Читать книгу Best Love, Rosie - Nuala O'Faolain - Страница 14

I took a deep breath before I went upstairs. ‘Min – where would you like to go while I’m in New York next month?’ I was standing at the window, tidying the curtain into even folds. My tone of voice was a carefully chosen shade of ennui. ‘I have to go over there but it’s only for a week.’

Nothing.

‘I have to go to New York. It’s work, not pleasure.’

Nothing. I turned around and caught sight of myself in the mirror. Talk about dull-looking. All I needed was a flowered pinny and rubber boots and I could pose as a simple Irish housewife, circa 1950. A good haircut was the least I needed before Manhattan.

‘We’re not getting any younger, Min. I need to find work I can do at home. My lump sum is disappearing at the rate of knots…’

‘I’m young enough, madam!’ She shot upright in the bed, and Bell gave a startled wail. ‘You go off wherever you want to and I’ll stay here in the comfort of my own house.’

‘As a matter of fact you didn’t even have central heating till I put it in,’ I said. And, I added silently, I bought out the leasehold for you as soon as I was earning good money – how come that never gets mentioned? ‘But anyway, you can’t stay here on your own.’

‘Yes I can. I was here for years and years while you were wandering the world and—’

You were younger then and—’

‘And I have no problems when you go to see the boyfriend or whatever that foreign man is who sounds as if he’s reading the news.’

‘Leo. You know his name is Leo. But I only go away when Reeny’s at home. If you fell, Reeny would come in in a flash. Those stairs are a death trap. Or if you left something boiling on the stove. But—’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

I flounced out past the bathroom to the little bedroom that was my dad’s so as to get myself under control, as I used to do when I was a teenager and Min was giving me various kinds of grief. I tiptoed across to the window and opened it to let in a bit of fresh air. All my life, even though my memories of him were so old they seemed in black and white, I’d tried not to stand on the strip of thin carpet between the bed and the wardrobe with its deep, secretive corners, because I thought of that as Daddy’s territory. His dinner-jackets used to hang in a neat rank above his socks balled-up in a cardboard box and his brown-paper packets of shirts and the brush-and-polish kit for doing his shoes. The mirror on the wardrobe door was the hinge between the two sides of him: the man in rumpled pyjamas who came downstairs with the cat in his arms and put it down to give me my kisses; and the cinema manager who gave himself a last looking-over – myself seated on the bed watching him adoringly – straightening his dickey-bow, plucking the crease in his pants to hang right, smoothing his hair back with rapid, alternate strokes of his lightly brilliantined palms, and going off in his black gabardine coat like a film star himself.

I sat on the edge of the bed, which sagged, just beyond the iron frame.

‘You used to climb out of your cot in Min’s room and climb in here, and go back to sleep beside me,’ my dad told me when I was small. ‘Maybe you remembered that your Mam slept in this bed when you were in her tummy. But she had to go to Heaven, then. So I sent a message to the priest in the place she came from to tell her father that she’d gone to Heaven, but that she’d left her little girl to mind me. That was you,’ he said, smiling at me, and he absent-mindedly touched my cheek. I knew that if I held up my face in a certain way his hand would not be able to resist the caress.

‘So then Min turned up. I didn’t even know your Mam had a sister.’

He made a face of comic astonishment, and I laughed with him.

Four or five years later, when he was in bed a lot and I used to do my homework up in the room beside him, he remembered that again.

‘Min wanted to stop you coming in here,’ he said. ‘But your Granny Barry told her to let the poor motherless child go to her father if she wanted to.’

He gave me a smile that was frail but mischievous. ‘Of course, Min didn’t like that. As far as she was concerned you weren’t motherless at all. And neither were you. Minnie was only fifteen when she came to us, you know, but she was as good a mother or better than a woman twice her age. But she should have been having fun. I think of that when I see the fifteen-year-olds that come into the Odeon. They never stop laughing – they’re having a great time.’

‘Why did she want to stop me coming in here?’ I asked. All my fights, when I was growing up, were with her, not with him. It was her I had to understand.

‘She wanted to toughen you up,’ he said. ‘She thinks she’s tough herself.’

