Pushed

When I was a girl, a woman in my town died in suspicious circumstances. I still think about the day of the funeral; the spice of the incense as the priest swung the smoking thurible over the closed coffin; my mother’s black skirt, tight on me and the way she plucked in displeasure at the fabric stretched over my belly, the puckered face she would make when I disappointed her.

We had barely left school at that stage, all of us girls barely done with our school uniforms, none of us goth enough or emo enough to have all black to wear to the church. We knew the woman; her older daughter, Maeve, was in our class. I sat in a row of girls wearing borrowed clothes, and I could see the back of Maeve’s head, bent low on the pale stem of her neck as the priest spoke of her mother, how larger-than-life she had been – her legendary karaoke choices, her dinner parties – how involved she had been: the protest at the school over the new curriculum, her way with the flowers on the altar. People do speak well of the dead. There hadn’t been a word about Maeve’s father. Not inside the church.

It was the end of summer, and we were all about to start our new lives: studies, jobs, whatever. The weather can get weird on that cusp with autumn – late-August storms that shock. We were chilled in the church; we could hear the slish of the rain from outside any time the doors opened. As we spilled out of our pews, following the coffin as it was carried down the aisle, the wind smacked us. The storm reached its climax: hailstones the size of marbles and a shaft of red lightning that broke the sky with an almighty crack. We held each other, cried for Maeve and the younger ones, cried for ourselves though nothing had happened to us.

Maeve, her brother and sister moved away. An aunt in the city, someone heard. This was long enough ago that people could lose touch easily. Disappear. Maeve moved on, but the town did not. Discussion eddied like the leaves that soon fell from the trees in brown and bitter drifts. How had the kids slept through everything that happened that night? It was unnatural. And were there pills missing from the many bottles in the bathroom cabinet? Had he really been seen in the next town over, buying an axe? And if that was just a rumour, then why was their cat never found, and whose was the blood on the stairs, because it wasn’t his wife’s? Nothing was ever proven.

When Maeve’s father died, a good ten years later, he wasn’t buried in our town. Someone told my mother that Maeve had visited him in hospital before the end, had flown home from her job in London to be there. I was shocked by it. My mother was too, though she balanced it with a carefully nurtured dislike for the long-dead woman – ‘She thought a lot of herself,’ was something she would say whenever the subject came up. The worst sin. We were pleased with our shock, she and I, and I was pleased to please her, always. I bathed in her moral correctness, her grudging approval.

It was so long ago, and yet it all sprang fresh to mind when I was up in the city a while back. I walked through the lobby of a hotel to use the bathrooms before taking the bus back home, and saw Maeve at the bar, two empty glasses in front of her. I spoke out her name without thinking – ‘Maeve’ – and she looked up, said she remembered me, even if at first she maybe didn’t recognise me.

We talked, in a way we used to, in a way I had forgotten when that death cut our lives into before and after. Her life in London, mine in the town she left. She’d heard my own mother died, which surprised me; I hadn’t known she was still in touch with people back home.

‘They weren’t unalike,’ she said, ‘our mothers. How did you put up with her, the way she pushed you around?’

The shock of her truth, spoken, tripped up my tongue. I mumbled some reply: how late, my bus. We swapped numbers, pretended we’d be in touch.

On the journey home, I watched the city straggle out into suburbs, countryside creeping in little by little and then all at once it was dark and the land I couldn’t see was all pasture, the grass long and rough. I thought about how I’d felt in the long years before my mother died; how she’d pushed me to give up my job, stay home, do her bidding. Pushed me to change shape, diminish, take up less space. Pushed me to wait on her, to serve.

Pushed.

I’d never had an axe in the house, but there had been a time when I’d imagined the feel of the smooth wooden shaft in my hands, light glinting off the polished blade, the sound it would make, cutting through air.