Make Yourself at Home Read online

She righted herself then, treading water. ‘You should come in, Marnie,’ she called out. ‘You’d love it.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Marianne called back, suddenly curious.

  ‘It’ll make you feel alive,’ Rita screeched.

  ‘I already feel alive,’ Marianne told her, cupping her hands about her mouth so her words weren’t whipped away by the sea breeze, which was, as she had suspected, sharper here.

  ‘Not like this,’ said Rita, and she dived under the waves, the water closing over the place where she had been, so that it looked, for a moment, like Rita had never been there.

  Marianne kept her eyes trained on the place where her mother had been. It was only when she spotted Rita’s head again, wrapped in a rubber swimming cap covered in canary-yellow flower petals, that she realised she had been holding her breath. She remembered a party Rita and William had thrown once. It hadn’t been a party exactly. Marianne remembered only a handful of people. Maybe six. They had ended up in the sea, in their clothes. Marianne knew because she had seen them from her bedroom window. She had held her breath then, too. Waited for them all to return to shore before she allowed herself breathe normally. As if that might save them from harm. And why had she been bothered anyway? She didn’t know any of them. Why had she cared?

  She didn’t think she had cared. She only knew that she had felt responsible.

  Rita got out of the water and ran up the beach, her arms flailing like windmills.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Marianne shouted after her.

  ‘Drying off,’ Rita shouted back, not stopping.

  ‘Your towel’s here,’ shouted Marianne, but Rita was already halfway up the beach, flailing.

  Marianne stuffed the towel back inside Rita’s carpet bag. Sticking out of the inside pocket, a bottle full of pills, a sticker on the side with Rita’s name on it. One to be taken three times a day. Marianne did not recognise the name of the tablets. Something long and Latin. They were probably for bone density. Lots of older people had to take tablets for bone density.

  Marianne looked up. Her mother had stopped running. Now she was bent in two, her hands on her knees. She was probably out of breath after all the running. She was probably just resting there for a moment, getting her breath back.

  Marianne watched and waited. For Rita to straighten. To turn round and run back towards her. Or just walk, since she seemed to be out of breath still. Marianne could see the heave along the curve of her back as Rita breathed in and out, in and out. She walked, slowly at first, up the beach, towards her mother. Rita’s legs bent at the knee and now she was kneeling in the sand like she was getting ready to do the Downward-Facing Dog. Which she might very well have been getting ready to do, Marianne reasoned. It was Rita, after all.

  Marianne picked up her pace. ‘Rita,’ she called. Her mother did not turn, did not look up.

  Marianne was jogging now.

  Rita fell forward, a bright yellow line in the sand now.

  She lay there, unmoving.

  Marianne ran. When she reached her mother, she kneeled, rolled her onto her back. Rita’s eyes were closed. Her lips were blue and her face was a sheet of white.

  ‘Rita.’ Marianne’s voice was sharp, like a reprimand. She gripped her mother’s shoulders, shook her.

  Nothing.

  She pressed her ear against her mother’s chest. Listened. It was hard to hear anything over the pound of the sea and the pitiful cries of the gulls, wheeling overhead.

  She wrestled herself out of Patrick’s hoodie and threw it over Rita, tucked it around her. She eased the swimming hat off her mother’s head. It left a bright red line along her forehead. She lifted Rita’s head onto her lap. Without the benefit of her turban or the swim hat, Marianne noticed how fine her mother’s hair had become. In places, the fleshy pale pink of her scalp was visible.

  Marianne fished her phone out of her pocket, rang Patrick. In hindsight, she probably should have rung the emergency services first. Got them to dispatch an ambulance. But it was Patrick she rang instead.

  ‘Is she breathing?’ he asked. Marianne squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘Do you know how to do CPR?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do. Thirty chest compressions followed by two rescue breaths, okay?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do,’ said Patrick. ‘Do the chest compressions to the rhythm of “Staying Alive”, okay?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do.’

  He hung up so he could ring for an ambulance.

  Marianne dropped the phone on the sand, looked at her mother. Her whole face had a blue hue to it now, the skin of her eyelids fragile, almost transparent.

