Читать книгу Araby - Gretta Mulrooney - Страница 9
ОглавлениеI hired a car at Cork airport, my usual practice. My parents would shake their heads, saying that I shouldn’t waste my money when my father could pick me up. But I knew that the arthritis riddling his bones made driving for any length of time an endurance test. Also, I needed to know that I could get away sometimes during my stays, especially on days when my mother was sunk in gloom, dwelling on her real or imaginary pains.
Ever since I could remember, she had been a mass of symptoms. I had no idea what she actually suffered with and what was conjured up. I supposed it didn’t much matter; to her it was all real. The National Health Service had always been her Aladdin’s cave, a box of goodies for plundering. She had been so impressed at its inception after the war, she seemed to think she had a life-long duty to make full use of its services. Compared to health care in Ireland where you still had to pay for the doctor’s visit, it represented all that was best about England, especially in the fifties, a decade awash with free vitamins and orange juice. The remedies she was given were put on trial when she got them home; if they didn’t bring dramatic relief within a couple of days they were discarded with allegations that they were causing heart irregularities or looseness of the bowel. If the medication was ineffective but she liked the look of it she would arbitrarily double the dosage; for my mother, more always meant better. When she met church buddies in the street she would chant her dosages like a litany, going over with relish the numbers and orders of medicines she had been told to take. ‘Under the doctor’ was one of her favourite phrases, imparted with a significant nod. Visiting the surgery gave her days a shape and meaning and staved off boredom. Tending to her health was a career and each new symptom and medication a promotion.
Her illnesses framed my childhood, trapping and bewildering me. She had taught me to count using her bottles of pills. I had picked the shiny orange and black capsules from her palm, lining them up on the table in tens. We’d done adding up with the round yellow tablets and the oval-shaped pink ones and multiplication with bright red bullet-shaped pills. In primary school, when we sat chanting our tables, I would see those red pills, the colour of phone boxes, dancing before my eyes. Whenever the teacher introduced sums involving questions of the sharing out of sweets or money, I pictured the ranked lines of tablets on the shelf over the radio or thought of Mr Hillard the chemist, who blanched when he saw my mother steaming towards him with yet another prescription.
Whether the washing had been done, the dinner cooked, the shopping fetched or the fire lit, depended on the state of her constitution on any particular day. Everything was unpredictable and subject to change at the last minute; a morning that had started promisingly would degenerate because a headache/attack of nerves/shooting pain in the stomach/hot sweats dripping down her skin or swelling of the legs had suddenly disabled her. I used to look at school friends and wonder how their mothers managed to stay healthy. There seemed to be some obscure code I hadn’t broken. I would envy them, knowing that they wouldn’t reach home to find a groaning figure splayed in a chair amidst the detritus of the breakfast dishes; they wouldn’t immediately be asked for a cup of weak luke-warm Bovril and two of the blood pressure tablets by a frail voice emanating from behind a pair of home-made eye shades.
The thought of her on bad days used to make my teeth ache. Her dramatic maunderings struck me into a paralysed silence; what could be said to someone who found no solace in words? As I got older that silence was tight with rage and I would ignore her and her requests for drinks and tablets, telling her to take a walk outside and think about something else. But now, as I stepped on the accelerator, I was acknowledging that you weren’t usually admitted to hospital for imaginary pain.
The drive from Cork took forty-five minutes. I rolled down the window and inhaled deeply. The air was peat-smoked and fragrant. My parents’ cottage was on the outskirts of a small village, looking down into the valley. I stopped the car momentarily on the curve of the road to examine its whitewashed walls and glossy blue windows. Smoke idled from the chimney. It was just like one of the houses pictured on the sleeves of the terrible records my mother used to play in London. ‘If We Only Had Old Ireland Over Here’ was her favourite. It featured maudlin songs about cruel landlords, grieving silver-haired mothers and lonely travellers far away from Erin’s fair shores. They made me hot with embarrassment, especially in summer when my mother played them loudly with the windows wide open. During my teens I would hide upstairs, shamed because they singled our family out as different and because I instinctively loathed the sentimentality of the lyrics. My mother would sing along in her trilling soprano while I was reading up about the swinging London which seemed to be mysteriously inaccessible even though it was happening all around me. I would tune the radio to Sandie Shaw or The Beatles to drown her out. Her favourite singer was Bridie Gallagher who had a rich, swooping voice. I imagined Bridie as a big-busted woman with a perm, the kind you often saw in small Irish towns.
