Kelly Still - A Memoir

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83594-009-9
Verlag: New Island
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 154 Seiten

Julia Kelly's mother, Delphine, spent much of her life in the shadows as a politician's wife, tending selflessly to the needs of her husband, John, and five wild children. Rattling around in a draughty house, the siblings - though much-loved - are left largely to their own devices, tended to by a series of hapless au-pairs, dodging mouse invasions and forever in search of their exhausted mother's attention. When John collapses of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine, it is a sad liberation for his wife. Unshackled from her domestic duties, Delphine undergoes a transformation. She embraces sea-swimming and, along with a coterie of elderly ladies, sets out on adventures to far-flung places. Her final journey is to the Galapagos Islands where, hit by an unexpected wave, she loses her balance and is forced underwater. When her body surfaces she is no longer breathing. The book left on her bedside locker in the hotel is 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. Mired in grief, the five siblings begin the long repatriation of their mother's body. But it is the post-mortem report that provides the key to Julia's healing and recovery: gradually, within the clinical descriptions of limbs and eyes, heart and toes, Julia finds solace. Taking inspiration from each body part, she breathes life into Delphine - finally still and fully present for the first time in her seventy-two years - in gorgeous, luminous prose. What leaps from the pages of STILL is someone unforgettable: a vibrant, complex woman, whose endless capacity for love continues to inspire and comfort. In the end, She died as she had always strived to live: in the middle of a huge adventure, diving into the great unknown.  

 JULIA KELLY  is an acclaimed Irish memoirist and novelist. Her previous books include Matchstick Man (2018), The Playground (2014) and With My Lazy Eye (2009), for which she was awarded an Irish Book Award and nominated for a Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and Irish Book of the Decade.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kelly, Julia

Leseproben

One

‘Mum?’

Nothing.

‘Mum?’ Louder, more strident.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ you’d say and rub the film of saliva on your lips with the knuckle of a finger. You’d hoist yourself upright, recross your slippered feet and squint at the television with a puzzled frown.

Soon your head would begin to droop again and your blinking would slow. Your expression would be one of intense concentration – you would try your best to stay awake but it was always a fight you would lose. With a final sharp jolt – a hangman’s noose – you’d be gone, sleep would have won and you would no longer hear your child calling you.

‘Mum?’ I’d say again, but I’d get no response so I would give your arm a tentative nudge. ‘Mum, you’re snoring,’ I’d whine, irritated by your unreachableness, doing all I could to deny you that delicious, impossible-to-recreate-in-bed sleep. Why would no one ever allow your small, raw, exhausted eyes to rest when you had been awake for so much longer than anyone else?

‘Gosh, I’ve been up for hours!’ you’d say in the mornings. Bright and competitive, walking shoes on, the cold air you’d brought with you billowing all over our sleep-stale breath, you would list everything you’d already achieved while your husband and children were still horizontal. Sleep was an indulgence to you, sleep deprivation your badge of honour, worry your nocturnal activity, your dark secret.

In sleep, your eyes moved rapidly beneath their thin, blue-veined lids, trying to solve the myriad of problems you’d suppressed in your waking hours. You were always expecting some sort of disturbance, something to be attended to that you alone had the duty and the ability to successfully deal with. It could be that ruddy leak in the attic that nearly caused the hall ceiling to collapse last time, or the jolting ring of the doorbell in the small hours revealing a drunken teenage daughter who’d forgotten her keys again, or one of the remarkably poorly chosen tenants of the basement flat who kept locking themselves out. ‘Being a landlord has its drawbacks as well as its privileges,’ you’d said to Dad as you clambered back into the warmth of bed one winter’s night, having supplied the tenant with the spare key to their abode. It had made him laugh so unexpectedly and so uproariously that you couldn’t help but giggle a little yourself in the darkness, as you tried to get comfortable again – and he’d repeated the story at parties many times. He always found you most amusing when you weren’t trying to be funny.

When sleep finally came, it would be fitful and shallow and any possibility of deeper slumber would be abandoned before the first shipping news on Radio 1. When you’d open the curtains on another day, you would never admit to tiredness, though it always showed in your eyes. The lid of your weaker one, the right, would begin to droop; the eye itself swivelling ever so slightly towards your nose, your lazy eye becoming more pronounced as the day proceeded.

Your eyes were never ‘properly placed’; one was always half-watching your children or trained towards your husband, trying to catch his reaction, to see if he found whatever it was on TV as interesting, shocking or funny as you did. ‘It’s just so silly,’ you’d say, weeping with laughter and rubbing your eyes. They would irritate you most in the evenings, not just from weariness but from worries about money, and a possible allergic reaction to your new expensive Lancôme moisturiser that promised to banish signs of fatigue, but instead left your eyes puffy and sore.

