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Mammy tells me the story of my birth. We sit at the kitchen table, cups of tea cooling, my homemade birthday cake between us. The icicles, she says, shakes her head, and smiles. She says the icicles that hung from the roof that year were so long and so thin, the low light seeped through and they dangled in front of the window like net curtains. During her sixteen-hour labour, she crunched through cone after cone of ice chips and the second the sun dipped below the horizon, I finally dropped out. It’s you. She lays her hand on the table, palm facing up. I place mine on hers. That’s what I said to you. I said, It’s you – you and me against the world. She kisses my knuckles, my arm, my neck until I’m a fit of giggles. My special girl. We eat the whole cake and skip dinner. 

*

I’m turning nine the first year the solstice falls on a school day. As was tradition on the last day of term, Mrs McIntosh said there was a day of board games and crafts planned with a film after lunch. And something fun at home time, she said, and glanced at me. I blushed with anticipation. But when Mammy wakes me on my birthday, she tells me in her excited voice I can stay at home. We’ll spend the day together like we always do. I hold back my tears until Mammy is in the shower. Later, the ingredients for my cake are on the counter. I pour caster sugar over butter, which mounds like snow. Mammy, I say. Why don’t I have a Da like other kids? She turns on the whisk. When it stops, I think she’s going to answer my question, but instead she says, Eggs, Edith. I yank open the drawer, whack the first egg. The knife cuts straight through, the egg’s gooey insides oozing over the cutlery. Sorry, I say. It’s okay, she says. Accidents happen. Then she tips the entire contents of the cutlery drawer into the sink, the sharp clatter like ice breaking.  

*

The following solstice, Mammy has to work. She has a job in the school office doing boring stuff on computers. Sometimes I have to wait for her to finish, so I sit at her desk doing my homework. Isn’t she such a good girl? the head teacher says, slipping me a custard cream and a hot chocolate from the staffroom machine. Mammy beams. She’s the best. On the way home, to keep up with Mammy’s long strides, I slip-slide, the tread of my boots almost worn through. We can still make a cake, Mammy says. And I’ll tell you the story of your birth. I roll my eyes, but Mammy doesn’t see because she’s staring at the woman standing on our doorstep, a woman who looks exactly like Mammy, but with slush-grey hair. She’s wearing a burgundy coat with a snowflake brooch. Hello Edith, she says. Happy birthday. I’m your Nana. The air between them is hard and spiky and glacier-cold. It’s been ten years, Mammy says. Mammy’s Mammy nods. I know. A nana! I have a nana! We’re going to make a ca– But Mammy interrupts. Go inside, Edith. I don’t move. Now, she says. From the hallway I hear Mammy say, Remember what you said when I got pregnant? Mammy’s Mammy says, Let me make it up to you. Both of you. Ten minutes later the door slams. I take the third cup from the kitchen table, hurl it at the wall, and its shards fall like rain. 

*

More solstices and more birthdays follow. On my thirteenth, Mammy lets me get my ears pierced; on my seventeenth, she buys me ten driving lessons. We both know I don’t have the patience to teach you. I laugh, she does too, neither of us acknowledging the real reason: she’s an abysmal driver. I would kill myself if anything happened to you, she says. But if it was my fault, I’d carry on living with the sole purpose of pure punishment. The day after my eighteenth birthday, I throw a bag onto the passenger seat of a terracotta Ford Escort and drive away. I don’t tell her I’m going. In each place I settle, for a week or a month or a season, I send her a postcard, but only on the day I leave. By the time I’m twenty-eight, I’m married with a child of my own. A boy. Mammy, he asks one day, as I push him in the supermarket trolley. Do you have a Mammy? I abandon the shopping in aisle sixteen and strap him into his car seat. We drive and drive and drive until I say, There. There’s my Mammy. She waves from the front window. 

*

The solstice Mammy is dying, I tell her the story of my birth. We’re in what’s called the Easy Room, two armchairs pushed close around a low cornerless table. The icicles, I say, shake my head, and smile. I say the icicles that hung from the roof that year were so long and so thin, the low light seeped through and they dangled in front of the window like net curtains. Sixteen hours, I say. I tell her I have no idea how she birthed me alone with only ice chips against the pain. I had epidurals that numbed my body like sleet. I lay my hand on the table, palm facing up. She stares at me for a couple of moments. Perhaps there’s a last glimmer of recognition before it’s forever extinguished. Or, it’s pure reflex. But she puts her hand on mine and I say, Mammy. It’s you.