Last Train from Liguria (2010)

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  PART SIX

  Anna

  DUBLIN, 1995

  June

  SOMETIMES I WONDER WHAT she does hear in there, if anything. I close my eyes and try to decipher it all through her ears. Can she tell the difference, say, between the uptight clatter of a hospital morning and the easier sounds of the evening wind-down? Would she know the tea lady’s whine from Thelma’s childish delivery? Does she recognize, maybe even dread, the brisk snarl of curtain around her bed and know that it’s time for a drip to be changed, a tube to be ruthlessly inserted? Is she earwigging away while the nurses exchange gossip over her head? Does she sense the sudden charge in the atmosphere when a doctor makes a rare appearance?

  And does she ever get afraid, I wonder that too, when it all goes wrong and gets out of control? As it does now and then, when something might happen, or even nothing might happen, except inside the head of a patient who suddenly and unaccountably becomes distressed. One setting off another, setting off the next. Does it upset her, all that noise and emotional chaos? Old men crying for their mammies. Old women howling over torments from the past.

  *

  I went back last week to the house on Pembroke Road and the flat where I used to live with Nonna. Dust-sheeted and stuffy, but completely unchanged since she left it for the nursing home a few years ago.

  After I had a good root around, found nothing of any consequence, and put everything back the way that it was - as if Nonna would somehow find out - I walked all the way home to my own place on the far side of town. It took a good hour and a half, I think. There were angelus bells when I came out of Nonna’s anyway, and when I opened the door into my flat, the lazy brass music of Coronation Street was coming from the telly. I can’t honestly recall one step of the long walk home. Some days are like that.

  The following afternoon, up in the hospital, little Nurse Blondy gave me a pat on the arm as she unlocked the ward door to let me out. ‘God, you’re as good,’ she said. ‘I mean, the way you give her so much of your time.’

  I could have replied, ‘I’ve got buckets of the stuff. What else am I going to do with it?’ but I didn’t like to spoil the moment.

  Since breaking up with Hugh, and even more again since leaving my job a fortnight ago. Time.

  When the headmistress finally got round to discussing her ‘concerns’ regarding my future, I couldn’t have made it easier for her. ‘Lack of commitment, quite simply,’ she began. ‘Too many excuses for too many absences, basically. You may well be having personal problems, Miss Moore, but essentially your duty lies with the students. We’re talking Leaving Certificate students here. We’re talking portfolio preparation. The future of our young people.’

  To listen to her you’d think she was headmistress of Eton or Harrow and not some dive where the teachers don’t know who to be more afraid of, the pupils or their parents, and where the police have to be called on a regular basis.

  ‘Try to put yourself in my shoes,’ she continued, ‘then ask yourself - is it any wonder I’m having reservations with regard to renewing your contract?’

  ‘No. God, no. No wonder at all,’ I said, weak with relief as I realized the drawing I’d made of Foster hadn’t surfaced after all. For over a fortnight I had lived in dread of it, sick with anxiety every time I walked into the classroom where I kept expecting to see it pinned to the blackboard, or anytime his little brother looked in my direction or there was a message waiting in the staffroom pigeonhole to say someone - in this case, the headmistress - wanted to see me.

  ‘You must understand—’

  ‘Oh, but I do understand, really. It’s fine. I don’t blame you. Indeed I don’t. Well, goodbye, and good luck with the replacement. Thanks for everything.’

  ‘But Miss Moore?’

  ‘Look - what else am I supposed to do? You don’t want me here. And to be honest I don’t want to be here either.’

  ‘You’re leaving? Now, this minute? Without so much as handing in your notice?’

  ‘My contract is nearly up anyhow.’

  ‘But I haven’t dismissed you - you do realize that? I’m simply putting you on a warning.’

  ‘No need - I’m resigning.’

  ‘If I could ask you to put that in writing please?’ she said, obviously relieved.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘All right then. Well, what about a reference?’

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘But where will you…? I mean how will you…?’

