Asking for It (23 page)

‘Morning.’

My parents are sitting at the table, glaring at each other, but as soon as I walk in they stop. My father crumples up the newspaper he was reading and walks out into the utility room, throwing it into the recycling bin.

‘Morning, Emma,’ my mother replies. ‘Did you sleep well?’

I grunt in response. My father leans over to kiss my mother on the cheek, asking her to hand him his briefcase. He pauses, as if he’s about to kiss me too.

‘Bye then,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you this evening.’

(I am six years old. I have woken early because it is my birthday, and I want to see what presents I got, and I want to have pancakes for breakfast, and I want to be spoiled rotten. Everyone at school will want to sit next to me at lunch today. They all want to be my best friend. They are coming to my birthday party, even though I won’t have a magician and a bouncy castle and a chocolate fountain like Ali did at hers.
Why can’t I have a chocolate fountain too?
I ask my parents, as my mother ties my hair up with a pink ribbon. My daddy gives me a big hug.
You are the prettiest girl in Ballinatoom. You don’t need a chocolate fountain.
I looked at myself in my mirror.
You’ll always be Daddy’s little girl, do you know that?
he told me.
You’ll always be my princess.
)

‘But why were you there?’ he kept asking me in the first few weeks after it happened. ‘Why did you drink so much, Emmie? Why were you in that bed in the first place, Emmie? I thought you knew better. I thought we had reared you better than that. Why, Emmie?’ he kept asking, and asking, and asking, only stopping when I started to cry. ‘Crocodile tears,’ he snapped. ‘Oh, just get out of my sight. I can’t stand to look at you.’

The first time I tried I was in my bedroom. I lock the door behind me. I take a towel, and I place it underneath me. I don’t want to make a mess.

I am going to make it end.

When I woke up in the hospital, Bryan was there. He had left Limerick as soon as he heard, he told me. He held my hand, bandages covering the new tattoos on my wrists, my parents behind him. ‘Emmie, please, I’m begging you . . .’ Bryan said, dashing away tears with the back of his hand. My father had told him, ‘That’s enough of that now, lad.’ We went home, and we didn’t talk about it again. (Until the next time.)

My mother waits until we hear the front door close behind my father.

‘Your tablets.’ She doles them out on to my palm. The dark shadows and crow’s feet around her eyes seem to be more pronounced every time I look at her. I remember watching her when I was a child as she patted and stroked her face, applying layers of creams and gels.
You have to take care of yourself
, she would tell me.
I can’t expect your father to stay interested in me if I just let myself go
.

‘Tongue?’ She nods afterwards. ‘Good girl. So, what’s the plan for today?’

What does she want me to say? That I’m going to meet the girls for lunch, maybe go to Style Magpie to pick out an outfit especially for tonight? Something revealing, that shows off my body; the perfect outfit that will attract the attention of a boy I have my eye on?
Slut, liar, skank, bitch, whore.
Does she want me to grumble about homework, to beg her for fifty euro for my vodka fund?

‘No plans,’ I say. She gets up and walks into the kitchen area, takes a dishcloth from the sink and makes small circles on the counter for a few seconds. ‘Where’s your brother?’

‘Still in bed, I think,’ I say, looking at the box of cereal on the table. I run through the routine carefully in my head. Take box, pour in bowl, milk on top. Take spoon and eat it, the nothing taste of cardboard flakes in my dry mouth. If someone stops eating completely, they would only survive for thirty days. Wikipedia says that death by dehydration is quicker, but more painful. During terminal dehydration, the usual
symptoms of dehydration
, such as
headache
and
leg cramps
, can occur. Dehydration can be hard to bear, and requires patience and determination, since it takes from several days to a few weeks. Those who die by terminal dehydration typically lapse into unconsciousness before death, and may also experience
delirium
and altered
serum sodium
.

You would tell me if you still had suicide ideation, wouldn’t you, Emma?
the therapist asks me after each session. I smile and tell her I would. I am lying. I would never tell her. She might try and stop me.

*

‘Emma? Emma, are you listening to me?’ I look up to find my mother staring at me.

