Brass

by Helen Walsh

  Lola’s is seedy as fuck. The reception is full of bagheads on the nod and homeless lads arguing in sleep-starved gibberish. The receptionist sits behind a shield of plastic scraping the sweat from his skull with a beer mat. His eyes are fixed to a pair of silicone breasts filling the whole of a portable TV screen. I ring the bell.

  He lurches his head round, absorbing me in one lingering sweep.

  ‘I only have a double left,’ he says before I can speak. ‘But yer can take it for single occupancy.’

  He simpers at me as though he’s said something impossibly funny.

  ‘Thanks,’ I spit and push the money through a gap in the shield. He pushes me a key and offers to show me up to the room. I decline with a firm face and once in the stairway, bolt up to my room and lock myself in. The air is fat with cigarettes and stale bodies. I prise open a window, shove a chair against the door, then collapse fully clothed onto a steel-hard bed. I sleep fitfully, lurid apparitions of angry invisible insects upon my skin and evil men entering the room creeping in and out of my dreams. The sound of scratching beneath the bed finally jolts me awake around five. My eyes ache and hammer, but no way am I going back to sleep. It hurts to swallow. I empty my bladder, splash cold water on my face and stumble bleary-eyed to reception. John Wayne is straddled across the backs of two galloping horses firing a pistol at the fat guy who is snoring like a pig. I hand a homeless lad my key, tell him to take my room then plunge out into the fuzzy black morning. In spite of the chill damp of the early winter’s morning, I am euphoric. Today is a new day. I spark a cigarette, draw deep on it, and head to the bus station.

  It’s filled with night people. Homeless, drunks, insomniacs, the unclaimed, the unloved and the unlovable. Was I one of these people? Would I have been? I find my platform and settle on a bench beside a shivering teenager, all peroxide and make-up – a boil in the bag kind of pretty that’ll be gone for good in a year or so. I flirt with the idea of firing up conversation but there is something volatile in her eyes. All I want is to talk, to while away the time.

  The journey is long and dark. The girl sits behind me snoozing gently against the window while I stare wide eyed and manic into disconnected flashes of scenery. Battalions of new-build houses squashed onto wasted city land. Massed council estates overhanging infallible swathes of beauty – hills, lakes, valleys, slowly revealing themselves under the shifting inflections of morning. We snake deeper into the countryside, far, far away from the madness of the city. Somewhere, out there, way beyond the frost-bitten greens and amphetamine-plated mountain peaks is my Mother. This is my Mum’s land. My head becomes light with her memory. Her soft hands and shy smile. Her brilliant, fiery eyes – Mum’s eyes. Bright and trustworthy and forever.

  Following the bus driver’s instructions, I walk through a dawdling village, veer left at the church and then down into a dip specked with small, cosy cottages. I am bewitched and emotional. All previous fears and apprehension of my unexpected arrival are made nothing in the presence of such beauty. I clock the house numbers and make my way to number ten – it is almost too much for my eyes to drink in.

  Her house is small, very plain, but pretty, decked with holly and a tangle of creepers. I pause at the gate and my heart starts to flip. Birds bicker in the eaves above. A pure white winter sun glows majestic beyond the peaks. I wait and watch. I’m not fearful now – I only want this moment to last. I want to remember the minutes before I found my Mother again.

  And then a light at the kitchen window and she’s filling a kettle from a big brass tap. It’s her. She’s right there, even more beautiful than I remember. A big maelstrom of emotions are thrashing through me now – excitement and fear and a mad, mad thrill that I can see her there and she doesn’t know I’m here. The very act of her filling the kettle floods my heart with so much love that I can’t hold back my tears. I push the gate open. She’s yawning, running a hand through her hair. And her hair has grown so long! I’m down the path now and Christ, there she is, so perfect and beautiful. She moves away from the window and the sudden absence pangs sharply in my stomach. I shuffle to the door and the crunch of my feet on the gravel brings her back to the window. Our eyes meet and she stares into my face and all thoughts leak away, so my head is just white and empty and filled with nothing else but the vision of her.

