September Starlings

by Ruth Hamilton

  In the coronary artery of a city’s slowed heart, a woman comes to terms with dementia, with Alois Alzheimer, with her husband’s frailty. It happened here, too, that slowing down. Will you pick up, Liverpool? Will your ship come in? Will Ben’s?

  I am weeping now and it doesn’t matter. No-one will come. And if someone does happen along, I shall be ignored. Women have wept on this road for years, I’m only a few decades out of step. I went into a pub once, an old-fashioned ale-house near Miller’s Bridge. An aged dear wailed in a corner and nobody bothered her. Her younger companions told me, ‘Oh, that’s Biddy, she cries a lot.’ They allow you your space, the Liverpool folk. It was a dockers’ haunt, so it was empty of men. Women sat with babies, nappy bags leaning against table legs, feeding bottles stacked among glasses of stout and lager. To get to the counter, I had to fight a dozen prams. The Liverpool lasses phoned the RAC, found me a sandwich, got the landlord to dig out a dusty bottle of white wine. They were good to me. Until this moment, I had forgotten them, how they took me in, nourished me, put a ten-year-old to guard my wounded car.

  I suppose they stood together when the tall ships came and went. The children would be older, wilder, possibly uncontainable. What did they think about, those girls whose grandfathers had run the greatest docks on earth? How did they feel when that last strip of canvas fell off their horizon? I bet they didn’t say, ‘Well, never mind, we’ve got all these enterprise things starting, tourists and boutiques and training schemes.’ Perhaps I’m getting depressed again. I’m no deep thinker, no poet, shouldn’t be standing here like cheese at fourpence. That was one of Auntie Maisie’s sayings, ‘Don’t stand there like cheese at fourpence.’

  Why Ben? Why Liverpool, why England? Are we all so unworthy? Who will look after Ben’s winter birds? I did it last year and the year before, haven’t his magic touch.

  He was always sad about house-martins. We once sat for a whole day in a Sussex field, Ben, myself and a couple of hundred insect eaters. Ben watched the babies, worried for them. ‘No nest to go back to when the weather’s cold,’ he said. I remember wondering what happened to their nests, should have asked at the time. ‘If they fly high, that means good weather. Low means rain. Many don’t get to Africa, many don’t return. But look how happy they are.’ Birds. He was always fascinated by them, was often emotional about his feathered children.

  I’ve decided to go and see Confetti. She’s just round the corner, is usually surrounded by dozens of people. Her dowry has been put to good use in a large house for distressed girls. She calls them her distressed girls, even to their faces, makes a joke of it. I have never met a less distressed crowd in my life. They come to Confetti when there’s nowhere else, when it’s too late for a lecture on birth control, too late for abortion. Confetti is vigorously opposed to what she calls ‘assisted miscarriage’, spends time and energy placing the newborn infants with foster parents, or finding homes for those young women who want to keep their children.

  I drive on to Waterloo, past the private hospital where Confetti goes for spiritual guidance from the Augustine sisters. In a side street off South Road, I park Elsie, walk into bedlam. She’s standing at the foot of the stairs, a baby in one arm, a feeding bottle in the other. ‘Laura, thank goodness you’re here. Get up those stairs now and tell that lot to turn down the music.’ We don’t need to listen, as the heavy metal is welding itself to our eardrums.

  ‘Why me?’ I ask.

  ‘Because you’re here. Did you never hear why Everest was climbed? Because it was there. Now get that racket stopped, I’ve babies scared halfway to death with it.’

  The girls sense their mentor’s anger, because the cacophony grinds to an abrupt halt. I am waved towards the kitchen. ‘Kettle,’ she says. ‘Tea bags in the jar marked flour, sugar in the biscuit tin, milk wherever they’ve left it.’ She must be in her seventies, yet she displays a level of energy that should put to shame many of her distressed guests.

  ‘Anything else?’ I ask sarcastically.

  ‘Well, a cheque might help, something with six noughts to it.’

  ‘Aren’t you being funded at all?’

  She shrugs, waves the feeding bottle. ‘Cut-backs. Good job I’m a registered charity.’