‘Sorry. What did you say?’

‘I was just saying that I’m going to meet Sheila for elevenses. Will you be OK by yourself?’

‘I thought she was supposed to come here?’

‘Yes, well.’ Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. ‘She said she feels like the Cake Shack today.’

‘Fine.’

I wait until I hear her footsteps on the stairs before I tiptoe into the utility room. I crouch down on my haunches, rummaging through the recycling bin to find what my father has hidden in there, wiping fingers sticky with dribbling honey and tomato sauce off the ends of my dressing gown,
And I’ve told you time and time again, Nora, please wash out the containers properly before you put them in the recycling. Jesus, is it so hard to remember? Is it, Nora? Do I have to do everything myself around here now?
Sitting back on my heels, I quickly scan through the
Ballinatoom News.
There’s a piece in the sports section about the team’s chances of winning the county this year. Sean and Paul had kept playing for the seniors last year. Paul had started a few of the championship matches on Ciarán O’Brien’s insistence, some of the crowd cheering when he was brought on, according to a caller on
The Ned O’Dwyer Show
. But when the case started to blow up, and the national newspapers got hold of it, Ali’s father had threatened to withdraw sponsorship from Hennessy’s Pharmacies if they weren’t benched for the rest of the season. They lost to Kilgavan in the quarter finals, the earliest they had ever gone out. That night, our house phone rang. The caller hung up when we answered. It rang again. They hung up. I stood barefoot on the landing at 1 a.m., watching from the top of the stairs as my mother answered the phone yet again. ‘Who is it?’ Her voice was wavering, and even from that distance I could hear the jeers and screams at the other end. We went back to bed. And the phone rang again. Then the doorbell began to ring, a long shrill note as someone held it down, screams of laughter when they ran away before my father could catch them. ‘Ring the garda station.’ My mother was getting hysterical. My father told her to calm down, that he couldn’t ring the guards over some stupid kids acting the maggot. The phone rang and rang. At 3 a.m. my father took it off the hook. And we pretended to go to sleep.

My father was exhausted the next day at work. He made stupid mistakes, he said.

(My fault.)

I thumb through the paper (a photo of Bernadette and Sheila at a charity event – where was Mam?), a drizzle of olive oil turning the paper transparent in the middle of the page, stopping when I find what I’m looking for. ‘As many of my loyal readers will know,’ Veronica Horan writes, ‘I have been writing about the degradation of Ireland’s ethical value system for some time now. Spoiled by indulgent parenting during the Celtic Tiger years, the youth of today show no sense of community spirit or civic duty. Nowhere is this more clear than in our young women. You can see them on a Saturday night, falling over in their high-heeled shoes, skirts worn so short that you can see their knickers. That is if they deign to wear underwear. You can spout all the nonsense you like about equal rights, but the truth is – women have to take responsibility for themselves and their own safety. If they are going to insist on wearing such revealing clothes, if they are going to insist on getting so drunk that they can barely stand, then they must be prepared to bear the consequences. The so-called “Ballinatoom Girl” should ask a few questions of herself. Did anyone force her to drink so much? Did anyone force her to take illegal drugs, as it has been alleged she did? No. And yet she is asking us to place the blame upon four young men. These youngsters have continued to protest their innocence And I believe them. I’ve never experienced anything like it before. I have watched as their lives have fallen apart, I have watched the effect this heinous accusation has had on their families. The mother of one of the men, vulnerable after the death of a son many years ago, is reported to be suffering from a nervous breakdown. Has the Ballinatoom Girl given any thought to this poor woman and her emotional well-being? I think not. I doubt that she cares that as a result of her actions our community is being torn apart at its very foundations.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Jesus.’ I gasp in fright as Bryan creeps up on me, a cereal bowl in his hands. He’s wearing a grey wife-beater and old football shorts, shovelling cornflakes into his mouth. ‘You scared me.’

‘Sorry.’ He puts the bowl down on top of the washing machine and leans over to grab the newspaper off me. ‘Why are you reading that out here?’ He scans through the article, his lips almost disappearing as he reads the last lines. My mother walks back into the kitchen, in a neat blouse and trousers, her bob held back with a black hairband. She rifles through drawers and under stacks of old magazines and unopened letters until she finds her car keys.

