Two Bluebottles

In order for ants to find the safest route to food, one goes out on its own. When that lone ant has found the path, it leaves a chemical trail for the others to follow. When you stamp on a line of ants or, less psychotically, if you interfere in their chemical trail in any way, it drives them crazy. The ones that have been left behind crawl around frantically in panic, trying to regain the trail. I like watching them at first totally disoriented, running around bumping into one another while trying to figure out which way to go, then regrouping, reorganising, and eventually crossing the pathway back in their straight line as if nothing had ever happened.

Their panic reminds me of Mum and I. Somebody broke our line, took out our leader, ruined our trail and our lives descended into utter chaos. I think‑I hope‑that with time, we’ll find the right way to go again. It takes one to lead the rest. I think, seeing as Mum is sitting this one out, that it’s up to me to go out front alone.

I was watching a bluebottle yesterday. In an effort to escape the living room, he kept flying against the window, hitting his head against the glass over and over. Then he stopped launching himself at it like a missile and stuck to one little windowpane, buzzing about like he was having a panic attack. It was frustrating to watch, especially because if he’d just flown up a little bit higher towards the top of the window, he’d have been free. But he just kept doing the same thing over and over again. I could imagine his frustration of being able to see the trees, the flowers, the sky, yet not being able to get to them. I tried to help him a few times, to guide him towards the open window, but he flew away from me around the room. He’d eventually come back to the same window and I could almost hear him: ‘Well, this is the way I came in…’

I wonder if my watching him from the armchair is what it’s like to be God, if there is a God. He sits back and sees the big picture, just as I could see that if the bluebottle just moved up the window to the top, then he’d be free. He wasn’t really trapped at all, he was just looking in the wrong place. I wonder if God can see a way out for me and Mum. If I can see the open window for the fly, God can see the tomorrows for me and Mum. That idea brings me comfort. Well, it did , until I left the room and returned a few hours later to see a dead bluebottle on the windowsill. It may not have been him, but still…Then, to show you where my mind is right now, I started crying…Then I got mad at God because in my head the death of that bluebottle meant Mum and I might never find our way out of this mess. What good is it being so far back you can see everything and yet not do anything to help?

Then I realised that I was the god on this occasion. I had tried to help the bluebottle, but it wouldn’t let me. And then I felt sorry for God because I understood his frustration. Sometimes when people offer a helping hand, it gets pushed away. People always want to help themselves first.

I never used to think about these things before; God, bluebottles, ants. I’d rather have been caught dead than be seen sitting in an armchair with a book in my hand and staring at a dirty fly tapping against a window on a Saturday. Maybe that’s what Dad had thought in his final moments: I’d rather be caught dead here in my study than go through the humiliation of having everything taken from me.

My Saturdays used to be spent in Topshop with my friends, trying on absolutely everything and laughing nervously while Zoey stuffed as many accessories down her pants as she could manage before leaving the store. If we weren’t in Topshop we’d spend the day sitting in Starbucks having a grande gingersnap latte and banana honey muffin. I’m sure that’s what they’re all doing now.

I haven’t heard from anyone since the first week I got here, except a text from Laura before my phone was cut off, filling me on all the gossip, the biggest of all being that Zoey and Fiachrá got back together and did it in Zoey’s house when her parents were away in Monte Carlo for the weekend. Her dad has a gambling problem, which Zoey and the rest of us loved because it meant when we all stayed over at her house, her parents would come home much later than everybody else’s. Anyway, apparently Zoey said that sex with Fiachrá hurt worse than the time the lesbian from the Sutton hockey team hit her between the legs with the stick, which was really bad, believe me‑I saw ‑and she isn’t in a rush to do it again. Meanwhile Laura told me not to tell anyone but she was meeting Fiachrá at the weekend to do it. She hopes I don’t mind and please don’t tell Zoey. As if I could tell anyone if I wanted to, where I am.

