by Annemarie McCarthy
Next to me, Maisie brings the paper cup to her lips. The lukewarm chocolate has been given the go-ahead, deemed cool and safe enough for her to drink.
She slurps one, two, three. Pauses to blow bubbles into it, her nose stuck tip first into the liquid. Then her head rears back, nose wet and dripping and she releases a yowling scream into the air, a primal sound. Nobody at my table reacts.
At another picnic bench, one sharp-eyed woman, sunglasses perched on glossy hair, swivels, ready to find the child throwing a tantrum, ready to judge any apathetic parents. Instead, she finds Maisie and quickly looks away, embarrassed.
The first sunny Saturday of the year and people throng the boardwalk which is much nicer than it was when we were little. Then we would have the place to ourselves in the winter and even in summer it wouldn’t be too bad. Now Dubliners come to spend the weekend here, the council ripped up the rotting wood and keep on top of the birdshit. The new coffee shop – and it’s still new at three years old – has plants lined on shelves on crisp, white walls and sells pastel sweaters with its logo. We always wait at a picnic table while Tom goes in to order. “It’s not child friendly”, he complains every time, although nobody in our family is a child.
Maisie maws and mewls a little bit, examining the grain of the wood intensely. The patterns please her and she rewards them with a shriek. I try and see what she can and she taps them as if it’s self-evident but I might as well be blind. Seagulls find it easier to ignore her. They poke around as people eat, their eyes firmly on the prize. They’re brazen, a couple of the real bravados have even been known to take a chicken burger straight out of your hand.
“If you let them, they’d poke the eye out of your head and then look at you through it”, Gran often said when she was well enough to come down here, shifting uncomfortably on the picnic bench. She’d be wrapped up in her good coat, even on summer days, though it didn’t stop her complaining about the wind chill. The stages of my life are thus: first I’d wonder why she just didn’t buy a better coat. Now I understand her complaints were as essential a part of our collective performance as getting hot chocolate, having a sit down halfway through and not reacting to Maisie. When Gran announced ‘I can’t sit here much longer, it’s getting too cold for me old bones’, that’s the signal to transition to the second part of the afternoon excursion, a gradual return to the car. The performance had different tempos according to the season but form, movements, peaks and valleys were the same. Only Maisie was different.
There was no rhyme or reason to her moods. All of a sudden, she might melt under the table, weeping softly into the ground. Afterwards, Mam would hold her hand gently as we walked along, tugging her along, her limbs jelly as she cried for the world.
If the inexplicable grief boiled over, she’d grab the railings of the pierfront, knuckles white, head thrown back and release a spine-shrieking keen. This wildness was Gran’s domain and she’d step up to her, gently rubbing her hand across her back, soothing her. She never asked her to stop or be quiet like she’d tried to comfort me as a child. Instead, she’d murmur out towards the sea ‘I know, I know. Let it out girly sharing a deeper understanding of the world.
When I was little, I’d try and ask Maisie why she was feeling this way and the response was always different. She’d kiss me on the cheek or start rolling along the carpet or hold up three of her fingers. Or sometimes it would be silence, a thousand-yard stare. I used to think if I was a better sister, if I looked or listened to her hard enough, I could crack her secret code but could never see enough repetition or overlap to work out any kind of causation.
When I was a teenager and discovering Sartre, Maisie became a puzzle to me. How did this young woman, who seemed so indifferent to the world, have such intense emotional reactions? What was the stimulus she was reacting to?
Now I wonder if Maisie is a receptacle. I imagine different energy bubbles from the people on the boardwalk flying in the air and when one lands on her she swallows it whole, giving herself over to it. Maybe that takes away her agency but I like to think she chooses what bubbles to take in. What emotion will she choose to feel today? All powerful. Maybe she is like the old keeners who would be paid by the grieving families to wail at the wake, giving voice to the emotions they could not.
How beautiful to not care. She did not shrink and shuffle when the boys in our school started commenting on her large breasts and what they’d like to do with them. She didn’t cry when our dog died, even when she watched me wrack my ribs, lost under the wave of sobbing. But then unprompted she would dance on the beach, flinging up fistfuls of sand into the air and sticking her tongue out to catch them again. She howls at the kitesurfers and sometimes her trills of delight wake me on Sunday morning and I know she is lounging under the conservatory sun like a contented lizard. Sometimes I want to throw myself on the floor too, pounding my fists until they bleed on the tiles, screeching out the pain. But I don’t. Maybe Maisie does it for me. But I would like to do it for myself.
Gran’s friends used to give Mam pitying looks when she was out with Maisie and as I got older, Mam would confide in me that she was sad for Maisie, that she would never know what it would be like to be a fully-fledged adult, fall in love, move out of home, travel, experience all the wonderful things out there.
“But don’t you think she’ll miss a lot of the bad things too?” I’d ask.
She’d shake her head sadly. “No, love, there’s so much in the world that is good.”
Maybe it was for her world. For ours I’m not so sure. Sometimes I feel jealous of Maisie, of her cotton wool and her freedom.
Gran isn’t here to prompt us to leave anymore so Tom has taken over. He rubs his hands on his knees during a lull in conversation. “Well, we’d better get a move on”, although we really don’t have anywhere else we need to be. Some of the local walkers nod hello to Mam and Tom and one neighbour even stops and says a bright hello to all of us, even Maisie, who is trying intently to twist her hands into various different shapes and shadows on the boardwalk. He is holding a sausage roll and the seagulls are circling behind his head. Only Maisie and I are really paying attention to them and she is suddenly entranced so I just watch her. When one makes a whoop and swoops down, she joins them in the sound and for a moment it’s harmonious. Her mimicking of the sound scares the bird away and the moment is gone.
© Annemarie McCarthy
Annemarie McCarthy (she/her) lived in Cork, Ireland. She finds herself writing a lot about the connection between landscapes and people. Her work has previously been published in Aimsir Press. You can find her on Twitter @annmo131.
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