by David Almond
“Go on, then.”
I hesitated.
“Maybe I’ll come down later,” I said.
He pushed his hair again and looked at me.
“Aye,” he said. “Maybe you will.”
We headed back up the hill.
“You could start your own band,” I said. “You and Margaret and Catherine.”
I stared at Margaret and Catherine, saw the looks on their faces. I raised my finger. “Yes. You understand?”
Inside the garden, I said, “Go on, then, Mary. Show them how it’s done.”
She hung her head and for a moment just stood there beside the swing and looked despairingly at the grass, but in the end she spun the broom handle once or twice and she blew through the kazoo.
“That’s great,” I said. “But let’s have more life in it. Think of those Fusiliers.”
I put them in order, Mary with the broom handle, Margaret with the kazoo, Catherine clapping her hands like a drum, and though at first their marching and music were stumbling and distressed by the morning’s events, and though I knew that Margaret would soon be sitting on the swing, and that Catherine would lose patience, for a time the knees were raised and the heads were held high and the music really did sound—for a short time—like “She Loves You.”
I stood beside them in the sunlight and felt the joy of being there and of having brought our sister back unharmed. I tasted the enticing bitterness of the cigarette on my tongue. My thoughts kept turning to the long pale legs of the girl with the baton. Then I saw that Mam was at the window, looking out and smiling.
“Look!” I called to her. “Aren’t they great!”
I saw the joy in her, saw her mouth say, Yes.
“Go on, girls,” I said. “You’re doing great! Look, Mam. Aren’t they wonderful . . . !”
It was all so long ago. Now Mam’s dead, and Dad died all those years ago, and Barbara was taken before two of us were even born. We who are left still come from all parts of the country to gather together near our old home. Often we tell our children about the day Mary ran away to join the Fusiliers. Sometimes we persuade her to perform for us, and then she hitches up her skirt and holds her arms so stiff and her head so still, and she marches back and forth through the room, tooting the old tunes, and we laugh and laugh, and the children giggle, and point in fascination at the tears in our eyes.
My Mother’s Photographs
AS WE LIFT THESE PHOTOGRAPHS, we discover the small world we have entered, and we see the intensity of the world before.
She could dance before any of us were born. She could walk for miles. Her legs and her fingers were straight and her shoulders were square and there was no pain in her smiling.
She danced with Jimmy Freel and Pat Flannery at St. Wilfred’s church hall in Gateshead, with handsome John McGuire at St. Dominic’s in Byker. She danced at Jessie’s Ballroom above the Co-op in Hebburn and at the Oxford in Newcastle. As a child she wore boots with studs hammered into the soles by her father. She ran down Felling Bank to school in them each morning and strode back up again each afternoon. She walked to Lasky’s farm by the Heather Hills for bacon. As a young woman she walked in the Pennines with Joan around Alston. She camped with brothers and cousins in fields behind pubs in Northumberland. She walked home in dancing shoes through the blackout from Newcastle. At the war’s end she and Dad took rooms at the Lodore Hotel by Derwent Water. She walked with him every morning over Cat Bells’ summit and around the lake. They honeymooned at the Swan in Grasmere and they walked for hours each day, feasting on milk and sandwiches given in the remotest farmhouses on the highest fells.
These things are true. We know this because of the stories we are told, because of the photographs we see.
Arthritis is as secret as the soul. No way of knowing when it starts. Is it present in this wedding photograph, in this straight smiling woman who calmly grips the arm of this straight proud man? In this woman who perches on the five-bar gate above Alston, she in the knee-length skirt, with her ankles comfortably crossed, with the wind playing in her hair? In this skinny-legged girl in loose frock and heavy boots who stands in the back garden in Rectory Road? Did it enter her, one secret and indecipherable moment, slipping into her like breath? Or was it always in her, conceived with her and entering the world with her, a familiar, a hidden companion, a malevolent twin? She had no answers. She told us there had been twinges in her shoulder as she sat at her desk in Elders Walker, stiffness in her fingers as she pressed the typewriter keys. And earlier? She couldn’t know. How could she have compared the pains of childhood play with the pains of her friends? How could she suspect a specialness in the ache she felt after dancing or on coming down from a fell? Speculation was pointless. She shrugged her twisted shoulders, turned up her crooked hands, clicked her tongue, pondered on the photographs and smiled and smiled. How could she have imagined that this was how she was intended to be?
