Blue Above the Chimneys

by Fraser, Christine Marion

  With one accord we all turned to look at him and I at any rate felt that the monster we had recently been watching on the celluloid had stepped from the screen to come walking out of the cinema with us. Da’s eye had taken on a new and hideous aspect. Most of the coloured iris was turned inwards and the white featureless globe that filled the eye socket was horrible to behold. It gave his face a sinister appearance made worse by the fact that he was grinning at the usherette and bidding her goodnight. ‘Ye wonder who thinks these picters up,’ he nodded, and the woman’s face distinctly quivered. Da was always pleasant to people of passing acquaintance and they usually responded to his jocose remarks, but the usherette’s reply came out in a series of inarticulate snorts.

  I stood on tiptoes and whispered to my crimson-faced sister, ‘He looks like Frankenstein’s monster, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, be quiet,’ snapped Kirsty, holding her head high despite her embarrassment.

  ‘John,’ hissed Mam, ‘your eye! It’s in the wrong way.’

  He looked at her in pop-eyed dismay, the smile fell from him, and he turned away to adjust the eye.

  The usherette kept her face averted as we passed but being a keen observer of the human race I knew that she was watching us from the side of her eye, her whole being agog with natural curiosity though her entire demeanour suggested a dignified disinterest.

  On the way home the funny side of the incident struck us.

  ‘That wifie thought she’d seen a bloody ghost,’ said Mam, throwing her head back and roaring with laughter.

  Da chuckled. ‘Ay, she turned a bit white, didn’t she?’

  ‘She thought you were a monster, Da,’ I added, feeling the occasion safely warranted a cheeky comment.

  He continued to poke fun at himself. ‘If I’d taken my wallies oot she would have got a worse fright! Imagine nae teeth and a goggle eye!’

  A giggle escaped from Kirsty who had been prone to a fit of the sulks for the last hour. It was difficult not to smile at the picture Da’s words presented to the mind.

  ‘I’ll buy ye all a poke of chips for a treat,’ he said benevolently. ‘Kirsty, away you in and get them. Buy a bag tae divide between Alec and Maggie, they’ll sulk if they don’t get any.’

  ‘Right, Da,’ said Kirsty, her legs taking her quickly into the chip shop and mine following with a far greater zest than they had taken me in the quest for Da’s glass eye.

  Needles and Bedpans

  I will never know why, how or when my lively, energetic little body became host to a rare disease that was to cause me many years of pain and inactivity. Health had always been a good companion of mine except for the usual childhood ailments. When Kirsty almost died of diphtheria at the age of ten and was so weak afterwards Mam had to wheel her round in a pushchair, I was sorry for my big sister but sublimely certain that nothing drastic would ever happen to me the way it did to Kirsty. These were the sort of things that always happened to other people. Such is the strength of human delimitation. If we didn’t build our own little boundaries we simply wouldn’t survive the mental strain.

  I had just celebrated my tenth birthday when a bad attack of bronchitis kept me off school. Mam put me to bed in the warm kitchen and spoiled me thoroughly. This was much to my liking. Being confined to bed meant steaming bowls of broth and all sorts of tit-bits. Mam was a tireless nurse. She knew when we were acting and when we were really ill.

  Coughing and spluttering, I lay in the bed recess, not too ill to enjoy my favourite storybooks and listening with half an ear to Mam and Da talking.

  The bronchitis weakened my chest so much I was taken to a clinic where I lay in agonies of apprehension under a sun-ray lamp with my eyes covered by goggles. Soon after this I contracted conjunctivitis which had barely cleared up when I took an attack of jaundice which left me with an enlarged spleen and a total aversion to certain foods. I didn’t really understand it all but Mam was kept busy taking me to doctors and clinics.

  After a while I was sent back to school but my zest for life had gone. My legs ached with tiredness and I dragged myself listlessly round the house. At school I could barely pull one leg after the other. The other children thought it was all a pretence. I had always acted the clown and now they thought this was just another game so I was shoved and jostled and told to get moving.

  During a routine medical examination the school nurse discovered I had shingles round my middle. I had endured the pain for days, not saying a word to anyone because I was afraid of all the strange things that had been happening to me. I dreaded the discovery of the painful little blisters because I harboured a secret fear of being sent to hospital.