*

Light, kettle, radio, oven – you animated everything on entering a room, humming happily as you pottered about the small, sauna-like kitchen that was your domain. Your draw was magnetic and we descended, surrounded and attached ourselves to you, blood-hungry leeches sucking out everything vital: Tayto and pink ham, help with homework, your soft, healing hugs. Soon the kitchen would be too hot and too full of humans who needed your attention but we would go on taking till we were swollen and sated and you were entirely spent.

‘It’s like an oven in here,’ you’d say, as you clattered about cupboards for the saucepan you needed, bent low, your dress rising up at the back to expose your thighs in tan tights. Your ceaseless humming would take on a more manic edge as you became increasingly addled. You were profoundly uncomfortable in silence, needing to fill it with words or with humming; you hummed tunelessly all the time.

You’d stretch over the sink to yank open the sash window behind the kitchen curtain – the fan built into its pane was broken and useless, covered in black masking tape and gunk and grease. An imprint of this window in miniature would remain etched on your eyeball as you turned back to a boiling pot. The image slid, oil-slick, down your cornea and shot up again when you blinked, infiltrating everything until it dissipated.

As your internal temperature rose, it would cause your rosacea to flare and spread across your nose and cheeks, and your face would flush from standing upright too swiftly. Beads of sweat would dot your upper lip and patches of damp would darken your armpits.

Sometimes, like a neglected pot on the hob, you would boil over. You would bite down hard on your lower lip as you gave the kitchen door an almighty slam. ‘Dash it! Damn it! For crying out loud!’ This startled and silenced everyone, not only because these moments were rare but because to us they seemed entirely unpredictable. We always failed to spot the warning signs, and when you snapped it was invariably over seemingly trivial things, like the crème caramel you made once: you very skilfully slid a plate under the mould, then turned it over – careful, careful – so that the set pudding would be displayed in all its patterned splendour. We all held our breath as you lifted the plastic mould to reveal the crème caramel, which immediately collapsed into a gelatinous heap and slid, jellyfish-like, into the sink.

*

You’d never been fond of looking people in the eye. Often, whole evenings would pass without you ever making direct visual contact with the person you were talking to, or you’d lock your gaze on someone entirely separate from the conversation, so much so that that person would eventually be forced to look away to break the intensity of your stare.

You’d squeeze your eyes shut at bad news, as if that would make it somehow not true, and also when you were waiting for someone to hurry up and finish their point so that you could get on with your more interesting one. You’d close them too for tiny power naps between jobs, to manage your exhaustion, like that woman who sailed solo around the world.

You told me a thousand times (‘Ah pet, I’ve told you a thousand times!’) but I still can’t remember how you singed off all of your eyelashes. You’d look at me sidelong in the car with some envy as I’d apply more mascara to my already stiff and congealed ones. I’d have ballyragged you into giving me a lift into town and you’d shoot your hand out instinctively to protect me whenever you had to stop suddenly, which was quite often because you were never fully focused on the road ahead.

Your eyes were blue, like mine – little b little b, homozygous recessive – but they were a paler, more apologetic hue: ballet blue, the blue of the Virgin Mary statue that lay decapitated on the shelf above my bed for all of my childhood. Not the piercing, cobalt blue of some of your children – or perhaps your eyes began vividly blue and faded, the way age fades everything.

Blue is your colour. Sky blue, aqua blue, cyan blue – like shallow water on a sandy beach. . Large amounts of sand in the collapsing dunes we charged down at Brittas Bay, you always behind us like a weary Sherpa burdened with belongings – picnic basket, blankets, buckets and spades – pausing between spiky tufts of marram grass above where we rolled and plunged to seek out a sheltered spot on the beach.

You’d sit wide-legged on the picnic blanket, like a doll whose legs have to be splayed to make it sit upright, as you organised and unpacked, your legs a solid ballast against the breeze, a way to keep the blanket from flapping up and turning in on itself, covering the items that we needed.

Large amounts of sand in my sandwich. ‘Oh, pet, it’s perfectly fine,’ you would say, brushing your fingers over its Easi Single centre while I cried that you’d just made it sandier and your eyes searched for the bag for rubbish. Grains of sand got everywhere: in the curves of our ears, in the cracked ridges of our lips, between our toes and bum cheeks, in the lengths of our sea-soaked hair.

*

When the wave came, did the sand storm and needle your lashless eyes? Were they open, wild and startled, as the great crash of the silt came down on top of you and plunged you into a sealed submarine world? Or did you squeeze them shut when you went under? Were you wearing snorkelling goggles? Did they pull the skin around your eyes and stretch them narrow? Were your blinking eyes trapped behind that mask, looking blindly...