My father came out to greet me, his braces dangling down over his legs and shaving foam on his chin. I hugged him, inhaling his combined smells of rough-cut tobacco and supermarket soap. He patted my arm, embarrassed by the contact.
‘The roses are nearly over,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s been on at me to prune them. I bet she mentions it again today.’
‘How is she? This seems to have been very sudden.’
‘Oh, not so bad. They’ve done the tests now, just waiting for results. I was hoping you’d talk to the doctors when we go in, you’ll understand it better.’
I knew from the way he bent down to examine a rose bush that he didn’t want me to ask him any more about what had happened, this event that was specific to women.
‘I imagine she hates the hospital food,’ I said, to let him off the hook.
He straightened up, back on safe territory. ‘Oh! Don’t talk to me! She has me worn out fetching in ham and such. And goat’s milk it has to be now; she says cow’s upsets her.’
We went in. I made tea and prepared cheese with brown bread while he finished shaving. Everything in this small cottage was familiar, especially the trail of disorder that my mother always spread around her. All of their belongings had been transposed from Tottenham and situated, as far as was possible, in the same places and patterns. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine that I heard the throaty hum of a red bus. The only new thing they had bought for the house in ten years was a tea strainer because the ratty dog from the nearby farm had run away with the old one. Over the back of a chair lay a gaudy half-finished blanket with my mother’s crochet hook threaded and ready to go – she kept up a steady supply for the African mission she supported. I could only hope that the recipients liked bright, clashing colours. My father had seized the chance to make the kitchen ship-shape in her absence. His book, upturned on the table, was a spy story in large print.
‘It’s been too quiet without your mother,’ he said, coming in. ‘I’ve been missing my orders. Hard-boiled eggs have been requested for today’s menu. Can you do my top button for me?’
Since smashing his elbow on an icy pavement in the seventies, he had been unable to flex his right arm fully. The joint was fused together with a metal pin. I could remember him walking the floor with pain during the nights before the operation, treading quietly so that he wouldn’t wake us. It had struck me that his genuine illness had to play a bit part while my mother’s trumpeted afflictions strutted centre stage. I reached up and fixed the shirt button, smoothing his collar.
She was in a small ward for six. It was named after St Martin de Porres which would please her because she had prayed hard for his canonization, signing a parish petition to the Pope. For some unfathomable reason she was keen that there should be more black saints. I wondered if it was her own brand of political correctness, trying to ensure that Heaven had its quota of coloured representatives among the higher echelons. I had heard her express regret that Nelson Mandela wasn’t a Catholic as he presented good potential for sainthood, with just a matter of a few miracles to be discovered. Her second favourite holy man was St John Macias who had an olive-tinted skin and was known as the soft-hearted saint because he couldn’t bear to see suffering. He had once intervened with God to effect the rescue of a drowning sheep and was said to have wept blood when he came across a starving old woman. My mother had copied a line from one of his prayers into her mass book; ‘The world is hard and life can be cold and pitiless.’
I could see her as we opened the door of the ward, sitting on her neatly-made bed, her towelling dressing-gown buttoned up and her hair brushed back. She looked like a resentful child who’s been dressed to go out and warned not to get mucky. She waved when she saw us and beckoned us on.
‘I told yeer father not to go bothering ye,’ she said, ‘but he never listens to a word I say.’ She leaned closer, lowering her voice. ‘Pull the curtains round. The ould one in the next bed wants to know everything, she has pointy ears from eavesdropping.’
I arranged the curtains as she wanted them, pulled to overlap so that no one could see us. From habit, I cast an apologetic glance at the woman a few feet away, just in case she’d heard the aspersions on her character but she was absorbed in a magazine and a huge pack of wine gums.
‘Have ye brought grub?’ my mother asked.
‘I’ve got it.’ I took out the pack containing cold chicken, eggs, ham and plain yogurt.
‘Ham,’ she said, ‘I hope they didn’t palm any old fatty bits on to ye.’
‘It’s the best cut,’ my father protested, ‘off the bone. I watched it being sliced.’
She examined it and nodded. Then she despatched my father for orange juice, giving strict instructions not to buy a brand that was full of pulpy bits.
