Curlew

Goodbye v hello:

I am four and a half years old. The daylight is coming through the glass panel in our front door behind her as my mother, who’s about to run out on my father and me – like out of petrol, out of patience, like she’s money or a membership, spent, expired – is hugging me against her legs in the hall. Then she comes down so her face is at my level, puts her hands on my shoulders and says,

you’ll be fine. I’m not worried for you. Because, you know what?

There is a dog, a big one, very thick fur, very like a wolf, in fact it’s not a dog, it is a wolf, and it’s sitting right next to you.

I look all round me but there’s no dog or wolf.

You can’t see it, she says. But I can.

Is it like the dogs the man who comes to get the rent brings with him? I say.

Even fiercer. And it’s yours, nobody else’s, it belongs to you and you to it. It will never leave you, and it means you well, she says.

There’s no dog or wolf. There’s nothing. But she is looking at me like she can see something.

Did any of this even happen? I’d no idea.

Did my father tell me it afterwards to make me feel better, make something more bearable for me? Or did I make it up to make myself – or even my father – feel better? More likely.

I knew hardly anything, only the things my father told me, and he’d told me hardly anything.

That she liked that poplar thing etc.

That she could be reduced to tears, to fury, by very sweet and simple piano melodies.

I liked this version of her. I liked to imagine that what infuriated her was the audacity of their sweet simplicity, that this somehow made her conscious of their silent companion, the complex cruelties that were always happening so very simply everywhere.

I imagined this precisely because of something else, the most vivid of all the things my father’d told me about her.

One day when my mother was a child in Ireland and one of her sisters was very ill, she was sent to fetch the doctor. She was eleven years old. On the way across the fields she met a young Traveller woman carrying a baby.

The woman asked her for money.

The child who’d one day be my mother had no money. I mean no money at all. There was no money even to pay the doctor, just the hope that he’d maybe come. But he was a different religion from my mother’s family and disliked them for all sorts of reasons including this difference, so nothing was certain.

The child my mother was apologized to the woman.

The woman took the child my mother’s hand, turned it empty palm upward and looked at what was and what wasn’t in it.

There’ll be a death in your family at half past three, she said.

True?

I’d no idea.

True or false, my mother’d definitely had a sister who died. You could verify such things online.

She’d more than likely gone for help there was no surety she’d receive.

When she was older she’d told this story, of how she’d been met by a woman who told her the future honestly, and for no payment.