And he smiled his tender smile again.

But Granny Barry didn’t like her at all and my Dad pretended he didn’t notice. I saw all that, even when I was small. We used to fetch the key to The Hut from Granny Barry at the beginning of our holidays. I’d run up the crooked stairs to the flat over the archway above Bailey’s Yard where my grandmother lived, praying that we wouldn’t be delayed there. There it’d be – the gold rimmed tea-set, the leaf tea in a perforated, chrome ball, paid out on its chain into the boiling water like a diver, the sandwiches – squishy egg or dry ham – in two columns on a leaf-shaped platter.

‘Sit over at the table, you must be dying with the thirst,’ she’d say, kissing me and my dad.

He sat in the armchair that was called ‘Billy’s chair’, smiling, his head resting on the embroidered white cloth that was there to protect the velvet. An antimacassar, Granny once said, and I was delighted, years later, when Markey told me that macassar was an oil men used to wear on their hair. All Granny’s things were perfect, Edwardian things. The chenille tablecloth with bobbles and the Turkish carpet and the bamboo stand for a china pot in the window and the stiff plant in the pot. Granny Barry used to rub Pond’s Cold Cream into its leaves. You could do a production of ‘The Dead’ with them if you made a play out of the story – though how would you do the end? You’d have to have a film coming out of Gabriel’s head. Granny knew who James Joyce was because every day when she lived in Bray she went to the same Mass as one of his sisters.

Min wandered around restlessly, longing to escape out of there. But she didn’t dare say anything. I took the opportunity to show off. I’d read out bits of the Papal Blessing certificate that was sent from Rome to bless Granny and Granda’s marriage – not that Granda was all that blessed, since he died, Granny always said, when their wedding cake was still in the tin. The Blessing was a framed scroll that had always impressed me. It was draped with an olive-wood rosary with beads the size of eggs and hung to the left of an equally imposing Sacred Heart. Jesus could see the Blessing, I once assured my father, if He just squinted a bit.

At last we got away and drove to the bottom of Main Street where we passed the rusted winches and rotting wooden sheds and crossed a creek of the Milbay River and came to a stretch of thin turf with bald patches of gravel and shell behind high fencing, where our hut, standing on concrete blocks, looked out to sea. In my memory it was always a perfect late-summer afternoon when my father unlocked the wire gate and drove us in and then went back to snap the padlock shut. He’d be wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Always. His straight, silky hair would fall across his face. That’s how I remember it. He’d lift his head to breathe in the salty air, and twirling the key with a flourish, he’d walk jauntily back to the car. Then he’d move the driver’s seat of the Ford Prefect forward with a thunk and Min would get in and drive – oh, the excitement! – across the sandy grass.

‘Brake! Brake, woman!’ It was wonderful how they laughed. She’d do no more than move the car at a snail’s pace about fifty yards but it would change her to do it. Her eyes would glint with pride. They’d seek out my father’s eyes, and he’d nod, as if to say, ‘Oh, yes!’

Then Dad would push open the door into air thick with the smells of splintery plank walls and tarpaper and dusty coconut matting. He’d bring in a Calor gas cylinder for the two-ring cooker and a few jerrycans of water from home. Min would have left the floor covered in newspapers the year before, and I’d squat and try to read bits which she’d keep pulling from under my eyes. Then she was knocking down spiders’ webs with a brush and prising open the window and dividing the bag of bedclothes between the iron bed in the inside room where she and I slept and the rubber mattress in the corner of the front room which my Dad would blow up last thing for himself with a bicycle pump.

We lived in our bodies in The Hut. I saw everything.

That was maybe the main reason why I so loved being there. We were close. I was near enough to the other two to understand them. Min would put our supplies out, for example, and I could see by the way she arranged them her pride in them because we never otherwise bought much at a time. We began each holiday with untouched packets of salt and tea and sugar, a stack of tins of baked beans, two cartons of eggs, a pound of sausages, a pound of sliced ham, a big fresh loaf with a black crust and a whole box of Afternoon Tea biscuits. She left everything out for a few hours but then she had to put the things a mouse might be tempted by into old biscuit tins, which she put regretfully away.

