‘No,’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t descend to his level, please don’t go breaking his legs.’
‘You know I won’t, Laura. But imagining him in pain is so delicious and it’s no crime. However, it would do no harm to have him followed now and then. I don’t like this, don’t want to think about what might have happened if I hadn’t been here.’
I accepted the tea, swallowed several scalding sips. ‘Don’t worry. These walls are thin and I’ve a good set of lungs. And we can try for an injunction on Monday.’
‘Hmm.’ She folded herself into a dining chair, placed her cup on the shabby formica table. ‘Pieces of paper won’t mean anything to him, you know.’
I did know, how well I knew.
‘He’ll still be hanging about like a bad smell.’
I got up off the floor, dusted down my dressing gown, sat opposite my cousin. ‘This time, it’s you worrying and me being complacent. Frank’s death sort of numbed me, but I’m so ill-tempered underneath. I can’t manage to fear him any more. It’s as if he’s done his worst.’
She dipped a bourbon into her tea, looked nothing like an up-and-coming young solicitor. ‘Don’t believe it, kid. Don’t ever believe that.’
The youngish woman stood outside my front door, a battered suitcase resting next to her feet. She wore a navy coat which hung open over a black skirt and a white blouse, yet even though the clothes were of good quality, she managed to look untidy. A bell rang faintly in the chambers of my memory, but I could not name this person. Her hair was short, brown and wavy, and the slender feet were encased in heavy brogues. ‘Help’, she said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ It was one of those moments in life when you look at someone or something, when you know that you’ve seen him or it before, and you can’t place the pieces of the jigsaw in a sensible sequence. It was a bit like déjà vu, only less weird. I dried my hands on the tea towel, pushed Gerald back into the house. I tried again. ‘I’m sorry, but …’
‘But what?’
‘Well, you asked for help. How can I help you?’
‘A cup of tea would go down great, Laura McNally.’
‘Holy cow.’ The words were out of my mouth before I could check them.
‘I’m neither holy nor a cow, miss. Now let me in and give some shelter to a failed nun before she keels over on your doorstep due to lack of sustenance and low blood sugar.’ She never paused for breath, didn’t smile. ‘My life’s a mess,’ she added. ‘And I’m out on the streets with no future and a bagful of clothes from the last century.’
‘Confetti?’ I leaned against the door jamb, needed its support. ‘Did they finally throw you out, then?’
She frowned. ‘The sisters do not throw anyone out. I walked. I did not need to be ejected. And my name is Goretti Hourigan. However, you may call me Confetti. Throughout my childhood, I was called Hooligan, but we shall draw a veil over that.’
‘But not a nun’s veil?’ I stepped aside, allowed her into the house. She picked up Gerald, sat him on the sofa, handed him some jumbo crayons. ‘Little boy, I stole these from school. Use them in good health.’ She turned to me. ‘Where’s the other one?’
‘Upstairs. He’s still young enough to need an afternoon nap. I’ll put the kettle on.’
While I made the tea, I listened as she educated my son. Within five minutes, he was reciting his two-times tables and had started to make inroads on the threes. ‘He’s bright,’ she shouted. ‘Like you used to be.’
I ignored the barb, picked up a tray, carried the tea into our tiny living room. ‘I made the cakes myself,’ I said. ‘Because I am still bright enough to follow a recipe.’
‘May all the saints be praised.’ She crammed half a buttered scone into her mouth, passed the remainder of it to Gerald. ‘Life is about sharing,’ she said. ‘And I shall share with you my store of learning.’
I sat down, picked up the teapot, poured.
‘Milk and no sugar.’ She winked at Gerald. ‘I shall have to watch my figure if I’m to find a husband.’
Sitting next to an ex-nun is not a comfortable experience. When she was a nun, I understood her, knew what she was, how she thought, how she expected me to think. But here she was, doing her best to be outrageous, pushing her way into a life that was already hard to manage. Did she intend to stay? Would I have to share my bed with a woman who used to teach me, who used to pray and go to mass when she wasn’t actually working?