  ‘Really. It’s grand. I’ve been meaning to give up this teaching racket anyhow.’

  I came straight out of her office and drove up to one of those cash-for-cars joints in Smithfield frequented by alcos and gamblers. There I exchanged my car for not all that much cash. Even though the car had nothing to do with the school - I usually walked to work anyway - it seemed the right way to finish the morning. And I suddenly wanted to be rid of all burdens. Even a car seemed overly needy; between feeding it petrol and finding it parking and sticking money into the meter on its behalf, then worrying about whether it’s been stolen during the night. Besides I was running low on cash.

  Walking back up Parnell Street a few minutes later, all I was able to think of was - well, thank Christ I won’t have to tell Nonna anyway, won’t have to listen to her trying to find ways to twist the blame away from me and back onto the headmistress. But best of all, I won’t have to answer her questions with lies. Nor would that Shay Foster bastard have anything on me either. He could show the drawing wherever he liked, he could hang it up in his dive of a pub - they couldn’t fire me for it anyhow. I quit while I was ahead. I felt elated for a while, although that feeling soon enough dwindled.

  And so this is how, twice, sometimes even three times a week, I can go to see Nonna. By the time I walk down to Abbey Street, take the bus all the way out to Portrane, make my way up the long avenue, dish out the smokes to the two boys who will always, no matter how I vary the day or the hour, be watching and waiting on the steps for me. And, by the time I spend an hour at the bedside filling up the air between Nonna’s face and mine with meaningless words she can’t, in all likelihood, hear; a chat with the nurses; a trip to the smoking room, a sit-down by the bed for another short while before doing it all over again in the opposite direction, maybe stopping at the off-licence or chipper on the way home - well, that’s that particular day more or less seen to. One seventh of a week. Gone - just like that! And I won’t have minded a thing for most of it, and I won’t have noticed too much either. Except that three years on, the taller of the two smoking lads no longer has such beautiful teeth.

  My doctor calls it depression. A term that’s too vague and self-indulgent for my liking. A malaise without just cause. I think maybe it’s loss that I’m feeling. If I had to put it in a poem, that’s what I’d call it anyway. ‘Loss’. Last year my father, this year Hugh. You could also include my grandmother, who it turns out can’t really be my grandmother but who has, in any case, always been more like my mother. So in a sense I’ve lost my mother again. And in another sense, I’ve even lost me.

  These are the half-cocked ideas that come into my head while I’m sitting at the bed waiting for Nonna to make up her mind if she’s coming or going. Or while I’m sitting, half pissed, in the darkness of my flat watching crap on the telly, and wondering if I should have one more smoke before trying for sleep, or to hell with it - why not? - open one more bottle of plonk.

  I started the poem one night, I wrote on the top of a page - ‘Loss’ by Anna Moore. But that’s as far as I got. I thought - if I write one word a day for the next six months, I could easily make up a poem. What’s the big deal? One word. It doesn’t seem much to ask of myself. By the time I’d finish it, Nonna would be gone. I could slip off myself then, if I wanted. I could follow her. ‘Loss’ by Anna No More, I decided I could call it then and chuckled ironically to myself for a few moments. Of course, before long I was crying again.

  One. Word.

  I have to, have to
, get out of this place.

  *

  I lived with Nonna from the day my mother died until I finished college and moved to Belfast to be near, and finally get to know, my father. On and off over the years I have lived with her again.

  The flat is made up of six rooms, three each side of the entrance hall, which effectively cuts Nonna’s home up the middle. To the left, the kitchen, sitting room and a small bathroom. To the right, two bedrooms and another, slightly larger bathroom. Because all these rooms were once bedsitters, there are Yale locks on all the doors. To get from one side of Nonna’s flat to the other you have to cross over the hall, where, when I lived there anyway, there always seemed to be someone talking on the public phone and always letters and junk mail splattered all over the floor.

  It was my childhood home - I can’t remember the Belfast house where I lived before my mother died - but I never really liked Nonna’s flat. The sense of living in one room at a time, brought about by having to use a hall-door key to get from one room to another. And having to remember to bring the bunch of keys every time you crossed the hall; I hated that.

