Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [76]
‘Your mother?’ he prompted, when Ashling remained mute. ‘She had depression, didn’t she?’
Dylan’s gentleness wasn’t enough to cajole Ashling to speak.
‘And I thought Clodagh might be the same…?’
Suddenly Ashling was back there, mired in the craziness, the bewilderment, the ever-present terror. Her ears rang with long-ago yelling and screaming and her mouth muscles were unresponsive with the desire not to talk about it. Firmly, almost aggressively, she said, ‘Clodagh is nothing like my mother was.’
‘No?’ Dylan’s hope was laced with prurient curiosity.
‘Decorating the front-room isn’t depression. Well, at least it’s not depression as I know it. She’s not refusing to get out of bed? Or wishing she was dead, is she?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Not at all. Nothing like that.’
Although her mother hadn’t started off that way. It had been gradual, hadn’t it? Against her will, Ashling lapsed into the past and she became nine years old again, the age she’d been when she’d first realized that something wasn’t quite right. They’d been on their holidays in Kerry when her dad commented on a glorious sunset. ‘A beautiful end to a beautiful day. Isn’t it, Monica?’
Staring straight ahead, Monica had said heavily, ‘Thank God the sun is setting. I want today to be over.’
‘But today was glorious,’ Mike challenged. ‘The sun shone, we played on the beach…’
All Monica said was, ‘I’m ready for today to be over.’
Ashling had paused from fighting with Janet and Owen, feeling excluded and unsettled. Parents weren’t supposed to have feelings, not those sort, anyway. They could complain when you didn’t do your homework or eat your dinner, but they weren’t allowed to have their own private unhappinesses.
At the end of their two weeks away, they came home, and it seemed like one minute her mum was young, pretty and happy, the next she was silent, sunken and had stopped colouring her hair. And she cried. Constantly, silently, just letting tears pour down her face.
‘What’s wrong?’ Mike asked, again and again. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ Ashling asked. ‘Have you a pain in your tummy?’
‘I’ve a pain in my soul,’ she whispered.
‘Take two Junior Disprins.’ Ashling parroted what her mother said to her when she had a pain somewhere.
Other people’s disasters set Monica off. Three solid days were spent crying about a famine in Africa. But when Ashling came home with the joyous news, gleaned from Clodagh’s mother, that ‘they’re sending in food’, Monica had moved on and was now weeping for a baby boy who’d been found in a cardboard box. ‘That poor child,’ she convulsed. ‘That poor, defenceless child.’
While her mother cried, her dad smiled enough for the two of them. Smiled hard. Smiled always. He had a busy and important job. That’s what everyone said to Ashling – ‘Your daddy has a very busy and important job.’ He was a salesman and he made his journeys, from Limerick to Cork, from Cavan to Donegal, sound like the adventures of the Fianna. So busy and important was he that he was often away from Monday to Friday. Ashling was proud of this. Everyone else’s dad came home at half past five every evening, and she couldn’t help scornfully feeling that their jobs mustn’t count for much.
Then her dad came home at the weekends and smiled and smiled and smiled.
‘What’ll we do today?’ He’d clap his hands together and beam around at his family.
‘What do I care?’ Monica mumbled. ‘I’m dying inside.’
‘Sure, what would you want to do a stupid thing like that for?’ he joshed.
Turning to Ashling, he smiled and said, as if sharing a secret, ‘Your mother’s artistic’
Her mother had always written poetry. She’d even had a poem published in an anthology when Ashling was a baby, and since the crying and strangeness had begun, she’d written a lot more. Ashling knew about poems. They were pretty rhyming words about sunsets and flowers, usually daffodils. But when, at Clodagh’s giggling instigation, they sneaked a look at some of Monica