‘Well,’ she said, when he’d gone, ‘what do ye make of this?’ She folded her hands across her stomach and made a steeple with her thumbs; her most confiding gesture. It would be all right to talk to me about what had happened because although I was male, I worked with bodies and had studied fat medical books. To my great mortification she had told several members of the Legion of Mary that she’d always known I’d do some kind of healing work; I had cool hands and a gentle manner. When she had hot flushes in her early fifties she would call me and ask me to put my lovely cool hands on her forehead.
‘Spill the beans,’ I told her. ‘What led up to you coming in?’
She glanced around, even though the curtain was a protective shield. It was her constant worry that other people might get to know her business. It never occurred to her that maybe no one was interested.
She’d woken up one morning to find that she’d been bleeding from ‘down there’, she told me. My father had called the doctor and she’d been admitted to hospital. Some kind of scan had been done and uncomfortable internal things.
‘Have you been having other bleeds?’ I asked her.
She said no but she looked down at her fingernails. ‘I’m having to wear one of them sanitary yokes,’ she said ruefully. ‘I thought them times were over.’
They ought to be, I thought, worried. She hadn’t worn those since the days of belts and thick looped pads that chafed the thighs. Stick-on winged discretion would be unfamiliar territory for her. I had a sense of things being out of kilter.
I knew that unexpected internal bleeding was not a good sign but I wasn’t sure what could cause it. I looked at her carefully. She had shrunk a bit more since I’d last seen her, her shoulders sloping further but at seventy-five that was to be expected and she was still plump. Her colour was good, the eggshell brown of summer days in the garden still evident and her skin, the skin that I had inherited, was clear.
‘Give me your specs,’ I said, noticing her fuggy glasses, ‘I’ll clean them for you.’ They were filthy, as usual, with tiny flecks of potato on the lenses from when she’d last been preparing dinner. Her eyes without them looked crêpey, vulnerable.
‘I expect I’ll need an operation,’ she said fatalistically. ‘I should have had one ten years ago of course, but yeer father wanted to move and I couldn’t leave him to do it on his own. Now I’m paying the price.’
I sighed quietly. She often referred to this operation she should have had but whenever I’d asked her what it was for she was vague, saying that it was to do with her womb. There was no good reason why she shouldn’t have had surgery if she’d needed it – the NHS was still on its feet in London then. I suspected that she was making it up, embellishing something a doctor had once mentioned to her, or that she had ignored medical advice and avoided going into hospital by using my father and the house move as an excuse. It was impossible to make sense of it; the line between imagination and reality where her health was concerned had always been blurred. She had told herself so many stories that even she found it confusing.
My father returned with orange juice which she examined closely before passing approval. It felt awkward with the three of us trapped behind the apricot-coloured curtain. My parents fell silent, oppressed by hospital inertia.
‘Did you hear about that hijacked plane?’ I asked. ‘I saw it at Stansted.’
My mother clapped her hands, energized. ‘I saw it on telly last night. Was anyone killed?’
‘I don’t think so. Some passengers were released early this morning.’ I gave them a full account of what I’d seen.
‘It’s supposed to be refugees that’s hijacked it, trying to get away from Saddam Hussein,’ my father told us. ‘I heard some of them had been tortured.’
My mother crossed herself. Hussein had replaced Khrushchev and Hider before him as the devil in human form for her. ‘Good luck to the poor creatures, may God help them,’ she said. ‘Don’t they deserve a bit of looking after.’
‘Ah, they might not get much sympathy in London these days. They might get sent back to that bastard.’ My father shook his head.
I left them, saying I needed the loo but intending to find a doctor. At the door I glanced back. My father had taken my mother’s hand in his and was showing her pictures of the hijack in the paper. I thought of their response to the story and then of the man in the shuttle bus at Stansted who’d said loudly, to general murmurs of agreement, that the hijackers should be taken away and shot. I was proud of my parents’ humanity, their decency, and glad that it ran through my veins.
A nurse showed me to a small cubicle where a young woman was writing up notes. She was introduced to me as Dr O’Kane and shook my hand, saying that my mother had been telling her about me. I could imagine that several extra degrees and doctorates had been added after my name during these discussions and I felt a familiar quiver of anger at my mother’s incorrigible urge for verbal embroidery.
‘I understand you’ve been carrying out tests,’ I quickly said.
The doctor nodded. ‘I’ve got all the results now. We’ve found nothing.’
‘So what do you think the bleeding meant, means?’
