by John Griffin - December 24, 2007
She wore a lifetime’s hurt in every pore of her being, and every look and gesture bespoke it. One sensed it in her aura and knew exactly what it signified even if there were no words to frame it. It was there in the downturn of her eyes, the way the arms hung by her sides, in the way she walked, or ambled sluggishly, how the tone of voice inflected to reflect no confidence, the wavering treble, the hollow tone matched by the hollowness of her deportment. She was a wounded creature and what once lived in her was now gone, not even the memory had lived on, no posthumous life for the child that once intimately knew her own face. She was overtaken by what could not be altered by time’s healing hand. There it was, fixed, interminable, brutal, keyed, without egress; well, there was the only possible conclusion to such a story, but some escape routes, the only one, actually, must remain forever beyond. She’d never have contemplated escape. And that was the essence of her wounds – there was nowhere to turn, or run, when they were inflicted, because the place where they came was the same place she had always called home, and home was where she always felt safest and most secure. And when that illusion was shattered, there really was no place else. And the home could not be fixed, no matter what else was said or promised afterwards. Home was … forever lost.
Olivia had fallen into flesh ever since, or had nose-dived into it with a crash landing – the after-shocks reverberated well into her middle years, which is where our narrative finds her, weeping on her knees on the cold kitchen floor. It’s past midnight. The room is dark but for the hood light above the stove. She has been kneeling watching the washing machine go through the final frantic whirrs of the spin cycle, waiting for her blouse to get done. Her head is slightly inclined but immobile in its stark concentration and the tears are streaming down her cheeks. ‘What’s the matter Liv? What ails you?’ There is none to ask. The room is still. There’s a faint scratching behind the wainscoting, otherwise the soft heaves of her chest draw in and out the lungs of silence breathing in the room. Earlier today the boys had bustled through the kitchen to replenish before heading off again. The younger one, Darragh, had introduced his friend to her turned back, “That’s the It over there, least that’s what we call her.” That might have been the trigger, except she had grown too accustomed to Darragh-like contempt and wouldn’t have given it a second thought. No, that wasn’t it at all. Anyway, it wasn’t about herself. It seldom was. It hadn’t been for over two decades now, though you wouldn’t think it the way the others goaded her for their own rankling pretexts. But such is life.
Earlier today Olivia had visited her aged mother in hospital and what she beheld there saddened her immeasurably. It wasn’t so much her mother’s helpless resignation that pained her as the story she told. The old woman had gone in for a check-up and was kept on for observations after they discovered an unusually high white blood-cell count. There was only the two of them in the house now and they had grown to depend on one another, even if they very rarely spoke at any length. They seemed to divine one another’s thoughts and needs, and then to act accordingly, without the strain of mouthing words. In their world words had become either a waste or a luxury. There had been enough words for two lifetimes while he was alive, only his words were mostly venomous, crude and offensive slurs and slanders: He rode the waves of his own blasphemies and diatribes and left very little space for their very different words. He had so bullied their voices into silent submission in the years before he died that they still behaved as though he was still seated at the head of the table scowling at them. In the end they hadn’t the confidence to hear their own voices, and when they did they were surprised at how lame they sounded. So they kept quite and gave a wider berth to the bully ghost of a dead husband and father. His aura still filled the silence. And anyway the two women had adapted to a life without the sound of their own voices. It almost seemed a sacrilege to speak at certain times of day, at morning over breakfast, during dinner, or at any moment during the six o’clock News. All the eating was done in silence, as was the praying at Mass, so too were all the household chores. An interdiction still hung in the air all these years later, long after his passing, but he too was quiet now, down there in the cemetery, looking up at the inside of his coffin forever.
Olivia had been conscious of the silence in the house tonight and it bothered her. It was a very different kind of quiet from the habitual, diurnal sort she’d grown used to. This wasn’t punctuated by all the shuffling and breathing and kitchen and TV and bathroom and bedroom noises that animated the late hours. Here was the stunned silence of absence, that lingering, suspended calm that announces aloneness, the kind that’s rife for and pregnant of fear. Olivia had given a lot of thought over the years to the moments she was now experiencing but the reality was very unlike what she had imagined. Is this what’s it’s really like to be alone, she wondered, to miss even the sound of his disapproving voice, of their urine groans, and toilet flushes, and the snores, and drawers opening and closing, and footsteps, and of a toaster popping up, or a kettle button snapping off, or familiar voices on the radio, and now at night to miss the nightly ablutions, and the sound of silent kisses goodnight. She thought of her mother’s face on the pillow, both hands in the prayer gesture under her cheek, the way she looked up at the pale light, how tired, weary she looked, how fed up she was to be stuck there. She thought of the sounds of their lowered voices and the way the woman in the next bed just lay there listening, trying to catch the drift of their conversation. Her mother looked old in that bed, but more than old, vulnerable. Was it that thought made her weep? Or was it to fill the fearful silence with some noise, however miserable, no matter how pathetic?
Olivia had been cast aside, driven out of that place where respect dwells, disowned by her siblings, the two other girls who saw her life as a self-inflicted shambles, and had been left to what life remained to her in this haggard, broken-down home. Those other two would never have believed her capable of this kind of sorrow. Imagine, they would mock, Liv feeling sorry for herself like that, bawling like a banshee. She ought to have more sense, more self-control. No, they simply could not imagine her carrying on like this, on her swinish knees on that cold kitchen floor, mesmerized by the damned spin cycle in the washing machine, heaving like that, such undignified unrestraint. Well, they couldn’t even picture her there like that. And where were they when their mother got ill? Where were they when their father brutalized the self-respect of their mother and sister? Where were they when the bills came due? Sure, off living their own lives, married, raising their own children, completely removed from any and all grim reminders of where they came from. And Livvy was too close to all they wished to forget. Only Livvy stuck it out with the old folks, but now look at her, no self-respect whatsoever, nobody left to take care of her, loverless, loveless, on the verge of being jobless, close to losing her own health, probably driving the old lady into ill health with her miserable aura. If only they could visit their sick mother sans Olivia, but dealing with her was too much. It wasn’t worth it … and mother would be back home again soon. They’d call her then.
She was so disconsolate she forgot all about her blouse and fell forward on her knees. The machine had droned to a complete stop and the house was deathly quiet now. Even the mouse behind the wainscoting was observing a respectful lull in his scratching. She heard a distant car horn and she was glad of it. But she could not rise from the floor. Her mother’s greying eyes as she said the words reduced her once more to tears. This is a dirty place, she said of the hospital, just look at the ceiling, webs and dust everywhere. And when I went to take a stand up bath I found somebody had left her underwear on the side. When I removed it a big black beetle fell into the tub. How horrible. When I returned again later, the beetle was still there, dying on his back. Did nobody see that? Her mother groaned and sighed and then reached out a hand to Olivia without looking. They held hands for a minute. Both were afraid, but both were glad to be afraid together. Then Olivia realized she was crying out loud, and when the heaves came, and her nose filled with mucus, and her head ached, she understood she was weeping out of the very deepest, darkest depths of her love. It was her love, and its needs, scared and saddened her the most.
John Griffin is a writer living in Ireland