The Yellow House

Ursula O’Sullivan-Dale

It isn’t through conscious choice that Clodagh calls her mother on Sunday afternoons. Neither of them made the decision to call at this time, nor did either of them specify that this was the most convenient part of the week. It simply started happening.

It’s been eleven Sundays since Clodagh has heard her mother’s voice. She pulls the last few items of clothing she needs out of her suitcase: a pair of thermal socks and a newly-bought waterproof jacket. Outside, she sees the last turning of spring. The wallpaper in her hotel reminds her of the one in her childhood home, which winds around the landing and the curved wooden staircase. She lies down and closes her eyes, letting the weakness of her body pull her into a light and uncomfortable sleep.

It started with her short story, “Out on the Lake”, which appeared in a journal. A review of the piece followed, and meant she’d been mentioned in her local newspaper. She’d disliked how the article had hailed her as more successful than she was. It had also got her age wrong, making the smiling photo of her look warped, as if it had been taken in some moment of a life beyond her, in years she hadn’t lived, of a woman with ghost-eyes.

The story itself, an extract of which appeared alongside the photo, had been about summers she spent in the yellow house, which sits on the edge of Lough Conn in Mayo, just out of sight of a peninsula that branches out into the lake. She never can call up the name of the man who built the house, confusing it with a story about the forming of the Lough, of floodwaters running from the feet of a hunted boar, of the ancient sound of pursuing hounds.

“Out on the Lake” told the story of her going out to the peninsula when she was eight. She then comes back as an adult to bury a body there, on the same day, after the passing of twenty six summers, beneath an August sky filled with shadows. Looking out at the view from her hotel room, the cheapest one she could get at the last minute, she thinks of what she’s always wanted to say to her mother. The empty space left in her Sunday afternoons lets her take the time to fill these gaps. She thinks back to the last conversation they had, how she said nothing, preferring to punish herself later.

It started after her mother read the story. She rang Clodagh to ask her why she’d written it, and if she was happy now that she’d alienated herself from her, and the rest of her side of her family.

‘You’ve made it sound like torture being there, Clodagh. Why do you always come back to this? Why can’t you let it go? It’s like you see me as some sort of neglectful mother, the woman in this story is so cold.’

She remembers the dull static of the line, and how she couldn’t quite tell if her mother had been crying.

‘Of course not. How many times have I said it’s only fiction? I’ve just used a familiar point of reference, the island, and built something around that. It’s a story, I promise, that’s not how I see you.’

‘You know what, Clodagh, you always undermine my intelligence. I know what a parapraxis looks like, and I know why you wrote this.’

‘Mum, please, that’s not what this is. I don’t even like the story that much,’ which wasn’t necessarily a lie. Clodagh had always had a skill for ruining things for herself, for directing herself through her mother’s words. ‘Can we please talk about something else? It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just how I write. I have to ground it in something familiar, or…I don’t know, I can’t do it otherwise.’

‘Something familiar? What about this woman who refuses to praise her daughter, and who is happy to leave her alone for two weeks with these “relatives” she barely knows, not caring about what happens while she’s away, is “familiar”? I just don’t understand why you’d write this unless, on some subconscious level, you wanted me to read it and dredge this all back up.’

‘I –’

‘And let’s not forget this trip to “Crete”, which is clearly about us choosing to go to Italy one summer,’ at this point, her mother began reading from the story, making Clodagh cringe down the line.

‘Something about the heat felt like a punishment. Not something vague and abstract, like a grand, cosmic injustice, but something of the self. She felt she could understand, then, the primal urge to see the burning of bodies, of exposed skin. How it cleansed. She wondered, then, perhaps for the first time, the true extent to which her religious upbringing,’ her mother emphasised the word religious here, ‘had shaped her, had sown this fear of her own body. As if it could all be connected back to that first bite of heat…what is this but a direct look back at your own childhood, at my own parenting?’

The women took a deep breath, together, before either of them spoke again.

‘Why does this conversation have to be like this? Why couldn’t you just ask me how I feel, or what it all means, rather than just accusing me?’

‘I’m not a narcissist, Clodagh, I know what narcissism looks like.’

‘Oh why, because you raised me?’

‘Don’t put words in my mouth.’

‘You know, of all the things in that story you could have focused on, you ignored the pain. All of it, all of…of a lost child who ends up turning a childhood memory into a literal grave. What do you think that says about my mind, how I feel? Not you, me,’ her voice was shaking with the effort of trying to stay measured. The end of the line was silent.

After a pause, Clodagh asked, ‘Mum?’, feeling like she’d given something up by speaking.

‘I am trying to think of how to respond to that, Clodagh. Give me a minute.’

‘Okay.’

All she got in return was a protracted sigh.

‘Clodagh, I am not trying to make light of the pain you said you felt or… feel. It’s just difficult, feeling like I’m still being punished, to use your words, like there’s something I’ve done wrong that you can’t let go of. You’ve basically just admitted that parts of this story are meant to be taken literally…’

Realising her mistake, Clodagh remembers clenching her teeth together, not seeing a way out.

‘Yeah, but–’

‘This makes me feel like you only see your Mayo holidays as some sort of prolonged agony, and that you’re never going to be able to forgive me for that,’ her mother’s voice was raised, untouchable.