‘It’s hard to know. Your mother has stopped bleeding now. It’s not on-going. It could just be a blip, some matter the body needed to eject. We’ll keep an eye on her through her GP. She seems well apart from this incident. She’s on very strong tranquillizers, though.’
‘She has been for years.’
‘I see. Do you know why?’
My mother would have said they were for her nerves. I used a more acceptable phrase. ‘General anxiety. My mother’s always been very concerned about her health. You’re not thinking of stopping the tranquillizers, are you?’ I’d read that withdrawal for old people was traumatic; as far as I was concerned, my mother was completely hooked and should be allowed to stay that way at the latter end of her life.
Doctor O’Kane shook her head. ‘Most doctors wouldn’t prescribe such drugs now, of course, they’d look at counselling or other therapies but at your mother’s stage in life …’
The doctor came back to the ward with me and told my mother that the tests were clear and she could come home the next day.
‘You’re sure I don’t need an operation?’ she asked, fiddling with the sheet. Her voice was meek, anxious. She was always on her best behaviour in front of doctors, polite to the point of obsequiousness.
‘Quite sure. Just get a bit of rest and stop eating all those lemons, they’ll ruin your digestion.’ Doctor O’Kane laughed. ‘I’m not surprised you’ve had stomach pains.’
‘What lemons?’ I asked when she’d gone.
‘Your mother’s had a bit of a craze on them,’ my father explained. ‘She has them grated and squeezed and sliced in hot water.’
‘I need the sourness. If I don’t have that I get this terrible coating on me tongue. What does that jade know about anything, she’s just fallen out of the cradle.’ Her shoulders had gone back and she was feisty again now that she’d been told nothing serious was happening.
I thought of the morning near my eleventh birthday when she’d kept me off school, convinced that she had heart trouble. Clutching her chest, she made me ring the doctor and ask for a home call. It was in the days before we had a phone and I raced to the phone box, gabbling my message, running back in a fearful sweat to the house, convinced that when I got there she’d be dead. She was propped up in bed saying the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary in a breathless voice. I fretted until the doctor arrived, attempting to clear up so that he wouldn’t see the worst of the jumble we lived in. Her bedroom smelled cheesy but she wouldn’t have a window open, saying that the row the buses made jangled her nerves. When he marched in I hovered near the bedroom door and listened to him clicking his stethoscope. She weakly explained to him that she’d had severe pains in her chest, just here. I heard him tell her snappily that she should lose weight and stop eating the rhubarb that was causing heartburn. For a moment I froze, thinking that heartburn meant a fatal disease but he continued that her heart was as strong as an ox; being so overweight, however, must put strain on it long-term. Fewer calories and more exercise, he threw at her, pushing past me on his way out and giving me a stern look which seemed to accuse me of complicity in this time-wasting. I hung my head and felt a hot blush on my neck. After he’d gone she’d cast her beads aside, bounded out of bed, cooked a huge fry-up and instructed me not to tell my father about his visit or that I’d missed a day’s school. I watched her shovelling down sausages and bacon and swallowed bile, promising myself that she’d never fool me again.
‘Ah, but six lemons a day, Kitty, that’s going it some,’ my father was pointing out.
‘Six! Think of all that acid,’ I said to her.
She put on her obstinate face, the one I imagined she’d worn as a toddler when life tried to thwart her. ‘They’re good for me,’ she insisted, ‘they clean out me system, keep me from being bunged up.’
I shrugged. There was no talking any sense to her, she’d go her own way, she always had.
The Beardy Fella
It was a hot, sticky summer’s day, August 1966.1 was fourteen and I thought I looked pretty far out in my cream cotton flares and orange T-shirt from Bazazz Boutique in the High Street. Despite my trendy clothes, I was dissatisfied. I had no money and nowhere to go. I was at that stage of moody adolescence when home seems like a shuttered prison and your parents are an embarrassment.
I could tolerate being seen with my father who was mildly spoken, tall and slim; with his neatly-trimmed moustache and erect bearing he looked vaguely military. The possibility of being publicly associated with my mother made my skin clammy. She was unacceptable from every view point; grossly fat, loud-voiced, horribly gregarious, unpredictable and toothless. Pyorrhoea had caused the loss of all her teeth in her mid-forties. She had been supplied with a false set but only wore them for photographs or important occasions, maintaining that they were pure torture. When she did insert these brilliant white gnashers her mouth looked over-crowded and horsey. The rest of the time she gummed her food and spoke indistinctly, spraying spittle. I had started to put carefully planned avoidance tactics into practice. I attended a different mass and found reasons not to help her with the shopping. If anyone called at the house I ducked into my bedroom, shot the little bolt I had fixed to the inside and lurked behind a locked door until they’d gone.
