Inch Levels (6 page)

Well, she’d set them right on that one. Getting older, she might be. But feeble? – no, and with a tongue like the blade of an axe, if she chose to use it. She was no pushover: and the staff in this place knew it by now.

But there was a flipside. Never show my feelings: that was Sarah’s number one rule. She knew how to keep her feelings in check, to keep them pushed down – even with her son lying dying right there, on the other side of the door. It was easily done: it really was very easy. A lifetime of experience in that particular art had made her an expert now in stamping down.

And besides, age had made it easier. Because there was nobody to speak to: not for five, six years now, not since Cassie died. She had forgotten how to do it.

‘How is my son today?’

Sarah watched the nurse’s mouth open again, she watched her lips move. She watched, as if from miles away, as the girl began to speak.

*

‘And how is the patient today?’ she said. ‘How is my son today?’

And the nurse paused for a moment. Warily, by this stage. Too many stings, by this stage. Fed-up, too, by this stage: for Mrs Jackson, this nice, upright lady in her fleecy wraps and her knitting needles and her fondness for pastel shades had a tongue on her, when she felt like showing it off. They had all felt sorry for her, to begin with: not very nice for the lady to see her son fading away like this, fading day by day: to sit and watch this, in silence for the most part. It was an inversion of the natural order of things: it called for sensitivity over and above what training demanded. It called for kid gloves.

But a few tongue lashings and – worse, much worse – a few biting sarcasms, put paid to all that.
A bit of a harridan, that one
: so went the talk in the nurses’ room.
A tartar
; and
she can stand up for herself, that one
. And so now the nurse paused before selecting the right word. The doctors, she thought, they can deal with the ins and outs of it.

‘As well as can be expected,’ the nurse said, ‘considering.’

The fleecy lady seemed to – yes, to consider for a moment. She considered. The nurse waited. Her duties were stacked up like planes waiting to land, today as on every other day, but she waited. This lady had a quality: the nurse felt as though she was being held by a tightening leash.

‘Considering,’ Mrs Jackson said at last. ‘Considering – everything.’

The nurse nodded.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Jackson, ‘that certainly clarifies matters for me, doesn’t it? That answers all the questions, doesn’t it?’

The leash was released now, it was snapped. The nurse nodded dumbly.

‘Thank you, dear.’ The nurse turned and scuttled away down the corridor. The fleecy lady paused for another moment: then she too turned and squared her shoulders. She took a moment: and then she pushed the door, and it swung and she entered the room.

*

Moments came and went: of course she’d had her chances, over the years. Plenty of them. One moment in particular came to mind: when the chance arose to – if not set matters right, then at least to speak of them, to begin to sort through them in her head.

‘What is it, mammy?’ Margaret asked, long ago: sitting up on her bed, tall now and long of limb and of hair, a teenaged pimple or two.
What do you want?
– is what she meant, though she was too polite to put it in those terms:
what do you want?
She looked at her mother, who was perched there on the edge of her bed: a wet February night, the window streaming with rain.

Margaret had been picking fights with Patrick all day, the pair of them cooped up in the house, winding each other up as the rain fell. Now she looked apprehensive, afraid – reasonably enough – that her mother was here to barge at her, to tell her off. But: ‘I just wanted a word,’ said Sarah with ceremonious formality, and Margaret’s expression changed to puzzlement. Not a telling off, then – but what?

Sarah hardly ever entered her children’s rooms. Not to draw curtains, not to open windows, not to pick up laundry from the floor. ‘You do your own jobs,’ she told them, ‘and you bring your own clothes to be washed, or else they stay dirty.’ Ditto the air in their bedrooms, which stayed stale unless they bothered to open their windows themselves. She had enough to be doing; and she wouldn’t let Cassie shuffle around picking up after them either. (Martin, of course, wouldn’t think of it, not for a second.)

And besides which, her children liked their rooms to themselves. They didn’t exactly stick Keep Out posters on their bedroom walls; they didn’t need to; the signals were unmistakable. They took after her – and yet now here she was, having made a trail through a swamp of clothing and paper and schoolbooks on the floor, here she was perched at the end of the bed in Margaret’s bedroom. From the living room, where Martin and Cassie sat at their ease, the murmur of the television.

