It’s been over ten years since that evening and still I regret whatever childish prank or preoccupation kept me from seeing my mother’s face that first time she saw him. I imagine her arriving short of breath and irritable at the top of the stairs and seeing him sitting there, head bent over a pot of yellow paint, surrounded by children so much smaller than himself, two of them hers by another man. I would have liked to have seen if she loved him immediately, if her face flushed with the unexpectedness of it all, if her breath had gone gasping from her throat when she saw him, if her hand had reached out to steady herself from the fall of falling in love. My father and his family have always told me that what happened was an ugly thing, and all too expected from a woman who was never satisfied. They said she’d always been that kind of woman, and a drinker, long before their marriage, long before the dole and debt and his own drinking could take the blame for anything at all. But still, I should have liked to have seen.
Despite her eccentricities, my mother’s was the voice of law and order in our home. It was not that our father was weak; he was merely indifferent, a natural state of existence only accentuated by unemployment. His role, as he saw it, was to sire his children and keep us all fed, if not with a wage packet then with a benefit cheque. Now and again he issued sanctions against what he perceived to be the overexpenditure of money. But he had nothing to say about the state of his house as long as it was as clean as his mother’s. He cared little for the progress of his children’s education, social or intellectual, so long as their names did not appear in the local papers and were not part of the evening news. It did not matter to him that publicity could be a mark of achievement as well as a disgrace. Once, when our class had taken top honours in some scholastic endeavour and I had shown him the picture of me in the paper, bright-faced with hair unbrushed and leaning too far forward over the girl in front, he’d dismissed my success with the grim prediction that I’d soon be sorry I’d won. Why couldn’t I be like the other girls from the Road, he’d asked, and thus avoid their envy? As for his wife, he cared less still, just so long as she remained his.
Consequently it fell to my mother to deal with any requests for pocket money and all permission slips from school in need of a signature. It was also she who meted out punishment, regardless of the nature of the offence. For all I would have muttered and Mandy would have cried, had she commanded us to come home even once in those first few weeks we would have gone. But she did not, and gradually some adult part of me recognised the pretext for what it was. After that first encounter, she would arrive at the House early every Wednesday, sometimes as much as two hours ahead of time, and come directly up the stairs to the Craft Room whether we were up there or not. There she would sit like a truant schoolgirl, her eyes brightly coloured above her lashes, her lips slightly parted and pinkened thickly before she’d left home.
At first she did not realise that she could spend time with him only on Wednesdays. The Thursday following the day they met I took the day off from school. From my parents’ bed where I always lay when ill, I listened with eyes shut tight as my father left with Mandy shortly after eight, waking only much later to the sound of her singing and the watery rush of the tub being filled. Through the gap where the wall did not quite meet the ceiling came the scent of bath cubes crumbled over warm water, carried on a heavy, porous mist which clung to the windows and to the surface of everything in the room. For an hour the thickness of it cushioned me more gently than the duvet and pillows on which I lay. Then came the harsh, choking rasp of waste water draining, and I heard the sound of her toweling, a hazy, static noise amidst the soft click and clatter of bottles replaced and the soap dish recovered. When she came in a few minutes later, robed and turbaned and scented like a queen, I watched her, mesmerised by the methodical reconstruction of her outdoor face and hair. When she left more than three hours after she had begun I still had no idea where she was going, but I do know I pleased her when she twirled in front of me and I answered her, Aye, you are looking well.
She was back quite quickly with Mandy in tow, her face, like the child’s, streaked with angry, indignant tears. She must have entered the House with some breezy greeting (“Hullo, just here for the children”), leaving herself with no other choice, when she did not find him there, than to simply take her daughter and go. For the next few weeks she made disparaging remarks whenever possible about the state of the House and the character of the volunteers employed there. She repeatedly questioned the level of discipline and even threatened to call the Health Board and demand that the place be closed down.
I suppose now that she must have blamed him for his absence, held him responsible for the embarrassment and humiliation of her mistake. But at the time the motivation for her behaviour was a mystery to me. In fact, so convincing was her performance that Mandy and I sincerely believed that we’d soon be prohibited from attending the House altogether. Gradually, however, she did recover and was full of praise once more for the work we brought home and for those who had helped us with it. Aloud and within my father’s hearing she began to remind herself to spend more time with us in the House. Considering how much time we spent there, she’d say, she’d hardly see her children if she didn’t. And my father, dismissively, would agree.
I can recall quite clearly the image of her sitting, a woman over thirty, spending hours painting pictures of simple square houses, big-headed flowers, and smiling yellow suns like a child of six or seven. At thirteen the only cure I could find for the sharp twitch of embarrassment I experienced whenever I saw her was to ignore her completely, and I taught Mandy to do the same.