She didn’t seem to notice; in fact, during the summer holidays she sought my company, bored by herself. She had few friends and no job, my brother had emigrated and my father was at work. Most mornings, unless it was a day for a jaunt or a visit to the surgery, she would lie in bed late listening to middle-brow radio and singing along with Doris Day, ‘que sera sera’. At about half-ten she would get up and eat a substantial breakfast; two boiled eggs from one of those double-jointed egg cups, half a loaf of bread smothered with marmalade, a couple of pots of tea and to finish with, a grapefruit to deceive herself that she was following a light diet. She would wash down her happy pills with the dregs of her tea and then install herself by the window, still in her loose cotton nightie, to watch the neighbours and see if she could catch anyone spitting into the hedge.
On that baking August morning I was planning to sidle off to the library where I could sit in the shady reference section and read Frank Yerby whose historical novels were sexually titillating. I was dismayed to hear my mother moving around at half-nine and to find that she was fully dressed in a good Marks and Spencer floral skirt matched with one of her white cotton charity shop blouses. This meant that she was off on a jaunt, probably a bargain hunt.
‘Ah, ye’re about,’ she said, ambushing me as I came downstairs. ‘That’s great, we’ll get a march on the day and we can be back for lunch.’
‘What?’ I said, mulish.
‘I’ve found a new dealer, a beardy fella. He does house clearances up at Archway. There’s a picture he has that I want but I’ll need a hand with it.’ The gleam of the chase was in her eye.
‘I’ve got plans. I’m going out,’ I told her, picking at a flake of peeling paint on the door jamb.
‘Where are ye going?’
‘The library.’
‘Sure ye can go there any time. No wonder ye’re short-sighted, with yeer head always stuck in a book.’
‘I’m not interested in going to the beardy fella, those places make me feel funny.’
My mother had graduated from second-hand clothes shops to bric-à-brac emporiums in the mid-sixties; the kinds of places that later on, when old artefacts had become the rage, would call themselves antique centres with names like ‘Granny’s Attic’ and ‘Times Past’. In her shopping heyday they were known as ‘Fred’s’ or ‘Bert’s’ and fairly valuable pieces from early in the century went for knock-down prices. She referred to them by the appearance or characteristic of their owners; so the one in Walthamstow was ‘The Foxy Fella’, the one in Haringey ‘Ferrety Nose’ and her favourite in Seven Sisters, ‘Snakey Tongue’.
I had been dragged around them numerous times, shifting from one leg to another in musty back rooms while she threw herself into the rough and tumble of the market-place. She would beaver around, poking at furniture, peering at pieces of silver, holding china to the light, examining for hallmarks and faults while silent men kept a watchful distance, waiting for her to engage them.
‘How much for the tongs?’
‘Five pounds to you. They’re solid silver.’
‘Hmm, I can’t see a mark. Are ye sure they’re not just silver-plated?’
‘Solid silver guaranteed.’
‘I’ll give ye three pounds ten and that’s robbery.’
Because they knew she’d be back again, a cat drawn irresistibly to the cream, they sold. At other times there were no purchases, just the satisfaction of haggling and a point scored.
‘That’s an outrageous price!’
‘Can’t go any lower, Mrs, it’s not worth my while.’
‘Ah well, I’ll be off then.’
‘See you again.’
‘Through the window ye will!’
While all this was going on I would gaze in a trance at stacks of chairs, bureaux, chests of drawers, jugs and candlesticks until the gloom would make me giddy and I’d slip outside and watch her gesturing through the dusty glass.
Despite my boredom I had been thankful for the change of focus from clothes shops. She still made the odd foray to the ‘nearly new’ or charity places; Sue Ryder shops were her favourite due to a tortuous connection based on the fact that Sue Ryder was the wife of a war hero, Leonard Cheshire, who was the friend of Douglas Bader, the pilot who had attempted to escape from the Nazis despite having tin legs. I think my mother must have had a crush on Bader or perhaps just on Kenneth More who played him in the biopic because she spoke of him in reverent tones and said that she’d rather give her few pence to a charity that helped the disabled than to them ould fat cats in the High Street.
