Helen stood screaming in the front room.
I took the children into the kitchen and started making pancakes.
Her scream continued for a long time. It went back to the time when she was a child only five years of age herself. In Birmingham. The house on the corner with the buses going by and passengers looking in the windows. Her father at work, her mother in the kitchen with earrings on peeling potatoes. Helen standing on the street, the side gate had been left open, her younger sister was getting into the back of a car. The driver was holding a bag of sweets. Her other sister, no more than three, was climbing in to join her. It was a Wolseley with leather seats, their legs were dangling. And the housekeeper from Ennis running out when she heard the scream, making up for everything she had lost in her own life, the baby she had to leave behind in Ireland. She was shouting Holy Jesus. Mary mother. Reaching into the back of the car to clutch the two girls by the arms at the last minute before the car took off around the corner with the rear door swinging. The howling of tyres creeping like a wounded animal along the wall.
The side gate was locked again.
Her mother’s face was at the kitchen window like a photograph gone black and white. To make them forget, the housekeeper put them all three into the bath and taught them a song about James Connolly, a working-class hero. Nobody called the police, it would have been shameful to have them come around to the house, people asking if it had to do with being Irish. Nothing happened, everyone was safe. He was caught some ten years later, an engineer, the Cannock Chase man. Only some of the bodies were found. He never admitted anything apart from the fact that he loved cars, somebody bought his Wolseley at auction to be burned in a public ceremony with a crowd of people standing by to watch.
Was that the reason?
The reason for going to Canada. The reason they could never speak of and for which they made up so many other happy reasons to go and live in a quiet place with a salt mine.
Rosie and Essie ate the pancakes with yoghurt. Essie caught me sprinkling invisible sugar with my hand. Rosie spilled yoghurt on herself, on me, it was on the carpet, a pink footprint. I brought them to bed and read the book about the boy in the bakery at night getting milk to go into the cake for the morning. We sat up in bed for a long time, all four of us. Helen was clutching them, one on each side, rocking back and forth until they were asleep.
It never occurred to me to get the groceries fallen on the ground in the street until a neighbour came to the door and handed them in to me without a word.
After midnight, Helen got up and went out to the public phone by the front door to make a call. There was no answer. She walked up and down the corridor, then she tried again.
In the house overlooking the salt mine, the phone rings around the hallway, into the kitchen, into the blue room with all the furniture brought over from Birmingham. It rings out onto the porch, as far as the white picket fence. Her mother has just left the house, on her way to the courthouse square to meet her friend. She puts on her sunglasses getting into the car. The lake has no meaning for her, the sunlight is full of scorn, the glare of things she wants to forget.
The day is hot, the cicadas are deafening. There is a child cycling along the sidewalk, in and out of brightness under the trees, making a soft tapping sound along the concrete slabs. The neighbours are gradually moving a little further along their lives each time the child comes back around – a man gardening, a woman on the porch with ice cubes ringing, blue shouts coming from a swimming pool.
The town is calm and polite. They drive slowly, they speak with caution, they call her by her first name, she gets invited to parties where people eat with their hands and it’s all paper plates and paper cups of wine and women standing around in shorts. A town where she first turned up in sweltering Donegal tweed and sang a song that brought the house down. The town by the lake where students drive themselves to school. Where the hairdresser has a swimming pool. Where the judge will be seen having coffee with the local electrician, there is no difference between people only what you have.
Helen’s mother has attached herself to this Canadian town like a story made up out of nothing. She has turned her back on Birmingham. The city in which her children almost disappeared. The city of fog. Fog loitering in the streets. The sound of coughing and cars starting at night. The headlights of a bus pointing through a dense grey curtain, the doorbell ringing and the fog slowly coming up the stairs.
The world is full of things that have not happened.
Helen gave up trying to phone her mother and came back in. We sat on the floor in the front room. The curtains were left open. Her face was gold. Her eyes were green. Her hair was copper with the light coming in off the street.
Was it wrong to feel lucky?
We ate some of the leftover pancakes. We drank two bottles of Guinness each. We made love. The dog next door was barking. The people upstairs were laughing. The buses stopped running. I got up to check on the children. I stood watching them for a while with the light from the hallway across their faces. The force of them asleep was greater than all their time awake.
My silence has become unbearable. There is a forest growing inside. Trees springing up in the kitchen, trees in the hallway, around the bed, roots running under the green carpet into the front room. The curtains have a pattern of falling leaves, the entire back wall of the house looks like open country with nothing but silence.
My mother tells me that she was in hospital once. It was in Düsseldorf, she says, during the war. She started bleeding, maybe this is difficult for her to explain. She doesn’t tell me what exactly happened, only that she could not stop bleeding and was taken to hospital.
In the room next door to her, she says, there was a man who kept screaming at night. He was a soldier, he had been stationed in the east. He was brought back injured, but the doctors could find nothing wrong with him, no medical explanation for his pain. He experienced terrible stomach cramps which made him vomit, he could not eat a thing. He crawled along the floor, he lay curled up in the corridor, the nurses had to lift him up and carry him back to his room. They said it might have been shell shock. He was more frightened than wounded, he couldn’t sleep, his arms and legs were shaking.
One night, he started talking, other patients in rooms off the same corridor could hear him speaking in a raised voice to one of the nurses, she was holding his hand. He had been commanded to a place on the outskirts of a small town. It was on the edge of a forest. Soldiers in his regiment had been given the job of clearing the town, separating women from their children. The women were rounded up into a small group of about thirty or forty. They kept looking back at the children from whom they had been separated, but the soldiers continued to push them towards a ravine. One of the children broke free and ran after the group of mothers but was held back. The child fell.
There was a soldier filming all of this with a moving camera, the man said.
The story went around the ward in a shocked whisper. The man was given an injection to calm him down. He continued speaking a while longer, then he was quiet. He was said to be delusional. Before the night was out, he was gone, his bed was vacant. The nurse said he had been discharged. There was no more talking, no more whispering, the story disappeared. My mother brought it to Ireland with her.
The dental practice is across the street from the former veterinary surgery. The waiting room is still in use as a dining room, a table and chairs for eight people, magazines like place mats. In the corner, there is a cabinet full of crockery, a porcelain teapot. Above the fireplace, a large picture of a turf boat with dark brown sails.
The surgery is in the living room, to the front, facing onto the main street. The dentist speaks to me at first in the native language, then he switches back to English. He’s from the North, from Derry. He smiles and flicks his head to one side as he speaks. He whispers