  The outside of the house was better. Granite steps to the front door, a small bedraggled garden; a permanent dome of mottled shadow from the huge trees on the road outside. There was a photographer’s studio in the basement, which I used to imagine brought a touch of glamour to the house. For years a blown-up picture of a gawky-looking bride was stuck behind the bars of the window. As if she was in prison, Nonna sometimes said.

  I loved to sit on the granite steps - the sparkle and solidity of them, the way they held the heat in summer, warming the back of my legs. I liked to watch for the bus that stopped outside the gate, waiting to see who would get off. People who lived in the flats upstairs - faces I would try to match to voices overheard talking on the phone. Or scrubbed-up customers self-consciously making for the photographer’s studio. Or my father, who never came by bus anyway, but always arrived in a taxi, pockets stuffed with oil rig money.

  His absence had, in a way, been worse than my mother’s death. I knew he could come back, if he wanted. Whereas my mother could not. I also knew my mother was in heaven, but where my father was - I couldn’t say. An oil rig meant nothing to an eight-year-old child. Nonna said no matter what, I should pray for them both every night. ‘God bless Mammy in heaven,’ was one thing. ‘God bless Daddy on an oil rig,’ never quite convinced, and I soon let him slip from my prayers.

  I was never inside any of the other flats in the house but thanks to the public phone in the hall, I got to know everyone’s business. Whenever it rang a young man who was unemployed would come clattering down the stairs in his purple flared trousers - although the calls never seemed to be for him. If he happened to be out it was my job to answer the phone and trot upstairs to knock on the relevant door. A woman on the third floor with rollers in her hair gave me a pound note one time. ‘Tell him I’m out, love, there’s a good girl. No - on second thoughts, tell him I’ve moved on.’

  I came to know every brush-off, excuse and cock-and-bull story in the book, and that adults lie and find it easy to lie, especially on the phone when their faces can’t be seen. I came to look on the phone as an instrument of deceit. So whenever my father called to tell me where he was, I didn’t believe him. Once he rang to say he was in London and would be arriving in Dublin to see me the next day. ‘Liar! Liar!‘ I had screamed down the phone at him and dropped the receiver, leaving it swinging from the cord, until his voice, condensed and slightly cartoonish, finally stopped calling my name.

  Poor man, with his direct northern ways, was probably the only person I have ever known who had always given me the truth, or what little he had of it, anyway.

  Once, when Nonna was having trouble with her back - lying on the floor, eyes glazed with pain and painkillers - she said, ‘You’re going to be beautiful, Anna, in another year or so. I hope it’s not going to get in your way.’

  I would have been about seventeen at the time, sitting at the dining table doing my homework. ‘What are you talking about, Nonna?’ I laughed, it seemed like such a personal thing for her to say.

  ‘You should have a few pals. You know? Girlfriends - like you used to have before you started going steady with this new chap - Marty, isn’t it? He’s a nice boy, but you don’t have to drop your friends just because a man comes knocking on the door, you know.’

  I felt like saying, How come you’ve no pals then, if they’re so bloody great? Because as long as I’d known Nonna I had only ever heard of one friend, a nurse called Dolores who phoned the odd time and whom Nonna had once gone out in her good coat to meet. Nor had she ever really encouraged me to bring friends home. Whenever I did she became slightly peculiar, never taking her eyes off them as if she expected them to steal something. On another occasion she had said, ‘Don’t trust anyone, Anna, not even your best friend.’ Although later she retracted that piece of advice, saying it might have been a ‘bit strong’.

  ‘You should watch those painkillers, Nonna,’ I said and went back to my essay. A few minutes later I could still feel her looking up from the floor at me. ‘What?‘ I asked her.

  ‘You get your looks from your grandmother,’ she said.

  ‘From you?’

  ‘No’, she laughed. ‘God, no. Your other grandmother. She was a beauty.’