Once the thrill of antique hunting took over I was spared the worst excesses of the second-hand clothes she used to buy by the bagful. Outings to the nearly-new shops had always been a rainy day activity, the damp drawing out the must and lingering residues of sweat from piles of discarded garments. My mother would scavenge with a practised hand, enthusing about an alligator belt, a lace collar, a paisley scarf. Yellowed, misshapen combinations would be held to the light and stretched to see if they had a breath of life. Candlewick bedspreads were examined for signs of moths or a tell-tale trace of camphor. Unlikely and awful articles were fitted against me; thick jumpers past their best, the wool lumpy from too many washes, boys’ shorts or trousers with shiny seams and baggy seats and large outdated jackets that I could grow into. The base line, the true test of worth, wasn’t whether a thing was attractive and desirable; it didn’t matter that it was too big or lacking buttons, it was real angora or lambswool or astrakhan or pure silk – ‘ye could pull that through a thimble’ – and it was bought.
One of my worst memories which can still make me shiver was the greenish tweed coat with a fur collar that she bought me one winter. It was three-quarter length, double-breasted, too big for me and ten years out of date. I twisted and turned as she did up the walnut buttons and teased out the collar with a clothes brush. The King of England, she told me, couldn’t wish for a better bit of cloth on his back. It sat on my dejected shoulders like a mouldering blanket, the fur making me sneeze. I knew that I would be a laughing stock if I was seen with it in school so I took it off at the bus stop and shoved it in my bag. For a couple of days I left the house each morning wearing it and shrugged it off around the corner. I froze in the December winds, my teeth chattering in the playground, until I got a chance to nip into the school boiler room and stuff it in the furnace. As the flames licked it I did a little war dance, and worst crime of all, poked my tongue out at my mother as far as it would go. At home I reported sadly that the coat had been stolen from the cloakroom, causing my mother to visit the school and complain. I stood feeling hot in assembly, trying to look suitably bereft, as the head-teacher lectured us on the sin of taking from other people and told us how shocked she was because nothing like this had happened in her school before.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the bags full of clothes were intended for my uncle’s family in Waterford. He and his wife Una had eight children and my mother despatched a huge brown parcel to them three times a year. I would watch with satisfaction tinged with pity as dresses and shirts which had been the height of fashion circa 1954 were folded into piles for a remote farm where Peter Pan collars and voile petticoats had never been seen. The threat to myself waned as string was tightened and secured with sealing wax and my father commented, apparently without irony, that they’d think all their Christmases had come at once.
My father indulged my mother in the purchases which cluttered up our small house, even when she acquired outlandish items; a walnut commode, an accordion inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a huge Spanish galleon made from matchsticks. When she produced a pair of bagpipes he made a fool of himself trying to press notes from the floppy cloth. I used to wonder if he feared what she might get up to if she abandoned this relatively harmless occupation; he may have been thinking of the time she set about home improvements, knocking bricks from the fireplace and almost undermining the chimney-breast.
On that hot morning she smoothed her Crimplene skirt, head lowered, and fired a crafty salvo.
‘I didn’t think it was so much to ask,’ she said. ‘It’ll only take a couple of hours at the most. It’s just as well I didn’t think of meself the time I saved up for the trip to Rome.’
This was a reference to the holiday I’d gone on with the school when I was twelve. My father had said he couldn’t afford it but she’d stored up savings stamps, the green ones with Princess Anne’s profile on, sticking them in a book until the fare had accumulated. At the time I had appreciated it, but now it felt like an albatross around my neck, as it got a mention whenever she wanted something from me.
I shrugged and pulled a reluctant face. If I didn’t go she’d harp on about it for days. ‘All right, but it had better not take long.’
She brightened, swivelling her skirt zip to the side of her waist. ‘Oh, ye’re an angel. Ye won’t notice the time flying.’
The sun streamed into the bus as it swept us to Archway. My mother was humming, tucking stray wisps of hair back into the curled up sausage-bun on the back of her neck. I checked my cream flares; it was only the second time I’d worn them and I worried that I might get them smudged. We were on the long seat, opposite a dark continental-looking woman who remarked on the heat. My mother responded that it was fierce warm sure, bad enough to fry your brains. The dark woman removed her cardigan, hot fingers struggling with the buttons, revealing a low-cut bodice and the swelling tops of brown breasts. My mother poked me in the ribs.
