Jennifer McMahon is the overall winner of the 2024 All-Ireland Scholarships Creative Writing Award (Public), a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, has been shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Short Story of the Year (2023), the Bridport Short Story Prize and many other notable awards, and has been nominated for Best Of The Net 2024. She was a second-place winner of the Oxford Prize (winter 2023), and her work appears in Crannog, Irish Independent (New Irish Writing), Oxford Prize Anthology (2022 and 2023), Fractured Lit, Heimat Review (issues 2 & 6), Empyrean, Books Ireland Magazine, Loft Books (issues IV and V), the Retreat West Anthology (2023), and in many other places. She is represented by Brian Langan at Storyline Literary Agency.

Beautiful Like Her

By Jennifer McMahon

Boys became worthless under her gaze, girls grew murderous. A scald to the eyes, Mossy Byrne once called her, like her beauty could melt the soul right out of you, or like an onion, and any fella who dared to peel her would be left in tears. Everyone had something to say about my sister, about Caoimhe Brady. She belonged to sherbet bursts of summer, they said, to soft melt of tarmac and bicycle spokes swishing in their breathless way. She belonged to yachts and trails of gulls, their crystal shrieks too poor a song to ever fall upon her ear. She belonged to sky and sea and feckless clouds, she belonged to endless love. She belonged to everything and anyone, but she never belonged to me.

In the mornings, I sing to Caoimhe. Bonnie Rait, I Can’t Make You Love Me, her favourite. ‘You should be on the tele,’ she says, pausing between spoonfuls of muesli. I offer her another but she compresses her lips and shakes her head. ‘Eh-eh.’

I set the bowl aside, take her bib away, and pick up her lipstick, amethyst shine. ‘Want?’

‘Hmm.’

‘Then pucker those lips.’

‘Do you love me, Laura?’

‘Who couldn’t love you, Caoimhe Brady?’

Thursday morning and we’re away to the People’s Park in Gorey, me to lump her around in her wheelchair, her to complain about the chill. She likes the frenetic rhythm of the skateboarding kids the most, but I’ve never lost my fear of teenagers, their sniggering whispers, hands covering their mouths as if they think I can read their lips. Today, their eyes are on Caoimhe, distain etching cruel lines around their mouths. She waves to them and they slink away, muttering loud enough for us to hear.

‘State of her. Did you see her face?’

Caoimhe crushes my hand. ‘What happened to me, Laura?’

‘An accident.’

‘Was I hurt?’

‘You were, love.’

She strains her neck to see me. ‘But I look okay?’

‘How could you not look okay? Do you want to go around one more time?’

‘Want to go home,’ she says.

We return to the car. It’s one of those special ones for wheelchairs. A special car for a special girl, and a sister to drive her out of Gorey and towards the coast, along a fringe of naked trees, ancient and shivering under a frosty sun. Caoimhe mumbles nonsense words, snatches of old songs, a line from a poem she loved when we were young. It’s all still inside her head, jumbled up and fragmented. ‘Where’s Mam?’ she says, as we pass the dark and timeless demesne of Courtown Woods.

‘She went to God, a long time ago.’

‘Oh. Where’s Dad?’

‘He’s away at the moment.’

‘Is he coming back?’

I don’t answer, and in a few moments, she forgets that she asked.

These are my staccato days, heels tapping through the hours. Feed Caoimhe, clean her, brush her hair, sing to her. When the carer comes, I can breathe a little. They told me it would be hard, but I insisted. She has no one else, I said, there is only me. Exhausted, frustrated, wishing she’d died in the accident like her leathery boyfriend had the decency to do. Forty years old and all the risks she ever took converged on a singularity of motorcycle versus truck. Partial paralysis, acquired brain injury, Caoimhe is here and gone, and there is only me.

There were boys, long ago, a useless slouch of wastrels, thick and raw with youth and summer. Most brazen of all were the lads who came from Dublin to prowl Courtown Harbour with carnal intent. Caoimhe wouldn’t look at a local, but the city boys had no fear of beauty. She skipped through them like chalk on a downbeat pavement, one after another, the wilder the better. Smoked a fag, a bit of weed. Guzzled flagons of cider in the pubescent privacy of the old cricket field, and laid herself bare. Dad was out of his mind, and me stuck at home with him, taking the blame.

‘She’s your sister,’ he’d say. ‘You should be looking after her. So what if she’s older than you? My special girl needs minding.’

A harsh word might be spoken to her the next morning when she turned up tousled and shameless, straw in her hair and wearing the same clothes she’d on the day before. ‘Chill out, Dad,’ she’d say. ‘Didn’t you have your wild days, too?’ and they’d laugh together, with a nod to me. ‘We can’t all be stay-at-home Janes.’

I whisper to her some nights, when she’s sleeping. I did it for you, Caoimhe, I say. To protect you, to save you from Dad. He never touched you because I took it all on myself. He never touched his special girl, no matter how coy you were or how much you teased, but he would have if I hadn’t been there. I was ugly enough to hold his shame, and stupid enough to make him bold. Do you want to know what he called me, Caoimhe? His weasel. Can you believe that?

‘Don’t tell anyone, Weasel,’ he’d say. ‘This is our little secret.’

