Goldsmiths - University of London

The truth was that the old wreck hadn't been touched in years and had fallen into ruin all of its own, stuck at the back of the room we called the pantry. More than likely, that cupboard hadn't been opened since the time I'd been accorded my one clear look inside – me on my knees still crusty with mud from the garden – and then the blackened key, picked out with heavy fingers from the others Gran wore on the cord around her neck, had been pushed back into the lock and twisted until the metal jaws inside snapped shut. It was not long after that day that my mother moved us all away to Cork for what she called a bit of peace, which was what she said three hundred good miles could buy you, and I'd never had another root inside.

This is the little that I remembered. For one thing, the fur: a long, trailing snake of bright white rabbit fur. To make a fine collar for my jacket one day, said Gran. Maybe some cuffs. That quietened me. I'd never known Gran to wear a jacket. Drab, thick-knit cardigans, yes, and patched, but no fine-collared jackets. And my other thought was how in blazes could a rabbit grow such a piece of fur? I was only a youngster then and I couldn't think for the life of me what part of the creature it must be, for it was never a tail. She dropped it onto my open palm when she saw my wonder and pulled at it gently as I closed on it, so that the silky hairs ran as smooth through my hand as my pony tail. And then she wrapped it back up in the crinkled tissue and placed it reverently on the table.

It was the most beautiful thing in the house; there was not the slightest thing worn about it.

That cupboard was where she kept the old fishing basket too. I caught a glimpse of it as the doors opened, tucked up in the corner with its perished leather straps sticking out at me like dry old tongues, just daring me to misbehave. I knew it well; it was where my Gran kept what she called her knick knacks. On the dullest of winter afternoons, dim and soggy from the rain outside, she'd take it out and bring it to the table after the plates from lunch had been cleared away to the kitchen, offering it to me like a prize for my sitting quiet all morning. And I'd know for sure that I'd deserved it, for the wet days inside were painfully boring, so that even that mouldy old fishing basket would come as some relief. Gran could count on the oddities inside keeping me quiet for at least another hour or two before I bust. I'd pick through it slowly, taking up one thing at a time: the red and blue lead soldiers with their missing limbs, granddad's old pins for his lapel with the foreign words written across them, and I'd have to take care for the curtain hooks loose at the bottom amongst the beads, curved and sharp enough to snag the biggest fish. You could make a chain with them and thread the coloured beads onto their points. You could spend at least a half an hour dangling the thing off the top of the door, or making it into a loop and fussing at Gran around the kitchen, begging her to wear it. There were the knuckles too inside, bits of bone from a sheep which had been scraped and boiled to rid them of their grease until all that remained was dry and smooth and patchy brown. Gran took them out for me once herself to show me how to use them, tossing the first one high in the air and shuffling the others smartly around on the floor before she caught it again. She said it was a game she'd learned from a Spanish Aunty of hers and would I like to have a go. But I never liked to touch them. I couldn't get out of my head the notion that the poor animals she was playing with had been dead for longer than I had been alive. Everything in the house, with the exception of that rabbit skin, had been old or dead for many years – or so it seemed to me.

When I thought of all those rainy day things in that basket, I looked away from the cupboard and pretended I hadn't seen it. Gran was showing me her treasures as a special treat and I felt I knew the contents of the basket well enough; I wanted to see what more she had in there.

Next out was the box of lace: white lace wound snug around hard cardboard like ribbon and fresh as a packet of paper doilies, and other dark, yellowing webs which were stained and badly frayed at the edges as if something had torn at them with its teeth. My Ma crocheted that, Gran told me proudly as she held it up. Blessed good with her hands, she was. They were difficult days back then, but my old Ma knew how to make do. She sewed all her clothes herself, you know ... I unpicked this lace from her Sunday blouse after she died. That spooked me well and proper, although I never let on. I had a gruesome picture in my head then for months of the old lady, teeth bared as she lay in her coffin with threads of cotton stuck in between them like shreds of rotten meat. Funny, all these years later it was only the fur and the lace and the basket that I recall sitting in the cupboard, as though my fright at the thought of the old dead lady had driven everything else that she showed me from my memory.