  Mum. My beautiful Mum. Look who’s here.

  For a taster of Helen Walsh's latest book, read on . . .

  Go to Sleep

  Out in July 2011

  BEFORE

  1

  So here we are then, finally. Here I am, taking in the slow chug of the river one last time; one last trip as Rachel, as me. Me. Here I am, inhaling the salty, diesel stink, trying to drink it all in and hold it down, each and every nuance of the early morning – the wind turbines, the seagulls, the ferry boat pulling away and, further down the prom, the huddle of school boys hunched over the railings, gazing out cross-river like the menacing mastheads of an armada. I want to commit all of this to memory – every beat, every inflection of the sky and the low silver light on the water.

  It will be different, next time I come.

  The tide and all its spume and gullies will have moved on to a distant shore. The sky will have shifted, the clouds drifted away. Everything will have changed. And so, too, shall I.

  * * *

  A gentle rain. I shelter under the conker tree that bows the sandstone wall of our old house. Before the baby, before all this, I hadn’t much thought of the place in years. Yet I keep coming back, now – back to the river, back for another look at the old wreck; South Lodge. A wreck that, for all its buckled walls and tang of damp, felt loved, lived in; felt like home. But it’s a wreck no longer. The sash windows that gave a glimpse of the water and Snowdonia way beyond, sometimes shaky, sometimes stiff, and the glass my doughty mother would devoutly clean when the mellow light exposed the river’s streaks and sprays, those old casement windows have been replaced with durable PVC. And the gardens – Dad’s jungle, where we’d plant the seeds and snips he brought back from his travels; that riot of untamed, secret scent and vine, tangle and trunk – it’s all been hacked away now, cut back, managed and manicured by South Lodge’s new owners, whoever they may be. When I first started coming back down here, I half hoped to catch a glimpse of them. Now I’ve lost interest. Some things just are.

  I’m glad that Mum isn’t around to see the old place. She was a snob, my mother. She kept it well hidden, but she was a tyrant at heart. Her disdain for anything modish – ‘fads’, as she used to denounce them – bordered on the manic at times. When the new housing developments began to spring up along the riverfront, her eyes would gleam with spite.

  ‘Would you look at those awful, ticky-tacky porches?’ she’d say. ‘Doric-effect columns, for goodness sake. What on earth!’

  But she loved the Lodge. She really, truly loved our house, till the day she died. Thinking of her, I’m happy-sad, right now.

  The rain peters out to a needle-fine sprinkle, cool on my face and hands. I loiter in the churchyard, waiting for the morning rush hour traffic to drop off before I head over to Lark Lane. I’ll have a lazy mope around the bookstore and antique shops, maybe a coffee at the Moon and Pea if I find something good to read. I’ve been looking forward to my maternity leave for weeks, yet now that it’s here I’m rudderless, guilt-ridden, unable to switch off from work: how will my kids get on in my absence? Keeley Callaghan, up in court again today; Milan, the Roma boy, only thirteen and already having to scrap for dear life, just to get by in cold, hard Kirkdale. And then there’s James. James McIver, my biggest challenge yet. How is he responding to Siobhan? How is she coping? Not too well, I find myself hoping. I was jealous, I admit, when I went in for the final handover and found her perched on the corner of my desk, chatting and laughing with Milan. He’s been a client since July, but I’d never even seen him smile. It’s hard enough getting him to open up at all – so much darkness already in his young life, so much hatred. But the
re was Shiv – Shiv by the way! – cracking a joke with little pint-sized Milan. And his beautiful dark eyes sparkled for a moment, and in that moment he was a child again. A kid. My heart lurched, it’s true – I was jealous that my young stand-in was getting responses I could never elicit. Fair enough, then – the kids love Shiv. She’s a natural rusty blonde, she’s tomboy pretty and, at twenty-one, she can engage them on a level I never will at my age. But can she get Milan a school place? They’ve already been back a week and getting him settled was a major priority for us. Did she remember the application for uniform vouchers? And has James Mac been turning up for that plasterer’s course? I finger my work mobile but sigh out loud and bury it deep in my bag. I touch my stomach and smile my apology to the Bean. I am going to enjoy this.