‘I’ll be taking advantage of your hospitality while I think,’ she announced.
My heart sank. I loved the bones of the woman, but the woman whose bones I loved was a nun, not a … a woman who stole crayons and looked for a husband.
‘Till my dowry comes through,’ she said.
It has been my experience that most disturbing remarks are made when someone within earshot has a mouthful of liquid. When I had finished coughing, I echoed the word. ‘Dowry? Is your family paying some man to marry you?’
She eyed me disdainfully. ‘Well, of course they are. You don’t think any fellow worth his salt would take me just for myself, surely? My dowry is to be four Arab-Irish racehorses and a smallish herd of cattle. The livestock should arrive at the docks in Liverpool at any moment. In fact, as we speak, there could well be a lorry full of beef and very superior horseflesh on its way down the East Lancashire Road.’
I decided that silence would be the best tack.
‘Have you a small field?’ she asked.
‘No, just a back yard.’
‘A tape measure?’
I pointed to my sewing basket. ‘You can stop this fooling around, Confetti.’
She swung to face me, her eyes bright. ‘What? I’m here just now trying to place my animals. Would you kindly tell me how many cows can stay in your yard?’
‘None.’
The tape measure fell to the floor. ‘Never mind, we’ll just have to keep them in the street.’
‘Can I have a cow?’ Gerald, who usually found adults to be boring, was fascinated by the new arrival. ‘I like cows.’
‘Ah, I’m only kidding. But we’ll take a ride out on the bus and find some cows, eh?’ She glanced at me. ‘The dowry comes from the convent. It’s the money I brought in with me.’
‘I know.’
‘Then why didn’t you say so, you obdurate girl? Isn’t obdurate a lovely word?’
‘It was a favourite of Tommy-gun’s,’ I answered. ‘How is she?’
‘Crippled with pain and refusing to die. How many bedrooms here?’
‘Two.’ She was going to take over. She was going to walk into my existence, into my home, and treat it like her classroom. ‘Aren’t you going home?’
She shrugged the thin shoulders, ran a hand through Gerald’s hair. ‘They’ll not have me. My brother was almost a priest till he upped and married a girl called Siobhan O’Casey with a marvellous figure except for the bulge. The bulge became twins who had been conceived during one of Eugene’s breaks from the seminary.’
‘Ceme-tery,’ said Gerald.
‘Exactly. Anyway, my mother’s head was bowed in disgrace throughout the whole of Lent and right past Eastertide. No-one in our village ever mentions 1959. They say, “Well now, and didn’t the donkey die the year when Eugene Hourigan had to marry Siobhan O’Casey with the great belly on her?’ My mother can’t take such shocks. She has a delicate disposition and a temper that’s mortal cruel. So I’ll be staying in England.’
‘Oh.’
Confetti arranged the skirt about her knees, obviously missed the long folds of her habit. ‘Don’t you want me to stay? I’ll be company for you and I’m to be teaching soon at one of the local schools. I’ll go if I’m not wanted.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly. I just wasn’t expecting it and—’
‘You were expecting it, Laura McNally. Haven’t I been writing to you since the crack of creation, telling you about my unacceptable beliefs? They may well stop me teaching in a Catholic school, just because I agree with birth control. I’ve be
en on my way out since you were knee-high to an inkwell.’
She was so … enthusiastic. She bubbled with energy, brimmed over with excitement. And she had chosen me to be the witness to her own rebirth. I wished with every fibre of my being that I could feel flattered by her faith in me. ‘You’ll have to share my bed.’
‘That’s fine by me unless you snore. Do you snore?’
I sighed heavily. ‘I don’t know. I’m usually asleep when I’m asleep, so I’ve no way of telling.’
‘Did Frank complain ever?’
‘No.’
‘Right. That’s the interview over and you’ve got the job. I’ll pay you seven pounds a week and I’ll share the bills.’
So that was it. The good woman had come here as if demanding bed and board, was hiding her concern for me under a blanket of noise and fuss. ‘It’s not much of a house, a bit cramped,’ I ventured.