We are photographs ourselves. Her image is upon us.
As I grew, I was stopped many times in the streets by strangers. They saw the shape of her face in mine.
“You’re Kathleen’s son,” they said. They smiled and their voices softened. “You should have seen her, boy.”
They reached out to me, held me for an instant: she was so lovely, she was the best of dancers, she was so filled with life.
“Tell her I was asking,” they said. “She’ll remember me.”
This happened to all of us, so many times.
It happens still when I return, even now, after she’s been dead these years. I walk through Felling Square, or raise a drink in the Columba. I see the eyes watching, see them softening.
I wait for the gentle touch on my shoulder.
I wait for the familiar words,
“You’re Kathleen’s son . . .”
I wait for time to dissolve, for the stories to begin, for her unspoiled image to be exposed again.
Loosa Fine
SHE COULDN’T SAY HER NAME, LOUISA, so we copied her and called her Loosa. Loosa Fine. She lived with her mother in Coniston in the shade of the bypass by the old coal line. They’d been abandoned by her father years ago. She sat on the low wall of her front garden, eating bread and jam, fiddling with the hem of her skirt. She waved and giggled as we passed. The kindly reached out to touch her cheek or her shoulder.
“I is Loosa,” she would say. “You has speaken to me. You has speaken to Loosa Fine.”
I first came upon her soon after we had moved to Thirlmere. I was walking back from the butcher’s with some soup bones. She lay jerking and squirming on the pavement in Rydal. Froth was seeping from her mouth. A neighbor had folded his coat and pushed it beneath her head. Nothing else we could do, he told me. A matter of letting it work its way through her. Other kids came and we stood around to watch her struggling all alone. The neighbor sent me for Mrs. Fine and I banged on the door and yelled for her. There was dirt and litter in the hallway, darkness inside the house, the scent of cigarettes and urine. “Where’s she this time?” she muttered as she lumbered out and shoved me back onto the path.
James Bridon lived two doors down the street from her. He told us of Loosa dancing in the back garden at night, of her howling like a wolf at the moon. One dusk I gave him some cigarettes to let me stand with him at his bedroom window and watch for her. She came out at last and roamed through the waist-high grass and weeds. We edged the window open and heard her muttering and gurgling. “What’s she saying?” I asked. He shook his head. She caught us watching and she pointed and laughed at us. Her attention was drawn away from us, to the bats that had come out to fly over the gardens and the line beyond. She followed them with quick lurching movements of her head. We shut the window tight. Soon full darkness came and there was nothing else to see or hear.
Each morning a green trip bus came to Coniston to take Loosa away. It came slowly, grinding its gears, filling the narrow roadways. The kids inside gazed out on us with empty eyes. Some showed their tongues to us, g
iggled, let their heads loll against the windows. Our parents told us not to stare but we couldn’t help ourselves.
“What happened to her?” we asked.
“There but for the grace of God,” they said. “His workings are mysterious, but there will be some purpose to it. Each child is precious in His eyes.”
They used Loosa as our guide. They clicked their tongues when we complained of little pains or minor problems. “Think of Loosa,” they said. “Just think of poor Loosa Fine.”
It was soon after Loosa left school that James told us about the older boys. He believed they came over the line from Wardley, or came down the line all the way from Springwell. He said she went with them into the tunnel where the line ran beneath the bypass. This was before the line was cindered and signposted as it is today. Dense weeds and bramble grew over the rusting rails, the ties, the runners for the cable that had once hauled wagons up and down between the river and the pit at Felling’s summit. He said he’d seen boys taking turns to go in to her. “What about her mother?” we asked. He laughed. “Plastered,” he said. We couldn’t believe all this. But soon I realized that our parents’ manner when they spoke of Loosa was changing.