  I take my time sifting through the books in the Amorous Cat, Miles Davis parsing his sorrow in the background. I find myself vacillating between the books I want to have read and those I want to read. I fudge it, plumping for a collection of Paul Bowles essays and Jackie Collins’ Lady Boss. I know which august tome will be seeing me through the next few weeks and beyond. I picture the scene: me, sat up in bed reading, a late September sun slanting across the baby’s head as he suckles at my breast. I’m sure the Bean is a boy; he just feels like a boy, and if he is I know exactly what I will call him. My tummy does a little flip at the thought of him – that he’ll be here, in my arms, any time now; but the reverie is broken by the bray of school kids over the road. Instinctively, I grope for my work phone in my bag. I dig it out and fire it up again, recalling Faye’s knowing face admonishing me with a look, hearing again the snap of her North Liverpool accent.

  ‘You do not take that mobile out of this office! Hear me? You are going to take time out and you are going to enjoy this marvellous thing.’

  Now there’s a Lady Boss for you.

  I pay, decline the shop’s cute carrier bag and make my way down to the park.

  I pass by Keith’s, already filling up with its regular cast of students, retired yet ever-more-opinionated academics, professional malingerers and aspiring musicians. Perhaps I should go in and join them, enjoy a glass of wine. A small Rioja would surely take the edge off my funk, help me to forget about work. But a sudden lunge from within, a tiny heel or fist, jolts me back to the here and now. I carry on past the wine bar, nostalgic but happy again, too.

  I did love that part of my life – long Saturday afternoons at Keith’s, squabbles about books or music, arcane conversations with strangers at the next table, just one more glass, one more bottle. That’d be me, holed up next to the Indian Professor bickering about nothing in particular. Professor of what, nobody could be certain – he just turned up one evening and, in that cultured, strident and authoritative voice of his, calmly destroyed Mitch Levin’s argument about liberal Islamic states. I loved him for it, mainly because I despised that beardy wanker Levin so much; he’d routinely thrash single female drinkers with his intellect then try, hatefully, to bed them. But the Indian Professor put paid to that, and in no time at all he was one of us; one of the regulars at the wine bar. It was my world not so long ago, but I’m happy to be leaving it behind. I’m ready for motherhood now, ready to be a mum. I want it so badly, it’s hard to imagine ever caring about anything else. Nothing, but nothing else is important any more.

  I smile for my own benefit, because the truth is that a year ago I’d given up thinking about children. I was thirty, enjoying life, enjoying work; I wanted to fall in love, of course I did – and as much as I loved my rogues and ragamuffins at work, I dearly wanted kids of my own. Yet, as time ticked by, on some instinctive level I’d come to understand that love wasn’t going to happen again for me; and I was fine with that. I met plenty enough interesting men – well, I met some; one or two. Being relatively tall and, I suppose, passably interesting-looking with my mane of red hair, I’ve never wanted for male attention; it’s just that I’ve never wanted it either, really. I may be a harsh judge, but I know within moments whether a man is going to set me on fire, and so, so many of them just don’t. And it’s fire I’m looking for. If it’s not there, it’s not there.

  But that was where I was, then: with the exception of my waning relationship with my father – and I knew we could fix that easily enough with a bit of give from him, a bit of take from me – there was not one single aspect of my world that felt lacking. I was chugging along in a state of grace where everything was in its right place and my world made sense to me; and then I got pregnant.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised; spontaneous, unprotected sex opens up the possibility of pregnancy. But I was shocked, when it was confirmed; then deeply frightened. My pure response was one of being unready, caught out, found out. I’d wanted a baby for so long, yet now it was real I felt exposed and wholly ill-equipped for the road ahead. A huge part of that stemmed from the circumstances of the conception – not even a fling, let’s be honest, but a knee-trembler with an old flame. But that was the thing. Ruben was a flame; and I just didn’t want to tell him he was daddy. I postponed any decision, bided my time.

