“I said, where d’ye think yer goin’?” The questioning is ritualistic, a way of searching for provocation in the least response, a question demanding the right answer. Elizabeth mutters, “Home,” her head bent low. Elsa says nothing. Then Elizabeth starts to cry.
“Are yous Fenians? Did yous hear me ask ye where ye fuckin’ live?” The long boy grows longer with the prospect of giving out a good beating. “Say the fuckin’ alphabet, yous wee fuckin’ Taigs. Say it!” Elsa and Elizabeth remain silent. Elizabeth wipes away the tears that are running down her face. “Have yous gone fuckin’ dumb or somethin’?” The long boy stands glaring at them. “Say the fuckin’ alphabet!”
Elizabeth lifts her head and is just about to start with the letter A, when suddenly, out of nowhere, a figure runs up from behind the group and pelts Elizabeth with eggs. Two, three, thrown at her face, another at her legs. The splat-splat against Elizabeth’s head confuses her. She raises her hands in protection, thinking someone has thrown stones at her, but then she feels the globules of egg white and yoke running down her face.
The group whoop and jeer, delighted with this surprise gift, satisfaction spreading over their faces like an infectious rash. The perpetrator hollers into the air and then scoots off across the road, gone perhaps to get more of his friends to gloat over his target. The long boy backs off. “Fuck yous,” he says. “Yous wee dolls need a hair wash.” He cackles wildly with his cohorts, leaving Elizabeth and Elsa alone.
Elizabeth stands sobbing, her face and hands slimy with egg white, a burst of egg yolk splattered on the crown of her head, shell caught in the strands of her hair, bits of eggs spotting the front of her coat. Elsa finds two egg spots on her sleeve. She rubs them off, then looks at Elizabeth. Passersby look, too, but make no remark, nor offer help.
Elsa wants to leave Elizabeth there and run away. But she doesn’t. They stand on the street, Elizabeth sobbing quietly, Elsa unable to comfort her.
Eventually, they shuffle onward, toward the bus, toward home.
On the bus, no one makes any comment, not even the bus conductor, who only shows some reluctance in taking the money from Elizabeth’s sticky hand. The egg in Elizabeth’s hair has a rotten smell. It feels like cool orange blood on her scalp. She sits on the bus with Elsa, still and quiet, holding her bus ticket, her schoolbag, and an unused alphabet.
When they arrive home, Elsa goes upstairs to find her mother and tell her what has happened, crawling up the stairs like a sherpa carrying a bagful of pitiful news. On reaching the top stair, she is halted by the sound of deep, low voices behind the closed door of her parents’ bedroom.
After a few moments, the bedroom door opens and Elsa, overcome with a sudden feeling of guilt, flees.
Now a stranger follows her down the stairs and stops to use the telephone without even asking. The stranger smells like a doctor. His shoes are shiny and his glasses have a silver chain that loops around the back of his neck. He speaks with a serious tone on the telephone, he writes something in his notebook, and as he turns to go back upstairs, he catches sight of Elsa. He smiles at her, nodding his head all the while, as if he is agreeing with himself. He looks as though he is trying to squeeze the smile out of his face.
“Ah . . . yes,” he says simply, and goes back upstairs.
Elizabeth sits quietly in the kitchen. She has made no move to wipe her hair or face. Elsa had gone upstairs to fetch Elizabeth a towel from the airing cupboard in the bathroom but had come down again empty-handed in her sudden departure after the doctor had opened the door. Now, at least, Elsa shows Elizabeth some concern.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, thank you,” Elizabeth says politely. “Where’s Mummy?” Elizabeth blows her nose on a crumpled tissue from her coat pocket. Snot and egg white are indistinguishable.
“She’s upstairs.”
“Who was that on the telephone?”
“A man.”
“What man?”
“I don’t know. A man.”
“What’s Mummy doing upstairs?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is she asleep?”
“No. She talking to Daddy.”