As far as I know, Gran never showed her treasures to anyone else; it was me she always spoiled, Mother said. Mother also said that the way the cupboard was, all locked up like that and no one allowed inside, it was like her Ma feared her own family might be thieving. She never asked me outright if I'd had a squizz inside; nor did I ever wish to tell her. But I think she knew and the knowledge had turned her sour, because it was me that Gran was closer to. And now here she was, my Mother, poking her nose into all the rooms in the house, and making plans for after, and fingering that old cupboard key in her pocket as she got herself ready for opening it, while Gran lay abed helpless to stop her.

She'd been put in a downstairs room, Gran, at the front of the house, with the grand piano still standing there next to her because it was too heavy to be moved. The nurse had sat in with her all morning. The doctor had been by too, examining his patient with all of us women standing around waiting. It won't be long, he'd told us in a voice which was hushed and loud at the same time, for he wanted to be heard.

Mother, who'd been fading quietly away in the heat next to the piano until then, gave a little knock with her elbow to one of the photo frames on the top, a grand, solid, silver centrepiece that the old lady who was good with her hands lived in. When she turned to see what it was for fear that it might properly fall over, she had taken it up and cried out brightly.

"Now look, Ma, who's here with you as well! Sure, you've the whole family keeping you company."

Her eyes teared of a sudden as she smiled at the faces around the bed and then back more tenderly at the others sitting on the piano. There in the front row were her three fine brothers all spruced up, there too those heroic uniformed uncles who had passed in the war, with their faded smiles and those unnatural partings in their hair, and finally the Aunts who'd survived the whole blessed mess standing supportively behind them, just as they were stood right then in real life beside the bed. The faces of these sterling people looked down at Gran in a holy huddle as Mother put the old lady back in front, meekly greying and seeming as if she were only waiting to be released from her posing to go back to the darning and lace-making, the cooking and the making-do which was surely the lot of a mother of seven children born into such difficult days and so good with her hands.

Then in the same voice – floaty, but dead like one of the bloated carp that had come up in the village mill pond during that hard, very dry summer – Mother said, "You take a good rest now, Ma, while I get on with some cleaning."

Gran said nothing back, of course, but as the rest of us straightened up to follow the doctor out and Mother stooped down over the resting figure with a flannel, I thought I saw her stir.

And once the front door was pressed firmly shut behind the rest of them and the nurse had resumed her seat, Mother's expression hardened right up. For a few short minutes she doddered, looking around the hall for what she might do next. Then she ducked her head into the cubby hole under the stair and pulled out that old contraption Gran would use when she still did her own cleaning, with the great baggy bellows behind it. She started in the hallway, the whine of the motor building up slow like an air raid siren. Before long she moved on and once I was quite sure I could think of nothing better to do I followed the dragging cable into the pantry.

"I'll do that for you, Ma. Will you not take a rest?"

"There's plenty of work for two, child," she replied shortly, scraping the long-bald machine over the flagstones and into the corners. One, two, one, two, her weight shifting from one slipper to the other in a private dance. Herself and her hoover.

Well, the house needed a good cleaning, I must say, but I couldn't think how to start, myself. I've my own home and my own children to care for now and I'm not a one to shirk hard work, but for the life of me I couldn't think how a house still full of Gran's things and so layered could be dealt with at a time like that. So much to lift up, so much to clear away. My Aunty Kathleen was coming to take away the couch on the Saturday – wouldn't it have been a finer thing to wait to do the cleaning until it was gone?

"Mother," I said firmly, "I plan to boil some water so we can take a hot drink. It will buck you up. There's no call for doing all of the work this very minute."

"No time at all like the present," she answered me briskly.

And so I went my own way into the kitchen and left Mother pushing the wheezy contraption around right up until I held the tea cups up under her nose. Then she stopped, wiping at her straying hair with the back of her wrist as she regarded the instrument at her feet.

