Peeling Oranges

by James Lawless

‘All right, Mam.’

  ‘And every barber that cut the king’s hair was put to death so that the secret could be kept.’

  ‘But, Mam...’

  A look of exasperation. Even at that age I recognised it.

  ‘Sorry.’ I sealed my lips.

  ‘He would lose the kingship if they ever found out that he had horse’s ears. But there was one mother, a widow who had an only son.’

  ‘Like you, Mam.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have only one son: me, Mam, and you are a widow.’

  ‘Pay attention,’ she snapped.

  My mother looked cross. She confused me. What had I done? I tried to give my beautiful mother a hug to make up for vexing her or whatever it was I had done to her.

  She drew away. ‘Stop that. Will you listen? This widow pleaded with the king to save her son’s life.’

  ‘What’s pleaded,Mam?’

  ‘Begged. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, Mam.’

  ‘She begged that the king would not kill her only son, and the king took pity on her, don’t you know? And he spared her son on the condition that he took an oath, made a holy promise, you understand, that he would never tell the king’s secret to anyone.’

  ‘And what...?’

  ‘And that he would hold his tongue,’ she says sharply, silencing my interjection. ‘But the barber could not keep the secret. So he went deep into the woods.’

  ‘Where the wolf is, Mam?’

  ‘No, the wolf didn’t come then. He went deeper and deeper into the dark woods and he stood in front of a tree and he told his secret to the tree.’

  ‘A tree, Mam?’ I chuckled again. This was a funny story my mother was telling me.

  ‘Yes, a tree; and he felt relieved then, don’t you know? He felt good that he didn’t have to carry a burden anymore, you understand?’

  ‘No, Mam.’

  ‘You are tormenting me.’

  ‘Sorry, Mam.’

  ‘You are a most ungrateful child. I don’t know why I’m bothering at all. Do you know the trouble you cause me. Do you have any idea?’

  ‘No, Mam.’

  ‘All these interruptions. Now listen,’ she said, and she shook me vigorously, her fingers pressing tightly into my arms, hurting me but I didn’t complain. ‘Some time later that very tree was cut down and they made a harp out of it for the king’s harpist. And when the harp was played...’

  ‘It told the secret, Mam.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mam.’

  I was beaming. I was expecting my mother to pat me on the head or to tell me I was a very bright boy but she did neither.

  ‘Labhras Loingseach has horse’s ears,’ the harp sang out over and over every time the harpist plucked the strings, and the whole court knew then.’

  ‘And what happened, Mam?’

  ‘What happened? That’s what happened.’

  ‘To the king, Mam, and to the barber?’

  ‘The king lost his throne, I suppose, and the barber lost his life. So you see...’

  ‘Call me my name, Mam.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You never say my name.’

  ‘What a strange little fellow you are.’ She looked at me. I remember that look, a look of mystification that was to be repeated many times as I grew up.

  ‘So you see what could happen if little boys ask too many questions, they wouldn’t be able to keep the secrets and they would tell the tales. You could wind up like the barber.’

  ‘But the barber wasn’t a little boy, Mam.’

  ***

  What did I do all that time when I was growing up? I have hazy images of summer holidays when I was home from boarding school being told to play outside – always distant from her. I played marbles, rolling them away from home. Some kids travelled home by marbles. The marbles led them all the way along the side channels of streets like lodestones to welcoming hearths. When I tired of rolling, I held the marbles up to the light and imagined mysterious universes captured inside the coloured glass.

  There was one time I remember – perhaps the only time – being conscious of a feeling of belonging. It was before I reached the age of knowing, before I wandered away from the tribe, before I developed an orphan mind. It was to do with the sea. All Liberties’ children love the seaside. We got the train from Amiens’ Street Station. My mother, my aunt Peg, and a few of the Liberties’ children and myself were all packed tightly into a train compartment. There was vying for the window seat and the winner (a boy with scaled bald patches on his head whose name I can’t remember) controlled the leather strap that raised or lowered the window. The prize for the winner was a squint.

  As we walked along the beach I saw a woman’s shoe in the sand. When I told my mother, she suddenly looked sad. ‘I don’t suppose that’s all she lost,’ she said. And I remember moving away from the group, and the wide expanse of sand with the tide out, miles and miles like a desert and nowhere to hide or shelter from the wind that always blows across the Irish sea. And the little pretty girl in a bathing suit. We had buckets and spades and had been digging wherever we found a whirl formation in the sand in a quest to discover the mysterious sculptor. The little girl was behind me. She told me not to look around. I heard a hissing sound drilling a hole in the sand.