“Keep away from her,” they told us. “Don’t look. Stay away from Loosa Fine.”
The older boys weren’t mentioned when the talk of sending her to Lourdes started. Each year the pilgrims from our parish took one like Loosa, less fortunate than ourselves and more in need of Our Lady’s care. The Lourdes Offerings were collected in a black box on the wall of St. Patrick’s and each Sunday it rattled with pennies, shillings, half crowns. Each spring Father O’Mahoney listened to the suggestions of his parishioners and prayed for guidance. This year the appeals for Loosa were irresistible. I was with James, kicking a ball on the verges, when the priest came in his Ford Anglia to Coniston. “On me head, boys!” he called, shaping as if to throw himself for an attempt at goal, before he winked at us, composed himself, and went in to call on Mrs. Fine.
It was the time of the great pilgrimages. To those like me who had never been, Lourdes seemed to be both out of the world and a simple extension of our parish, some warmer and brighter suburb of Tyneside. It was a place of miracles populated by people like ourselves and filled with familiar landmarks. We had images of Our Lady and St. Bernadette on our mantelpieces, walls and windowsills. We sipped Lourdes water along with our medicines, we rubbed it on our aches and pains. Our girls were called Mary, Marie, Maria, Bernadette. We had foot-long photographs showing our pilgrims there. They wore white blouses and socks and carried folded jerkins on their arms. They carried shoulder bags filled with prayer cards and souvenirs. The men wore their white collars outside their dark lapels. Our priests at the front were proud and proprietorial. The Knights of St. Columba held the diocesan banner. The names of our parishes were borne on little flags. The faces of our relatives and friends and neighbors smiled out at us through brilliant light.
I knew many who had been and who had prayed for me there. They lived in little hotels with dining rooms that doubled up as prayer rooms. They drank French coffee and ate French bread and tried French wine and beer. They were nostalgic for toast and Scottish and Newcastle ales. They ate roast dinners and complained of the awful tea and the undertaste of garlic that was in everything. They talked of the glorious basilica, the joy and beauty of torchlit processions, the endless gushing of holy water from taps and fountains, the sound of the rosary swelling into the Pyrenean night. They told us of the icy baths and the miracles that had occurred in them, of the crutches of the cured hanging in the grotto. They came back with suntanned faces, carrying bottles of duty-free Teachers and boxes of Players. In their cases they had painted plaster statues of the beautiful Virgin and kneeling Bernadette, musical grottoes, models of the basilica in snowstorm paperweights, 3D postcards of Bernadette’s vision. They brought supplies of the precious water: Virgin-shaped bottles of it, wine flagons of it, tiny pocket-size phials of it. There was never a miracle among our pilgrims, but they knew that they had been healed inside. They came home bearing their gifts as if from some great adventure or as if waking from some astounding dream.
It was a Saturday afternoon in early summer when Loosa’s pilgrimage departed. I stood in the garden with my mother watching the sky until an airplane heading south passed over us. We waved and giggled, knowing that the pilgrims would be looking down upon Tyneside and seeing no one, but waving, too.
“Will Loosa get cured?” I asked her.
She laughed and said, “We are all in God’s hands.”
“Why is God so mysterious?”
“He does give signs.”
“Like Lourdes?”
“Yes. Like Lourdes.”
We watched the airplane disappear. I walked out of the garden into the quiet street. I called for James but there was no answer. I sat on the bypass embankment. Traffic whined above and behind me. I looked up into the empty sky and down upon the overgrown coal line and the pale pebble-dashed homes. I said a prayer for Loosa and the others. I sat waiting.
