‘Lifelike’ by David Gogan

Until Mum brought it home, I’d never realised how you only use the term ‘lifelike’ to describe something if it’s dead.

I had called up unannounced to the terraced house where she’d lived with Brendan for the past twelve years. The look on Brendan’s face when he answered the door, a dreadful anticipation, made me feel for a moment like a guard coming to break bad news. Not-quite-relief softened his eyes behind the thick glasses, but when he pulled me in to kiss my cheek his grip on my wrist was too tight. I followed him into the kitchen without mentioning that I had called to see Mum, not him. He told me she was out, and didn’t ask me why I was there. When our tea was ready – I never asked for coffee here – he sat beside me instead of across the table like I had expected. His smile was a rigid decal bolted on too loosely as he asked me how Sharon was getting on in school, and how work was going for Graham and me. I gave him highlights; something about that wavering smile said he couldn’t take any negativity.

Then we heard the front door open and close, much more softly than usual. No shouted greeting, which was odd. Mum never seemed to think that being in different rooms should be any barrier to having a conversation. The kitchen door eased open, and she came in. Something was cradled in one arm, and she was looking down at it – smiling down at it – so she didn’t immediately realise I was there. It was wrapped in a pale blanket. A memory from the hospital where I worked that hadn’t surfaced in years blazed through my defences with a peal of bright, shining horror. I just about stopped myself from reaching out to grab Brendan’s hand.

‘Brendan,’ she said, still staring down at the thing she cradled. ‘Would you look!’

He cleared his throat. ‘Love, Caitriona’s here.’

Mum looked up at me then. For the briefest of moments, her features expanded in a burst of animal panic. Other people may have missed it, but my years as a therapist meant that it didn’t get by me. It was only with my family that I felt like aspects of my job were an occupational hazard.

Mum glanced back down at what she was holding and her features quickly rearranged themselves into that drugged-out, blissful look.

‘Oh Caitriona, it’s so good you can be here too,’ she said. Too bright, and my mind whispered reaction formation.

‘For what, Mum?’

She looked over at Brendan, who seemed to realise that this was his cue to stand up and go to her. She angled out the package in her arms, scrunching her shoulder up the way I used to when handing over Sharon as a baby.

Support the head.

I shivered.

Brendan’s jaw worked, as if he were using his tongue to try to dislodge a piece of food stuck in his teeth.

‘Well?’ said Mum. She looked back down at the package and half-whispered through that odd, awful smile. ‘What do you think?’

Brendan’s arm raised up to touch it, and he stopped himself, glaring for a moment at the limb like it had betrayed him. He pressed a finger against his glasses, even though they were firmly in place. ‘It looks like something from a mortuary slab.’

There was no mistaking this new expression on Mum’s face. Rage. She clutched the bundle more tightly against her chest as if Brendan had tried to steal it. Her lower lip quivered. ‘Brendan, how can you say that?’ And for the first time in my adult life, I watched my mother cry.

*

Forever Angels. The name of both the website and the products it sold. I navigated through the site, looking at the pictures and darkly comic testimonials, thinking Who the hell buys these things? before remembering that Mum had.

There were some ‘standard’ Angels for sale, but it seemed like the unique selling point of the site was that you could design your own. The pricing page (Valuing Your Angel) had no set fees, just a form to fill in for a quote. Couldn’t be cheap. I thought of Brendan sheepishly asking if Graham and I could help out with their gas bill three months ago, and wondered with a sting of anger where Mum had been hiding the money to throw at Forever Angels. I went back to the home page, and the image of the infant-sized thing staring from the screen with eyes of violet glass.

‘Who’s that baby, Mom?’

I jumped, a rush of embarrassment heating my cheeks. I hadn’t heard Sharon come in from the kitchen. She plonked her pointed chin in the crook of my shoulder.

‘It’s not a baby, sweetie,’ I said. ‘It’s a doll.’

Sharon’s small hands twined absent-mindedly with my hair. ‘It’s creepy.’

‘I think so too.’

Her hand stopped twirling my hair. ‘Are you gonna get one?’

When I said no, she jerked her chin from my shoulder; the urgency in my voice surprised us both.

*

I’d kept an entire afternoon free in work for a twelve-year-old girl coming to start a full neuropsychological assessment. No show.

I rang the girl’s mother, knowing what to expect. She’d insist that things were fine at the moment, so why should the girl need an assessment at all? Until the next blip in the girl’s behaviour, when mum would drag her in to the hospital demanding that somebody do something, she’s been in an accident.

Struck by a car six months ago. Midday, but the file offered no explanation as to why she hadn’t been at school.

I logged the afternoon session as DNA: Did Not Attend. I mentally phrased the harsh letter I would send to the referring solicitor, stating I would not be offering the girl – although I really meant her mother – another appointment. Then I thought that I’d sleep on it, be more charitable for the sake of the little girl whose mother wasn’t her fault.