  ‘Lift your vest up, Christine,’ said the nurse with calm detachment.

  ‘It’s attached to my knickers,’ I told her, grimly holding on to the garment in question.

  ‘Stop playing games,’ she said, whipping up my vest and spying my red band of spots immediately. ‘You’ll have to see your own doctor, Christine,’ she told me kindly. ‘I’ll give you a note home to your mother. You can go home right away.’

  Normally I would have shouted for joy at being let off lessons, but now I was afraid I had some awful disease. On the way home I swung my satchel half-heartedly and stared at the note in my hand, wondering whether to tear it up so that Mam wouldn’t find out about my spots. Then I remembered, tonight was bath tub night. Out would come the big zinc tub, one after the other we would stand in it to get washed before the fire. My blisters were bound to be discovered so there was no point in tearing up the note.

  Mam read it, then examined my belly. ‘Och, Chris,’ she chided gently. ‘They’re awful sore-looking. Why did you no’ tell me about them?’

  Hot tears sprang to my eyes. ‘I think I’ve got a terrible trouble. I don’t want to be sent to hospital.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, it’s only shingles … though bairns like you don’t usually get them. The doctor will give you something to clear them up.’

  The doctor poked my belly, felt my spleen, and shook his head.

  ‘She’s always been a robust wee lass,’ frowned Mam. ‘Now she seems to be taking everything that comes along. It’s no’ like our Chris.’

  After I had been given a good overhaul he took Mam aside and spoke to her quietly. I didn’t know it then, but he was telling her he was going to arrange for me to go into hospital for observation.

  Mam couldn’t bring herself to tell me but one day a postcard popped into the lobby. Always eager to see what the postie had brought, I went to pick it up from the rough hair mat at the door. With incredulous eyes I stared at the card, then carried it through to the kitchen where Mam was making pancakes.

  ‘Mam!’ I exploded in panic. ‘There’s been a mistake! This card says I’ve to go to hospital! It’s not true, is it, Mam? You won’t let them take me away?’

  She sat down heavily in her hard little chair to look at me with green eyes clouded with misery. ‘Oh, Chris, my wee lamb,’ she sighed. ‘I should have told you but I didn’t know how. Hospital’s not the awful place you think, and it will only be for a wee while. They’ve got to find out what makes you so tired all the time.’

  The world smashed round my ears. I couldn’t believe the news and created quite a scene, screaming at Mam that I wouldn’t go into hospital. I couldn’t leave Mam and all the familiar things that meant security and love. I had never been inside a hospital in my life and the thought of what the doctors would do to me terrified my soul. I pleaded and argued with Mam till her dear face was flushed with worry.

  ‘Please don’t make me go,’ I begged. ‘They’ll jag me and cut me up. I might never get out again!’

  ‘Listen, Chris,’ she said quietly. ‘You don’t have to go, I won’t make you, my lamb, but I was always used to a healthy Chris, my own wee gypsy, never still for a minute. The doctors are clever, Chris, but you have to help too. You’ve got to be a brave bairn. If you’re not then I really will think I’ve lost my Chris. You were always a daredevil,
never afraid of anything. Da has always been proud of you for that. Do you want to let us both down?’

  ‘No, Mam,’ I sobbed. ‘I’ll go into hospital, but only for a wee while, not for keeps.’

  She had won the battle but it was no triumph for her. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she chided gently, ‘as if I’d let them keep you forever. I would have no one to make me laugh the way you do.’

  ‘Only for a week … or maybe two days,’ I quavered bleakly.

  The day Mam took me to the big general hospital I lost my voice and could do nothing but stare dumbly at people who spoke to me. As I watched my dear familiar mother walk away down the ward I wanted to die. I couldn’t cry, tears were too superficial for the depths of my feelings. An efficient nurse got me into a cool white bed and I buried my head under the blankets, listening with a feeling of utter desolation to the strange sounds of my new world.