"It's not so bad, is it? Would you credit it, when I first bought this thing for her ..." she looked down at the old hoover, scowling, "... Ma plain refused to use it. Stubborn old mule!"

"She was used to the old ways, Mother. That's all. She meant nothing by it."

"Right enough. The old ways was always better in her books."

"Sit with me a moment, why don't you? Come on ... do," I begged her.

I led her out of the pantry and into the empty room at the front, balancing the saucers with the cups rattling their own dance on the top of them. I poured from the teapot I'd left on the mantelpiece and took a good look around. The room was almost bare of furniture, some of the older sticks having been carried down to the dump already. All there was now to speak of was the good couch, hardly used and still with a healthy mound of springs in the middle, and we sat down on it together a moment, the two of us, our four stockinged knees lined up politely and each with a cup in one hand. I reckoned we'd have sat no taller or straighter if we'd been guests at a wake already. I was thinking about my Mother, and about her own Ma, that there'd be no joining ever again. There are some trees that take off wild like from the root of others and you'd never know it. They sway each in their own way; they crave a different patch of sun and they sigh at their own singular preoccupations. That was how I was with my Mother, and that was how she'd been with her own. Any minute now whatever was left of the gnarled old joint at the root would sever for good, and then what?

Mother looked around for a place to put her empty cup and seeing nothing she stood up.

"Well now," she told me. "It is my firm intention to clean this house from top to bottom and you may either help me, or you can leave."

"Well then, I'll help you."

We went by the kitchen with the cups and then back into the pantry. Mother stopped at the door a minute to take a good look at the great oak cupboard and then fished into her apron, bringing out the cord with Gran's keys on it. She untangled it slowly and looped it around the back of her neck just like her own Ma used to, leaving the keys to settle over the profound dimple between her breasts. Then, as if she were worried she might capsize, she stuck one hand out to hold the door jamb and leaned there a while, the other hand fingering her collar of keys, running over each of them as if she were doing the rosary. Ah, but she reminded me then of that photograph on the piano, and the sainted old lady who dreamed of nothing but her darning and her lace making.

There being no one left to stop her any longer, Mother stepped resolutely forward to the old wreck, lifted the iron key and turned it cleanly in the lock. Those heavy doors swung open as if of their own desire and then Mother began to draw the contents out and to pile them up on the table in the corner of the room.

First out was the basket, dulled and withered, and with those same cheeky tongues of leather as I remembered. She put it down without caring to take a look inside and reached in for something else. Out came the boxes with the lace and others I didn't know at all with the names of shops written large on the top of them, and then the length of old rabbit hair which had made such an impression on me when I was a girl, looking grey now from the dust and the long years of Gran's fingering. I thought about taking it up but there was something about Mother's stern expression which prevented me. She would not want me to dally, I knew. As each new thing came out, she gave it no more than a glance before putting it away to the side and moving onto the next.

It did not pass at all as I'd imagined when I'd seen that determined look in her eye earlier. It seemed as if she'd forgotten all those years of wanting, like she cared not a jot any longer to see what it was that was buried in those packages and boxes of her Ma's. I felt a softening towards her. She wore a look I'd not seen for some time, not since our move to Cork, when the three solid days of unpacking and scrubbing had knocked her clean off her feet and into her bed.

"What are you planning to do with all these things now they're out?" I asked her gently.

"I don't suppose they'll be fit for much more than the dump, girl, after all this time. We shall look at them later, if you wish."

She worked fast, and when one side was empty she began on the other, and all the while I stood by idly, wondering what it was that I should do. Mother no more wanted my help in the matter, I reckoned, than her own Ma had wanted hers. Or so I thought until she snapped at me, rousing me with her shortness.

"If you're finished with your dreaming, Maggie, you may turn that infernal thing on and make a fair start on the cobwebs."

I would have helped her then, my ma, but my eyes had become sore because of the dust so I left the room to wash them. I wanted to help her, sure I did, but my thoughts had stuck on the diminishing mill pond, where the water had become green and furry like moss on an old path, too thick to see through, and the bloated fish lay floaty and dead on the surface.