I told myself that my decision to leave work early and visit Mum was unrelated.

*

That look of near-panic again when she opened the door to find me there.

‘Oh love, do you never call ahead anymore?’

‘Is this a bad time?’

I sounded casual, but she paused just long enough for me to know that she was thinking about it. ‘Eh, no, not at all,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

Into the living room. Scattered drifts of old supermarket magazine-rack fodder, their covers trilling a psychotic mix of diet tips, soap gossip and ‘My son tried to rape me’ horror stories. Doilies hung askew on the arms of the sofa and chairs, and despite the amount of cleaning products that she kept buying from the Eazy Klean hucksters that called around every month, it didn’t look like the room had been tidied in a while. A forty-inch flatscreen dominated one side of the small room. I knew what her monthly payments for it were, and wondered how it compared with what she had spent on that… I didn’t even know what to call it. The word ‘thing’ seemed to dignify it too much.

‘How come you’re not in work?’

‘A patient cancelled on me,’ I said. ‘Where’s Brendan?’

‘Oh, pub I think.’

It was three in the afternoon. I said nothing.

Mum ran through a carbon copy script of what Brendan had asked the other night – Sharon, Graham, work – but something was off. It took me a few more minutes before I realised it. Something I would have twigged in an instant with someone in therapy, but when it’s your own mother …

‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Why are you speaking so quietly?’

Her eyes flicked towards the ceiling. ‘Am I?’

‘Yes, you are,’ I said. Too loudly, trying to balance it out, and Mum winced, as if she was about to tell me to keep it down.

I took stock of her. She wasn’t fat, but looked swollen, her face rounded out by extra flesh, yet the watery eyes behind her thick glasses looked sunken. Her black hair – so luxurious in Sharon, her only grandchild – was lank and greasy, with a pale gleam of scalp showing through. Open-toed sandals showed uneven, yellowing nails. Her thin blue t-shirt struggled to contain an expanding paunch that should really have worried me, this recent protuberance from her thin frame. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to walk out of the house.

Her mouth gaped open, closed. She looked at the ceiling again, at the TV, out the window, everywhere but me. I held my therapist’s pause, feeling dirty.

‘She’s upstairs in bed.’

*

It was.

Brendan had said that it looked like something from a mortuary slab. He had never seen such a thing, but I wondered if he knew just how accurate his description was. I looked down into the cot – Mum had bought a fucking cot! – at the figure that lay there under a familiar blanket I remembered covering me and my sister Aoife. In the dimness of the room, there was no light source to reflect off the glass eyes to give it the sparking lie of life.

Mum stood on the other side of the cot. With a smile so content it made her almost beautiful, she reached down and stroked its cheek. Even in the gloom, I could see the faint tracery of blue veins under its skin … No! I caught myself. The veins weren’t under its skin, they were blue lines drawn or etched on the ceramic or porcelain or plastic or whatever the hell it was made of.

‘She’s only gorgeous,’ Mum whispered. ‘I’m going to call her Evelyn.’

No therapist’s pause this time; I just didn’t know what to say. ‘But… Mum. What about Aunt Evelyn?’ Dead ten years.

‘She’s the image of her, do you not think?’ Her finger moved from the cheek to the eddy of black hair that cascaded from beneath the bonnet on its head. I remembered Sharon idly twirling her fingers in my hair the other night, and suddenly what Mum was doing looked obscene.

‘I don’t see the resemblance.’

‘Sure you do. The eyes are just like hers.’

‘Mum, it’s a doll.’

The smallest of pauses before she said, ‘I know that Caitriona. But she still reminds me of my sister, and I think it’s okay to name her after her, don’t you?’

‘What are you even naming a doll for Mum? What’s going on?’

She straightened up, looked at me properly for the first time since I got here. ‘Are you asking how I am now, Caitriona? After all this time?’

‘What?’

‘You never visit …’

‘I was up just the other day!’ I heard myself sound like a grumpy teenager.

She continued. ‘You know that me and Brendan have been struggling with money, and you haven’t offered to help once, even with you and Graham both working …’

‘Struggling with money? Stop buying those shite cleaning products …’

‘Language!’

‘… and get rid of the TV maybe. And how much did this thing cost?’

Her intake of breath at the word ‘thing’ was sharper than when I swore.

‘That has nothing to do with anything. And I hardly ever get to see Sharon.’ A typical turn of direction from Mum. She couldn’t stay on topic, always strayed to the next tangent like a cat following the most recently dangled piece of string. I had always thought that she just had a short attention span, but as I looked down at the thing in the cot my thoughts grew darker and began to whisper …

… braintumourvasculardementiapsychosis …

‘You see plenty of Sharon,’ I said.