Where I am. I haven’t told you that yet, have I? I’ve mentioned my mum’s sister‑in‑law, Rosaleen, already. She’s the one my mum used to empty her wardrobe of all her unworn impulse buys for and send them down in black sacks with the tags still on. Rosaleen’s married to my uncle Arthur, who is my mum’s brother. They live in a gatehouse in the country in a place called Meath in the middle of nowhere with hardly anybody else around. We visited them only a few times in my life and I was always bored to death. It took us an hour and fifteen minutes to get there and the build‑up was always a let down. I thought they were hicks in the middle of the sticks. I used to call them the Deliverance Duo. That’s the only time I remember Dad laughing at one of my jokes. He never came with us when we visited Rosaleen and Arthur. I don’t think they ever had an argument or anything, but like penguins and polar bears, they were just too far apart ever to be able to spend any time near one another. Anyway, that’s where we live now. In the gatehouse with the Deliverance Duo.

It’s a sweet house, a quarter the size of our old one which is no bad thing, and it reminds me of the one in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. It’s built from limestone and the wood around the windows and roof is painted olive green. There are three bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen and a living room downstairs. Mum has an en suite but Rosaleen, Arthur and I all share a bathroom on the second floor. Used to having my own bathroom, I think this is gross, particularly when I have to go in there after my uncle Arthur and his newspaper‑reading session. Rosaleen is a neat freak, obsessively tidy; she never ever sits down. She’s always moving things, cleaning things, spraying chemicals in the air, and saying stuff about God and his will. I said to her once that I hoped God’s will was better than the one Dad left behind for us. She looked at me horrified and scuttled off to dust somewhere else.

Rosaleen has the depth of a shot glass. Everything she talks about is totally irrelevant, unnecessary. The weather. The sad news about a poor person on the other side of the world. Her friend down the road who has broken her arm, or who has a father with two months to live, or somebody’s daughter who married a dick who is leaving her with her second child. Everything is doom and gloom and followed by some sort of utterance about God, like, ‘God love them,’ or ‘God is gracious,’ or ‘Let God be good to them.’ Not that I talk about anything important, but if I ever try to discuss those things in more detail, like get to the root of the problem, Rosaleen is totally incapable of carrying on. She only wants to talk about the sad problem, she’s not interested in talking about why it happened, nor in the solution. She shushes me with her God phrases, makes me feel like I’m speaking out of turn or as though I’m so young I couldn’t possibly take the reality. I think it’s the other way around. I think she brings things up so that she doesn’t feel like she’s avoiding them, and once they’re out of the way, she doesn’t talk about them ever again.

I think I’ve heard my uncle Arthur speak about five words in my life. It’s as though Mum has gone through her life speaking for both of them‑not that he would have shared her views on anything she said. Arthur speaks more than Mum these days. He has an entire language of his own, which I’ve slowly but surely learned to decipher. He speaks in grunts, nods and snot‑snorts; a kind of mucous inhale, which is something he does when he disagrees with something. A mere, ‘Ah,’ and a throw back of the head means he’s not bothered by something. For example, here is how a typical breakfast‑time would go.

Arthur and I are sitting at the kitchen table and Rosaleen as usual is buzzing about the place with crockery piled with toast, and little dishes of home‑made jam, honey and marmalade. The radio, as usual, is blaring so loudly I can hear every word the presenter is saying from my bedroom; some annoying miserable man talking in monotone about the terrible things happening in the world. And so Rosaleen comes to the table with the teapot.

‘Tea, Arthur?’

Arthur throws back his head like a horse trying to rid his mane of a fly. He wants tea.

And the man on the radio talks about how another factory in Ireland has closed and one hundred people are losing their jobs.

Arthur inhales and a load of mucus is sucked up through his nose and then down his throat. He doesn’t like this.

Rosaleen appears at the table with another plate of toast piled high. ‘Oh, isn’t that terrible, God love their families. And the little ones now with their daddys out of work.’