  She had seen a demonstration of CPR at the back of a St John Ambulance vehicle once. In the park one Saturday. She had been on her way home from her annual visit to her dental hygienist.

  Marianne placed her hand on her mother’s chest. Rita had grown thin. She put the heel of her other hand on top, pushed down. She shuddered at the feel of it. Like she was crushing bone. She tried to get into a rhythm. ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,’ she whispered, pushing her hands against the bony plate of her mother’s chest. Her mother lay there, unresponsive. Marianne increased the pressure of her hands against her chest. ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.’ She said it louder this time. She kept doing it, out of breath now. She lost count of how many times. What had Patrick said? Thirty compressions? Had she done thirty? She didn’t know. She stopped and bent down, towards Rita’s face, tilted her head back. Was she supposed to pinch the bridge of Rita’s nose with her fingers? She couldn’t remember. She did it lightly, covered Rita’s mouth with hers. It felt soft. Slack. She breathed gently. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her mother’s chest, rising slowly. She lifted her head, took another breath, breathed it into Rita’s mouth again, saw the rise of her chest. Marianne straightened, arranged her hands against Rita’s chest again. ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.’ She was nearly shouting it now. Perhaps she thought Rita might be able to hear her. The insistence in her voice. ‘Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.’

  Beneath her hands, Rita never moved.

  Chapter 25

  When Patrick arrived, he had warm, thick blankets with him. He covered Rita with one and draped another across Marianne’s shoulders. She hadn’t known she was cold until he did that, her teeth banging against each other and her fingers, bloodless and rigid.

  Patrick put his hands on Marianne’s hands, still pushing against Rita’s chest. ‘It’s okay, Marianne,’ he said. ‘You can stop now.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ shouted Marianne, her voice hoarse and breathless.

  Patrick gestured towards two men coming up the beach, carrying a stretcher between them. Marianne stood up, her legs cramping hard from kneeling on the sand for so long. She stood beside Patrick and they watched as the paramedics lifted Rita onto the stretcher, covered her with a foil blanket.

  Marianne could not bring herself to ask any questions. She nodded when one of the paramedics suggested one of them travel in the ambulance with Rita while the other followed in a car so they could get themselves home later.

  By the time Marianne had run up the treacherous, moss-slick steps, across the garden and into the house through the back door, she was breathing hard, her heart hammering against the walls of her chest like a trapped animal. She threw open the door into the kitchen and the handle banged against the wall, startling Gladys the cat, who leaped off the windowsill where she had been sitting in a puddle of sunshine.

  ‘More haste, less speed, Marianne.’ It was Aunt Pearl who inspected her watch as she lowered an egg on a tablespoon into a saucepan of boiling water.

  ‘Rita,’ Marianne managed.

  Pearl looked up, her hand suspended above the pot, steam coiling around it.

  ‘
What happened?’ she said.

  ‘I need to go to the hospital,’ panted Marianne, her chest burning with effort.

  Pearl nodded, moved the pot off the hob, turned off the flame. ‘I’ll drive us,’ she said to Marianne, walking into the hall. She lifted her car keys from a hook over the hall table and pulled on her gaberdine coat.

  ‘Come along,’ she said, marching to the front door and holding it open.

  Marianne hesitated. ‘I’m … afraid,’ she said. ‘That she’ll be dead. When we get there.’

  ‘Well, us being there or not being there won’t have any impact on that,’ said Aunt Pearl briskly. ‘Now, chop chop, my girl, I don’t have all day.’

  In the car on the way to the hospital, Marianne leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes. She was glad that Pearl was driving. She was also glad that Pearl did not say much. Just the odd comment about traffic or the best way to get to the hospital. She did not seem to require a response, and for this, Marianne was grateful. She kept her hand on her phone in her pocket and took solace from the fact that it didn’t ring.

  Patrick would ring if anything happened.

  Pearl pulled up outside the front door of the hospital. ‘You get out here,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and park.’

  Marianne fumbled her way out of her seat belt and reached for the door handle. Aunt Pearl’s car was pristine. And it smelled unlikely. Like candy floss. It was quiet inside the car. Everything was in order. Marianne’s fingers tightened around the door handle.