‘No I don’t. You never bring her round, I never see her. She hasn’t even met …’

She broke off. Her eyes cast downward again.

Something swelled in my belly. ‘Were you about to say that my daughter hasn’t met this doll?’

I reached down and grabbed its wrist. It was like hard but pliant rubber, disgustingly warm yet not warm enough, and again I thought of mortuary slabs, of handing a swaddled bundle around the same size to a mother whose face looked like it was coming apart under the skin. I meant to pick the thing up, let it dangle in the air, show it for the toy it was, but before I could, Mum reached across the cot and slapped me in the face.

*

‘So what the fuck is up with this doll?’ Aoife said. Her nasal voice cut through the clatter and murmur of the small off-chain coffee shop.

I shrugged. ‘No idea.’

‘Oh come on, you’re the psychologist. There has to be something weird about it, right?’

In the three days since Mum had slapped me the same question had snagged in my brain like wool on barbed wire. I’d even considered bringing it to group supervision, pretend that Mum was a patient and see what some of my colleagues thought. It took me longer than I like to admit to catch myself going so horribly easily down a very unethical path.

‘I was looking stuff up online,’ Aoife said. ‘Saw something about a ‘transitional object’, something that young kids hang on to as they get older. Is that what this is? Some kind of messed up delayed grief reaction to Dad?’

‘Is ‘delayed grief reaction’ another term you found with Google?’

A smile – or possibly the beginnings of a smirk – tugged at the corners of her mouth. ‘As it happens. But seriously, the transitional object thing. What do you think of that?’

I made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. ‘As a psychological explanation?

‘Why not?’ She didn’t even have the gall to look embarrassed.

‘It’s no more sophisticated than the problem page advice in those rags that Mum reads. Do you honestly think that those are the type of interpretations I make in my job?’

Aoife waved a French-tipped hand. ‘I really don’t know, Caitriona. You hardly ever talk about what you do.’

‘That’s because whenever I start to, you get that same stupid fucking condescending look on your face.’

Another wave. ‘Oh, I do not.’ She sounded like Mum.

I set down my cup with a clatter that caused heads to turn. ‘Yes, you do. And now you think there’s a problem with Mum and because I’m the psychologist, suddenly you think I can just fix it?’

I thought that Aoife’s half-smile faltered, but she said, ‘Well?’

She had never asked about my job before. Only snide comments about paying for friendship, and talking-but-not-doing.

‘Have you ever seen a dead baby, Aoife?’

At least that got rid of the smile. ‘Jesus, Caitriona, keep your voice down. That’s horrible.’ Then, her voice became softer than I’d heard in years. ‘Have … I mean, do you see that kind of stuff?’

I almost didn’t reply, wondering how much would come out, knowing that it had been building since the moment Mum carried that thing into the kitchen like a newborn.

‘A few years ago,’ I said, ‘me and the other psychologists at the hospital wanted to do something to minimise the trauma that parents experienced when their kids came in with life-threatening injuries. Nothing revolutionary, we just set up a protocol for keeping the parents informed all along how their child was doing. No matter how bad things were, the more parents were kept in the loop, it lessened the trauma just enough to count.’

‘To count when?’

‘When they get told their child has died.’ I thought I saw a shimmer in Aoife’s eyes. ‘So whenever a critical child came in to A&E, I liaised with the parents throughout. That was it. Nothing too in-your-face, but enough so that if things were getting hopeless they knew about it. One evening, this baby, around three months old, gets brought in. This was probably about a month before I found out I was pregnant.’ My voice cracked. I’d never thought of that little coincidental detail before. I cleared my throat. ‘Meningitis. The parents hadn’t seen the warning signs, and things were critical. Huge pressure on the baby’s brain. The surgeons did their best, removed a bone flap, put in a shunt. About two hours of surgery and monitoring, and all along me and this young nurse, Ciara, were shuttling information from the surgical team to the parents. As per the protocol I’d put in place, I was the one that told them their baby was dead.’ As per. Lapsing into more formalised speech, my voice felt stronger once again. ‘After the news, the parents were almost serenely quiet, which I took as a bad sign. They just wanted to see their baby. But there’d been a nasty car crash with three people to be worked on, and it was a Bank Holiday Friday evening, so lots of staff were off, just agency cover. The team was too swamped to prepare the … remains.’ I shrugged, sat back. It felt important that I appear casual, in control. ‘So I did it.’

Aoife cleared her throat. ‘Did what, exactly?’

‘With Ciara’s help I cleaned up the baby, wrapped it in a blanket, and gave it to the mother before bringing it to the mortuary.’

It.