  I had to look.

  The straps of her pink pleated bathing costume were removed revealing two raw little nipples with no breasts to cling to. The bathing suit was pulled down to just above her knees as she squatted, still holding her bucket and spade. There was a temporary look of hurt in her freckled face, but she quickly pulled up her swimsuit and shook her dark pigtails and, with a smile that is registered immortal, bounded off along the strand.

  The girl’s name was Sinéad.

  ***

  Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin’s people were well known in the Liberties. They shared a common republicanism with my mother’s people and were frequent visitors to the Woodburn shop. Sinéad’s mother died of consumption when Sinéad was very young. She was brought up by her father, Jack the tailor. I remember as a child someone mentioned the tailor’s donkey and I spent a long time wondering how a donkey could fit into a flat. My mother sometimes sent me over to the Ó Súileabháin’s with a message or something from the shop. ‘Ah Derek,’ Jack would say, greeting me always with a smile. ‘How is your mother? Is she bearing up?’ ‘She’s fine,’ I would say, not quite clear what his meaning was. ‘Will I give you a bar?’ he would say, and I thought at first it was a bar of chocolate he meant, but he started straightway into The Bold Fenian Men, sewing as he sang.

  I remember a musty room with chalk-marked cloths cut into the shapes of triangles and squares strewn across the linoleum floor as if awaiting a geometry class; brown paper patterns hanging from hooks in the ceiling; a delineator and a heavy shears with its adjustable brass screw; boys’ short pants pressed and made ready to be sold to drapery shops throughout the city and the new suburbs; steam gushing from an iron making the room appear like a train station; the hum of the sewing machine or the silver thimble on his finger and the halfmoon glasses hanging down his nose as he worked on the ‘special’.

  Jack Ó Súileabháin could make cloth curve and fall in all the right places to nullify the imperfections in the human frame. Some say he was an artist, but cloth covers up and art lays bare. I discovered in my reading that Jack made Patrick Foley’s wedding suit. My mother recommended him, but Patrick was concerned that the ‘singing arthritic’ (Jack developed rheumatism in his fingers) might mar the cloth. However, the suit fitted Foley so neatly at the shoulders and hung so well on his frame, that no one knew that the diplomat had a hump.

  When Jack’s wife died in nineteen fifty-four, he and Sinéad left the Liberties and followed the peregrinatio to the suburbs – he had accrued a fair amount of money by sheer hard work. They took up residence in Rathfarnham, a few roads away from where my mother and I now live.

  The origin
s of Jack Ó Súileabháin’s anti-Englishness are not clearcut, but for the convenience of folklore (myths like their causes and effects uncomplicated), they are rooted in the Tan war. It was said the Tans attacked his home looking for rebels, and that they threw his mother onto the street and she only wearing a nightdress (not unlike my dream), and then they came at her with her own scissors and cut her long mane of auburn hair into shreds. Patrick records my mother telling him that the later recounting of such an outrage had a profound effect on a young Gearóid Mac Suibhne who swore that there would be retribution for all crimes committed against ‘his’ people.

  The tailor instilled in Sinéad a hatred of all things English. He indoctrinated her so strongly in lore, myth and song that no amount of education could ever hope to redress. ‘Is treise dúchas ná oiliúnt’ (nature is stronger than nurture) was a favourite saying of Sinéad’s and one could hear her father’s echo in it.

  As a primary school kid, Sinéad often called to our house, more to see my mother, to practise her Irish than to see me. My mother is a fluent non-native Irish speaker. She told me in one of her rare moments of denouement that she had been in the same Gaelic League class as Éamon de Valera.

  What happens to the real offspring of a mother when she is seconded to someone else? We search for blocks to fill our own absences. Sinéad got information out of my mother that I could never get: about Cumann na mBan, the Irish language, the Troubles of the twenties and more besides.

  My mother berated me for my apparent luke-warmness towards the language.

  ‘Sinéad is going to get a good result in her exam because she practises all the time. How do you expect to do well if you don’t speak it? I never hear you speaking it.’

  ‘I hear it. I hear you. Isn’t that enough?’

  It was the first time I remember being deliberately cheeky to my mother. It was to do with her showing me up in front of Sinéad. Or maybe it was because I saw through her words and found something hollow.