‘That’s not true though, Mum, I promise. I don’t…I,’ she paused, looking for the right words to make the pain leave her mother’s voice.

‘I can’t atone for the mistakes I don’t know I’ve made, Clodagh. Maybe this is a story about your pain but also…it’s not just about that. There can’t be a victim without a bully,’ something in her voice was fragile, or righteous. Thinks backs to it, Clodagh trembles, twitching with guilt, anger, shame, sadness.

‘Please,’ she said, not even sure what she was asking.

‘And…it makes me feel like you put all of this…pain, in one place, like my side of the family has just been some massive source of trauma. I don’t see any love in these words,’ as Clodagh listened, she looked out of her apartment window, and the grass patch breaking up the cement blocks of the square below. It’s the ugly colour of city-grass, bottle-green. It needs nourishment and tending. In her hotel room now, she feels herself falling backwards into this moment with her mother. How both women were suddenly far away from the conversation, shouting across a long stretch of water, losing words in the wide, blue pulse.

Clodagh wonders how she hadn’t foreseen this. She’d known the way it sounded when she’d submitted it, and she hadn’t objected when the editor had sounded when she’d submitted it, and she hadn’t objected when the editor had suggested she’d focused ‘more on the trauma’. She remembers writing the land, the unending churn of the lake, the enclosing of the trees, the mounted deer skull knocking in the wind, calling out through the veil of the worlds, through the late summer-night air.

‘And don’t get me started on your father. All smiles and jokes and sympathy. I sound so cold next to him.’

‘He’s barely in it, Mum.’

‘But what is there speaks volumes.’

‘But it’s fiction. I’ve taken the details from those trips, to build something else. It’s nothing more, I promise.’

‘I don’t think you’re seeing what I see, Clodagh. This is not some trivial detail to me, it’s a thorough accounting of…me, as a mother. That’s how this ‘invented’ life feels.’

‘Well, I’m truly sorry that it’s made you feel that way. That was not my intention.’

She let out a sigh. ‘I know, but you wrote it, Clodagh. That was intentional.’ Another deep breath, and the line went dead.

The memory of the conversation, and what was said exactly, is fading a little, but the warning in her mother’s voice remains, lingering with Clodagh in private, quiet moments. She resents the story, now, and the loss of that brief feeling of being freed by it.

It is this sense of being watched, of the slow burn of her mother’s voice, that she tries to push from her mind as she pulls up to the yellow house. The fading paint, the colour of old summers, which flickers in and out of sight through the black bushes, as the car makes its way slowly up the long, curved drive.

She feels herself sift into some other lifetime, or some other form, as she stops for her first look at the house in years. Fumbling for the old key above the door, she sinks into some other, smaller body, and walks in and drops her bags down in the kitchen. She might not bother with putting them away right now, instead starting to pick at the skin of her arm. With the bags offloaded, she walks into the room she’d stayed in as a child, and thinks about how, before she left the next morning, her mother would always tuck her in on her first night.

From “Out on the Lake”

It takes three hours to pull the boat out from the old shed, through the trees and down to the bank. Her muscles ache and tear at the surface of her body from the labour of it. The path out of the trees and to the Lough is overgrown and full of sharp and itchy plants, which move in and out of their shapes in the half-light of the moon. Its faltering curve rests on the lake, bringing the peninsula clearly into her line of sight as she moves forward. The night is cold, an Irish summer night, and the brightness of her skin in the patchy moonlight makes her ethereal, as if she is on the last passage out of this life.

She rests, for a moment, the wet earth and the slow-moving tide speaking into the silence of the night. After a minute, she pulls the large bag up to the side of the boat and hauls it over the side, till she hears a hollow thud on the flat bottom. It’ll be another couple of hours until she’s back on land, she thinks, packing oars into the small vessel in case the engine fails.

The next few hours are difficult, as she predicted. Movement through the water feels rough, despite the windless night.

The following morning, Clodagh wakes to an unsettling pale light, which falls through the gap in the blind. The child’s bedroom, which sits at the front of the house on the ground floor, looks onto a field, where there are sometimes cows. In the summers of her childhood, their noises would often unsettle her in the night and scare her into thinking something else might be out there. The grey sunshine creeping into the room belongs to a specific place and time; by being back here, she is intruding. Any minute now, and the other occupants of the home, of this house meant for a large family of six or seven, are going to come in and pull her from the bed and throw her into the Lough, or leave her in the shade of the woods, which creep and curve around the house like ribs. The family will start unloading shopping from the Dunnes in Ballina, or bringing in shells from the beach at Enniscrone, or rocks from the strand at Killala. The kids will groan and drag their feet because they all have to go to Céide Fields, for its historical value. All the while the parents make sandwiches, check swimming costumes and towels are packed, rub suncream on unwilling faces, and perform final shimmies of the keys in the door, though it’s not really needed around here. Instead, the house fills with the sounds of one. One woman, who gets out of bed and finds the route to the kitchen with her eyes half-open. Who follows the the lines of the house, which belong somewhere in her, and are familiar like the contours of a raised scar.

Sitting with tea, looking out of the back window of the kitchen, she sees the stretch of grass that blurs into deep brown and green before blackening into Lough. Moments from her dream come back to her, and she feels guilty, like there’s something buried in her memory of the night she’s forgotten.