  ‘Go on now, there’s a good girl,’ said Aunt Pearl. The sharp edge of her voice was softer here, inside the car.

  Marianne opened the door. Immediately, the noise of the world rushed at her, as did the wind, which had picked up now and went straight for her hair, lifting it and tying it in knots, to match those in her stomach.

  She asked a woman behind the information desk where she could find Rita. The woman didn’t look at Marianne but began tap-tap-tapping on her keyboard, glaring into her computer screen.

  ‘St Luke’s ward,’ she said, briskly. ‘Lift is down that corridor on your left-hand side. Take it to the second floor, turn left. She’s in the room at the end of corridor, on the right-hand side.’

  ‘Do you know if …?’ Marianne began, but the woman had turned away, smiling now as a man approached the counter. ‘Hello, sir, how may I help you today?’

  Marianne pressed the button for the lift. Nothing happened. She pressed it again. Jabbed at it. A man glared at her. She glared back and he jerked his head away.

  It was quieter on the second floor. There was a hum of machinery and the shuffle of patients’ slippers on tiles, the rustle of starch across a nurse’s uniform and the cheerful whistle of a porter pushing a bed down the corridor. Marianne turned left and walked towards the end of the corridor. She could hear Rita before she saw her.

  ‘What are you doing with that needle?’

  ‘Don’t you dare stick it … Ouch, that hurt.’

  ‘Such a lot of fuss about nothing.’

  Then a woman’s voice, exasperated, affectionate. ‘You’re the worst patient I’ve ever had. And I had to lance a boil on a Progressive Democrat’s arse once.’

  Rita’s laugh then. Like a cartoon in a comic.

  Hee hee hee.

  Marianne put her head round the door. Her mother was propped up on pillows while the doctor, in a white coat, a headscarf, and high heels, perched on the edge of the bed, pressing one end of a stethoscope against Rita’s chest.

  ‘That’s freezing,’ said Rita.

  ‘I warmed it between my hands,’ the doctor said. ‘You’re such a whinge-bag.’

  ‘Are you even a real doctor?’

  ‘There could be a spot of colonic irrigation in your immediate future, if you’re not careful.’

  Marianne coughed. One of those discreet coughs – ahem – to alert attention to one’s presence. Rita and the doctor looked up.

  ‘You seem … better,’ said Marianne.

  ‘You must be Marianne,’ said the doctor, smiling. She was one of those women who looked healthy everywhere; the bloom of her skin, the whites of her eyes, the pink of her nails, the shine of her teeth. ‘You’re the image of your mother.’

  She lifted the stethoscope from Rita’s chest, wrapped it round her neck and stood up. ‘I’ll leave you two to talk,’ she said. She touched Rita’s hand, squeezed it briefly. Rita nodded.

  When she left, the room seemed very quiet.

  ‘I thought you were …’ Marianne began. ‘Aunt Pearl drove through an amber light, driving here.’ She could hear the sharp edge of accusation in her tone.

  ‘Aunt Pearl is here?’ Rita said, sitting up.

  ‘You were unconscious,’ said Marianne. ‘We didn’t know what …’

  ‘I just … felt a little weak,’ said Rita, shrugging. ‘I forgot to have breakfast this morning. And maybe you’re right about the water. It’s pretty cold, this time of the year. Especially for an old bag of bones like me.’

  ‘You’ve never admitted to being old before,’ said Marianne.

  ‘It’s probably the shock,’ said Rita, grinning. Marianne shook her head and sat down, her legs shaking now as the adrenalin drained away.

  ‘I thought you’d be on a trolley in A&E,’ she said.

  ‘I must have got lucky,’ Rita said, brightly.

  ‘Nobody gets that lucky in an Irish hospital,’ said Marianne.

  ‘Maybe they thought I’d set Patrick on them if they didn’t prioritise me,’ said Rita, grinning.

  ‘Where is Patrick?’ asked Marianne.

  ‘He said he’d be back after Fadela finished examining me,’ said Rita.

  ‘Is Fadela the doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You seem to know her very well.’

  ‘You know me,’ said Rita, shrugging. ‘I’m over-familiar.’

