Mary, Mary

by Julie Parsons

  Around her flowed the business of the house, dominated by her mother’s illness. She had cancer, first diagnosed eight years ago and treated. A radical mastectomy followed by six months of chemotherapy. Now it was back. A tumour on the spine. The first time a letter had sufficed, but this was different. She had lain in her bed, twelve thousand miles away, listening to Catherine’s sobs, and thought, it’s time to go back. To say goodbye properly, to lay the ghosts.

  Now her cheek rested against the floor. She closed her eyes. She could feel the movements in the rooms below, travelling up through the house. The Hoover trundling backwards and forwards over the faded rugs set up the steady, rhythmic vibration that rattled Mary’s jars and tubs of makeup on the dressing table. Nellie must be here, she thought. Poor old Nellie, as Catherine called her, not realizing that Nellie who had worked for them since she was fourteen was considerably younger and healthier than she. The doorbell rang twice. She lifted her head slightly, then dropped it back again. The familiar rumble of the doctor’s voice. Catherine’s favourite. The youngest recruit to the local practice. Came to see her every day. Sometimes brought her flowers or chocolate. Flirted with her, responded to the coquettish glances she gave him through her sparse eyelashes, pretended not to notice her smudged and smeared lipstick and powder. Who else would come on this bright morning? Perhaps Father Lonergan, with his gracious smile and long, well-tended hands. Maybe one or other of the neighbours who remembered when Catherine was the best-dressed woman in the parish with her handmade shoes and tailored suits.

  Margaret rolled onto her back, and folded her arms tightly around the bundle of clothes. Sunlight moved and shifted across the room. As it had when she was a child. An apple tree grew up the back of the house, right against her bedroom window. Many times she had crawled out over the sill and scrambled down its arthritic branches, jumping the last few feet to the lawn below. Mary had done it too, in the first week after they arrived. Just to see, she had said, if all the things you told me were true. O ye of little faith, Margaret had chided her, as she stood on the grass looking up at the window. Be careful. You don’t want to hurt yourself. But Mary was as light and lithe as she had been, landing on her toes on the mossy grass, then spinning away from Margaret’s outstretched arms, her feet placed precisely, her body aligned perfectly, a succession of jetés carrying her effortlessly onto the stone terrace where Catherine sat, a large gin and tonic in front of her on the slatted table.

  Margaret sat up, slowly. Beside her was a wooden bookcase. She turned her head and checked the titles. All her old medical texts. Vander, Sherman and Luciano’s Human Physiology. Davidson’s Medicine, Gray’s Anatomy. How to fathom the mysteries of the human heart she thought, as she pulled them out one by one, flicking through the yellowing pages. Her handwriting, surprisingly childlike, decorated the margins. Passages underlined, further references to be consulted and then, sandwiched between a line drawing of the inside of the knee and the muscles of the thigh a scrap of cardboard torn from a cigarette packet. ‘I love you’ was printed in careful capitals, the black ink faded.

  Tears came then, running down the creases beside her nose, gathering in the corners of her mouth, dripping onto her hands. Silent tears, and again, another sound, insistent. The phone, ringing. Again and again. No longer a summons she could ignore. She got to her feet, folded the cardboard carefully in two and pushed it into her pocket. She walked down the stairs to the hall, wiping her face with the back of her hand. She picked up the receiver. She held it to her ear. Beside her the grandfather clock chimed midday.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said. Silence. She spoke again. ‘Hallo.’ Still silence. Then the sound. An intake of breath.

  ‘Please, speak to me.’

  And another sound. Whistling, high, clear. A tune. For the first few moments the notes seemed unconnected, disjointed. Panic flooded her body. What did it mean? What was it? Then a voice rose up from the silted layers of her memory. Her father calling her to his side.

  Listen, Maggie, listen to this. My mother, your granny, loved this record. Listen. Hands fumbling with the crackling brown cover on the hard black disc. Be careful, Maggie. If you drop it it’ll break. Careful, now. Put the needle down very gently.