  In the stark kitchen, I find two expectant mothers at the table and a third standing near the outer doors, the arm of an expectant father round her shoulders. All of them seem to be no more than sixteen years of age. They eye me warily, as I am one of the ‘them’ who have caused all the trouble. At sixteen, they know everything and the parents who turn them out know nothing. With my age against me, I brew tea, place six mugs on the table, pour, hand a drink to each one of them, pick up mine and Confetti’s, walk to the door.

  ‘Ta,’ says the lad. They’re OK folk, just a bit wary and self-defensive.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  In the front room, my old friend is humming to herself while feeding the baby. She is sitting in an armchair that pretends to be a golden-yellow, but the moquette is badly stained and torn. ‘Thanks for the tea,’ she says. ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘Simmering. How’s your dad?’

  She lifts the infant to a shoulder, rubs the tiny back. ‘He’s ninety-five and still on the go. My sisters in Birmingham are fighting over him, because neither wants him in the house. He was found last week walking up the slow lane of the M6, said he was going home.’

  ‘Oh.’ I know she’s worried, know she won’t show it. ‘Dementia?’

  The grey head nods. ‘Alcohol. The good man never touched a drop till Mammy took ill and died. We’d a grand farm, everything up to date, good land, valuable animals. I think he flushed the last racehorse down the toilet just before we brought him over. Sold the lot just to numb his pain with drink. Anyway, I can’t have him, not with this lot.’

  ‘Perhaps he would have been better at home.’

  She sniffs. ‘That’s all well and good, but there was nobody for him. Eugene’s showing no signs of coming back from Canada, and the rest of us are in England. I couldn’t have done my birth-control classes over there, not without a lot of church opposition.’ She looks me up and down. ‘Have you money to spare?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Confetti is one of my tax blessings, as I pay to the mother and baby home on a monthly basis. ‘What did you do with the last cheque?’

  She tut-tuts. ‘I used it on cocaine, of course, ruined my nostrils. It’s just gone, Laura. There are fifteen young adults living here, and four babies just now. They need food, washing powder, electricity, gas—’

  ‘Shut up.’ I am already writing the cheque. ‘And get yourself some decent clothes, for goodness sake. If I see you in those old trousers again, I’ll bring a gun.’

  She peers over the coffee table, scans the cheque. ‘That’s a lot of money, Laura Thompson. Still, my need is greater than yours.’ The grin is impish but short-lived. ‘Ben?’

  I shake my head. ‘No chance. There’s nothing new, no miracle on the horizon. When they do discover something, I don’t think it will help him, because he’s lost too much, gone too far. The best that can happen is the finding of a drug that might slow the process. There’s no replacing dead brain cells.’

  ‘Ah, God love the both of you, Laura. I pray every night for some sign of recovery, but it seems not to be the Lord’s will.’

  I sip the tea, pull faces at the baby. When the cup is empty, I take the child, give Confetti the chance to enjoy a break. She gulps down a mouthful, settles back in the disgraceful chair. ‘They’ve called that one Garth. It’s a great pity that these little creatures are saddled from the start with odd names. That’s enough to make him different right from the word go. What’s wrong with Peter and John, for goodness sake? Mind, I’ve done well this year, three Michaels and a Goretti.’

  I laugh at her. ‘That’s the funniest name of all.’

  ‘A matter of opinion.’ She peers down at the navy trousers, seems to be attempting to identify the several stains mapped all o
ver them like the pages of an atlas. ‘I’ll go to town and get a couple of skirts,’ she mutters. ‘And a blouse or three. Mind, I’ll be needing some new cot blankets and a couple of baby baths. Does Mothercare ever have a sale? Laura, remember that God is good.’ There is no signal to herald the change of subject. ‘Ben won’t go on for ever like that.’

  ‘He’s suffering,’ I tell her yet again. ‘It’s so cruel.’

  ‘There’ll be an end.’

  ‘And get yourself some support tights.’ I am becoming as bad as she is, peppering my conversation with snippets of irrelevance.

  She looks straight into my face. ‘We’re all tempted. I was tempted when the cough mixture stopped working for Mammy. They prescribed morphine, and the giving of a drop too much would have been the easiest thing.’

  ‘I know.’

  She stands, takes the snoozing infant. ‘I’ll put him in the cot. You’re right, I need some support for these varicose veins. Laura, get that business out of your mind.’ Sometimes, I can’t quite love her, because she reads me too easily.