‘Come on up the bus. I’m not sitting here with that ould one showing all she’s got.’ Her voice carried in the still air.
The dark woman scowled and turned to stare out of the window behind her. The conductress looked up from her Daily Mirror and sniggered, winking at me. She was young and good-looking. I traipsed after my mother, seething. There wasn’t much room for me beside her on the two-person seat and I sat scrunched up, my thighs rubbery and a headache starting. I closed my eyes while my mother sang, ‘Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon, all I want is loving you and music, music, music’. A baby grizzled behind us, its cries piercing my skull.
‘Wakey-wakey,’ my mother said. ‘We’re nearly there. I could never have slept during the day at yeer age. Ye should take a tonic, something with iron.’
I remembered that years ago I had heard her refer to a great-aunt who had started screaming one market day in Bantry. The nuns had taken her in and kept her until she died. After that day when she threw her groceries into the air and opened her lungs she never again spoke a sensible word. I wondered what had driven her to such a pass.
We trudged up the hill at Archway, my mother bobbing along with little steps and stopping now and again for breath. A bell jangled as we entered the beardy fella’s and a man with a luxurious growth of hair on his chin appeared from the dark recesses of the shop, smiling when he saw who it was.
‘You’re back again then. After the picture, are you?’
‘Ah well now, that depends on what ye’re asking. I’ve brought me son – he’s a bit of an art conosoor, ye know.’
‘Oh,’ he said in mock amazement, ‘that’s too posh for me, you’ve got me there.’
He lifted a huge frame from behind a bookcase and turned it to the light. I was faced with a tapestry of a solemn-faced Jesus preaching to a multitude. The threads were in violent hues of green and yellow. Jesus had a livid purplish face with murky blemishes resembling chicken-pox scars. His followers were a brown blur.
‘You can’t buy that,’ I hissed, ‘it’s foul and anyway, we’ve nowhere to hang it.’ As soon as the words left my lips I regretted them, knowing that they would be taken as a challenge.
My mother rubbed her fingers along the frame, standing back and looking at it rapturously as if it was a long-lost Van Gogh.
‘I think it’s gorgeous. Look at the work that’s gone into it. There must be hundreds of threads in there and sure somebody did it for the glory of God. How much?’
I moved back and propped myself against a crumbling sofa with horsehair escaping from its seams. A fox’s head perched on one of its arms. Dust motes drifted across an ancient wardrobe with age-mottled glass. The air was so dry and thin it was hard to breathe. In Carnaby Street people were swinging and having their hair cut in geometric shapes. I’d read in the Evening Standard that Mick Jagger was opening a new boutique there this week. I felt a sullen rage.
The beardy fella was examining the masterpiece. ‘Ten quid and that’s a bargain. The frame alone is worth that.’
‘I’ll give ye seven, there’s a scratch on the corner.’
‘Eight.’
‘Ye’re a terrible blackguard. All right so.’ She was pleased. She took out a hanky and rubbed the glass. ‘Will ye give us a hand with it out the door?’ she asked him as she passed over notes.
‘How are you getting it home?’
‘On the bus, me son can help.’
‘Blimey! I hope you’ve got strong muscles, it’s bloody heavy.’ He cast a doubtful glance at my skinny frame.
‘Oh, we’ll manage,’ my mother said, pushing me ahead of her to the door. The beardy fella manhandled the tapestry after us and left us to it.
‘Now,’ my mother said chirpily, ‘we’ll hop on a bus at the corner. Ye go in front.’
The thing was a dead weight and difficult to grasp. We staggered up the road in the blinding sun, panting, stopping every few minutes to massage our fingers. My shoes were rubbing my toes. I felt a pain beginning in my side where the frame was gouging into me. I thought that it must have been like this carrying the cross through Jerusalem; all we needed to complete the picture were centurions and whips.
‘Never mind,’ my mother gasped encouragingly. ‘Not far to the bus now and then we’ll be on the pig’s back.’
I saw that she’d gone beetroot red and a savage satisfaction gave me the strength to make the last few yards. We leaned the tapestry against a low wall by the bus stop and I sank down beside it. My head was hammering, my mouth dry and sandy. I rubbed my bruised hands and noticed that my trousers were covered in dusty marks. Shreds of horsehair were clinging to the seams.
‘See,’ my mother said as the bus swayed into view, ‘it’s only half-eleven. Didn’t I say we’d be back for lunch?’
