Inch Levels by Neil Hegarty Read Free Book Online Page B

questions, doesn’t it?’
    The leash was released now, it was snapped. The nurse nodded dumbly.
    ‘Thank you, dear.’ The nurse turned and scuttled away down the corridor. The fleecy lady paused for another moment: then she too turned and squared her shoulders. She took a moment: and then she pushed the door, and it swung and she entered the room.
    *
    Moments came and went: of course she’d had her chances, over the years. Plenty of them. One moment in particular came to mind: when the chance arose to – if not set matters right, then at least to speak of them, to begin to sort through them in her head.
    ‘What is it, mammy?’ Margaret asked, long ago: sitting up on her bed, tall now and long of limb and of hair, a teenaged pimple or two. What do you want? – is what she meant, though she was too polite to put it in those terms: what do you want? She looked at her mother, who was perched there on the edge of her bed: a wet February night, the window streaming with rain.
    Margaret had been picking fights with Patrick all day, the pair of them cooped up in the house, winding each other up as the rain fell. Now she looked apprehensive, afraid – reasonably enough – that her mother was here to barge at her, to tell her off. But: ‘I just wanted a word,’ said Sarah with ceremonious formality, and Margaret’s expression changed to puzzlement. Not a telling off, then – but what?
    Sarah hardly ever entered her children’s rooms. Not to draw curtains, not to open windows, not to pick up laundry from the floor. ‘You do your own jobs,’ she told them, ‘and you bring your own clothes to be washed, or else they stay dirty.’ Ditto the air in their bedrooms, which stayed stale unless they bothered to open their windows themselves. She had enough to be doing; and she wouldn’t let Cassie shuffle around picking up after them either. (Martin, of course, wouldn’t think of it, not for a second.)
    And besides which, her children liked their rooms to themselves. They didn’t exactly stick Keep Out posters on their bedroom walls; they didn’t need to; the signals were unmistakable. They took after her – and yet now here she was, having made a trail through a swamp of clothing and paper and schoolbooks on the floor, here she was perched at the end of the bed in Margaret’s bedroom. From the living room, where Martin and Cassie sat at their ease, the murmur of the television.
    Margaret said, ‘What kind of a word?’
    And yes: what kind of a word? A word of absolution?
    But when it came to it, Sarah manufactured some question or other: how was school? – and how was homework? – and I was just checking that everything was coming along well enough, you know, what with O Levels on their way next year . Margaret looked puzzled, as well she might. ‘Everything’s fine,’ she said, after a considering pause, during which a helicopter could be heard passing overhead, skimming the treetops in the darkness, deafening. She waited for the din to fade, then spoke again. ‘You know I don’t like Physics, but even that’s going along, you know, well enough too.’ And then: good , Sarah said, that’s good , and she picked her way back through the clothes and books, and slipped out of the room, leaving something – a confused silence – behind.
    She remembered this episode now. Twenty-odd years ago now, she thought, more years than I can stand to think about – she remembered it as she sat on the edge of another bed. Of Patrick’s bed, this time, in this hospital, smoothing the sky-blue coverlet until he moved his index finger just enough to give her a sign, to indicate that he didn’t like her there, that she was annoying him, that she should sit in the chair by the bed – or get out. She was interfering with the bed’s level, with its equilibrium.
    ‘The nurse said you’re doing well enough today, considering.’
    Patrick opened one eye, and looked. Then closed it again.
    ‘Did she indeed?’
    And that was