‘Their mothers too, you know,’ I say, taking a slice of toast.

Rosaleen watches me bite into the toast and her green eyes widen as I chew. She always watches me eat and it freaks me out. It’s as though she is the witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel’, watching for me to become plump enough so that she can throw me into the Aga with my hands tied behind my back and an apple stuffed in my gob. I wouldn’t mind an apple. It would be the fewest calories she’d ever given me.

I swallow what’s in my mouth and put the rest of my toast down on my plate.

She leaves again, disappointed.

On the news they talk about some new government tax increase and Arthur inhales more mucus. If he hears any more bad news, he’ll have no room for his breakfast with all that mucus. He’s only in his forties but he looks and acts older. From the shoulders up he reminds me of a king prawn, always bent over something, whether it’s his food or his work.

Rosaleen returns with a plate of Irish breakfast enough to feed all the children of the one hundred factory workers who have just lost their jobs.

Arthur throws his head back again. He’s happy about this.

Rosaleen stands beside me and pours me tea. I’d love nothing more than a gingersnap lattÉ but I tip the milk into the strong tea and sip it all the same. Her eyes watch me and don’t look away till I swallow.

I don’t know how old Rosaleen is exactly but I’m guessing somewhere in her early‑to‑mid‑forties, and if this makes sense, I’m sure whatever age she really is, she looks ten years older. She looks like she’s from the 1940s in her floral tea dresses buttoned down the middle, with a slip underneath. My mum never wore slips; she barely wore underwear. Rosaleen has mouse‑brown hair, always worn down, parted sharply in the centre of her head, revealing grey roots, and it’s short, to her chin. She always tucks her hair behind both ears, pink little mouse ears peeping out. She never wears earrings. Or makeup. She always wears a gold crucifix on a thin gold chain around her neck. She’s the kind of woman that my friend Zoey would say looks like she’s never had an orgasm in her life and I wonder, while cutting the fat off the bacon and as Rosaleen’s eyes widen at me doing this, if Zoey had an orgasm when she did it with Fiachrá. Then I visualised the damage the hockey stick did to her and I instantly doubted it.

Across the road from the gatehouse is a bungalow. I have no idea who lives in it but Rosaleen pops back and forth every day with little parcels of food. Two miles down the road is a post office, which is operated from somebody’s house, and across the road from that is the smallest school I’ve ever seen, which unlike my school at home, which has activities every hour throughout the year, is completely empty during the summer. I asked if there were any yoga classes or anything in it and Rosaleen told me she’d show me how to make yoghurt herself. She seemed so happy that I couldn’t correct her. In the first week I watched her make strawberry yoghurt. In the second week, I was still eating it.

The gatehouse that is Arthur and Rosaleen’s house once protected the side entrance to Kilsaney Castle in the 1700s. The castle’s main entrance has a disused scary‑looking gothic entrance that I imagine I see severed heads hanging out of every time we pass. The castle was built as a towered fortification of the Norman Pale‑that was the area with Norman and English control in the East of Ireland, established after Strongbow invaded‑sometime between 1100 and 1200, which, when you think about it, is a bit vague. It’s the difference between me or my half‑human, half‑robot great‑great‑great‑great‑grandchildren building something. Anyway, it was built for a Norman warlord, so that’s why I think of the severed heads, because they did that, didn’t they?

The area it’s in is called County Meath. It used to be East Meath and, along with Westmeath‑surprise surprise‑it made up a separate and fifth province in Ireland, which was the territory of the High King. The former seat of the High Kings, the Hill of Tara, is only a few kilometres away. It’s in the news all the time now because they’re building a motorway nearby. We had to debate it in school a few months ago. I was ‘for’ the motorway being built because I thought the King would have liked to have one in his day, as it would have made it easier for him to get to his office instead of having to go through shitty fields. Imagine the filth on his sandals. I also said it would be more accessible for tourists. They could drive right up to it or take photographs from open‑top buses going one hundred and twenty kilometres on the motorway. I was only taking the piss, but our substitute teacher went crazy, thinking I actually meant it, because she was on a committee to try and prevent the motorway being built. It’s so easy to give substitute teachers nervous breakdowns. Especially the ones who believe they can do some good for the students. I told you, I was nasty.