  And now the same tune, whistled.

  Bring flowers of the fairest, bring blossom the rarest

  From gardens and woodland and hillside and dale,

  Our poor hearts are singing, our glad voices bringing,

  Our praise of thee, loveliest Queen of the May.

  O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today,

  Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.

  The whistling stopped. Silence again. And coldness, sweeping over her body. The muscles in her legs weakening. Sweat breaking out on her palms, on the soles of her feet. Hairs standing up on the back of her neck. And a sudden pain, deep in her heart, forcing her down onto the floor, to bang her head, again and again and again, until that was all she could remember.

  5

  She had asked him to phone her mother. So he had done it. As simple as that. Driven into town. Found an empty box. Put the money in the slot. Punched up the numbers. And bingo. The first couple of times he hadn’t said or done anything. Just stood there in the sun, listening. He liked the sound of her voice. She had a funny mixture of accents. It was mostly Dublin, south side, but her vowels were a bit different. More like her daughter’s. Kind of spread, wider, looser, if that was a way you could describe them.

  He’d never done anything like that before. Well, not since he was a kid, anyway. And then it had been random, haphazard, names picked out of the phone book. So he’d never been able to imagine properly how they’d look when they lifted the receiver and listened, and began to feel frightened. But this time he’d taken Mary’s little photo album with him, and he flicked through it until he found the picture he liked best. Her mother. Margaret. Sitting on a beach. Wearing a bikini. Leaning forward to pour tea from a flask. One small breast about to fall out of her top. He stroked the picture with his index finger. One day he’d feel the skin itself. Not just the silken skin of the emulsion covering the print, but the real thing.

  He had been tempted to bring Mary with him. He had thought he might let her speak too. Maybe she could have persuaded Margaret to come and meet them. But prudence overcame impulse. Too difficult. Too dangerous. Better this way. Less messy. So he left Mary handcuffed to the ring in the wall. She’d told him she wouldn’t scream or shout, but he didn’t believe her. So he got out the sticky tape and covered her mouth. Tears had burst from her eyes when he finished. Silly girl. She should have realized by now that he wasn’t susceptible to them. They didn’t move him at all.

  The third time he phoned was the best. He’d known it would be good, but not how good. He stood in the phone box on O’Connell Bridge. The one on the south side of the river, at the point where Westmoreland Street curves around onto Aston Quay. It was so hot the chewing gum all over the footpath was beginning to melt. There were people all around him. Tourists in silly summer clothes, baggy Bermuda shorts and loose shirts decorated with palm trees and blue waves. Flocks of Spanish students shrieked like angry parrots as they clustered around the poster shops, buying cheap CDs and gimmicky souvenirs. A couple of guards stood by the traffic lights. A man and a woman. He was tall and bulky. He rocked back and forth on his rubber-soled shoes, his hands in his pockets, his sleeves rolled up over brown arms. She was small, her fair hair scraped up under her cap. She was looking up at him, smiling, almost flirting. Then turning away to look at the map that a tourist had shoved under her nose.

  An old man came and leaned against the phone booth. His hair was long and grey, streaked with nicotine, matted. He was wearing a dark overcoat, far too heavy for the hot weather. As the rough material scraped against the glass, Jimmy saw himself reflected, smiling, his teeth very white. He looked like the picture that his mother hung framed in the hall. His confirmation photo. Red rosette and grey suit, and a smile, his mother said, that w
ould make the angels happy. He turned back to the phone, waiting. When he put his lips together and began to whistle that song he felt such intense excitement. It burst out of him, pleasure like nothing else he’d ever known. He couldn’t understand how no one else seemed to notice.

  It was his mother’s favourite. She loved the way they always played it on The Gay Byrne Show on the first of May. For days afterwards she’d be going around singing it. Out of tune. Her voice mangling the words. He’d always hated it. Until now.