“Oh, Daddy’s home?” Elizabeth, for the first time since the incident, manages a small smile. “I didn’t even see his car.”
“It’s parked on the street.”
“Why is it parked on the street?”
“I don’t know.” The conversation comes to a natural halt. Both of the girls realize how strange it is for the house to be this quiet when they come home from school. Whatever is happening upstairs seems to have cast a spell over everything.
Elizabeth and Elsa hear heavy movements on the floorboards above them. There are footfalls on the stairs and then the front door of the house opens and closes. The two girls remain sitting in the kitchen. Elizabeth begins to shiver.
Upstairs in the back bedroom, everything, in a single moment, reduces itself to a point of nascent panic when the word cancer is mentioned. The doctor has advised George that Katherine be taken to the hospital for treatment immediately, for as far as he can tell, the cancer, wherever it started, has spread to her spine. George cannot hear anything the doctor is saying after he hears the word cancer. The doctor’s mouth is moving, but George cannot decipher sound. The doctor is writing something on a piece of paper and showing it to him, but George cannot make sense of it. It is as though the furniture in the room is rapidly being sucked, piece by piece, into a vacuum and that any second they, too, George and Katherine, will be sucked away.
Finally, the tiredness that Katherine had been feeling is explained to her, and the nausea is explained to her, and the breathlessness, and the back pain.
Now Katherine is moaning in disbelief and shaking her head, a gentle grimace on her face. She cannot comprehend it. She is staring at the doctor expectantly, as if she is waiting for him to change his mind. But the doctor doesn’t change his mind. After a few moments, he leaves the room to make a phone call, and as he opens the bedroom door, he finds Elsa scurrying away down the stairs.
Strange to say that, after this, Elsa will not have any memory of her mother leaving the house. What she will remember is her father coming into the kitchen, looking agitated and white-faced, and she will remember his gentle, if somewhat distracted, concern over Elizabeth and the eggs in her hair and the long boy. She will remember how, eventually, she helped Elizabeth out of her stained uniform and helped her to wash her brown-black hair in the bathroom sink. How she dried Elizabeth’s hair by the two-bar electric fire in the back room, Elizabeth’s cheeks getting overly hot and flushed, and how she brushed Elizabeth’s hair until it was beautiful again. She will remember Isabel calling at the house and sneering at Elizabeth on hearing about the egg incident, and she will remember telling Isabel that that wasn’t a very nice way to behave and then Isabel leaving with her head down. She will remember that later she and Elizabeth joined Maureen and Stephen at Nanny Anna’s, and that she and Nanny Anna and Maureen and Elizabeth sat playing cards at the little round table in Nanny Anna’s front room, and that they lifted their heads occasionally from their game of cards and caught Stephen, wrapped up in his woolen coat in the garden, pulling leaves off the winter shrubs and laughing.
11
December 1969
KATHERINE NOW SHARES A WARD with six other women, all suffering from cancer. She wears a lilac nightdress and a pink dressing gown. She feels the nightdress is too short, but it was all that was available to her—she had pulled it hastily from the airing cupboard—and she tugs the hem of her dressing gown once again to cover her bare knees.
George is with her now. He has managed to secure two days off from work to get Katherine settled. He can leave shortly to get Katherine whatever she needs, toothpaste, tissues, soap, a longer nightdress.
The consultant’s registrar has already been on his rounds and has taken some details from Katherine, confirming her age, the name of her G.P., which medication she has been on, if any.
The questions from the registrar had been innocuous enough, but to Katherine they were able to stir within her a deep sense of anxiety and panic. The registrar had written down her details on the sheet of ruled paper pinned to his clipboard, writing them down as she spoke quietly or George spoke for her. The registrar was a young man, no more than early thirties, his registrar’s coat just a little too big for him. He had spoken to Katherine and George with the acquired veneer of authority. He had informed them that shortly Katherine would be taken down to the Radiology Department on the ground floor for a chest X-ray and then Mr. Kentworth—He had stopped to ask if they’d met the consultant, Mr. Kentworth. No, Katherine and George had replied. Well, after the X-ray Mr. Kentworth would be able to get a clearer picture of Katherine’s condition and then decide how best to proceed with treatment. The registrar had left them, a self-satisfied look on his face, cocking his head sideways as he passed the nurses’ station in the assumption that there would be an admiring audience. But the nurses’ station was empty.
