Eabha

Summer trailed off into unseasonable warmth in the August that I left home. It was the first one I had seen in Dublin, a summer that had been rank with heated piss in the city. I had been coming up to the city since June intermittently, trying to find somewhere to live before my college year started, and eventually my mother called in a favour; I began living with my aunt, her husband and their daughter Ciara in an enormous seaside house out in Dalkey so that I could trawl the housing market with a bit more efficiency. The novelty of the city had worn off quickly, and I bobbed around in the refreshing cool of the seaside towns south of the city centre after despair-inducing viewings. Before I arrived, and even on and off for a few days at the beginning, I felt interminable luck; things couldn’t go far wrong if I could stay in that great brick heirloom in Dalkey while room-hunting.

Aunt Eabha’s had become a family legend. Even once she had moved away from her sister, my mother would return to Dalkey in the summer, drawn like a fish on a line by the house’s proximity to sea and the feeling it gave her to have the right to swim in their indoor pool. I had heard about these summers so often that my mother had to correct what had become my assumption about the house; that I would be entering some kind of palace suspended over the tall hedges that made it private from the nosy road.

Despite stories of bright white dinghies on a shining green sea, of summer salads readily available and the abundance of everything that would lead to summers of doing nothing, these luxuries, as it turned out, had disappeared as quickly as eight o’clock sunsets. Eabha used to be the marvelled aunt; skidding up past the muddy ditches and pigeon wire fences towards our pebbledashed bungalow in a convertible suited to warmer weather, sunglasses and pop songs. This Eabha was long gone. The red lippy that used to warm our cheeks in a perfect kiss now only stained the poorly washed glasses on the draining board.

Her husband, John, who used to hang around her like an expensive perfume, now seemed to droop from the walls like peeling wallpaper. He would shuffle around the house, newspaper in his sunspotted hand, open to the sports section. As that summer’s tanned body sprinted away from me, I tried to spend more time with John. We would usually sit in silence, but sometimes talk about the weather and how we had slept. He seemed to have virtually no solid opinions, making him remarkably easy and incredibly annoying to talk to about anything of substance. His retracting from life had a clearer cause that only became obvious to me later; but my arrival actually held all the details of what would come later, in ways that only hindsight can reveal.

*

I hadn’t been given a tour of the place when I arrived in early August. After knocking on the Georgian door, I had waited for longer than I imagined it took to answer it. The door was yellow, and reminded me of a peeled banana, as the paint seemed to crack in lines and reveal a dark brown underneath. Eabha had answered the door in a dark purple sweater that seemed inappropriate for the weather. It reminded me of the lining of the coffin we had picked for Gran in colour, but the fabric looked less comfortable. She was smaller than me, or hunched over, and the red lipstick that I remembered looked different. Before, her lips always had the appearance of having just eaten a raspberry; now it was as though she had had wine from a wide brimmed glass, with a deep red permeating the tiny lines and wrinkles around the outside of her lips.

Eabha shuffled back and had just sent me up to my room with rough directions slurred from a sour mouth. Following me up as though she didn’t know the way, she mumbled about the frames on the walls, where she was pictured not in poses but mid-laughter on beaches in Italy or the south of France with a boyfriend or a picnic. There were some with a familiar face in them, and Eabha - between mumbles - would refer to this face, never with her name but as ‘your mother’. Once we arrived upstairs, right at the top of the house as Eabha hadn’t stopped me, I was faced with just one door. Putting my bags down, I could see a slice of light being fed between the uneven angle of the door and the floorboards underneath. Eabha suddenly lurched forward muttering either ‘I’ll get it’ or something else about my mother.

My birthday had coincided with this strange arrival in Dalkey. A cake had been arranged by my mother, coming from the city centre in the afternoon. I had nothing to do except unpack into the shuffling silence of the house that morning, so by 2 o’clock I was in impatient anticipation of the cake, just for something to do. Eabha had gone. Either from the house or deep within it, and I was yet to meet anyone else. The cake was delivered, but I somehow missed anyone dropping it off, only opening the great door to find the box. Beautiful and fragile, I carried it with such care that I thought I might just drop it on the way through the dark, unfamiliar hall into the kitchen. The bright pink icing, my name looped in a darker shade; it looked like a storybook cake, clean, and marked with a palette knife by some expert hand. This magenta cake was completely incongruous perched on the grimy counter - like a kid’s party at Miss Havisham’s. I took a picture and sent it to my mother with a short thank you message. On re-reading the message and realising that it probably betrayed my loneliness in some way, I decided to make an effort to have a good day. Remembering the pool, I splashed through the kitchen’s noisy, bizarre silence and walked to the back of the house.

My sandals brushed the art deco tiling in the rectangular room that housed the pool, the sound echoing into the high arched ceiling. It felt like some kind of church. I wondered if I sang out one of my old choir songs from secondary school, perhaps I would be taken aback by the resemblance. I stayed quiet and listened instead. Perhaps calling it a pool is an overstatement - it was now an empty box. My hand on the ladder leading halfway into this blue tile grave, I wondered when Eabha’s streamlined body stopped descending these stairs. When did the glittering reflections of water on the walls get replaced by damp mould? When did this gradual process suddenly begin?

I decided that if I wanted a birthday swim, I’d head to the beach. Ciara was nowhere to be seen. I later discovered that on searching for her, you might think you had heard something, and only when starting towards where the noise came from would Ciara appear, as though she had been spying and was covering her tracks by bounding out of some door or appearing in the centre of the room. I decided I would introduce myself by inviting her to the beach with me if she could be convinced, but I was again left alone in my idea, and fetched my swimming costume and towel. The beach was sunny and cold, and although I enjoyed my short swim, I felt continually anxious. The swim should have felt joyous; but my mind was constantly cast back towards the house, not least because I could partially see the top of it. I had become acutely aware of my age, fearful of a fate similar to that of the swimming pool on birthdays to come, when I returned to the house. If I were to be gutted of all leisurely activities and bound to become decrepit, I wasn’t sure I could bear it. Rubbing at salt dry eyes and passing through the kitchen, I doubled back. My eyes followed a fly dumbly buzzing over the cake I had photographed mere hours earlier. The icing had melted slightly in the afternoon sun, and reminded me of ‘before and after’ botox photos, but in reverse. In the centre, a large uneven slice had been cut.