She clicked her tongue. ‘I’m used to a room with no space for a flea. We’ll be as snug as bugs here.’
‘Bug,’ said Gerald. ‘Bugger. Bugger, bugger, bugger.’
‘Exactly,’ agreed Confetti. ‘Now there’s paper in my case, so I’ll get some for you and you can draw me some cows and some bugs. Then your mammy and I will cook some food and we’ll have bedtime stories if you’re good.’
He ran his eyes over her. ‘I’m four,’ he said disdainfully. ‘So I’m always good. But Teddy is a pest. His real name’s Edward, but we call him Teddy.’
‘Is that so? What kind of a pest is this brother of yours?’
‘A bloody pest.’
She nodded. ‘Ah, that sort. Ah well, we’ll see if I can sort him out for you.’
It was as if she had always been there. Gerald took to her immediately, made me feel redundant. Even Edward fell under her spell, stopped moaning about Gerald pinching his toys, pinching his arms, ruining his tiny life. In a sense, I was rather jealous of Confetti, because she displayed all the hallmarks of a natural mother, whereas I had needed to train myself through books and by many bouts of trial and error, had learned mostly through my thousand mistakes.
When the boys were in bed, we sat together in front of the dreadful electric fire. The evening was warm, so we used no heat, but the fake coal glowed and flickered as a wheel of metal spun over a light bulb in the base of the fire.
‘Marvellous,’ she declared. ‘The things they’ve invented. We always burned peat over to home. And here you sit with a nice clean electric heater, no grate to scrub.’
‘I hate it.’ My tone was petulant.
‘Don’t hate anything or anyone, Laura.’
‘That’s difficult.’
She nodded. ‘I know. There’s your mammy and that pig of a husband. Is your divorce done? Are you free from him?’
‘Not yet. Anyway, you’re not supposed to believe in divorce.’
‘I’m a sinner, sure enough. I’ve even gone so far as to put down my name as a voluntary worker with the FPA. Family planning, that is. Of course, I’ll not be involved in the mechanical side of the process, but I can answer the phone and book people in for appointments.’
I stared at her. ‘Why? It’s one thing believing in birth control, but to go out and actually encourage it – what would the Pope say?’
She giggled. ‘Five Aves and a Pater Noster, I shouldn’t wonder.’ The smile wiped itself off her face. ‘No, this is a deep thing with me, Laura. It’s about women’s freedom. You see, that Pankhurst woman and all those others, they believed in us having our franchise, which was all very well and necessary in the broader scheme of things. They began the fight, but we mustn’t put down our weapons yet. We’re still victims, you see. Like the men are in charge all the while, and those of us who had not the benefit of being born male are just here for those who were. A woman’s life can be very small, my dear.’
‘I know.’ My life was the size of this house, stretched no further than the Co-op on Derby Street. ‘But how can you make a woman’s life more fulfilling?’
‘By giving her some control. By allowing her to choose motherhood or to reject it, by letting her decide when to allow her body to be hired out as an incubator. We should all be citizens with rights, equal rights and equal duties. For example, if you were to take the bread knife and stab your husband, what would you get? A life sentence?’
‘Probably.’
‘Yet he can interfere with you whenever he likes. He’ll come in from the pub with a bag of chips and a great drunken smile and he’ll expect his rights there and then. Well, once he’s eaten his chips. Can you prosecute him for his deafness when you say no? You are still his property, Laura. Until the day comes when you can sue your partner for rape – and you of all people should know about that – then we have no dignity at all.’
So I was living now with a missionary. The fire in her eyes burned far brighter than the 60 watt lamp in my two-bar heater. I could not understand how the convent had managed to contain her for so many years. Within the order, Confetti must have stuck out like a boil on the face of a saint. So she had let herself out, because a vocation as strong as hers needed freedom, not confinement. This woman must have suffered beyond measure, as she was a strong believer in God. Her arguments with Rome were fundamentally unacceptable. And I knew that she was terrified by what she was doing.
‘You’ll be all right,’ I said.
She stared into the poor imitation of fire, sighed from the depths of her soul. ‘I hope so, Laura. Oh, I hope so.’