  Chapter Two

  There’s a nip in the air today, a promise of October, though this month is barely middle-aged. I sit on the concrete steps and watch Chewbacca as he cavorts mindlessly, senselessly, hurling himself about all over the sands. He finds something, loses it, forgets to retrieve it as soon as he spots another piece of flotsam. Our flotsam is deserved, because much of it is just our own rubbish coming back, Coke cans, beer cans, condoms and fag packets.

  The Welsh hills have remained coy all morning, have secreted themselves behind a veil of light mist, but the New Brighton dome is clearly visible. I see no ships, though I am reliably informed that Liverpool is receiving more cargo than ever before. When they do come, the vessels are huge and ugly, low in the water, many of them as grey as the scum on which they float. Who unloads them? I wonder. There must be some dockers, just a few, enough men to direct the lifting of massive containers.

  I am thinking about my children. Jodie was here a few weeks ago, but I’ve seen little of my sons for the past eight or nine months, can remember that they came at Christmas. Gerald gave me some more shares for what he refers to as my portfolio, then a talking-to about surviving the so-called recession. He’s a southerner now, all rounded vowels, clipped consonants, car phone, designer shirts and suits, designer stubble. I always knew he’d turn out to be something in the city. Sometimes, he messes about with my offshore bank accounts, frightens the life out of Ruth, my best friend and accountant. She tells me that Gerald is sailing close to the wind, suspects that he might be dealing with the aid of inside information. He’s thirty-one, a big boy, but I hope he doesn’t get caught, hope he stops in time.

  My son Edward is gay. For Christmas, he brought me a pair of satin pyjamas and his latest boyfriend. Edward refused to accompany Gerald when the statutory visit to Tommo was paid. ‘He’s not my father anyway,’ he said. ‘And he hates what I am.’ All his life, Edward was different, separate from the common herd. He has told me how he felt, how he suffered through being ‘soft’ and ‘queer’. From a very early age, he was uncomfortable, troubled. When people go on about gays being perverts, I lose my rag a bit, stand up for my middle child’s principles. Edward was always a loner. If I’d had half a brain as a young woman, I would have realized long ago that my Edward had been predisposed from birth to be extraordinary. He’s a fine man with a good heart, he’s a man who was programmed from the start to love people of his own sex. With the aid of money from me and Ben, Edward owns and runs a health club in Manchester. He still tends to overweight, continues to indulge in bouts of comfort-eating, so he fights the flab constantly, uses his own exercise machines to sweat away the fat. I love him, find him gentle yet cuttingly witty.

  Chewy runs to me, the nine-inch tongue lolling and dripping onto my coat. ‘Woof,’ he says companionably. He wants me to run with him. ‘Woof off,’ I reply. He gives me a paw, soggy, dripping with sand and oily water.

  ‘What about Jodie?’ I ask him. ‘Will she ever settle down, or is she going to carry on for ever like another bloody Confetti?’

  ‘Woof.’ He spots a distant dog, bounds away jerkily, his legs splaying like the limbs of a marionette whose master has not yet served his apprenticeship.

  Jodie is a newly qualified doctor who travels about, refuses to settle to a life of medicine until she’s winkled out what everybody, with the exception of her good self, calls the madness. The madness consists of Oxfam frocks, open sandals, dirty hair and a small motor home. She looks just like Confetti used to look, a nightmare from the late sixties, plaited hair-bands, tangled locks, large pendant earrings, a weather-beaten skin, eyebrows almost knitted together by all that unnecessary thinking.

  I keep telling my errant and lovable daughter that the world will find its own way to hell, but she will insist on being concerned. Being concerned to a certain level is fine, even commendable. But jumping in with both feet, a BAN THE WHATEVER sign and a bad attitude is taking altruism that little bit too far, I’d say. She’s been arrested on Greenham Common in her youth, more recently in Trafalgar Square (I never asked what she was doing on that occasion, could not bear to hear what she’d perpetrated in the metropolis) and, last month, outside some remand centre where she campaigned, none too quietly, for the release of one of her numerous unsuitable boyfriends.