Last thing, when all the chores were done, she’d hang her old polka-dot bathing suit on a nail in the partition wall. She didn’t swim in it; she didn’t swim at all. But she loved it and she hung it up as though it were a banner.

I stood up from Dad’s bed, dreamy with memory, and a watery version of myself stood up in the mirror of Dad’s wardrobe. The room – the whole little house – was as silent as the tomb.

Dad didn’t die till I was fourteen years old. Towards the end, he lay downstairs in the kitchen on the special bed Reeny got from Homecare, where he coughed and coughed, and was too weak to make much difference to the household. There was really nothing left of him by the end. Min did everything for him – fed him, emptied his bedpans, washed him, gently cleaned his teeth and his eyes and his ears. She wouldn’t let him be taken to hospital.

‘I promised him,’ she said, no matter what the doctor or the neighbours tried to say.

I know my father heard her because I saw his hands rise from the coverlet as if he wanted to applaud.

On the last day she held a cigarette to his lips for a few minutes and he tried to suck on it, and she poured a little shot-glass of whisky and smeared some of it onto his tongue. Then she put those things away and combed his hair and lightly sponged his face and held one hand, while I held the other, until Dad came to his last breath.

We sat frozen for a minute or two minutes, not able to believe the silence where his breathing used to be.

‘Open the door!’ she cried. ‘Quick! Quick!’

I opened the front door a fraction.

‘More!’ she commanded. She was standing up, her eyes coal-black in her white face. ‘Wider!’

Then Reeny came in. She gave me a kiss and said to Min, ‘Will I give you a hand washing him?’

Min hadn’t moved from where she was standing, and still looking at the door, didn’t answer.

At that age I was mad about boys, who were on my mind even in the hours after my father died. Though it wasn’t boys themselves so much as the intensely exciting world me and my girlfriends had discovered, where we watched and were watched by boys and talked about them all the time. I went up to this room, Dad’s old room, and I stood just inside the door and I tried to clear my head of everything but him and pray for him to rest in peace.

I could all but see grief sitting in the corner, beckoning to me, but my own life surged in and out of my mind. I was in the top gang of girls for the first time now that I was boy-crazy and they didn’t have to ostracise me for liking lessons. We hung around outside Colfer’s shop and the Sorrento chip shop and the back lanes, and the boys shoaled up and down and sat on walls and jeered at us as we passed with pink cheeks. And now that my dad was dead downstairs it filled me with anxiety that I’d have to walk around wearing black with everyone looking at me. And I’d be trapped in the house.

I heard Min come up the stairs. All my life she’d hop-skipped up and down them like a mountain goat, but today she was slow. I thought she was going to her bedroom, but she came into the room behind me and I think she rested her cheek against my back for a second.

‘We’ll have the removal tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and the funeral the next day. And then – you go out with your friends, Rosie. You were his pride and joy, don’t forget, and he wouldn’t want you to be stuck in the house.’

Then her voice got stronger. ‘He had a great life so he had,’ she said. ‘I know that’s not what it looked like, but it’s what he said to me a thousand times and he never told me a lie. And he’s happier now than he ever was. Did you not feel his spirit going out the door? Did you not feel how happy he was?’

I closed the window in Dad’s room again. To think – that day, the day we lost him, Min was only twenty-nine!

I went back past the bathroom to her room, where she was a lump under the bedclothes.

‘Is it OK if I turn on the light?’ I said. ‘OK? Listen, Min, I was having a think there about New York and it might just be a waste of money. I was really only going for one meeting. To tell you the truth, the meeting was with Markey Cuffe from out the back lane, and nothing might have come of it. So I’ve decided not to go.’

‘No,’ she was swinging her child’s legs out of the bed. ‘No,’ she said without looking at me. ‘You go. I should have said to you, go.’

‘I really can’t,’ I said, ‘unless you’ll stay somewhere for me.’

‘Choose me somewhere nice, then,’ she said.

If it had been our custom to hug I’d have crushed her. As it was, I gave her a lift to the pub because it was raining.