  Patrick arrived then, carrying three paper cups of tea and a carrier bag full to the brim of fruit, biscuits, chocolate, and a teddy bear at the top, wearing a blue T-shirt, proclaiming, ‘It’s a boy.’

  ‘It was the only teddy they had left,’ explained Patrick, lowering the teas onto Rita’s bedside locker and tucking the teddy in the bed beside her.

  ‘It’s not even a maternity hospital,’ said Marianne, looking at the bear in confusion.

  ‘Delivery mix-up,’ explained Patrick. ‘Holles Street got the Get Well Soon bears.’ He handed Marianne a cup.

  ‘Thank you.’ Marianne took the tea, savouring the warmth that seeped into her cupped hands.

  ‘I suppose nobody thought to wonder if I had a mouth on me.’ Aunt Pearl stood in the doorway with her arms folded tight across her chest.

  ‘You can have this one,’ said Patrick, holding his cup out, but Marianne stepped between them. ‘Have mine. It’s the way you like it, black with no sugar.’

  Pearl accepted the cup and allowed Marianne to steer her into the only available chair in the room, which was an armchair by the window and deemed acceptable by Pearl once she had sprayed it with the anti-bacterial spray she kept in her handbag and wiped it down with a square piece of muslin she also kept in her handbag.

  ‘Well,’ she said to Rita, when she eventually sat down and had taken a sip of tea that produced a grimace of distaste across her face, ‘have you quite finished putting the heart across us?’

  ‘See?’ said Rita. ‘I knew you cared. Deep down.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ Marianne said. She needed to be on her own. Get her bearings. Regroup a bit. She walked up the corridor, breathing in as deeply as she could, in spite of the stagnant heat of the ward.

  She glanced into bedrooms as she walked past them. There was a young woman, bald and pale, playing solitaire on her iPad. There was a man, maybe thirty, sitting in an armchair attached to a drip, reading Talk to the Headscarf. What remained of his hair had a frail, wispy look about it and he had no eyebrows to speak of. There was an elderly couple, sitting on either side of a bed with a
woman, maybe forty, in it. They were laughing at something the woman had said. A colourful scarf covered the woman’s head.

  Marianne reached the nurse’s station. She stopped there.

  ‘Are you all right, Marianne?’ It was the doctor. Fadela. She was checking a computer behind the desk.

  Marianne scanned the name badge on the lapel of Fadela’s white coat. ‘Prof. Fadela Rahaman’.

  ‘You’re a consultant,’ said Marianne.

  Fadela nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘An oncologist,’ said Marianne. Her voice sounded louder here. Everything sounded louder. The shrill ring of a phone. The rustle of paperwork on a clipboard. The metal rings of a curtain, jangling along a rail. Marianne stepped back as if she was trying to distance herself from the noise. From the facts that were coming at her now, bearing down on her, the truth rising to the surface like air bubbles, bursting into sharp focus.

  ‘I’m glad Rita told you,’ Fadela was saying. ‘I told her she should, when she was in for her radiotherapy last week. It’ll give her great comfort, having your support.’

  ‘Last week?’ said Marianne. She lifted her hands, gripped the edge of a windowsill. The movement was laden with effort, like she was walking underwater.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fadela, looking curiously at Marianne now. ‘She is so happy that you’re helping out with the Get-Well-Sooners.’ She smiled. ‘She says you’re great with them.’

  ‘It’s lung cancer,’ said Marianne, and it sounded like a statement rather than a question, with the monotone of her voice.

  Professor Rahaman nodded slowly. ‘Which we were very positive about before it spread to the bones.’ Fadela looked closer at Marianne. ‘Rita has spoken to you, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Why isn’t she having chemotherapy?’

  ‘Well, it would have compromised her quality of life and she didn’t want to put you all through that, for the sake of a few extra months. You know what your mother’s like,’ said Fadela, gently.

  ‘No,’ said Marianne, and her voice was brittle. ‘I don’t know what my mother is like. I have no idea what my mother is like.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Marianne,’ said Fadela. She put her hand on Marianne’s arm but Marianne shook it off. This time she glared at Fadela. ‘Why is she bothering to have radiotherapy at all then?’ She knew she was speaking much too loudly in the close confines of this suffocating corridor. She might even be shouting. But she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything.