Instructions for a Heatwave (9 page)

Monica gazed at a place where the chocolate-brown paint had chipped off the banisters, revealing layers of color underneath,
like rings in a tree. A dull turquoise, a violent mauve, a creamy white. She thought for a moment of the other people who had stood there in the hallway, like she did, considering what color to paint it.

Michael Francis was talking again, about how she needed to come to London, to help their mother, how they had to contact Aoife but that he didn’t have a number for her; he’d called the one she’d given him but the person who’d answered had said Aoife didn’t work there anymore.

Typical Aoife, Monica thought immediately, to move jobs but not inform them. Then she felt a prickle of irritation to observe that her mind had, once again, been pulled back to her younger sister. What was it about today that was making Aoife so present, so dominant in her thoughts, as an adult, as a child, as a baby? The age gap between them meant that Monica had a clear view of Aoife at every stage of her life. And Aoife had howled, Monica remembered, as she stared at the chip in the paint, for years. Pretty much nonstop. They had got used to it in the end, to living their lives with the foreground noise of Aoife’s rage. She had screamed in her high chair, in her buggy, in the car, on the bus, in her cot, in her baby carrier. If Monica had put her on reins to walk down the street, which she had done a great deal because Gretta had to have a break sometimes, just fifteen minutes or so, Aoife would cast herself facedown and kick the pavement in a frenzy of fury. If Monica didn’t let her explore some steep stairs, she would bite and scratch and scream; if Monica did let her climb them, because she was tired of being bitten and scratched, and Aoife fell and banged her head, she screamed as well.

Sleep didn’t seem to be something Aoife needed. She woke five times a night, well into her childhood, lacerating the dark with her sudden yells. Their mother would lurch, gray-faced, through the door to attempt to coax her back to sleep. Monica, who had the bed next to Aoife, tried to get there first, tried to make Aoife be quiet so their mother didn’t hear her, so their
mother could sleep, so their mother could get back to being the way she used to be, before all this: large and in love with life, always popping in and out of other people’s houses or jamming on her hat to go and see the priest, not the ghostlike wisp of a woman who haunted the rooms of their house. But Aoife would not be comforted. There was always something, with her. She had nightmares about creatures under the bed, about things tapping at the window, about a black shape behind the bathroom door. If Monica took her across the landing and showed her that the black shape was nothing more than their father’s dressing gown, hanging on a hook, Aoife would stop twiddling her hair for a moment, stare at the dressing gown and say, “But it wasn’t that before. Not before.”

Their father said Aoife was difficult; their mother said she was her cross to bear, her comeuppance for wanting one more; Bridie said that child needed the arse tanned off her; the doctor said, “Oh, you’ve got one of
those
,” and gave Gretta a prescription for tranquilizers—her first.

After that their mother slept a lot and, sometimes, even when she was awake it was as if she was asleep, somewhere in her mind. Monica would often come home early from school, pleading a headache or an upset tummy, but really knowing that if she made it home before Aoife woke up from her afternoon nap, she could take her out of the cot and have her downstairs or out in the back garden and their mother wouldn’t be woken by her squawks and yells. Sometimes Gretta would sleep on until the early evening. Monica would put Aoife in her playpen with a pan and a wooden spoon while she got the tea on. When her mother emerged, face crumpled and somehow vague, she would rest a hand on the top of Monica’s head and say that she was an angel, a heaven-sent angel. And Monica would stand there, feeling the weight of her mother’s hand, and what would wash through her was not so much pleasure at her mother’s words but relief that she had got everyone through another day.

Aoife walked before she was one, taking everything off the kitchen shelves, dragging the ash out of the grate, pulling teacups down off tables. She talked in full sentences at a year and a half: “I don’t want that red bowl, for some reason, I want the green one.” By her second birthday, she could count to fifty, say the alphabet, recite a poem about a mouse. It seemed to Monica that her parents were relieved at this point. There was a reason why Aoife was the way she was: Aoife was gifted, Aoife was special, Aoife was a genius. “Of course,” her mother could now say to people in shops, if Aoife was lying across the entranceway, kicking the door and screaming, “she’s terribly bright.”

But then, to their surprise, things didn’t go so well for Aoife when it came to school. She came home each afternoon with a cross, set face, smudged with ink. If Gretta asked her whom she had played with at break time, Aoife scowled and said nothing. She would slide off her chair and disappear under the table. Monica happened to pass the infants’ school on her way to a games lesson with her class and, scanning the groups and clusters of small children, caught sight of a familiar figure, socks fallen around her ankles, hair escaping from its plaits, standing alone in the shade of the plane tree, engaged in an animated conversation with herself.