  For days I refused to speak to anyone and lived only for the sight of my parents coming through the doors. They brought fruit and sweets but I had no appetite and told Mam in a sad little voice not to waste her precious money on such things. I knew what the sacrifice entailed and I couldn’t bear to see her struggling to make ends meet. All I wanted was to be home with my brothers and sisters. My small hand lay in Mam’s warm grasp, the strength of her burning into me. Da was gruff but kind and all at once I felt a great affection for him. In the past I had been too taken up with my youthful pursuits to spare time to analyse my feelings for him. Now I saw he was as much a part of my life as Mam was. He was dressed in his best suit, his watch chain sparkling, his back straight and proud. He fumbled for comforting words and I wanted to reach out and touch him. Long years of suppression kept me from doing so but I told him stoutly, ‘Don’t worry about me, Da. I’ll be all right and I’ll be home soon. Don’t let any of the others sleep in my bed.’

  But home was to be a very long way off. The hospital nights were long and I, who had slept like a log all my young life, now knew the awful experience of insomnia. Each night I lay and watched the night nurse sitting under a dim green light that threw eerie shadows on her face. Her eyes were lost in vast dark sockets, the blob of her nose was thrown into a shapeless lump. She looked sinister and I dreaded making the slightest noise lest she would search the beds for a wakeful patient. If my bed creaked I froze, my heart thumping in my throat, my whole being alive with the fear that she would come and give me an injection to make me sleep. All through childhood my mind had been fed on fantasies of hospital. Stories had been passed from other tenement children of hospital experiences where doctors and nurses perpetually injected people with huge hypodermics, of gorgon-like ward sisters who ruled nurses and patients with rods of steel. As the days went on and nothing very alarming happened, I began to relax a little and take some interest in my surroundings. I was the only child in a ward full of grown women and in the days ahead I was to get an education such as was never taught in any school. The children’s wards were full, so in beside the adults I went. They were kind to me, trying to put me at ease despite my scowl and a total rejection of their attempts to include me in conversation. The ward sister was a large buxom woman with a forbidding expression but her voice was a soft lilting burr that had been nurtured far over the sea on the island of Lewis.

  I gulped when I first saw her and thought, ‘Wait till I tell Alec I’ve seen a real gorgon.’

  Whenever she came near I quailed, expecting her to produce the biggest hypodermic of all. Instead she gave me picture books and smiled, an odd kind of smile that made me think her tight mouth was going to fray at the edges. She was pretty strict all round except with me and I soon grew to realize she had a soft spot for children.

  I was a puzzle to the doctors. Not for me some straightforward disease like polio. X-rays became part of my life. Inevitably I had to have blood tests which were agony because my veins were difficult to find. Sometimes the needle had to be prodded around before my blood frothed colourfully into a syringe.

  Something that had been bred in me wouldn’t allow me to cry, no matter how painful the tests were. Injections were started, four times a day. Soon my hips were full of black and blue lumps which I showed proudly to Mam. ‘I’m a human pin-cushion,’ I stated grandly. I had heard the expression used by another patient and thought it sounded important, but Mam stared in horror. ‘Chris, my poor wee lamb! How sore you must be!’

  ‘I am, but I lie on my back so’s not to hurt my lumps. The blood tests are the worst. I could cry really loud but I don’t want anybody to think I’m a baby.’

  ‘You’re a brave wee gypsy,’ whispered Mam, and her words made me all the more determined to keep up my front.

  In time I was up and running about the ward, feeling important if the nurses allowed me to help make the beds and take round the cutlery trolleys.

  Despite injections and exercise my limbs became progressively weaker and a biopsy was decided on.

  ‘I’m to have an operation,’ I told Mam, adding disgustedly, ‘It’s only to be a wee one, not a major operation – what does that mean, Mam? It sounds a lot better.’

  ‘It means a really big operation, Chris.’

  ‘Oh! Well, a wee one might be better.’

  Before the operation I experienced for the first time the awful mortification of an enema. I sat on the bedpan crying my eyes out and wouldn’t look at the nurse who had performed the terrible deed for a full week afterwards. Pain I could bear but not humiliation. Two pieces of tissue were removed from my leg which helped the doctors to discover that I had an extremely rare disease, one that was so unusual that none of the medical textbooks gave it more than a passing mention. The calcium in my body had gone haywire. Far too much was being produced, the excess finding its way into my muscles and causing them to seize up. The doctors frowned over me and mumbled in technical jargon at the foot of my bed. Different types of treatment were tried, my injections were changed. There was no possible hope of my getting home for a long time to come.