Margaret said, ‘What kind of a word?’

And yes: what kind of a word? A word of absolution?

But when it came to it, Sarah manufactured some question or other:
how was school? – and how was homework? – and I was just checking that everything was coming along well enough, you know, what with O Levels on their way next year
. Margaret looked puzzled, as well she might. ‘Everything’s fine,’ she said, after a considering pause, during which a helicopter could be heard passing overhead, skimming the treetops in the darkness, deafening. She waited for the din to fade, then spoke again. ‘You know I don’t like Physics, but even that’s going along, you know, well enough too.’ And then:
good
, Sarah said,
that’s good
, and she picked her way back through the clothes and books, and slipped out of the room, leaving something – a confused silence – behind.

She remembered this episode now. Twenty-odd years ago now, she thought, more years than I can stand to think about – she remembered it as she sat on the edge of another bed. Of Patrick’s bed, this time, in this hospital, smoothing the sky-blue coverlet until he moved his index finger just enough to give her a sign, to indicate that he didn’t like her there, that she was annoying him, that she should sit in the chair by the bed – or get out. She was interfering with the bed’s level, with its equilibrium.

‘The nurse said you’re doing well enough today, considering.’

Patrick opened one eye, and looked. Then closed it again.

‘Did she indeed?’

And that was about the height of it.

Of course they’d never had much to say to one another. She’d made sure of that. Had watched the two of them, her son and daughter, playing as children, fighting, tussling and wrestling – and talking. Had felt something like pale satisfaction that they were managing well enough, in spite of her.

That, certainly.

But something else too: a pulse of envy, of anger, that they
could
manage, that they had been able to reach out to each other, even though their own mother had long since given up doing anything of the sort. She had watched them: playing and fighting in the waves on warm days at the beach, until their father waded in to separate them; squabbling and playing in the garden together. Being normal. In spite of everything, being normal; or something that passed for it. A club of two, with Cassie in the wings.

Now, she sat by Patrick’s bedside, watching him die. At our age, Sarah liked to say to her cronies, we reach a sort of equilibrium. We reach the top of whatever mountain we’ve been climbing: and now we’re on level ground, and we can look back at the view, and get our breath back. Can’t we? – and they would nod agreement.

And now she sat in her chair by Patrick’s bedside, watching him die. Equilibrium and balance, in the face of all this. No: in the face of her whole life. It was hardly possible, was it? She pulled her woollen scarf a little closer. She could hear the subdued routine of hospital life continuing beyond the door – low voices, wheeling, a genteel rattle and clink of a trolley; and after a few minutes the bell began to toll in the school across the way.

The next day – the day after she had perched on the end of Margaret’s bed – had it been the next day? Yes: and it was chilly but dry and she had the day off; so she loaded the car up with her restless children and with Cassie and set off to Inch Levels for a walk, for some air. Clambered up the leeward side of the sea wall, as she always did, grasping onto handfuls of the long grass that grew there – grey now, at the very end of winter – as she always did. And then she was up on top, on the level surface of the wall, and there was the sea before her and the slob lands, level and fertile behind her. The sound of a church bell drifted across the fields: the Angelus, tolling determinedly.

She never tired of this place. Her mind drifted towards it during dull, irksome moments at work, at home: when she was totting sums and in the midst of paperwork; or chopping onions, browning mince in the pan, pouring off the fat; when she was sweeping, cleaning, ironing: when her mass of duties and jobs began to eat at her, she could step out of that life and into this one, all air and a great sweep of sky. Whatever the weather, there was space here and air to breathe. She stood still on top of the sea wall and looked out across the waters of the lough, grey and silver, the purple height of the island on the further shore, higher blue hills to east and west; and a mass of wintering geese in the fields, of wintering swans on the water. She thought – nothing, for a change; she looked and breathed, that was all.