Aoife had turned, almost overnight, from being “difficult” and “a genius” to “a worry.” Her writing unfurled from her pencil tip in an incomprehensible, spidery scrawl. She used both hands indiscriminately; she seemed to have no concept that she ought to favor one over the other. She wrote her
s
’s backwards, her
t
’s upside down. The spaces between words were elided or appeared randomly, mid-syllable.

“Look, Aoife,” their mother would say, “here’s an
A
, a lovely tall
A
. Can you see it? An
A
for ‘apple’ and ‘amen’ and ‘Aoife.’ ”

Aoife kicked her heels against the chair legs, squinted at the letter, then laid her head on her arm and shut her eyes.

“Can you see it?” Gretta persisted.

“Mmm,” Aoife said, into her sleeve.

“Can you write one for me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it looks like the side of a house, a house that’s been sliced in half so that all the roof is cut and open and all the people have fallen out and—”

“Let’s move on to
B
.” Gretta was being firm. The teacher had said that Aoife needed to be taken in hand, that she mustn’t be indulged in her fancies. “Now,
B
is for—”

“ ‘Bolster,’ ” Aoife said. “And ‘buoyant’ and ‘bulbous’ and ‘bosom’ and ‘bottom.’ Mrs. Saunders has the biggest bottom—”

“Aoife, we don’t say things like that about—”

“—you’ve ever seen. It’s so big it doesn’t fit into the teacher’s chair. She has to sit sort of—”

“Aoife—”

“—sideways to squeeze it in.”

Michael Francis, across the table, doing his geometry homework, started to snicker. “She’s right, you know,” he said. “She does.”

Gretta leapt up, swept the alphabet book to the floor. “I don’t know why I bother,” she shouted. “I’m trying to get you to better yourself but you don’t care. You don’t try. You have to try, Aoife. Anyone can do this—anyone! You just need to put a bit of effort in. I’d have killed for the education you’re getting and you’re just throwing it all away.”

Mrs. Saunders said that Aoife’s reading age was very low and that she couldn’t even write her numbers properly, let alone add them up, and that, in short, her recommendation was that Aoife be kept back a year. Mrs. Saunders referred to Aoife throughout this talk as “Eva” and when Gretta corrected her, Mrs. Saunders replied that didn’t Gretta think it would be better “for everyone” to use what she termed “the proper spelling” of the name? If
only to give Eva a better chance of learning to write it? Monica, who was standing in the classroom with her mother, felt Gretta inhale, saw her pull herself up to her full height and place her knuckles on the teacher’s desk and Monica closed her eyes.

Either way, Aoife/Eva repeated the year, then repeated it again. At the age of seven, she was still in the first year of infants’ school, sitting with her knees jammed under a tiny desk at the back of the class, writing her letters the wrong way around and upside down, words that ran diagonally or backwards, unreadable numbers that streamed right to left, as if reflected in a mirror.

It was at this point that Monica started going out with Joe, or was spending her evenings studying her nursing books, so she slightly lost focus on “the Aoife problem,” as the family termed it. It was as if the presence of Joe in her life gave her special absolution—for the first time—from looking after Aoife, from taking responsibility for her.

But there was one night when Aoife, still in the infants’ class, was struggling through a first-stage reading book about a cat and a rat, Michael Francis spelling out the letters for her, when Joe leaned forward from his chair. “Why do you do that?” he said.

No answer.

“Aoife? Why do you do that thing?”

She looked up reluctantly, her face screwed up, her hand over one eye, and it was possible to see the cat and its exploits with the mat and the rat drain from her features. “What thing?”

“With your hand over your eye,” Joe said, tapping his ash into the grate.

“It stops the letters leaping about the page,” she said, replacing her hand and looking back down at her book.

Joe had been hugely amused by this reply and told it to several people that night at the pub. Monica had felt hot as he did so. She didn’t want people to laugh at Aoife; she didn’t want people to know she had a strange sister.