Now Katherine and George wait. They say very little to each other because talking seems like a frightening thing to do. It does not help them forget. It does not help them pass the time. It merely serves to draw their attention in, to copper-fasten their terror.
George holds Katherine’s hand, absentmindedly stroking the elongated soft hollows between her knuckles and rubbing the tips of his fingers across Katherine’s nails, which have begun to curl back over and around her fingertips. Both Katherine and George look around the ward. They are out of their depth. The smell of the ward and its muted sounds blend to become one awful, indistinguishable thing.
The other women in the ward lie propped up in their beds, assuming the shapes of women. Only one woman sits on a chair, rocking slightly back and forth with her hand across her mouth, her hair just two small tufted bunches on her head.
Katherine looks at George.
He does not exist in her mind. He is real. Her marriage to him does not exist in her mind, but comes from real things. Has always come from real things. It is more than love, is it not? It is the sweet pattern of compromise. It is love and more than love. She has suspected this. Suspected it long before her illness ever distilled her.
And as she watched George then, the night she stood on the little veranda of their Mexican hotel, she had felt that the sky was too big to be true. Looking up, it was the widest expanse she had ever seen and still blazing, although the tyranny of the daytime sun had waned. Incidental clusters of cloud, bathed in a burning sunset orange, broke the foreverness of the sky and helped her feel less overwhelmed by it, gave her eyes something to latch onto. These clouds felt almost merciful to her. She had never seen anything like this before.
She stood on the wooden veranda, which faced onto a broad stone courtyard. Shadows fell from the yucca plants and the bougainvillea. Behind her, the town square, out of which a church spire stretched elegantly over the surrounding low buildings with their ugly loose-hinged shutters, was quiet. She could smell the resin from the wood beneath her bare feet. The wood was warm. The air was warm. And from off of her skin rose the faint, and not unpleasant odor of her perspiration.
She turned from the sky to look through the open door into the room beyond. She watched George. He was inside, sitting on the bed and fixing the strap of her sandal, which had snapped during their walk back to the hotel that evening. He was quietly and intently working with a needle and thread.
Beside the bed, its plain covers of limp cotton crumpled from their lovemaking, sat two sombreros, one on top of the other, on a squat cabinet. She and George had bought them when they had stopped to get their bus at the border town of Nogales. The markets there had been full of street sellers crouched on the ground, selling sweets and flowers, some offering little wooden images and idols of baked clay. Mangoes had spilled from plaited baskets. There had been papayas and bitter cucumbers, too. She and George had both felt the flush of inelegance when one street seller, a man with a deep-set jaw and coal black eyes, had reached out to take their camera and had gestured to them to pose for a photograph in their new hats. They had stood for what seemed like an achingly long time while the street seller pointed the camera this way and that, their arms slung around each other, motionless in their vulnerability, smiling into the sun, and had felt obliged to give him extra pesos.
The trip to Mexico would symbolize a new start for them, George had said. And after Katherine had finally agreed on a wedding date, he could think of nothing else. His plan was for them to travel by boat from Belfast to Liverpool and then take the transatlantic liner on to New York. Arriving in New York, they would board the Southern Pacific Railroad Golden State train to Phoenix, Arizona, stopping overnight in Kansas City. In Phoenix, he and Katherine would stay with Mildred, his mother’s sister, until he had secured a job and a small flat to rent. His job prospects at home with the Belfast City Council were modest, to say the least, and he felt fervently that America promised them a better life. Mildred had assured him in her letters that there were plenty of opportunities in the burgeoning electronic and clothing industries in Phoenix as long as he was prepared to accept any position to start with. She already had a list of employers for him to contact when he arrived. So George and Katherine’s wedding was also a wake. They said their good-byes to family, friends, and colleagues to begin their new life together, a strain of anxiety visible in both their faces, despite the obvious excitement of the day.
