs have been UNions and Shin Fein—the people who walk all over me are both Protesants and Roman Catholics. There are the same amounts of people of both kinds. I have nearly ten thousand people living on me like little nits in my hair.
My synbol is made up from the synbol of the county and three fish. The synbol of the county is the red hand and it comes from the story of when Ulster had no proper ruler. The men agreed that a boat race would happen and who’s hand was first to touch the shore of Ireland, would be the owner of the place. Many boats were in the race and a man called O’Neill saw that he was losing so he got a sword and chop off his hand and lifted it and threw it and it reached the shore first. O’Neill was made the king and he lives at Tullyhog fort outside the town near Christine’s house.
The family Donnelly live in the south part of me, on the Lissan road. They are a happy family and there are five of them. Mummy and Daddy and Liz and Alison and little baby Spencer. The mummy makes rice krispy buns and cherry scones. The Daddy sells houses to people who need places to live. Alison and Spencer are OK.
My businnesses are to make cement out at the Cement works and to make sausages at the Bacon Factory. Sometimes out in the playgground of the primary school you hear the pigs squealing in the factory as they’re being brought in or put down. They cut their throats, but quick so it doesn’t hurt. And sometimes there is a bad smell from the factory sweet and rotten both.
She was in no doubt at all; she could handle this. The embarrassment inside her had been turned way down—it still burned merrily and brightly like a gas ring left on, but it was bearable. She could bear it. It had not been a serious enterprise. She knew that. And there had been precedents. There were incidents pertaining, sure. The party in Brooklyn Heights where she had walked into the kitchen and “a good friend” had been hugging Joel from behind. Little folds of time. You can quicken memory and scatter it and thread the incidents together.
She felt a bubble of new anger rising through her and reached for her phone, then put it down again, sat back against the plastic seat, and concentrated on the view as her train rattled through the industrial edgelands of Newark. Concrete grandeur, a thin scrim of light rain. Unaccomplished graffiti on abandoned railcars. She looked at the phone. She wanted very much to be able to hurt him, and she realized that one of the things bothering her about this was that she wasn’t sure she could. She decided to send the text: You broke my heart. Inadequate, self-harming, momentarily satisfying. Nor did it feel remotely true even as she typed it, but what with the renewed steady movement of the car, and the rain, and the dilapidated splendor of New Jersey’s manufacturing heritage, she tried to think herself into a space where it might be true, and stared out the window, and for a moment thought she might cry again, if she kept still and stared hard enough at the particulars of night coming on.
Her phone vibrated, but once more it was her sister. Lovely weather here today. Izzy outside on bike all day! We looking forward to seeing you. You sort car hire OK?
Liz’s family had downsized their role in her life since she left home, of course, but not in the way she’d expected. They were like a village she had once lived in that had been shrunk down to miniature. The relationships didn’t loosen to old friendships; they contracted over the years, but retained all the same angles and shapes, the same functions of shame and despair and joy. It was like a scale model she lived in—and it still functioned. The little train ran, the signs swung outside the little shops, tiny people went from room to room, turning on and off the lights. Interacting with her family was like entering the village as an adult—outsized, and trying to crawl under the arches and bridges and flyovers, trying not to put one’s size-fives in the miniscule flowerbeds.
She spoke to her family every other day or so. Is this healthy? That was one of Joel’s lines. Is this healthy? Possibly, she’d reply. It’s possibly healthy.
She texted Alison back: Didn’t hire car yet. Any chance of a lift? Why you still up?
The reply came after a minute.
Up when M’s up. He’s feeding, mostly screaming. I’m giving him a bottle and watching Downton Abbey with earphones. I’ll get Stephen to pick you up. I have a final dress fitting. They messed up the zip.
Liz considered for a second, and replied:
Awful show! Btw just came home to boyfriend in bed with someone. Not feeling too chipper tbh.
She knew the phone would ring. She watched the display light up with ALLY HOME, and considered