  And when he’d finished and put down the phone, he went for a wander. Up to Grafton Street, looking at the pretty girls. And then he saw her. Mary. A bank of televisions in the window of the Sony shop. He stopped for a moment in the street, and stared at the face on the screens. A woman eating an apple stepped in front of him. He could hear the crunching of her jaw, and see the little bubbles of juice that were collecting in the corners of her mouth. He waited for her to move, but she didn’t. So he went into the shop. It was the lunchtime news. A missing-person report. Four days since she’d been seen. An interview with the girl’s mother. Standing in the garden, a mass of roses behind her. Wearing a simple white T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. She looked straight at the camera. She looked straight at him. Please, she said, please, if anyone knows where my daughter is. Please tell the guards, or tell me. She lifted her hand as she spoke, and smoothed down her hair. Dark brown, shiny, straight, pulled back from her pale forehead. He put his face close up to the screen. She disappeared, broke up, into lines of light and dark. He stepped back and there she was again. Perfect, beautiful, his.

  6

  The black bull twisted and turned. Blood coated its back, a slick of red, and dripped from its wide-open nostrils. The matador stood, his body bent like a crescent moon, the red cape stiff, held out to the side. The bull came at him, his head down. The matador jumped back. He dropped the cape. The bull kept coming. The matador fell, his face buried in the sawdust. The crowd roared. Two men rushed in towards the bull, distracting him, teasing him, turning his attention away from the small man in the tight blue and gold suit, sprawled now, clumsy, inelegant, on the ground. The bull’s heavy, wounded body lumbered away, the lances tearing at his skin, dragging at his flesh, slowing him down, so he swayed and staggered, his head drooping low.

  Margaret watched in spite of herself. She wanted the bull to stay his ground, to deal with his tormentor, to catch him on his curved horns, toss him in the air, make blood pour from his wounds too. But now a doctor was kneeling beside the young man, explaining in French, too fast for her to understand, the nature of his injuries. She stood up, uncurling herself from the hard upright chair on which she was sitting and stretched to the top shelf of the dresser. She lifted down a bottle of whiskey and placed it on the table with a glass. The room was dark, apart from the flicker from the small television set. It was sometime in the early morning of the seventh day.

  He had phoned again. Yesterday evening, just as the angelus bell was ringing. Again he said nothing, but she had known nevertheless who it was. She phoned the guards in Dun Laoghaire about the calls. They sent someone to talk to her. A young man, dark-haired, polite. He stood on the doorstep beside her, his gaze fixed on the Kish lighthouse on the horizon. He took down all the details in his notebook, his handwriting precise, neat. He asked for permission to put a tap on the phone.

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Although he’s hardly likely to call from anywhere significant.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’ he replied.

  ‘Well, do you?’

  He shrugged and looked at his watch. ‘We can’t be certain that whoever is phoning you has had anything to do with your daughter’s disappearance. There are a lot of people out there who are quite capable of doing something like this, just for fun. It could be kids, anyone.’

  ‘And where would they get my phone number from?’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we’ll keep an eye on the house. Our lads will patrol past here every hour. If you need anything, we’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.’

  She unscrewed the cap on the bottle and poured the yellow liquid into the glass. She drank and poured again. Then she leaned down and picked up the heavy black book from the pile on the floor. The cover was embossed to make it look like crocodile skin. The word ‘Photographs’ was inscribed on the front in flowing gold script. Dust clung to it, and to her fingers. She had found the albums under her father’s desk, tucked into the bay of the window in the room that had always been his study, across the hall from where her mother now slept.

  She remembered. The feel of his bony thighs underneath her. The books spread open on the shiny desktop.

  ‘And that’s my mother, your grandmother, and that’s my father, your grandfather, and that’s Uncle Peter and Auntie Bridie.’

  One neat finger, the inside edge of the nail stained dark yellow, tracing the family. Who was who and what was what. Big houses covered with Virginia creeper. Shiny horses held at the bit by small boys with flat caps and lace-up boots.

  ‘And look, Daddy, here you are. With Mammy.’

  ‘That’s right, Maggie mine. And what were we doing?’