  Chewy is starting a war. A small black terrier has not accepted the attentions of the exploded sofa that masquerades as my pet, is barking furiously as Chewy leaps about in circles. I run, arrive at the scene of the crime, pacify owner and canine with words of apology. They both escape to the car park. I hold Chewy’s collar, listen until the Mini’s angry engine is started. Strange how some ill-tempered little people have noisy little cars and nasty little dogs. And how some tall, unkempt women called Laura have long-legged unmade beds as companions. He is a mess. I adore him.

  I am not a snob. At least, I think I’m not a snob. But Jodie will pick up people with problems, folk with disorders ranging from simple dyslexia to apparent paranoid schizophrenia. And skin problems. When she does deign to arrive home, it is usually in the company of some youth whose face owns more craters than are visible on the moon when viewed through a high-powered telescope. And she isn’t even remotely interested in dermatology. She came three weeks ago, breezed in, ate, had a quick bath, drifted away again. This time, she was alone and on her way to pick up some newly released and downtrodden convict with ‘morals’. God help him, he’ll be wishing he’d stayed inside.

  For Christmas, Jodie bought me a book about somebody with Alzheimer’s. ‘It can be coped with, Mother. A sufferer isn’t always miserable, you know.’ She brought nothing for her father, did not visit him. ‘I’ve seen him twice,’ she protested. ‘And there was no discernible improvement on the second occasion.’ When she doesn’t like somebody, she makes no bones.

  Chewy and I amble home, fight in the rear porch with a bucket and a towel. He doesn’t enjoy having his feet washed any more than I enjoy seeing my towels ripped to bits. When we are both breathless, we collapse in the kitchen, a cup of coffee for me, a handful of biscuits for the miscreant. Flakey drinks some formula, is lapping well. The dog stares at Handel, considers having a go at the immobile cat, thinks better of it, snores at my feet.

  The gate creaks. My dog opens an eye, looks at me. ‘No more barking, please,’ I beg. ‘It’s not a burglar.’ He would probably find a burglar exciting, would welcome him with a big smile and a quivering tongue.

  I rise, look through the window, believe for a moment that I have conjured up Jodie just by thinking about her. But no. This is a different kettle of frankfurters altogether. I remember that she likes sausages and Carnation, not necessarily on the same plate, that her name is Diana and that it’s not Thursday. She was supposed to iron my things on Thursday.

  I open the door, stare at the vision before me. My uninvited guest is dressed very much à la Jodie, that is to say she looks extremely odd. There’s a
blue flat cap which has lost much of its flatness because of the blond hair bundled into it. Then there’s a filthy anorak type of jacket with just a hint of green showing between dozens of badges and slogans. The leggings are purple today, but there remains some consistency in the feet, which are clad again in those huge and hideous Doc Martens. During my lifespan, I have been privileged to know three such fashion-plates – this one, my daughter, my dear friend Confetti.

  After looking her up and down, I wait for her to speak, but nothing happens. ‘Well?’ I say, watching as she sweeps a smutty mark from the end of her nose. ‘What do you want this time? I’m not having a new door.’

  She placed her worldly goods at my feet, and I am reminded now of Handel, who sometimes bestirs himself to contribute to the larder by bringing home a dead bird or two. Today’s offering is just as unsavoury, two aged Woolworth’s bags and a filthy canvas backpack that looks as if it might have served in both world wars, perhaps the Crimea too. ‘Can I come in?’ She has a way of making her eyes round, looks like a neglected and wilful infant begging for sweets.

  ‘You may come in tomorrow night, do the ironing. Then, if you like, you might magnolia the dining-room walls on Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘I hate that colour. It’s not a colour, it’s a bad mood.’

  ‘Then stay away.’ I do not care, I am telling myself sternly. She is not my child, not my responsibility.

  She glances over her shoulder, waves a hand towards the steely grey water. ‘Where do I go till tomorrow, Laura?’

  ‘Double-glazing, I presume.’ She is a lost soul, but so am I, so are we all. Yet I am weakening, will give in any minute now. ‘What happened?’ I feel my shoulders sagging. If I let her in, will she stay for ever, become one of those tenants who sit there for all eternity? And will she wear me down to the point where I might buy a front door which looks like plastic, is a dead ringer for extruded UPVC?