After the Norman psycho, various lords and ladies lived in the castle. They built on stables and outhouses around the place. Controversially one lord even converted to Catholicism after marrying a Catholic, and built a chapel as a treat for the family. Me and Mum got a swimming pool as our treat, but each to their own. The demesne is surrounded by a famine wall, which was a project to provide work for the starving during the potato famine. It runs right along Arthur and Rosaleen’s garden and house, and creeps me out every time I see it. If Rosaleen had ever visited our house for dinner she’d probably have started building a wall around us, because none of us eats carbs. At least, we never used to eat carbs, now I’m eating so much I could fuel all the factories they’re closing down.

Kilsaney descendants continued to live in the castle until the 1920s, when some arsonists didn’t get the memo that the inhabitants were Catholic and they burned them out. After that they could only live in a small section of the castle because they couldn’t afford to fix it up and heat it, and then they eventually moved out in the nineties. I don’t know who owns it now but it’s fallen into disrepair: no roof, fallen‑down walls, no stairs, you get the idea. There’s loads of stuff growing inside it and whatever else that scutters around. I learned all that while I was doing a project on it for school. Mum suggested I stay with Rosaleen and Arthur for the weekend and do some research. She and Dad had the biggest fight I’d ever seen or heard that day, and Dad became even more crazy when she suggested I go away. The atmosphere was so bad that I was happy to leave them. Plus, Mum trying to get me to leave the house really pissed Dad off, and so feeling it was my duty as a daughter to make his life hell, I merely obliged. But as soon as I got there, I wasn’t really interested in snooping around and finding out the history of the place. I just about managed to stay with Rosaleen and Arthur for lunch, and then went to the toilet to call my Filipino nanny, Mae‑who we’ve since had to send back home‑and made her collect me and bring me home. I told Rosaleen I had stomach cramps and tried not to laugh when she asked me if I thought it was the apple pie.

I ended up taking an essay about the castle from the internet. I was called to the principal’s office and she failed me for plagarism, which was ridiculous because Zoey did her project on Malahide Castle, stole everything from the internet, changed a few words and dates around, got the words and dates wrong to make it look like she didn’t copy it, and she still got a higher score than me. Where’s the justice in that?

Surrounding the castle is one hundred acres of land. Arthur is the groundskeeper here and, with one hundred acres to look after, he’s out first thing in the morning and back at five thirty on the button, as dirty as a coal miner. He never complains, he never groans about the weather, he just gets up, eats his breakfast while deafening himself with the radio, and then goes out to work. Rosaleen gives him a flask of tea and a few sandwiches to keep him going and he rarely comes back, except to get something from the garage that he forgot, or to go to the toilet. He’s a simple man only I don’t really believe that. Nobody who says as little as he does, is as simple as you’d think. It takes a lot to not say a lot, because when you’re not talking, you’re thinking, and he thinks a lot. My mum and dad talked all the time. Talkers don’t think much; their words drown out any possibility of hearing their subconscious asking, Why did you say that? What do you really think?

I used to stay in bed for as long as possible on school mornings and on weekends until Mae dragged me out kicking and screaming. But here, I wake up early. Surrounded by so many gigantic trees, the place is swarming with birds. They’re so loud and I just wake up without feeling tired. I’m always up by seven, which is nothing short of miraculous for me. Mae would be so proud. The evenings here are long too, and so there’s pressure having to keep myself busy during the daylight. That’s an awful lot of hours for an awful lot of nothing to do.

