Once or twice Mam came into my room and sat by the window while they were downstairs. She said nothing, just looked out the window, watched the pattern of weather outside. The thing that got her most was the cold, the more or less constant lack of sun, the way it would seep downward into her marrow. She often wore two or three jumpers over one another. In the morning, while she got the fire ready in the living room, she kept the tea kettle beside her, warming her hands over the steam, even wearing gloves while she cooked breakfast, teeth chattering. Still amazed by snow, in winter she would watch my snowmen dribble down to a carrot and eye-pebbles, hugging herself into a coat, stamping her feet on the ground, watching the clouds made from our breath. The whips of winds shook her to the core — she was a watcher of storms. Huge billows lashed in from the Atlantic, carrying spindrift, causing the river trees to kowtow to the ground, litter to animate itself. One storm was a peculiar blessing for her — a sandstorm from the Sahara, carrying dust, red dust, all the way from North Africa, depositing it on the land so that tiny particles covered the windshields of cars, the roofs of houses, gates, walls, boots, the leaves of flowers by the front door. She didn’t wash the windows for weeks, enthralled by the revisit of red dust to her life. She ran her finger along the window ledge and held it up for me to see, ‘Isn’t it nice, m’ijo? A red wind.’
O’Shaughnessy and my father began to take trips abroad, mostly Belgium and France, something to do with EEC beef deals. Pictures were taken of O’Shaughnessy at conventions, wearing his fat gaudy ties. They’d be gone for a fortnight at a time, and Mam would fall asleep in a wicker chair by my bedroom window, three blankets pulled around her.
And then one evening the old man arrived home from France with two cardboard boxes. It had been a particularly cold day, frost on the ground, all the windows of the house locked tight, robins frantic over bits of bread in the yard. O’Shaughnessy dropped my father off at the front of the house, blew my mother a kiss as she stood at the window in her jumpers. She turned away. The old man lumbered the boxes and his suitcase out on to the porch, shuffling his feet precisely over the ice. He sat there for a while, the boxes at his feet. Mam asked me to call him in for dinner — this time he said nothing about chips. He breezed his way into the house, threw off his coat, just a white shirt underneath, combed his hair across his pate, pasted it down with spittle, and put his suitcase down against the kitchen table. Mam was bent over some eggs with salsa sauce, rubbing her gloved hands together.
‘Two shakes of a lamb’s tail,’ my father said, and he stroked her tenderly on the side of the face.
She looked up, surprised. He went back outside and lifted the cardboard boxes from the porch. Despite the chill, two large ovals of sweat formed on his underarms. He laid the two boxes on the kitchen table and nodded up and down, turned and told me it was time for me to take my swim. ‘He will be frozen,’ said Mum. My father winked: ‘Nah, he’ll be fine, he’s a big man now.’ There was a strange look in the old man’s eye. I went upstairs and got the two sets of togs. At the front door I waited for him to come with me. I held the togs up, but he motioned me away with his hand, told me to go on my own. He took out a knife and began cutting the string from the cardboard boxes. I waited at the window.
‘This is a present for your Mam,’ he said, ‘you go on down and I’ll join ya later, take your coat, wrap up well when ya get out.’
We had often swum in the cold before, but always in the morning, the initial shock of climbing in disappearing, a feeling that another skin had developed over my body. I had become better at going against the current, didn’t have to hang on to the poplar roots any more. I swam for maybe ten minutes, let the water push me backwards, went to the pool at the side of the river and pulled a hollow reed, went underwater, breathed through it. It was a strange green world down there, immense and fascinating and slimy, until I was so far down in it that water poured through the reed and I let it go, and my breath left me at the same time, bubbles rising up, and I sank, felt like I was swimming blind, the pressure thumping my chest, pushing arms outwards. I sat on some riverbottom stones until the pain became almost peaceful, a barrage of it in my lungs, and I shunted myself up, resurfaced.
The meat factory had only just been set up and none of the offal floated in the water yet, although I had begun to notice a little bit of a smell. I paddled around the river for a while, saluted a duck, got out and pulled my anorak around me — the zip was broken — put a towel around my neck. When I came back up from the riverbank Mam was at her wall in her big coat and three sweaters, and the old man was nowhere to be seen. I walked up and stood beside her, my hair dripping wet, a chatter in my teeth, wanting to tell her about my swim, but she told me to go into the house and towel myself off. She was looking down at a place where her wall had given through, one of the teeth fallen from the grey gum of it. She looked at it long and hard, knelt down, picked up a field rock, tried to wedge it back in, tried very hard but couldn’t, broke a fingernail, said something in Spanish I didn’t understand. It sounded as if there was custard in her mouth. I thought she was just cold. Her body began to tremble, quietly at first. ‘I thought it would support,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s so easy thing to do.’ She tried to wedge another rock in, but it jutted out and her fingers shook. She pushed her knee against the rock, but it still didn’t budge. She stood up, shivering.
‘I always thought it will be better than this, m’ijo,’ she said suddenly. ‘I always told myself it will be better than this.’
And I — ten years old — thought she was talking about the hole in the wall, and said: ‘It’ll be all right, Mam, we’ll give it another shot in the morning.’
* * *
The ancestry of act — every moment leading up to haunt that one particular moment. Instead of Mam’s own body breaking itself down in the slow natural entropy of motherhood and age, it became something else altogether — destroyed for her in a strange sort of way. It wasn’t even a vagarious thing, or a whim, or an impulse on the old man’s part — it might have been easier that way. But he had planned it for a long time, I suppose. He wanted a memorial of some sort, an epitaph for himself, a packet of light to emerge and print itself indelibly on his life, to say: I was once great, look at these great photos I took, look how perfect they are, look how I once lived, I was alive! Maybe he laboured over that book, maybe he pored over all his contact sheets with a singular intensity, maybe he truly believed that it would reinvent things, or maybe he thought it was a gesture of love — that she could look in its pages and remember herself. Or some vision of herself.
But something other than her life was on display — it was the moments of her body. Her neck and breasts and stomach and legs and spine and moles and pubic hair and ankles and eyes and raven-dark hair under mosquito nets, near fire towers, in a pine-pole camp, in a dark Bronx bedroom, screaming out for some sense of place, lost between the cheap covers of a book.