Chapter Eight
We had a wonderful Christmas in 1965. Confetti organized me, pushed me into inviting Ida and Ernie Bowen who had lived next door to me during my time with Tommo. She also persuaded me to write to Hetty Hawkesworth, my good friend from the country. I received a note from her, read with delight her slanted hand. Hetty had won a national bingo prize, was going off on a cruise without ‘him’. It seemed that ‘he’ had been stepping out of line, but she intended to leave him a few bob before she sailed into the sunset, just enough for the odd pint and a fish supper on Fridays.
‘They’re all at it,’ beamed my house-guest. ‘Soon, we shall be recognized as true human beings.’
Confetti was completely unrecognizable, though she still looked just about human. She had taken to wearing the strangest clothes, great full-skirted dresses in Indian cotton, headbands, beads, shawls with fringes. On her feet, she usually sported clogs with leather uppers and wooden soles, and she clanked as she moved, because both wrists were a tangled mass of slender metal bangles. During these colder months, she was making few concessions to the weather, with the exception of one or two eccentric purchases. It was with great pride that she showed off her sheepskin coat, 15 shillings from a second-hand shop, and her fluffy boots, £1 from the same establishment. Her dowry had come through from the convent, but she had plans for it.
When our Christmas meal had been consumed and our guests had wobbled off beneath the weight of laden bellies, she tackled me again. ‘This coming week, you will visit your mother.’
For answer, I blew into what Gerald called a ‘ter-ter’, a whistle attached to a tube of paper with a feather stuck on the end. My breath expanded and unrolled the tube, sounded the whistle, caused the feather to collide with Confetti’s earnest face. ‘Get lost,’ I said politely.
‘Isn’t that just great?’ she asked.
‘Don’t be rhetorical, Goretti,’ I warned. ‘Or I shall become hysterical. You go and see my mother. Then, when you’ve seen the dragon, go and visit your own parents.’
‘They’ll not let me in.’
‘Quite. And my mother won’t put out the red carpet for me.’
She dragged some multi-coloured streamers from her hair, handed them to the children. ‘She sent you a card and a cheque. There’s about five hundred pounds worth of cheques in that drawer. At least she remembers you.’
I nodded. ‘Oh, she remembers me all right. In the same way as we all remember the war and toothache and smallpox. Anyway, stay out of my tin and mind your
own business.’
I went, of course. Goretti Hourigan was, still is, a great manipulator. She works on the theory that a drip of water, however small, can wear away stone in time. She dripped. Into every conversation, she dragged the importance of family, the sadness of growing older without seeing one’s children, the futility of a life without love. The anecdotes came thick and fast as the days went by. ‘And of course when she got there, her mother had passed on and the wake was starting. Her mammy was all decked out in the coffin and Padraig Mulvanny was playing a sad song on his melodeon. The fiddler from the next town was so upset that he couldn’t tune up for weeping. His sadness came from the fact that the wilful daughter had neglected her mammy for so long.’
‘Shut up, I’m going.’
‘She went into a decline after that, hadn’t the strength to hold the rosary. Aye, she was a broken woman and all because she had left it all too late and—’
‘I’m bloody going!’
I scarcely recognized McNally’s. There were new buildings, low sheds prefabricated in concrete, embellished with dark wood and large windows. In the centre of all this magnificence a garden had appeared, a sweep of lawn with a fountain at its centre. A cherub in greyish marble balanced on a plinth, one foot stretched out as if ready to walk away. He carried a pitcher, and it was from this that the water poured. The base of the fountain had been inscribed, IN LOVING MEMORY OF JOHN McNALLY, FOUNDER OF THIS COMPANY. How thughtful of Mother. How difficult it must have been for her to find those few kind words for a man who had irritated her for so many years.
I was accosted at the door by a bulky man in a navy blue uniform. He tweaked the cuffs of a white shirt, made sure that they showed for an inch or so below the blazer sleeves. There were cufflinks too, spoked circles like a pair of wagon wheels. ‘Can I help you?’
September Starlings Page 40