‘OK, kids, I’m off—’

‘Have you read this?’ Bryan confronts her, holding up the greasy, stained paper. My knee joints crack as I stand up and follow him, leaning against the door frame between the utility room and the kitchen area.

‘Yes,’ my mother admits.

‘And you weren’t going to tell me?’

‘Tell you what?’

Bryan stares at her.

‘What was I supposed to say?’ she says. ‘I’m surprised you hadn’t heard from one of your friends anyway.’ She snatches the paper from him. ‘A nervous breakdown. Oh, wouldn’t I have loved the luxury of a nervous breakdown. And using the memory of poor John Junior for sympathy, as if that could excuse things, as if that . . .’

Everyone knew that Deirdre Casey had never recovered after John Junior died. Their house was always cold, silent. Jennifer spent most of her time with us. ‘It’s nice to be around a
real
family,’ she would say.

‘John Senior has to cook all his own meals,’ Sheila Heffernan had tutted to my mother a few years ago, ‘and he coming in from a hard day’s work on the farm.’

‘Ah, Sheila,’ my mother had replied. ‘She lost a child. There’s no greater loss than that.’

I wonder if she still feels like that. Maybe she wishes that I had died too. Would that have been an easier grief than this, looking at me every day and knowing that this was only a shell, that Emmie, the real Emmie, was never coming back and that there was a new Emma that she had to learn to love all over again?

Maybe they would all rather I was dead.

Maybe they wish that Bryan hadn’t found me in time.

Maybe they’re hoping that it’ll be third time lucky.

‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.’ Bryan shoves past her and storms upstairs.

‘What good would it do? Jennifer isn’t talking to you, is she? She doesn’t want to have anything to do with this family, and we don’t want to have anything to do with hers, so just
grow up
, Bryan.’ My mother follows him out into the hall, standing at the bottom of the stairs and yelling up at him, ‘Where are your loyalties? This is your
sister
we’re talking about here –’ as Bryan slams his bedroom door.

She shuffles back into the kitchen, her skin flushed. ‘Oh, don’t
you
look at me like that, for God’s sake. I was defending
you
, wasn’t I? None of this would even . . .’ and she stops herself just in time.

None of this would even be happening if it wasn’t for you.

I feel like I did when I was a very small child and I lost sight of my mother in a crowded shopping centre. I looked up at the lady next to me, putting my hand between her knees, but then I saw it wasn’t Mam, and panic began to pool in my throat. The seconds slowed down, everyone walking past me as if they were wading through water, and I believed, at that moment, that I would never find my mother, that I would never see her ever again.

*

‘Emma.
Emma.
Wake up.’

Someone’s hand is on my shoulder, shaking me out of my nothingness dream. I open one eye to see Bryan and I blink, that grey in-between sleep and waking space sharpening into shapes, colours, memories that I don’t want to look at. I turn away from him.

I wish I was dead.
I hug the thought to myself.

‘Why are you asleep? It’s only three o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘I was tired,’ I say. My mother had gone to meet Sheila without putting the padlock back on the medicine cabinet. I had taken one of my sleeping tablets, counting out the rest. Twenty-six little white pills. It must have been a new bottle.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six. I look at them all in the palm of my hand.

(I am dead.

There is a funeral.

People come. They cry.

Would they be sorry?

Would my sins be forgiven?)

But I couldn’t do it to Bryan again. He had been the one, my mother told me afterwards, who found me when I tried the second time. He screamed. He phoned the ambulance. He put his fingers down my throat to try and make me get sick. He thought I was dead. And he had been the one by my side, once again, when I woke up.
Please, Emmie
, he said.
Please, stop doing this. Promise me.

I had promised. (But I didn’t want to stop.) (I don’t want to stop trying.)

(I want all this to end. I want all this to be over.)

‘Fine,’ he says now, and I hear the sound of my desk chair being rolled across the floor, feel his knees nudging against my back as he sits beside my bed. ‘So, any plans for the day?’