  ‘You were getting married.’

  ‘That’s right. And we were very, very happy.’

  Standing together outside the church. Mother in a long white dress, with a scoop neck edged with flowers and a train that flowed in folds and frills and ended up beside her small white shoes. Father in a grey suit with tails and a top hat held in one gloved hand. His brown hair was slicked down over his head and he was smiling as he stood arm in arm with his young bride.

  And then her favourite picture.

  ‘Where’s that, Daddy?’

  ‘You know, Maggie, think.’

  ‘Is it when you were on your honeymoon, Daddy?’

  ‘That’s right, my pet.’

  ‘And is it the tower that has the funny name? The Eye-full tower, is that right? I wish I’d been there. Why didn’t you take me too?’

  And his laugh vibrating through her back, warming her up.

  ‘I couldn’t take you, my sweet. Because you weren’t even thought of then.’

  ‘Wasn’t I, Daddy? Why not?’

  She looked at the photograph now. He was standing, framed by the tracery of the tower’s iron legs, a cream linen jacket hanging from his thin shoulders, a panama hat pushed back from his forehead. His hands were shoved in his pockets and he was laughing.

  She turned over the stiff black pages slowly, peering at the faces, wondering, seeing her own face looking back at her. And Mary’s too? Sometimes here and there. Not in the colouring, or the shape, but occasionally a hint, a touch, an expression, a set of the jaw, an angle of the shoulders to the breast, a turn-out of the foot.

  She poured more whiskey and picked up the remote control, flicking through the numbers. The satellite channels were still transmitting, pictures of children in a feeding station in central Africa, and refugees, a straggling, desperate band. She watched for a couple of minutes, the alcohol soothing, calming, drowning the cries. Then she picked up another of the albums. Baby pictures, the same baby all the time. Held stiffly in her mother’s arms. Sitting in her high chair, waving a silver spoon. Smiling broadly, showing the gaps in her front teeth. Riding her first bicycle and her first pony. Standing in her bathing suit, long legs skinny and knock-kneed, hair trailing rats’ tails over her shoulders. First communion and confirmation, the perfect angel. More signs of triumph and success. Winning rosettes and cups at the local shows. Prize day at school. And then. Nothing.

  She turned over the rest of the pages. All of them were empty, except for the rough patches marking out the perfect squares and rectangles where the photographs once had been, showing where they had been torn from the stiff black paper. She got up slowly, her glass in her hand, and walked out of the kitchen, feeling her way up the uneven wooden stairs in the dark. She pushed open the door to the study and switched on the light. Once there had been other photographs, framed,
on the mantelpiece, on the wall. Graduation Day in Trinity College. A sketch he had done of her for her sixteenth birthday. Her first trip to Greece, standing in front of the Acropolis wearing a long white dress. He had loved that photograph. He always kept the original in his wallet and she’d got it enlarged and framed as a surprise one Christmas.

  She stood in the middle of the room and looked around. Nellie had been sent in to pack his books and papers into the tea-chests that were now lined up along one wall. She knelt down beside them and reached in, scrabbling through their contents. The metal lining, exposed along one edge, cut into her arm, scratching her skin just above the elbow. Still she searched and hunted, pulling out handfuls of loose typed pages, bundles of notebooks, old diaries. Finally she sat back, her knees stiff, her hands covered in grime. She stood up and walked out of the room. She opened the front door. The air outside was warm, thick with the smell of the salt from the sand and mud, exposed now in the low tide. She leaned against the railings at the top of the steps, and drank deeply from her glass. A large black car passed slowly, weaving its way carefully through the other cars parked on the narrow road. She watched its red tail-lights as it continued to the end of the cul-de-sac. She listened to the sound of the engine as it stopped, reversed, and drove back again. She couldn’t see who was in it. One, maybe two people. The police, she thought. It slowed, and stopped. Just for a moment. Then it moved on. She turned and watched its lights as it swung round the corner past the Martello tower and up the hill to the main road. Then she walked back into the house and closed the door.