But it was a lesson my sister learned better than I. I tried not to look at them; I even tried to avoid them, to concentrate my attention on activities taking place in some other part of the House, but I could not. My mother’s fascination with Big John fascinated me. On those afternoons when the Craft Room was closed I’d loiter downstairs and watch him play chess with the Over-Fourteens, studying his face as he studied the board, considering the length and shape of his fingers, the varying shades of his moustache and beard, but so much did my mother’s performance disgust me I could see nothing attractive about him at all. At night and on weekends when my father was home I’d catch myself staring at him the same way, unable to penetrate what it was about what made them different that could effect a difference in the way she behaved.
That no one else commented upon it or even appeared to notice how doggedly she pursued him was baffling. That children younger than myself and lacking the family connection should be oblivious did not surprise me, but I was convinced that the volunteers were more astute. My mother would inevitably be the last to leave at the end of the day, dallying with an air of studied distraction as she collected her belongings and apologetically summoned her children, who were usually already waiting for her downstairs. On one such occasion, eager to complete some project or another, I too had remained after the hour but still found myself impatiently urging her out ahead of me. Big John was standing in the doorway, holding it open, his usual signal that the room should be cleared. As my mother crossed the threshold he reached out abruptly and flicked on the light above the stairs. The gesture drew her up short; she stepped back and I stumbled into her from behind. I looked up irritably from whatever crushed creation I had been holding just in time to catch the warmth of the smile she flashed him, and the bold way she looked directly into his eyes. Perhaps she was flattered; no one had ever lit her path or held a door open for her before. She went down the stairs then, past some other volunteer on his way up, and I saw the look the two exchanged behind her back—Big John with his eyes towards heaven, the other’s suggestive, sympathetic grin. I imagined them talking about us after we’d left and laughing at my mothers affectations, and I resolved to have no part of her from then on.
For a time she tried to discipline us while we were together in the House, to play more a big sister’s role than a mother’s, but eventually she found this too distracting
and gave up on it altogether. When she was away from him she sat in debilitated silence, poking the coals or staring out the window; most evenings she parked, openmouthed and vacuous, in front of the TV. For six days out of seven she was listless and depressed, yet so trite was the image she conjured that something inside me sneered even then. I could feel no empathy, no understanding for her at all. Perhaps as a consequence, I no longer feared her, and was soon challenging her authority even outside the House.
More than any murmur of gossip, it was this change in our behaviour towards her that first roused my father’s suspicions. Stay in, she’d say, and we’d go out; leave that, she’d tell us, and we’d cover whatever it was in palm prints and smudges, so determined were we to do the exact opposite of whatever she decreed. My father, distracted from his track lists or the television by an unusually flippant bit of cheek (which, like all others, went by unchecked), would watch her watching nothing, her eyes vacant but never dull. With what appeared to be clinical detachment, he observed the gradual decline in my performance at school and Mandy’s sudden, unprecedented reputation as a “difficult” child. To him such developments were merely a part of growing up; he expected a child’s bad behaviour to be directly proportional to its size, and children were bound to lose interest in schoolwork, just as one might lose an old mitten or a mismatched sock—such things could always be replaced by something better. But when my mother failed to draw his attention to or even pass comment upon these changes, he began to wonder why.
He was not alone. After an unrewarding stretch during which they periodically quizzed both Mandy and myself and sent notes home with us which we invariably destroyed, a barrage of teachers-cum-social-workers eventually appeared in person on our doorstep to inquire if everything was “alright” at home.
Had it not been for their involvement, we might well have gone on indefinitely as we were. Though something had certainly changed, whatever it was had had virtually no effect on our day-to-day routine. The house continued to be cleaned, albeit with less energy. My father’s meals continued to be ready whenever he required them, and he was not the kind of man to notice a decline in the aesthetic quality of his food. And if his children had grown somewhat more wild than they had been before, at least they were no more poorly behaved than any other on the Road.
But my father hated any intrusion into his privacy; he hated the false solicitations of strangers and their hesitant, obtrusive probing into what he devoutly believed to be none of their business. To his mind there could be no validity to their protestations of mere friendly concern. Because they called round on a Wednesday, my father, who only by accident was in to receive them, was caught disastrously off guard, and endured the ensuing interview in visible discomfort. Though he offered them tea and sent a boy round for chocolate biscuits while it brewed, he was unprepared for such domesticity and bitterly resented having been placed in a situation where he could not help but feel a fool.
For they could not have chosen a worse time to call. Whether for fighting or spitting or using profanity, I’d been sent home early from the House and had taken Mandy with me when I went. But my mother, blinded and deafened and struck stupid by love, had failed to register the fact of our departure and so remained behind on her own in the Craft Room with the other children and Big John, leaving my father to explain her absence to the two quietly observant faces who had come to call. Oh, is she a volunteer with the community house, then, Mr. Millar? they asked, and I watched his face flush with anger and shame as he lied.
He did not tell my mother of the Social Service’s concern for her family’s welfare; he did not tell anyone, but still she learned of it from the Road. So pervasive appeared the communal knowledge that my father began to find it difficult to pass his associates outside the wine lodge, let alone go on inside. His pride was dependent on appearances and on what others thought of him; it did not well up from any source within. Had they called him a cuckold, he would have hung his head and believed, just as he had when he’d been told he was unemployable, that he was too old for night school, that he was “too Belfast” and would never fit in overseas.
