The Fall Girl (3 page)

Fate reminds me of that song: ‘Que sera sera'. My Aunty Lily used to sing it. I can still see her sitting in the armchair, singing and swaying, her eyes dancing in her head, her face flushed from brandy. Oblivious to her fate. Not a worry in the world that I could see.

‘Come on, Frances, sing along with your Aunty Lily,' she'd say, taking me on her knee. ‘You have a lovely sweet voice just like me.'

We're having a visitor – my Aunty Lily. She's from London, no less. I can hardly wait. I look at the clock for the hundredth time since morning. Though I can't yet read the time, I can tell it's after two o'clock, but not yet three.

‘A watched kettle never boils,' my mother says.

‘I'm not watching the kettle,' I tell her. ‘I'm watching the clock.'

‘Here, make yourself useful.' She hands me a plate, a doily and a packet of assorted biscuits.

‘What's she like?' I ask, as I arrange the biscuits around the plate – plain, fancy, plain, fancy, plain, fancy.

‘You'll see for yourself,' she says with a sigh.

Tearing off wads of tinfoil, she covers the plate of sandwiches, the biscuits and the apple tart. Then she checks her watch.

‘They should be leaving the airport about now,' she says, wringing her hands nervously. ‘Run upstairs and get my beads from under my pillow. We'll say a decade of the rosary that your father and Aunty Lily will have a safe journey home.'

Prayers said, I kneel up on the armchair next to the window in the front room to watch out for them. The Reilly twins, who are in my class, are playing out on the street. I lean across the back of the armchair, knock on the windowpane and shout out to them that I'm waiting for my aunty who's coming over from London. When I realize that they can't hear me, I climb across the top of the armchair and on to the windowsill. As I reach up to open the top window, my mother comes in and scolds me for being so noisy. I don't think she quite understands how excited I'm feeling. Up until this day, apart, of
course, from my parents, I haven't met any of the few relatives I have. Both my grandmothers and my maternal grandfather are dead. My paternal grandfather lives in Australia with my father's sister, Aunty Philomena. I didn't even know Aunty Lily existed until last week. My mother never said she had a younger sister.

‘Aunty who?' I asked her, when she'd told me about our visitor.

‘Your Aunty Lily. From London.'

‘I didn't know about her.'

My mother said of course I did, but that I must have forgotten, and that she's not surprised because I've a head like a sieve.

Everyone else at school has sisters, brothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunties, uncles, first cousins, second cousins, third cousins once removed. They're all part of big families, local families. They all have the usual surnames – Maguire, Reilly, Cusack, Kelly. No one ever asks – Which of the Falls would that be?

Through the net curtain, I see the car coming and I call out to my mother. She shoos me away from the window and reminds me once again to be on my best behaviour. The key turns in the front door.

‘Stay where you are,' my mother says, patting her hair as she steps into the hall.

‘Rita!' my aunty whoops. ‘Ah Jesus, it's great to see you.'

‘Hello, Lily,' my mother says. ‘It's good to see you too. Eh … and who have we here?'

‘That's my old man,' my aunty tells her.

‘Your … pardon me?'

‘My husband.'

‘Good God!'

‘Rita, Xavier. Xavier, Rita.'

‘It's very nice to meet you,' the man says.

‘Holy Immaculate Mother, when did all this happen?' my mother asks.

‘Arragh, I'll tell you all about that later,' my aunty says. ‘First things first. Where's Frances?'

The door swings open and a lady, whom I can't believe to be my mother's sister, throws open her arms to me. I'm standing facing her, staring at her tangerine blouse, her brown bell-bottoms and her crocodile boots, not quite knowing what I'm supposed to do.

‘Hello,' I say.

‘Come 'ere and give me a hug, love,' she says, her arms still outstretched.

I try to catch my mother's eye for her approval, but I can't see her face; she's standing behind my aunty's husband, who has the cut of a grandfather about him. As I walk towards Aunty Lily, I see tears in her eyes. She bends down and squeezes me so tight my ribs hurt. For a moment, everyone is silent.

