The Daisy Picker (19 page)

Lizzie can’t remember the last time she held Mammy’s hand. The skin is rougher than she thought it would be – all that scrubbing and polishing and scouring. Mammy stares
straight ahead – she hasn’t said a word since they sat down – and her empty face doesn’t change as tears start to pour slowly down her cheeks. She makes no effort to wipe
them away; it’s as if she doesn’t know they’re there. They fall off her chin and drop one by one onto the handbag in her lap. The sound they make is tiny, a little, gentle
plup.
Lizzie watches them and thinks:
Daddy is dying. Daddy has cancer.
She lets the words fall like the tears; but they’re heavy, and black.

They’re taking Daddy home tomorrow. The hospital will arrange for a nurse to visit the house each day and inject him with enough morphine that he won’t be in pain. Or not in too much
pain.

‘I’m so sorry; it’s quite clear from the X-rays that there’s nothing we can do for him.’ The doctor looks too young and too tired to have to do this terrible thing.
Lizzie looks at him and wonders how often he has to smash people’s lives with a few sentences. Does it get easier every time he does it? After a few years, will he be able to break hearts and
then go home and eat his dinner? She wants to hate him, but she can’t. All she can do is hold Mammy’s hand and watch the tears leaving dark splotches on the cracked brown leather.
Daddy has cancer. Daddy is dying.

Daddy is sixty-nine.

They go to sit with him in his room. He’s sleeping, his mouth slightly open. His false teeth are sitting in a glass on the locker, giving his face a defenceless look that makes Lizzie want
to wail out loud. He’s wearing his own pyjamas, which their neighbour Claire brought to the hospital at some stage. Lizzie wonders who put them on him. There’s a needle attached to the
back of his hand –
Were his fingers always that thin?
– with a tube going into it from a see-through bag of clear liquid. Something is beeping. The room is warm and smells of
medicine.

They sit on either side of the bed and look at him. Lizzie feels wide awake. She watches Daddy’s chest rising and falling under his pyjama top. She imagines him not being around any more,
and has to push the thought away quickly because it makes her feel like getting sick.

She remembers a one-man show she saw once, years ago, in Dublin. She and a pal were up for a few days, staying in a B&B near the theatre, and they decided to check out the show for the
laugh. The actor was Australian, and he pranced about the stage and spoke in rhyme about his speckled life. One line stuck in Lizzie’s head: ‘He dragged me from happy and pushed me to
sad.’

Now she knows what he meant. She feels as if some brutal hand has reached out and wrenched her from the happy place she lived in until this morning, and shoved her into someplace dark and
cold.

I’m frightened, here in the dark.

She tries to remember Daddy when she was young, but all she can find in her head is a black-and-white photo: the two of them on a beach somewhere, sitting on a rug. She’s half-wrapped in a
big towel – the straps of her togs are just visible above it – holding a bag of Taytos and looking straight at the camera, unsmiling. Her hair is wet and plastered to her head. A bucket
and spade are beside her. She looks about four.

Daddy’s hair is black, and he’s smiling and looking at her. He wears dark trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt, and his feet are bare. He sits with his legs out in front of him
and leans back on his palms and looks at his little daughter.

Just at the edge of the photo, someone – her? – has built a higgledy-piggledy sandcastle with a moat. A few shells have been stuck haphazardly into its sides, and a lollipop stick
pokes out of the top. The bit of the sky that’s visible is very white – too white to have been blue in reality. The day must have been cloudy. Some long-forgotten holiday; she knows
they went to Donegal a few times when she was small.

The night lasts a million years. Only Daddy sleeps. Mammy sits beside him and holds the hand that’s not attached to a tube and cries very softly. Lizzie sits for a while, and then gets up
and leans on the radiator and rests her hot cheek against the window and tries not to think. About anything.

In the morning, Mammy and Lizzie go to the canteen and push toast around their plates. When they get back, Daddy is having breakfast – two thin sausages and a rasher, and homemade brown
bread, and a cup of tea. He eats nearly one sausage and half a slice of bread. Mammy pours him more tea.

As if they’re having breakfast at home. As if none of this nightmare is real.

They talk about the weather – typical Irish summer – and about how nice and warm it is in the room. Lizzie’s eyelids are like sandpaper rasping up and down over her eyes. Her
legs are heavier than lead, but her head feels light. Daddy says they should think about getting central heating in the house. He doesn’t ask them about his leg, doesn’t ask any
questions. He seems glad to be going home. Lizzie wonders if the doctor told him.