My father had never been a particularly inquisitive man, let alone a demonstrative one. He preferred to suffer most things in silence or ignore them completely rather than confront them head on. But these encounters with his peers annoyed him. He knew they ridiculed him for allowing his wife to indulge in any antics whatsoever, however innocent. To curtail her involvement with other men was, after all, the reason he’d married her. And so he decided to revisit the House.
On the day my father came, Big John had set most of us the task of tearing strips of newspaper from the vast outdated pile in the corner of the room. He positioned those remaining round an old porcelain wash basin and from a safe distance directed us in the creation of a crude papier-mâché mixed from flour, water, and powdered glue. Though we had been given a plastic spoon and the broken handle of a brush with which to mix it, these tools were soon discarded in favour of the more efficient if less tidy method of simply using our hands. Big John, intrigued, perhaps, by the pleasure it gave us, plunged his own hands beneath the murky, oatmeal-coloured waters and caught momentarily at our groping fingers, pulling them down still deeper into the cool, trembling gel that had settled at the bottom. My mother, who had been primly cutting paper with a pair of blunt-tipped scissors, now joined in enthusiastically, squealing in mock horror whenever someone’s hand grabbed hers. When my father appeared in the Craft Room door to claim his wife and children, she was up to her elbows in wet newsprint and paste, her new frock speckled with flecks of white flour, her nose still wrinkled and her lips still pursed in distaste from the moment before when, at some child’s urging, she had gingerly tasted the glue.
Considering its potential, it was a disappointing moment. Silence did not fall upon us; the general chatter and splash continued uninterrupted. No one stared, no one passed comment; my father made no accusation and my mother expressed no surprise. Instead, he spoke only her name when he saw her, and she came to him like a dog, or like one in a trance, immediately and without protest.
Had she not behaved so meekly at that moment, had she not exhibited such cringing humility but had instead told him that in all the time they spent together she had never so much as touched this other man and whenever she addressed him she always called him Sir—but she told him nothing. Had I been older and less likely to be spiteful, I could have been her witness and her ally, and perhaps I would have been believed. After all, when I was not in the House I was just in front of or inside our own, and so was she. She could not have managed to slip away unnoticed, and she never offered any pretext to get away. Nor was she the kind of woman who would fondle her lover in the local community house in full view of children. Once, at her request, when I’d shown her my textbook on Greek mythology and she’d seen the picture of naked Perseus, she’d flushed like a virgin and hastily turned the page. But because she would not defend herself, I assumed, as did my father and everyone else on the Road, that the rumours were true, that she must have been guilty of something, that perhaps she’d even gone to him or let him come to her as soon as her children had left for school.
Within days my father’d left her. He took us with him when he went, an unusual decision for a youngish man without a job. He’d have crossed a body of water to keep her from him, or so he said, and I suppose he did, in a small sort of way, when he crossed the Lagan to the other side of town. But after five days of his brother’s whining, his sister’s refusal to cook for or clean up after him, and his parents’ tremulous demands upon his time and money, he decided to bring us back home.
The house was empty when we returned. Just as he had gone to his mother, so she had sought shelter with hers, returning to the same small room whose yellow curtains and Pierrot clown decor had remained unchanged and waiting for just such an emergency since the day she had left thirteen years before. In later years my father’s family blamed her even for that, claiming h
ers was the easier move, her mother being bright and healthy and having no other responsibilities that might have distracted her from the care and support of her daughter. For two weeks nothing was washed; we ate no breakfast, had school lunches for dinner and various take-aways for supper and tea. He could drink more easily with his friends at the pub but when he came home he could not sleep—and still his pride would not allow him to speak of her, let alone go after her and ask her to come back. Then one afternoon she simply reappeared, and because he did not acknowledge her presence one way or the other, she put her things away in their bedroom up the stairs and did not leave again.
They remained together for another three years, until my father joined the army and went to serve overseas. Mandy and I stopped visiting the House, and eventually a combination of arsonists and vandals closed it down. With admirable opportunism, the church organised a complete philosophical overhaul of its mission in the community and reopened a more overtly Christian rendition of the House in another part of town, but by then Big John had returned to America. He never wrote back to us, not to the House or the volunteers, not to the church which had employed him, or to me when I sent a query at the age of seventeen demanding to know the truth. Perhaps he had been her lover, but it didn’t seem likely; perhaps he had no idea what part he’d played in the episode at all. I meant to ask him the day he left from Aldergrove, and arranged to go along with a small crowd from the old House with that purpose in my mind. The party had been organised to send him off, to see him board the big, bright plane that would take him home and make sure that he got away without complication or distress. But there were delays on the motorway, an accident or an incident, I don’t remember which; and when at last we arrived at the airport he was already gone.
Departures Page 9