‘Sit down, why don't ye,' my father says, and I'm relieved to be released from my aunty's embrace.

My mother shows her sister round the house. My father and my new uncle, Xavier, have a drink. I like the whiskey smell and the crystal glasses. Xavier tells my father about meeting Lily two years after his first wife had passed away. He has two daughters – Madeleine and Linda – in their late teens, working lassies, one a nurse, the other a telephonist.

‘Nice steady jobs,' my father says. ‘I'm in the post office myself – a postman.'

‘A good, honest job,' Xavier says.

‘Aye.'

‘The women have a lot of catching up to do.'

‘They have indeed. It's been a while.'

‘Almost seven years, I take it.'

‘Aye, that'd be about right.'

‘I think Lily misses having family around her.'

‘I suppose she would,' my father says, shifting in his seat like he's sitting on something lumpy.

‘Twenty-five years I've been in London and I still don't call it home.'

‘Do you not?'

‘No. Armagh is still home to me, and will be till the day I die.'

‘But your girls are settled in London, aren't they?'

‘Oh aye; they were born and reared in it.'

‘Sure, they're the most important family you have now. And Lily, of course.'

‘The girls will move on, get married and set up homes of their own. That's the way it goes,' Xavier says, pulling a pipe and a box of matches from his sports-jacket pocket.

Aunty Lily peeps in the door and tells her husband that she needs help to take the luggage up to their room.

‘Will you let the man finish his drink first?' my father says.

But my uncle is already on his feet.

‘She keeps me on my toes, does this one,' he says, putting down his pipe on the mantelpiece. There's something about the way he says it that makes me think he could stay on his toes for ever.

While they're upstairs, my mother slips back into the room and says in a loud whisper, ‘Has that girl lost leave of her senses altogether?'

‘As far as I can gather,' my father says, ‘she's just the same old Lily – full of surprises.'

‘I think I'd class marrying a white-haired publican as more of a shock than a surprise. And did you know he's a widower and has two daughters in their late teens?'

‘Aye, so he was telling me.'

‘What in God's name possessed her? Why couldn't she have just waited? A fine-looking woman like her – she could've had her pick of husbands if she'd played her cards right.'

‘They seem right happy to me.'

‘Yeah, but for how long? That man will be collecting the pension before Lily hits thirty.' She lifts back the fire screen and pokes the coals. ‘And she'll be spoon-feeding him before she hits forty. If my poor mother could see her now, she'd turn in her grave, God rest her.' She hangs the poker back on its hook and blesses herself.

‘Will you not be worrying about Lily, Rita? She'll be grand.'

‘Living in the upstairs of a public house! I can't see them getting a rosary said of an evening in that kind of seedy atmosphere, can you?'

As if in response to my mother's remarks, we hear an outburst of laughter from upstairs.

‘See,' my father says. ‘Happy as the day is long.'

I don't think my father realizes that it's not her sister's happiness my mother is worried about: it's her soul. If she's not getting a rosary in every day, she could find herself on what my mother calls the slippery slope.

When Lily and Xavier come downstairs, my mother goes quiet, but I know she's thinking and worrying, and wondering what she can do, if anything.

‘I'll make the tea,' she says at the first lull in conversation.

‘I'll have coffee, Rita, if it's not too much trouble,' Aunty Lily says. ‘You just can't get the same kick out of a cuppa tea.'

‘Oh you can't, can't you?' my mother mutters on her way out the door, signalling for me to follow her.

‘Here,' she sighs, handing me a pound note in the kitchen. ‘Run up to Scully's for a jar of coffee. Madam must have her kicks, God help us!'

After we've eaten, Aunty Lily tells me to follow her and leads me upstairs to her room.

‘For you, love,' she says, handing me a black-haired doll in a yellow dress.

‘Listen,' she says, pulling a string on the doll's back.

My name is Rosie
, it squeaks.

‘You do it,' Aunty Lily says.

I pull the string.
Will you play with me?

‘You'll be looking forward to having your friends round to show her off, won't you?' she says.

‘I don't have any friends.'

‘Of course you do,' my mother titters, coming into the room. ‘Though living in Crosslea, she's hardly spoiled for choice.'