Aoife’s hand fluttered up to her throat. ‘Oh Christ, Caitriona.’ Her voice shook, and I felt a perverse stab of pride that I could deal with something that she couldn’t. My mind flashed on the details I’d left out: The baby feeling lighter than I expected. Wrapping her in a blanket, her pudgy muscles showing a hint ofthe tone that they will never develop. Ciara, crying quietly and steadily all the time, placing a perfectly fitting woollen cap – where did she get that? – on the head to hide the hastily patched up evidence ofsmash-and-grab emergency surgical intervention. The baby’s limbs complying as I swaddle her, but stiffening already. Hearing a choking sob, just one, and realise that it has come from me. Picking the baby up, flinching at the oddness ofno movement, the lack ofinstinctive infantile clutching. Bringing her to her mother. Handing her over with that automatic shoulder dip even though the reason for it no longer mattered.

Support the head.

Aoife leaned forward and hissed, ‘Why are you telling me that horrible story?’

It took me a while to process the echo of the words I spoke. ‘Is it horrible?’

*

We didn’t come out and say that we were going to talk to Mum about it, but we knew that’s what we were going there to do. It wasn’t so much the slap that made me realise we had to do something; it was the fact that I didn’t want Sharon to have anything to do with the thing that Mum had brought home. If things didn’t change, it might come down to Sharon not seeing her grandmother. I told myself I didn’t want that to happen.

Brendan answered the door. He still looked tired, but different from the nervous exhaustion I’d seen before. There was something about the way he held himself, some new set of his shoulders maybe, that I tried to place. I couldn’t get it.

‘Hello, girls,’ he said. ‘Your mum’s upstairs.’ Not using her name. Again, I wished I had a different job with my family, wished I wouldn’t notice these things.

‘Why don’t you go up to her?’ Aoife said to me. ‘I’ll help with the tea. There is tea, right Brendan?’

A relaxed smile. ‘There is indeed. And stronger stuff if you like.’

They both laughed their way into the kitchen. I went upstairs.

A few feet away from the bedroom door, I heard my mother weeping.

Not the soft, sad crying of a few days ago. These were deep, choking sobs, made all the worse because it was obvious she was trying to stifle them. I heard gentle, wooden rattling that must be the bars of the cot; I pictured her clutching them. I had a flashback that was hallucinatory in its quality: I was eleven, in the grips of my first ever migraine, trying to dampen those same heaving sobs because each one ignited further fireworks of agony. Mum held me then, and stroked my hair as I buried my chin in the crook of her shoulder, just like Sharon had done with me a few nights ago.

The hall shimmered and doubled as my eyes suddenly overflowed. I wanted to go into my mother and sob with her and hold her and be held.

But I went back down the stairs.

On the way, I swiped at my eyes and glanced at my reflection in the hall mirror. You couldn’t tell how I felt. Good for a psychologist doing therapy, but where else?

Tea with Aoife and Brendan should have been excruciating, but wasn’t. Brendan was more talkative than he’d been in weeks. Aoife’s laughter at his little stories and turns of phrase, while polite, was genuine. I settled back into the couch, sipped tea, and almost relaxed.

Mum came into the room.

It dangled from her hand by the ankle

‘Stupid thing’s broken,’ she announced to no one, and tossed it on to the couch beside me. I don’t think I flinched.

Mum poured herself tea.

Aoife glanced at me, as if for permission to speak, then said, ‘Are you, eh, alright Mam?’

Mum snorted. ‘Typical internet company. I won’t be buying from them again. They better give me my money back, I can tell you that.’

I looked at the thing on the couch next to me. It looked the same as it ever had. I reached out (why so slowly?) and picked it up. I turned it over in my hands, feeling the pliant flesh-like substance its midriff was made out of. I worked hard to dampen down memories of similarly proportioned unresponsive flesh. I saw that the hair had been combed back, and behind the ear, I saw the damage.

A spider web of concentric cracks, with a tiny hole at the centre.

As if it had been dropped on a sharp corner.

Or held by its ankles and swung into one.

I turned it again, looked at its face.

Mum sipped her tea and asked Aoife how she was.

Brendan was watching me, the psychologist. In the matte reflection of the flatscreen TV I saw myself as a dim outline, and the way I was holding the doll.

Cradling it.

I dropped it on the couch again. When I looked up, Brendan had engaged in Mum and Aoife’s conversation. He reached out and took gentle hold of Mum’s hand, and I saw her squeeze back.

And then I understood the expression on Brendan’s face when he had answered the door. If someone had been watching me the day I handed a newly grieving mother her lifeless child they would have seen the same thing.

Brendan looked like someone who had just finished doing something unpleasant, but that needed to be done.

From issue #1: autumn/winter 2015

About the Author
David Gogan is a writer from Dublin. He is the author of the psychological thriller Critical Value under the name D.C. Gogan.