didn’t have the words to describe what was happening in our own family. We were children watching. None of us could understand any of it. It was like seeing your own legs in the water when you go swimming and you wonder if they still are your own legs, she says. Because it was only years later that she understood what was going on around the table, how the woman who was not her mother had come to ask her father to go to Australia with her. She wanted to buy my father from my mother, she says. She had the money to do that. She wanted my father to leave us all behind and go off to Australia, she says, with no children.
So then, she says, her mother must have said something. She put up a fuss and said nobody was going anywhere. Nobody was leaving until they were finished eating. The least they could do was appreciate the food that she had cooked for them. She had put all the love she had left into that dinner and she started drinking wine very fast, in big gulps, she says, because my father was thinking of leaving us all and going to Australia. Her father got up and said he had enough, he was not hungry. The woman who was not her mother got up and ran after him, out the door. We stood at the window watching them all, she says, marching away after each other, down the street. My mother fell and we saw her left in a heap on the ground.
20
The two women sitting at the table opposite in Café Einstein look over at us. They look as if they feel they’ve been looked at. We look back at them. Then we all look away in different directions, as if we’re taking no notice of each other. The waitress comes to our table and picks up the empty plate. She asks if there is anything else we might need, more water maybe.
It’s lovely water, Úna says to the waitress. Is it tap water, just?
Yes, the waitress says. It’s ordinary tap water.
Úna says she started out trying to make sure she was not like her mother. She says she ended up being like her father. Or was it the other way round? Back and forth. I went to London, she says, to try and be myself. But the more I was myself the more I was like them.
It felt like they were coming after me, everywhere I went, I couldn’t get away. I remember them sending my brother over to London. My father sent him because he didn’t want to be responsible for his own son any more. He didn’t want his own son loitering around Dublin, getting into trouble, bringing his good name into disrepute. Because he was the king, she says, the king of journalism, the king of the city and all the people gathered at receptions. He didn’t want his son to be his weakness. He didn’t want to be reminded of his role as a father and having to love his own son. He wanted his son out of sight, out of harm, so he sent him to London for me to look after. Jimmy, she says, he was not even eighteen. He was only a boy and I should have done more for him.
She says she loved her brother so much she was afraid of him. He was our Don Carlos, she says, killed by his own father, sending him off to London with no love in him.
He was the baby in the family, she says. Curly hair and big open eyes, like his father. I was already in secondary school when he was born, she says, so I remember him sitting on my knee and I knew what it was like to be his mother. I put his shoes on and taught him how to tie his laces. I put stories into his head and heard them coming back through his imagination, everything repeated. I remember him sleepy after waking up, trying to make him laugh. You could never be angry with him. He followed me around the house, watching everything I was doing, asking me why was I drawing over my eyebrows with a pencil and where was I going and what was in the book I was reading. Not letting me out of his sight. He was there every morning, waiting for me to get up because his mother was still passed out from drinking the night before.
He was a child unable to grow up. He was like his father, good at being out in
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