For the first time since she's arrived, Aunty Lily isn't smiling.

At seven o'clock, my mother announces that it's time for the rosary and offers a set of beads to her sister.

‘Ye go on ahead,' my aunty says, dragging on her cigarette. ‘Xavier and I say ours together in bed at night. Isn't that right, darling?'

‘Oh God, aye,' he says and either sneezes or sniggers, I'm not sure which.

‘How long do you intend staying?' my mother asks her sister over breakfast the following morning. My father and Xavier aren't up yet.

‘Just the week. Why? Are you getting tired of us already?'

‘No, no, it's not that. I was just wondering.'

‘Sure, I have to spend a few days with my long-lost niece,' she says, ruffling my hair. ‘You wouldn't begrudge me that, would you?'

My mother lifts the teapot. ‘I'd better fill the kettle again,' she says. ‘It's nearly empty.'

‘Who do you think she looks like, Rita?'

‘I really don't know.'

‘I think she's the down stamp of Mammy.'

‘Good morning, ladies,' my father says, coming into the kitchen.

My mother looks up at the clock. ‘About time.'

‘She's as bossy as ever, I see,' Aunty Lily says, pulling out a chair for my father.

My mother's cheeks flush.

‘I was just saying to Rita, Joe, I think Frances is the image of our mother. Would you agree?'

‘You needn't be asking him,' my mother says. ‘When it comes to family resemblances, he wouldn't have a notion who's like whom. Would you, Joe?'

‘Nah,' my father says, looking at the floor and scratching his head, ‘Rita's right. You're asking the wrong man.'

‘Take it from me, love,' Aunty Lily smiles at me, ‘you're the picture of your grandmother.
Bee-autiful
she was. Everyone thought so. Didn't they, Rita?'

‘They did.'

‘I'm supposed to be like her too.'

‘That's the first I heard of it,' my mother says, placing a clean cup and saucer in front of my father.

‘Oh yeah,' Lily says, pulling a cigarette from her packet, ‘people were always telling me that.'

When the visitors take the bus into town on the Monday afternoon to go shopping, my mother sprays air-freshener all over the house and tells my father that she's counting the hours. I'm not quite able to count the hours, but I am counting the days. I'm going to miss them. In fact, I'm already missing them and they've only gone into Castleowen for a few hours. What I notice most is that I can hear the clocks tick again and somehow that makes me feel lonely.

The night before they leave, my mother invites her friend Nancy, the district nurse, and Nancy's brother, Father Vincent, the parish priest in Castleowen, to join us for the evening. They're all from the same town in County Cork. When Father Vincent asks about London, Aunty Lily talks about the underground trains, Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly, Hyde Park, Chinese restaurants and its huge department stores.

‘Some day I'll take you to London, love,' she says, winking at me. ‘You'll absolutely love it.'

‘With all its attractions,' Xavier says, and takes two quick puffs of his pipe, ‘it can't hold a candle to Ireland.'

‘I'd say not,' Father Vincent says.

‘To be quite frank with you, Father, London's going to the dogs.'

‘Is that right?'

‘Och aye. Between the hippies and the junkies and the nig … the blacks, you don't know who you're going to run into when you step outside your front door.'

‘Are there a lot of blacks?' Father Vincent asks.

‘They're coming in their shiploads.'

‘From where?'

‘Africa, Jamaica, Timbuktu, I don't know. Sure they all look the same to me. And I'll tell you something else –'

‘What's that?'

‘I'd sooner have an English Protestant for a next-door neighbour than one of them fellas. And coming from a deep-rooted republican family, that's saying something.'

My father unscrews the top of the whiskey bottle and refills the glasses. My mother pours more tea for Nancy and herself.

‘Are you sure,' she says to Lily, ‘you'll not have a cup of coffee instead?'

‘Thanks, but no thanks. I'm on my holidays. I'll enjoy my wee drink, if it's all the same to you.'

Aunty Lily's legs are crossed: the upper one is swinging. She forgets she has a cigarette resting in the ashtray and lights another.