After breakfast, they have to wait in the corridor while he’s given medication and dressed. Then they put his pyjamas and his Steradent and his comb and his razor back into the bag Claire
brought the day before. He’s wheeled to the car in a wheelchair and manoeuvred in by Lizzie and one of the nurses. It’s shocking how feeble he suddenly seems to have become, like an old
man.

His hand trembles as Lizzie gently guides him in. ‘Thanks, love.’ She wants to cry, just looking at him; she blinks fast and hard.

He’s given a stick to use when he gets out of the car, to get him to his bed. Hopefully he’ll be able to manage the stairs, the nurse says; otherwise they’ll have to move a bed
downstairs.

Daddy makes no comment when he realises that it’s taken for granted that he’ll go straight to bed when he gets home. He says nothing, just nods, when the nurse tells him that one of
them will be calling in to see him the next day. Mammy gets in beside him and puts her arm through his and pats his hand.

Lizzie looks at him sitting quietly in the car, and knows he knows. On the drive home, he doesn’t speak. She watches his eyes droop in the mirror.

Dragged me from happy. Pushed me to sad.
She keeps having to swallow.

When they’ve got Daddy upstairs and settled in bed, he falls asleep again almost immediately. They go down to the kitchen, and Lizzie makes tea and Mammy tells her what happened.

‘I came home from town and walked in and saw him lying there.’ He’d missed his footing near the top of the stairs and come tumbling down. ‘He wasn’t unconscious,
but he couldn’t get up, couldn’t put the weight on the bad leg.’

Lizzie’s heart clenches as she pictures him lying in pain at the bottom of the stairs. She sees Mammy dropping her bags and running over to him, front door swinging wide open.

‘I rang for an ambulance, and then I ran out for Claire.’ Peter O’Driscoll grew up next door to the O’Gradys, and Claire married him and moved in when Lizzie was about
eight. They had no children, just the odd cat who spent his time avoiding Jones. Claire would wave and smile whenever Lizzie passed her in the garden, but generally the O’Driscolls kept to
themselves. When Lizzie walked into the hospital, the night before, she wondered for a second who the woman sitting beside Mammy was.

‘She was great, Lizzie – insisted on coming to the hospital, brought Daddy’s things, stayed till you came . . .’ Mammy’s voice trembles; her eyes fill with the
tears that keep appearing. ‘You never know how good people are till you need them.’

Lizzie hands Mammy a tissue and sits beside her while she cries hopelessly. The tea they made goes cold. Neither of them wants to move – what is there to do that can’t wait until
later?

Lizzie looks around the kitchen. It hasn’t changed since she left – not that she expected it to. She thinks,
Something is missing
, and then realises that it’s Jones;
normally he’d be wandering around, getting under Mammy’s feet as she swept and washed up.

Mammy’s good friend Julia O’Gorman calls later that day – she met Claire in town. Lizzie answers the door.

‘Lizzie, my dear, I just heard Jack had a fall; how is he?’ There’s no sign of the coldness Lizzie remembers from their last conversation. It’s amazing what a little
tragedy will do.

She opens the door further. ‘Julia, come in. Thank you for coming. Mammy is just checking on him.’ She gives Julia tea, and they spend ten minutes talking about nothing at all, and
manage not to mention Tony’s name once. Julia doesn’t ask Lizzie about where she’s been, and she doesn’t tell Julia that she knows about Pauline Twomey. Then Mammy comes
down and Lizzie escapes.

Later she phones Angela and tells her the news.

‘Oh, God, Lizzie, you poor creature. I’m so sorry.’

The sympathy in her voice makes Lizzie want to burst out crying. She bites her lip, hard. ‘Angela, I don’t know when –’ When what? When she’ll be back? When Daddy
will die?

‘Of course you don’t, pet; you’ll stay there as long as you need to.’ Angela’s voice is strong and steady, and Lizzie clings on to it. ‘Don’t give
another thought to anything here – your stuff will be fine, Jones will be well fed. Dumbledore has promised to mind him till you’re back. And I’m sure Joe will manage fine without
you too.’

‘Actually, he let me go.’ Lizzie tries to sound casual. ‘Charlie has offered to work for him.’