Dad decided he’d had enough in May, right before my Junior Certificate exams, which was a little unfair as, up until then, I thought I was the one who was supposed to want to top myself. I did my exams anyway. I probably failed them, but I don’t really care and I don’t think anybody else does either. I’ll find those results out in September. My entire class came to Dad’s funeral, which I’m sure they loved because they got a day off school. With all that going on, can you believe I was actually embarrassed about crying in front of them. I did it anyway, which started off Zoey and then Laura. A girl in my class called Fiona, who nobody ever talked to, hugged me really tight and gave me a card from her family saying that they were all thinking of me. Fiona gave me her mobile number and her favourite book, and said she’d be there for me if I ever needed somebody to talk to. At the time I thought it was a bit lame, her trying to get in with me at my dad’s funeral, but thinking about it after‑which is something I do now‑it was the kindest thing anybody did or said to me that day.

I started reading the book in the first week I moved to Meath. It was a kind of a ghost story about a girl who was invisible to everybody in the world, including her family and friends, even though they knew she existed. She was just born invisible. I won’t give away the rest but she eventually becomes friends with someone who does see her. I liked the idea and thought Fiona was trying to say something, but when I stayed overnight in Zoey’s house and told her and Laura, they thought it was the weirdest thing they’d ever heard and that Fiona was even more of a freak. You know what, I’m finding it increasingly hard to understand them.

During the first week that we moved here Arthur drove me to Dublin so that I could stay overnight in Zoey’s house. The car journey was over an hour and we never spoke once. The only thing he said was, ‘Radio?’ and then when I nodded he turned it on to one of those channels that just talk about the problems in the country and don’t play music and he snot‑snorted his way through it. But at least it was better than silence. After spending the night with Zoey and Laura‑and bitching about him all night‑I was feeling confident. Back to my old self. We all agreed that he and Rosaleen definitely lived up to being called the Deliverance Duo and that I shouldn’t allow them to pull me into their weirdo existence. That meant that I should be able to listen to whatever the hell I wanted in the car. But the next day, when he picked me up in his filthy dirty Land Rover, which Zoey and Laura so obviously couldn’t stop laughing at, I felt bad for Arthur. I felt really bad.

Having to go back to a house that wasn’t mine, in a car that wasn’t mine, to sleep in a room that wasn’t mine, to try to talk to a mother that didn’t feel like mine, made me want to hold on to at least one thing that was familiar. Who I used to be. It wasn’t necessarily the right thing to hold on to, but it was something. I kicked up a fuss in the car and told Arthur that I wanted to listen to something else. He put my favourite radio station on for one song and then he got so frustrated listening to the Pussycat Dolls singing about wanting boobies, he grumbled and changed it back to the talk channel. I stared out the window in a huff, hating him and hating myself both at the same time. For half an hour we listened to a woman crying down the phone to the presenter about how her husband had lost his job in a computer factory, couldn’t find another and they had four children to look after. My hair was down across my face and all I could do was hope that Arthur didn’t see me crying. Sad stuff really gets to me now. I heard about it before but I was kind of numb to it. It just didn’t happen to me.

I don’t know how long we’re going to live here. Nobody will answer that question for me. Arthur simply doesn’t talk, my mum isn’t communicating and Rosaleen isn’t able to cope with a question of that magnitude.

My life is not going as I planned. I’m sixteen and by now I should have had sex with Fiachrá. I should be in our villa in Marbella swimming every day, eating barbecued dinners, clubbing every night at Angels & Demons and finding guy number two to fancy and sleep with. If the first person I sleep with ends up being the man I marry, I think I’ll die. Instead, I’m living in hicksville, in a gatehouse with three crazy people, the nearest things to us being a bungalow housing people that I’ve never seen, a post office that’s practically in somebody’s living room, an empty school, and a ruined castle. I have absolutely nothing to do with my life.

Or so I thought.

I’m choosing to start the story from when I arrived here.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 780