  And then came the scare at nine weeks, the bleed and the frenzied dash to hospital. That was the real shock – that, as the taxi tried to weave a path between the speed bumps and I dug my nails into the ball of my thumb, silently cursing the cabbie to go faster – my plan for this, for life, just settled upon me like an apparition. I actually laughed out loud. Of course, of course I would do this alone! It would be me and the baby; just the two of us. It had been that way for me since Mum died. It was always meant to be like that. And I swore to myself that if my embryo survived this trauma I would love it like no other. I would be the best mother a child could ever have.

  The nurse who examined me seemed functional, disengaged; but then I caught her gulping and I knew. The baby was dead. The miniature life form had failed and she didn’t know how to tell me. I tried to envisage just how tiny, how frail its little heart must have been. She gave me a pitying look, swallowed hard and left the room; left me wired up to the monitor, left me to work it out for myself. Her footsteps echoed like gunshots in the corridor beyond. I didn’t move. I didn’t want to know. For as long as this moment prevailed, as long as nobody came back into the room and took my hand in theirs, looked me directly in the eye and prefaced their tidings with a sigh, then there was still a chance.

  The nurse came back in with a doctor or a surgeon, a man in a white gown with a full day’s stubble. Neither of them even glanced at me. The nurse pointed at the screen and the doctor nodded. He muttered something to the nurse, gave her another curt nod and turned sharply, left as quickly as he could. Left it to her.

  But then she turned the monitor round. Jesus! She was turning the monitor round so I could see it and the cruelty of it almost knocked me out.

  Her voice brightened. ‘Now, what we’re looking at here . . .’ She pointed to a greyish, wispy mass, like the cloud cover on a weather report’s satellite photograph. ‘This is Baby, here.’

  I almost choked. She hadn’t said the foetus was alive, but surely she wouldn’t be showing me if . . .

  ‘Is it?’

  She smiled. ‘Baby’s fine. It’s a little small but it’s just . . .’

  And the moment I saw it, that tiny pulse on the monitor, the struggling mass no bigger than a kidney bean, that was it. That was me, gone – smashed with a love more ferocious than anything I’d ever known. I knew then, where I was heading, where I’d been heading my whole life. I was more certain of it than I had been of anything before. When I was finally able to stand, to function, I thanked the nurse. She looked stunned when I tried to hug her.

  My head spinning with ideas, plans, contradictions, I walked automatically, instinctively, towards the Anglican Cathedral. There, my mind might slow down. There, I could be close to Mum. I sat out on the café’s terrace, the only customer on a bleak and beautiful February afternoon, gazing out over that spectacular vista. Trees, endless sky, silent graveyards below. Gambier Terrac
e directly opposite, where this began. Where it ended. I should tell him. It was right that he should know. I could call him. Or I could just walk over there now, knock on the door and break the news to him. But that’s how it would be, wouldn’t it? I’d be telling him something he really didn’t want to hear. Dad was right about that part – that’ll be why he did what he did. Held him off. Held him back. And besides – what if they’d offered Ruben the job? He’s on the verge of a new life. He needs it. Not that they’d give him the job – a black lad from Liverpool 8 working in a place like that. But for my part, I can do my bit.

  I felt my eyes well up, and I knotted my fingers tightly round my cup. Yet the overpowering sense of destiny that rinsed me through and through came without fear, without sentiment. Calmly, with a cold, still certitude, I made my big decision; and it was easy. It was clear. I was going to do this thing by myself – all the way. I shivered and sipped my coffee, smiling to myself.

  *

  By the time I reach the park I’m perspiring wildly. The baby’s feet are pushing up into my chest, its head bearing down on my bladder. I need to pee, and fast. I steal a quick glance either side and duck into the bushes. Squatting uncomfortably, it seems to go on for ever – one solid jet of foul-smelling yellow, a stench so sharp you could nick yourself on it. These last few weeks I’ve felt as though a separate pregnancy has inhabited my bladder, so tight and cumbersome has it become. I shake myself, sigh out loud with relief. The baby relaxes, reclines into the extra legroom and the pressure eases on my lungs.