But then Joe asked Monica to marry him and it no longer mattered if Aoife mysteriously refused to learn to read. It didn’t matter that Aoife still couldn’t write or spell. It didn’t matter that she, Monica, had to share a room with a child who woke her in the night by talking to herself or bawling through a nightmare. It no longer mattered that she hadn’t done well in her first-year nursing exams or that her father rarely spoke or that her mother insisted on wearing a mackintosh repaired with staples. Nothing mattered anymore because she was getting out of that family and into her own. It didn’t matter if she left nursing college because, really, what was the point in staying when soon she’d have a husband and a flat above a shop, a home all of her own?

“Well, don’t ask me,” Monica said to her brother, down the phone. “I’ve no idea how to get in touch with her.”

As Michael Francis is arguing with Monica, as Monica is putting down the phone and recrossing the hall and going back into the dining room, as she is allowing herself to collapse into Peter’s outstretched arms, to submit herself to his particular smell—a fumy mix of paint stripper, oak dust and varnish—Aoife, 3,500 miles west, five hours behind in time, is laboring up the stairs in an apartment block in the Upper West Side. A bag is slung over her shoulder, a pair of unlaced boots are on her feet and they are beginning to bother her but she’s gone too far now to stop.

The bag is heavy, the day is hot and gritty, and her feet slip and slide inside the boots, which are a size too big but she hadn’t been able not to buy them. Russian Army boots, the man with the flea-market stall had told her as she pulled them on, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk, her feet in the gutter. Should see you through a couple of winters, he’d said. She had yanked and fiddled with the knotted laces, her toes spreading and stretching into the hardened leather innards. Funny, she always thought, how your feet spend so long in a space you never see. She has squinted into the dark, half-seen toe spaces of shoes but has never been able to equate those semicircular tunnels with the soft, humid places her feet know so intimately. They’ve probably trekked across the steppes, Gabe had said, lifting up her foot to examine the boot sole. Pretty small for a soldier, he said.

Michael Francis is trying to herd his children into their nightclothes; he is squeezing toothpaste onto their matching brushes. Gretta is opening a cupboard and discovering an old macramé kit holding a half-finished plant-pot-holder. Monica is accepting a brandy from Peter; she is tucking her feet under her on the sofa. And Aoife is pausing to catch her breath before the last flight of stairs.

On her feet are dead men’s boots; in her bag are boxes and boxes of photographic film, a particular type that Evelyn needs, which takes well to the silver-bromide processing, that likes to soak up the white of Evelyn’s blenched backgrounds, likes to take the imprint of every curve, every dip, every contour, every tensed muscle in the expressions of her subjects. It’s sold in only one shop in Brooklyn so every couple of months Aoife is dispatched to stock up. She likes the ride over there, starting in the innards of Manhattan, then rising into the light, which crosshatches the passengers’ faces with shade.

The sign next to where she stands, leaning on the handrail, would to anyone else say
6TH FLOOR
, but Aoife turns her head away, avoiding its eye, as if it is a person who has committed some offense against her. Text to Aoife is slippery, dangerous. It cannot be trusted. One minute the sign might say
6TH FLOOR
; the next, the letters will have shifted, with sickening ease, into
GUT FLOUR
or
GIRTH LOOT
or
9TH HOOR
.

When she first came to New York, she knew no one. She arrived in a rush, like someone who trips as they enter a room. She had dismantled her life in London in a matter of days, giving away what she couldn’t carry, leaving her bicycle on the pavement with a notice:
FREE TO WHOEVER NEEDS IT
. She knew someone who knew an American bloke who said his godfather ran a music club in somewhere called the Bowery. He’d give Aoife a job, he was sure of it. It was a tenuous lifeline, but she’d taken it.

When she first came to New York, she found herself always on the lookout for families. In the street, in cafés, in queues at the
movies, under the leafy canopies of trees in Central Park. When she saw one, she would study them. She would walk behind them in shops, position herself near them on a bench and lean in to catch their conversations. She wasn’t particular about ages: any family would do. She looked into prams and strollers, and felt a sort of satisfaction when she found an echo in the baby’s face of the mother’s unusually wide eyes or widow’s peak. She watched a father and a teenaged daughter eat bagels together, outside a corner deli, both licking their bottom lips in exactly the same way, apparently unconscious of their mirroring. On her way to the subway every morning, she crossed paths with an elderly mother and daughter who wore the same color lipstick; they had the same fine, flyaway hair. The mother wore hers swept up into a chignon; the daughter had cut hers—defiantly, Aoife always thought—into a severe bob that didn’t suit her. Aoife often got the urge to whisper, Just give in, grow it and put it in a chignon, it will look better.