I knew many of the other pilgrims that year. They included my uncle Michael from St. Wilfred’s; a girl from my class named Claire Gullane; and Mrs. Worley, an old woman from Ennerdale whose errands I used to run. I imagined them with their candles in the fervent crowds. I pictured Uncle Michael swigging great glasses of wine and conducting choruses of “O Sacred Heart” and “Cushy Butterfield” in the hotel bar. I saw Mrs. Worley trembling as she lifted the water to her lips, beating her heart as she whispered prayers for her long-gone husband. I saw Claire copying the ardent posture of Bernadette as she knelt at the grotto. I imagined them caring for Loosa, taking her arm, directing her attention to Our Lady, teaching the prayers to her. In the middle of the second week a card from Uncle Michael came, sent on the day they’d arrived. He wrote of the clean hotel, the crystal mountain air, the holiness you felt as soon as you stepped out of the airplane. He promised he would pray for us. I asked when we’d be able to go and my father said I was right, we’d have to make the effort soon. He laughed and told me that in the meantime Felling would have to do.
The days were lengthening. I spent hours after school with James on the abandoned line, shinning up into hawthorn trees and searching for eggs. We blew out the insides and rested them on sand in shoeboxes. We shined flashlights into the roof of the tunnel, threw sticks at the bats there, getting them to fly out early. We saw obscene pictures of Loosa chalked on the walls, lurid statements of what she’d done. We fought with the Wardley boys, swore at them through the hawthorn and bramble, threw rocks at them. We saw groups of boys roving higher up the line but we knew of the wildness of those from Springwell, and we kept away. We looked through the back fence and the weeds toward Mrs. Fine inside her house, saw her at the kitchen table shoving great forkfuls of food into her mouth, saw beer bottles lined up on the windowsill. “Just imagine,” we whispered. “Poor Loosa Fine.” When we climbed back into the neighborhood I touched the Sacred Heart medal on my breast and asked to be forgiven for my transgressions. When I slept, I dreamt of Our Lady with her hands held out in comfort, descending from the sky toward our houses.
They returned on a Saturday night. After Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s we heard the first of the stories. All the first day and all through the first night Loosa had howled for her mother. A French doctor sedated her. The Felling pilgrims took turns in sitting with her in her room. She wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink, muttered gibberish and obscenities. A group of nuns and priests came for her, carried her to the Virgin, held her at the grotto, prayed passionately for her. She began to howl again and attack her helpers when they laid her in the baths. A girl called Doreen McKenna from a Gateshead parish stepped forward and somehow managed to calm her. She was again sedated, again taken to her room. Doreen sat with her while the pilgrims gathered in the dining room to say the Rosary and the Memorare and sing “O Queen of Heaven Come.” On the third day Doreen fed her with milk and bread and she was taken out again,
now more subdued because of her excesses. Doreen held her arm as they joined a procession. On the steps of the basilica Loosa fell down and entered a fit. A space was cleared around her. She came out of it and showed by her actions that she wished to continue. At the grotto she fell again and lay as if in violent agony below Our Lady. After a time she raised her head to those gathered anxiously around her. Doreen knelt at her side, whispering gently to her. Loosa muttered and gurgled, until at last her words were understood.
“Her has speaken,” said Loosa. “My lady has speaken to me.”
Those who were telling us paused and watched our faces.
“Our Lady,” my mother whispered.
“Yes. So it seemed. Our Lady appeared, and spoke to Loosa Fine.”
I waited. The adults around me moved into a closer group and lowered their voices. A neighbor looked down at me, asked me not to listen. My mother told me to be good. I saw Claire on her own behind a crowd of her relatives. I went to her and asked her to tell me about Loosa. She bit her lip and was wide-eyed and beaming.
“She saw Our Lady,” she said.
“What else?”
“Our Lady spoke to her. It was a miracle.”
“What else, though?”
“Our Lady told her secrets.”
“What secrets?”
“Secrets she can’t tell.”
She bit her lip again.
“A miracle,” she said.
“Who’s Doreen?”
“Somebody from Gateshead. Loosa’s friend. Her helper. She appeared like an angel at Loosa’s side.”
On the way home from church in the car I asked my parents if it was true. My father said it depended what I meant by true.
“That she saw Our Lady,” I said.