There’s a slight pause; then Angela says, ‘Oh, right . . . Well, your baking job is still here for you; I’ve no intention of sacking you.’

Lizzie tries to laugh, and something that might be a sob comes out instead. ‘Thanks, Angela . . . I’ll call again in a few days.’ Suddenly she remembers John’s letter.
‘Angela, what about you? How are
you
doing?’

‘We’re fine here – don’t give us another thought. Just look after yourself, and your mam.’ Angela clearly doesn’t want to talk about John. ‘Look, I
won’t keep you. We’re all thinking of you.’ And she’s gone.

Over the next few days, they accumulate enough casseroles and apple tarts and fruitcakes to last them a month. Hardly half an hour goes by without someone calling to see how Daddy is –
neighbours, friends, people from his work, even though he retired four years ago. It’s exhausting, but Lizzie is glad of it; it keeps the darkness away for a while.

She’s terrified at how quickly Daddy has deteriorated since he came home. Now she understands what people mean when they talk about someone ‘going downhill’. It’s as if
Daddy was teetering at the top of a steep slope for the past eighteen months, and one day someone came along and nudged him gently in the back with a finger, and off he went.

He sleeps a lot; there must be some kind of sedative in the injection he gets from the nurse who calls in the afternoons. He doesn’t seem to be in pain – not that he’d say if
he were – but he eats very little; a slice of Lizzie’s lemon sponge, one of his favourites, comes back downstairs barely touched. He takes Complan, and a little stewed apple sometimes,
and occasionally one of Mammy’s egg flips, dolloped with sherry.

They take it in turns to sit with him when he’s awake, and when it’s Lizzie’s turn she reads him bits of the paper – the main news, the sports, anything she thinks will
appeal to him. He lies there and listens, smiling gently now and again. Sometimes they do the crossword. Sometimes she just sits in the room with him, listening to the rain outside.

And sometimes they talk. He asks her about Merway.

‘You must have made a lot of friends there.’ His voice is low; Lizzie has to bend her head a little to hear him.

‘I have.’ She tells him about Angela, and working in the restaurant, and how Jones and Dumbledore manage to share the garden fairly happily. She describes Merway’s main street
and pebbly beach, and Big Maggie’s garden centre, and Dominic painting by the sea with his rickety easel, and Rory and Aisling in the laundrette, and Gráinne in the
newsagent’s.

She leaves out Joe, and Ripe, and Charlie.

At night she lies in her old single bed and hates herself. Why didn’t she come back to visit them? Why did she keep putting it off? What was so important about her wonderful new life in
Merway that she couldn’t spare one weekend to get into the car and go home?

She thinks of Daddy asking on the phone when she was going to come and see them, and she has to turn her head into her pillow to try and smother the grief. She misses Jones’s bulk, the
weight of him on her legs, the buzz of his purring when she reaches out and strokes his head.

One night, when Mammy has gone to bed, Lizzie goes out into the back garden and walks down to the end. She sniffs: the saltiness of the Merway air is missing. No waves rattling the pebbles. The
moon is out, though – she can make out the shapes of the shrubs, the shiny leaves of the red robin catching the cool white light, the last of the clematis draped over the stone wall.

The garden was always Daddy’s territory. Lizzie can see him, in his old blue shirt and grass-stained grey trousers, trowel in hand as he squats beside his flowerbeds, digging out weeds and
slinging them into a green plastic bucket. On his head is an ancient grey-white baseball hat that Mammy hates – ‘If you could see how ridiculous you look’ – but that he
quietly insists on keeping. He found it on a golf course years ago and has worn it for gardening ever since. Lizzie wonders where it is now.

She looks at the sky and ignores God. She’s been ignoring Him since she came home. The stars go blurry, and she puts up her hand and wipes her eyes. She wonders where people go when they
die, and hopes Daddy will be happy when he gets there. More tears flow out and she feels them sliding down the sides of her upturned face and into her ears.

After a while her neck starts to hurt, and she stops looking at the stars and pulls her head back up. She stands at the bottom of the garden, hands in the pockets of her jacket, and wishes again
that she’d brought Jones home with her. She wants to hug his furry warmth and bury her face in him.

Or Joe would do instead. He could hold her and tell her everything will be all right, and she’d close her eyes and lean against him and believe him.