38

June 2018

TUESDAY NIGHT. MY WEEKLY visit to Kinsella House. My penance. I’m gone from here twenty years – my suitcase packed the day my very first pay from my very first job hit my account. Enough for a tiny room in a house-share in Glasnevin. Enough to pull away from Cynthia. But not enough to ease the guilt. No money in the world could do that. I killed her daughter. So I keep coming back. I send her money. I pour her whiskey. I do my duty.

The flat is dim, with just a thin slice of yellow sun casting through the gap in the heavy curtains. Cynthia is reclining; goddess of her own couch. Arm outstretched, empty glass in hand. I get up to fill drink number four, suggesting a fresh glass, taking time to scan the grubby kitchen. There won’t be any photographs of Lila here. Thirty years on, why would there be? But I have to start somewhere. The first kitchen drawer holds cutlery. No neat tray with forks and knives in separate sections here – a jumble of everything thrown in together. The next drawer has receipts, torn scraps of paper, and lists and lists of random words in my mother’s looped, dramatic handwriting. She is always taking notes.

For when I write my life story, she says. It’ll blow people away.

It won’t blow people away.

It’s a sad, squalid, unoriginal story. A woman who loved her narcotic highs too much. A mother who couldn’t give them up. A story of neglect and narcissism. A story not of what was done to her but by her. She won’t see it that way, of course, in the story she’ll never write. Because it is all about her. And always has been. Back when I was six, at home alone, wondering if she’d ever return. Told to look after myself, to clean the flat while she was gone. Six is old enough, she’d say, pulling the door after her. The lean months when we couldn’t pay the electricity bill. The better months, when things were easier, but I still went to school in a too-small uniform. The days we feasted on pizza, because she was hungry. The days we had nothing to eat, because for her, wine and whiskey were enough. The days I stole food from other kids’ school bags. The days I didn’t go to school at all. Those days won’t make it into her imaginary book. Her child might not even make it in there. And what of the other child? The ghost?

I check the third drawer. A jungle of musty plastic bags, pharmacy receipts, more notes, half a dozen syringes still in their packaging, another three open, possibly used, and six white plastic bottles of pills. I pull one out. OxyContin. No prescription sticker. I put it back and close the drawer. That’s when I notice the pestle and mortar on the counter top, and the white powder residue inside.