Below her was the narrow beach of shingle and white sand, built up gradually in the hundred years since the engineers designed this wall and the navvies constructed it: laboriously, as she imagined it, stone upon stone, until the sea was safely held back and they could relax a little. The new fields behind the wall began to drain, then, with rich black earth showing against the green of new grass. She knew all about this place: had read up about its history in the Central Library; had made a point of it. They built a railway line across this flat landscape, once they had secured it, running west and away into Donegal’s blue distance, and east towards Derry. The line had been taken up recently: nothing remained now but the level embankment, which was already being colonised by hazel and ash.

Today, no movement. No other walkers, nobody but them to disturb the peace and space. Patrick and Margaret were already down there below, crunching along the narrow beach. ‘Bring a ball,’ she’d said, earlier, as they donned coats and scarves, ‘to kick’. Patrick didn’t want to come in the first place: the suggestion of a ball had gone down badly, very badly. He scowled at her, a scornful, hatefully adolescent look; when did he ever show any interest in a ball, any ball? Never, that’s when. He and Margaret went and waited in the car, then – and now there they were, walking slowly along the edge of the lough. Beachcombing, maybe, she thought: for a piece of driftwood, for shells, for something brought ashore by the waters of the lough that might hold some interest for a few moments. The shore was scattered with the quills of feathers, of a mass of swandown like a fall of snow.

It was tremendous here: the big sky and salt air, the shingle shelving away gently into shallow water. ‘Why do you
like
it there?’ the ladies sometimes asked back in Derry – intrigued, disturbed, for people went to actual beaches, smooth Donegal beaches, for walks in this part of the world. They did not come to this sea wall, to these flat fields. The ladies were easily mollified for the most part: over tea and meringues in a booth at the Dolphin Café, Sarah mentioned the sea air, the blue hills and green fields. And the exercise, she added, walking on the flat. I walk and walk, she said, and she pressed the tines of her fork onto the meringue until it shattered.

She liked its loneliness best – though today, with this unaccustomed company, the loneliness of the place was hustled away. During the drive out here, Patrick had grizzled in the back seat, complaining of boredom. Cassie in the back too, silent. Margaret in the front: silent too, discombobulated – it must be – from the conversation in her bedroom the previous evening. The non-conversation. Leaning her head back, gazing out of the windscreen, playing with the matt-black toggle on her duffle coat, twisting its leather thread around and around. Removed, Sarah thought: looking not onto the worn colours of late winter, onto suburbs and industrial plants slipping past the windows, but at something else entirely.

Her mother’s daughter.

And beside her, Sarah drove in silence, her gloved hands gripping the wheel, her shoulders set.

Though: what need for set shoulders, for these familiar defensive feelings? She ought to be capable of leaving the past in the past: at her age, she really should be able to do such a thing. It was a long time ago, she thought as she drove: and I was younger and more foolish too, without a shadow of a doubt; not much of a person, really. Cassie could bear witness to
that
. I was different then, she thought, and I am different now, and I don’t have to carry my past around with me like a millstone.

Defensive of what? Nothing, so she thought and thought again: nothing, nothing. Night by night looking up at the flat, modern ceilings of the new suburban house, with Martin asleep and breathing almost silently beside her; day by day keeping her colleagues at bay, or walking on the sea wall here in the slob lands, or making her way from shop to shop in the city, lowering her eyes as she passed gun-toting soldiers in groups of six or eight, smiling mildly as she encountered an acquaintance here or there.

Or, hardly a thing: only a history, a series of episodes foisted upon her; a story left behind like an unwanted parcel.

‘No, nothing,’ Cassie told her. ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing,’ shaking her head. Over and over: nothing, nothing, nothing.

Why, then, had she made her way along the landing only last night, with Cassie and Martin parked in front of the television down the hall? Cassie’s knitting bag and knitting needles, Martin’s
Radio Times
. Why had she tapped gently on Margaret’s door and… and then the ridiculous conversation to do with Physics O Level, there in Margaret’s untidy bedroom, with a misty rain falling through the yellow light of the street lamp outside?