Their journey from Belfast to Phoenix would take them almost twelve days, and they had put aside enough money to then celebrate a week’s honeymoon together before George would begin looking for work. Being so close to the U.S. border, Mexico had seemed the obvious choice for a honeymoon. It had also seemed exotic to them, dangerous almost. Clearly the start of something new. But as they set off on their trip out of Phoenix, they suspected that their honeymoon had been ill planned. A little too much to take on in a week. They had already felt the journey across the country to Arizona very long and tiring, and then here they were almost immediately setting off again. They took a Greyhound bus from Phoenix to Nogales, which was comfortable enough. However, the bus journey onward from Nogales had been long and hot (the only “air conditioning” was the fleeting rasps of still-warm air sucked in occasionally through the open windows of the bus). The bus had rattled along the rough sandy roads through scrubland, infants sleeping on the floor, the driver chewing coca leaves in an attempt to keep himself awake, and it had taken almost six hours to reach their final destination, Alamos. It disheartened them to realize that after only three days in Alamos, they would make the return journey, stopping once again at Nogales to catch the Greyhound bus back to Phoenix.
Despite all that, the time spent together in the heat and the uncomfortable confinement of the bus had reduced them. It had disabled their quick judgments and their small talk and had induced a kind of sleepy acceptance of this harsh new world through which they moved together, watching the mountains push majestically toward them as they traveled south.
When they arrived at Alamos, they had walked from their cheap hotel through the town, crossing the almost colorless central arcaded plaza, catching glimpses, here and there through half-open doorways, of the small patios beyond filled with marguerites and with carnations of yellow and white. They had talked and walked holding hands. They had sat waiting patiently in the heat at an empty bar just off the central square, where, eventually, they were served seasoned pork sandwiches and refried beans, which they washed down with glasses of lime water.
Refreshed, somewhat, they had walked back through the town and across the Plaza de Armas, where they had found a small museum—they were not sure whether it was even open, it seemed so empty and quiet, but it was—which had retouched photographs of the town in its heyday. The photographs showed Alamos’s rise to substantial wealth in the seventeenth century, following the discovery there of some of the richest silver ore in Mexico, a stark contrast to the sleepy town they now saw around them. Th
e mine workers stared out from the photographs with a fearsome intent, their large mustaches ringed in white dust. There was a little model of the mine itself and of the homestead of the Alamada family, who had governed the region after its independence. Someone had stuck a parakeet’s feather down into the chimney of the little house. A feathery plume of green-and-yellow smoke. Katherine slipped the feather out of the little chimney, thinking she might keep it as a memento.
“My turn to put the fire out,” she had said to George, giggling a little, and then had blown her breath upwards, through her pursed mouth to cool her face.
There was little to do in the town. Within an hour and a half, they had walked from one side of it to the other and back again and had had their modest meal and their visit to the museum, but it was just this sense of idleness which, they were suspecting, was enriching them.
And the way in which George had held her hand that day as they’d walked through the square of the small Mexican town, is the way in which he holds it still, now, among the drip trolleys and the dying women in the hospital ward. He holds her hand now the same way in which he has always held it, with love.
A porter arrives with a wheelchair to take Katherine to the Radiology Department, and with the porter is a friendly young nurse. When the results are examined by Mr. Kentworth, he will make a particular visit to Katherine and explain to her that, in his opinion, operating on the cancer is not an option. He will suggest radiotherapy and chemotherapy as a way forward. He will not inform Katherine to what extent the cancer has spread, but he will tell George. He will tell George that Katherine has, at most, six months to live and his lips will fall in a slight pout, as though he is about to say “Sorry.”
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