  Now quite at home in the ward, I observed my fellow patients with unending fascination. Many of them were old. Two had been sent from mental asylums for specialized medical treatment. They occupied special beds with high sides so that they couldn’t climb out. One lady spent her entire day undressing herself and shouting, ‘Mammy! Daddy!’ over and over.

  I watched her taking her clothes off, my eyes bulging, unable to believe the quantity of breast that hung in pendulous folds to her belly. I was really seeing life in the raw and my eyes almost fell from my head. But the novelty soon wore off. I felt sorry for the nurses who were kept busy running to cover the great breasts. I took to shouting at Mrs Brown at regular ten-minute intervals. ‘Mrs Brown, put your nightdress back on!’

  At first she took no notice of my childish pipe but my perseverance began to seep through till the whole thing became like a game. The second she began to fumble at her attire she looked at me with vacant expectancy which was my cue to roar at her. Eventually she stopped removing her clothes and took instead to rocking herself back and forth all day – decidedly a more desirable occupation than the other.

  The second lady spent her entire day ringing an imaginary till and talking to invisible customers. From her mumbled words I gathered she had run a post office in bygone days. I gulped and hoped the postmistress from our corner wouldn’t suffer a similar fate through having to deal with my dummy parcels.

  One of my special friends was an old lady known to everyone as Granny Walker. She was a gentle soul with snowy hair and twinkling faded blue eyes. The bond of understanding that can spring up between youth and age is an uncanny one, the pathway of life just beginning for one, the other nearing the road’s end, with all the wisdom that only years of living can bring, offering so much to a good listener. For my age I was a very good listener and I grew to love Granny. I had never known my own grandmother and knew now what I had missed. Each morning I plumped Granny’s pillows, combed her lovely soft hair, and carried her dentures to the bathroom to
clean them carefully.

  Two ancient ladies in the ward provided me with endless anecdotes to store up as future material to weave into my bedtime fables for Alec and Margaret. They were unmarried ladies, Miss Jolly having a long, doleful face like a bloodhound, Miss Trotter looking definitely like a small pink pig with her wrinkled snub nose and beady bright eyes. They spent the long days snarling at each other and finding fault with everything in general.

  Miss Jolly was very envious of Miss Trotter’s ring, which, inscribed with an affectionate message, was proof that once upon a time the little pink lady had known romance, but Miss Jolly was not going to let her think so for one moment.

  ‘It’s no wonder the mannie never married you,’ she said one day to Miss Trotter. ‘He was likely tired of yer girnin’ face.’

  Tears sprang to Miss Trotter’s tiny eyes but she managed to utter a pig-like snort. ‘Hmph, you’ve a cheek, ye auld spinster! At least I was engaged and I’ve my ring here to prove it!’

  ‘Ay, weel, why keep it hidden away in yer locker? Wear it through yer nose! That way we can see it all the time!’

  The ward was agog when one morning the ring went missing. Miss Trotter was beyond consoling, Miss Jolly looked positively triumphant. Accusations flew but despite the fact that the ring was found wedged in behind the drawer of the locker Miss Trotter was obviously convinced that her sworn enemy had a hand in causing her such anguish and vowed vengeance.

  ‘Don’t listen,’ Granny Walker advised me as the two ladies cursed each other from here to hell, but I was thoroughly enjoying the quaint words and kept my ears well cocked.

  The affair of the ring was forgotten till the day Miss Jolly’s teeth went missing. She had a habit of wrapping them in a hanky and leaving them on top of her locker. They were kept for the sole purpose of masticating food, their decorative side holding no interest for Miss Jolly. Dinner was served and she reached for her teeth but they had disappeared. All hell was let loose. She dissolved into floods of tears and sobbed, ‘It’s that awful wifie! She’s stolen my teeth because she thinks I hid her brass ring. It’s her, I tell ye!’