She doesn’t remember the court case, just as she can’t remember anything else. She stood in the witness box and proclaimed Dad to be a loving father. In her eyes, all he’d ever done was care for us, and it couldn’t have been easy for him after Mam died. I was jealous of her, she said, and I was angry with Dad because I knew she was his favourite. I watched her eyes as she spoke, and saw no lie. When the guilty verdict came back and the judge passed sentence, she moved away from Courtown and didn’t speak to me again until she came out of her coma in the hospital after the accident. She clung to me and begged me not to leave her there. I wanted her to suffer for what she’d done, but the Caoimhe I knew was gone, and the broken one before me was a child.

Friday means grocery shopping, me pushing Caoimhe around in her chair while she grabs things from the shelves. One of these. Two of those, please. No, we don’t need them, Caoimhe, so you can put them back. She holds up a pack of custard creams to show me. ‘I think I used to like these.’

‘It wasn’t you, it was Dad.’

She looks up at the high ceiling, her mouth hanging open. ‘That’s right. I remember.’ I snatch them from her hand, put them back on the shelf, and move her forward before she can grab them again. ‘Why’d you do that?’ she says. ‘I wanted them.’

‘Too expensive.’

‘They can’t be—’

‘No, Caoimhe, we’re not getting them, not today, not ever.’

She balls up her hands and slams them into her armrests. ‘Want,’ she snaps, loud enough to draw stares from the people around us.

‘Can’t have,’ I say, pushing her on and around to the next aisle.

‘Want!’

‘No, and that’s final.’

She keeps it up all the way to the checkout, until I buy a pack of mints to distract her. We’re all-but invisible to the young girl who serves us, and she doesn’t even look at us when she gives me my change. Caoimhe stays quiet in the car on the way home. I park her in front of the television in the sitting room, and put on cartoons for her to watch. She laughs at them sometimes, but today is one of those days when they make her sad.

‘They’re always hitting each other,’ she says. ‘Were we like that?’

‘Sometimes,’ I say. ‘But you were mostly out.’

I head for the kitchen to put away the groceries, but she calls after me. ‘Why do you hate me, Laura?’

I return to her, shivering with uneasiness. ‘Are you still upset over the biscuits?’

‘No, it’s not that.’

‘Don’t I look after you?’

‘You do, but—’

‘But what?’ I say.

She gazes at her hands, tosses her head from side to side. ‘You never tell me you love me.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Caoimhe, watch the cartoons.’

I stalk into the kitchen, slam cupboard doors and drawers as I stow things away, crush the bags, cursing under my breath for being caught by… What? A child? I strain my ears past the merry cartoon music. Caoimhe is sobbing, but I don’t have time to deal with it. Someone has to clean the place, cook the dinner, do the laundry. Someone has to feed her and clean her, help her use the toilet, be her mother, be her carer, be her everything. There is only me, weak and hateful, unforgiving, carrying a lifetime of resentment in every aching muscle and every line on my plain face. Who would I have been, if I’d been born beautiful like her? Maybe just like her, mean and self-obsessed, caring only for her own wants and not giving a damn about her little sister.

She’s dozed off by the time I return to her. I wheel her into her room and wake her just enough to get her into her bed. Before I leave her, she asks, ‘Am I still beautiful?’

‘No, Caoimhe. You’re an ugly weasel like me.’

I’m expecting a downpour, but she brushes my cheek with her fingers. ‘But you’ve always been so beautiful to me, Laura.’

‘Go to sleep.’

For the remainder of the day, I can hardly catch my breath between waves of nausea and memories. Caoimhe screams in the night. It’s a regular thing. She calls out for me but I don’t go to her, I just let her cry while I remember steps creaking on the stairs and light spilling in as my bedroom door opened, Dad’s breath hot on my cheek and the sweet scent of his perspiration as his hands roved. If Caoimhe was home at the time, she was asleep in the next room, innocent of the sacrifice being made in her name. In the end, there was probably no one who could’ve saved either of us. Her boyfriend’s motorcycle was always going to hit the truck, Dad was always going to do what he did. In my mind, they’ve been doing so over and over ever since.

In the morning, I sing to Caoimhe, I Can’t Make You Love Me, her favourite. ‘That’s a great song,’ she says. ‘Did you write it?’

‘No, it was someone else. Want some more muesli?’

‘Yuck!’

‘Lippy?’ When she puckers up, I draw it along the broken line of her lips.

‘I had an awful dream,’ she says.

‘But the night is over, and a new day is here.’

She seizes my hand. ‘Do you love me, Laura?’

‘Who couldn’t—’

‘Do you?’ she says.

I study her face with its deep valleys and ridged scars. The surgeons did their best to put her back together, but there wasn’t much to work with after the accident. Unburdened of her beauty, she’s more beautiful than ever. ‘Yes, Caoimhe,’ I say at last. ‘I love you very much indeed.’

I lie down beside her, rest my head against hers, and sing her song again. On the chorus, she joins in, and it doesn’t matter that she gets most of the words wrong, and it doesn’t matter that I giggle when she does. Caoimhe Brady belonged to sherbet bursts of summer, to sky and sea and endless love, but in this brief respite between remembrance and forgetting, my sister belongs to no one else but me.