  The next time I saw my father I asked him what his mother had looked like.

  My father, brought up in a climate of suspicion, always seemed to be startled by the simplest of questions. ‘My mother? What are you askin’ about her for?’

  ‘I just want to know what your mother, my grandmother - looked like, that’s all.’

  He thought for a moment, before answering in his sharp Belfast quack, ‘The bawk of a bus, if you must know.’

  *

  Sometimes I have these imaginary conversations with Nonna where I bombard her with questions and cheeky remarks I would never dream of saying to her face - whether asleep or awake. I say things like: ‘You’re trapped now, Nonna, you may as well come clean. Come out with your hands up, tell us what the hell’s been going on these past fifty-odd years.’

  Or I might get a little more personal. ‘How could you go an entire life and still be a virgin, Nonna? I mean - the age you are and you still don’t know what it’s like? And that husband of yours, did he not mind having to go without? Did he leave you because of it - was that it? Did he not die in the war at all? Or did he ever even exist? And why? Why did you never tell me the truth? Did you think I would leave you if I found out we weren’t really flesh and blood?’

  Other times I just tell her things. Like how much I’ve come to hate the flat she was good enough to buy for me, with Hugh’s fingerprints and stains and thoughts all over it. That I can’t even be bothered to clean it, that’s how much I hate it now. And what’s more that I never even made all that much use of the studio. In fact, I gave it over to Hugh a long time ago when he was preparing for an exhibition and needed the extra space. And I forgot to take it back or he forgot to give it back. He hadn’t even had to ask if he could use it in the first place. My idea, my insistence and, if I’m to be honest, when he accepted - my relief.

  I know this would really get to her. The fact that I gave the studio away, wasted the chance, ‘the talent’, as she used to call it. ‘You’ve inherited a talent, Anna, it would be a shame to waste.’

  The times I’ve heard her say that. I had always presumed someone from my father’s side had a flair for art, because my mother and my grandmother - the only other relatives known to me - had none. Nonna called it talent, I would settle for mere ability - not quite the same thing. Whatever it is, it has always seemed to matter a lot to Nonna, anyhow. When I was a child she used to fill the walls of the flat with my pictures. When I got into art college she lost the run of herself and bought a bottle of champagne. Even when I disappointed her (though not myself), by taking a job as an art teacher in an inner city school, she paid my insurance and bought me my
first little car.

  In these imaginary conversations I never lie to Nonna. Not like I used to do, all the time. Just for the sake of it, or just for an easy life. I used to feel bad about all those stupid lies. But not any more of course. Now that I know that all along there’s been a pair of us at it.

  I imagine telling her about Hugh. ‘He’s left me, Nonna,’ I say. ‘He’s not coming back.’

  ‘Is that so?’ she quietly asks back.

  ‘He’s left me, Nonna, he told me there was nobody else, but that all things have a time to end.’

  ‘Did he now, did he say that, well well?’

  ‘Nearly six years, Nonna.’

  ‘Six years! Was it really that long?’

  ‘Mmm. It turns out he’s gone back to his wife.’

  I imagine her looking at me for a moment, measuring every word I’ve said, taking it all in. A slight slow nod, perhaps a pat on my hand. ‘Ah well,’ she says then, ‘live by the sword, die by the sword - isn’t it always the way?’

  *

  I only found out the truth about the house on Pembroke Road the first time I brought Nonna to have a look at the fancy nursing home in Chapelizod. We had spent the afternoon there and, when the grand tour was over, had come outside and sat in the car in the driveway for a while. A smitten Nonna smiling benignly through the car window at the house and its gardens. That was when she said: ‘This is the one. This is the perfect place.’

  I couldn’t understand where she was getting such notions. It hadn’t been that long since she’d bought me the flat and now here she was talking about nursing-home fees, as if she were talking in telephone numbers.

  ‘It’s lovely - isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Don’t they keep it lovely? Really though - I mean, look at that beautiful willow tree. I love the willow, I must say, despite its melancholy reputation.’