  One Christmas – I remember now it was the Christmas after that summer excursion to the seaside – I got a plastic ring in a cracker. Sinéad was visiting us. She never mentioned that incident by the sea, and I never brought it up either. But it made me feel close to her, not in any overt sexual way (I was still prepuberty then), more like a kind of bonding, making her a sort of surrogate sibling. I offered her the ring. She laughed. She was just at the stage of shedding those soppy female qualities that she later called weaknesses (like calling her father, Daddy – she was now referring to him simply as Jack).

  We were sitting on a bed over the shop. Tomás’ room.

  ‘I want you to wear it,’ I said.

  ‘You know we could be cousins. We are like cousins.’

  By cousins I think she meant that we lived close to each other, and to give a ring to a cousin or to kiss her was not ‘on’.

  But she said that I was go deas and that she would keep the ring but not to wear.

  Her refusal to wear the ring troubled me. I felt rejected. I had saved it for her. It was meant to be a sign of something between us. I remember going outside. It was beginning to snow. I began to shiver. I was in shirtsleeves and short pants. There were goosepimples on my legs. I walked into Saint Patrick’s Park and saw a statue all grey on a bench with the snow falling on it. And then the statue got up from the bench and it was a man and he walked away. A man with a hat shadowing his face.

  ***

  My mother did not neglect me materially. I never went hungry. I had the best of clothes. My school fees were always paid on time. Maybe I felt all her money went on me and she had nothing left for the insurance man. But I realise now, looking back, that all those years inside myself I was calling silently for a touch, a caress, a mother’s warmth.

  I never knew my mother’s lap.

  Again when I was small, I remember her addressing an envelope. I put my hand on her shoulder. It was a spontaneous act. I wanted to see what she had written. She had written the word Box. She quickly turned the envelope upside down the minute she felt my hand and shrugged me off, not roughly, just by the raising of her shoulder, enough to make me withdraw.

  ‘Why are you writing to a box, Mam?’

  She sighed. ‘It’s for your Uncle Gus. He moves around a lot.’

  It was her little concession to me. But she wouldn’t tell me any more.

  Every year on my birthday and at Christmas a present arrived by post from England – a Meccano set or a chemistry set that could make bombs, stuff like that.

  From Uncle Gus.

  As a small boy I took all this for granted. I didn’t care who Uncle was or whether he lived in a box or not as long as I got my presents. It is only now that I query my mother about our mysterious relative.

  ‘Why doesn’t Uncle Gus ever come home, Mam? How come I’ve never seen him?’

  ‘He would lose his job. Jobs are scarce.’

  ‘Even for a holiday?’

  ‘He can’t afford a holiday.’

  ‘But he has never seen me, Mam.’

  ‘Run along now, Derek. I’m getting a headache.’

  ***

  I can recall now the first time I heard the insurance man remonstrating with my mother. It was late one Christmas Eve. I was six or seven at the time, waiting in bed for Santa, pressing tightly on my eyes, trying desperately to sleep for fear he would not leave me anything if he caught me awake. The song fading on the wireless below I remember had a relevant poignancy:

  I feel sorry for the laddie…

  He hasn’t got a daddy…

  He’s the little boy that Santa Claus forgot.

  Mr Counihan’s querulous tone rose through waves of drowsiness and my mother’s sobbing.

  But when I asked her about it the next day – Christmas Day – all she said was, ‘What a dreamer you are, Derek.’

  ***

  I keep my own diary up to date. It is like a companion to me or maybe a crutch. Like trying to fill the void in your head with blobs of ink. I write:

  What can be found after an archaeological excavation of the human heart? The only thing I can deduce for sure is that I live in a loveless world. Everything else is uncertain. Uncertainty is a wound one carries inside oneself.

  ***

  Mam’s health continues to deteriorate. I want to confront her about the circumstances of my birth but I am afraid. Afraid of breaking the fine thread that holds her life together.

  Christmas of the my last year in boarding school I am sitting in a church pew. There is carol singing, but I am concentrated on a family, on a baby in a crib. A little boy lights a candle near the crib, his action safely guided by his father’s hand. I contemplate a virgin birth. I think of the decapitated statue of the Virgin that I discovered in the storeroom in boarding school. I saw her insides made of chalk. I try to examine the countenance of Joseph for signs. He is holding a lily-branch in his hand. His face of plaster shows no emotion as he looks on the child that he did not beget. I think of the absurdity of the situation. I think of Patrick Foley and wonder how he looked at me as a baby in a cradle. I think of his painting on his study wall. I was the burden carried through the storm, the heavy package that weighted down the earth.

  Part II

  Driftwood

  Ireland & Spain 1932 - 1947

  Patrick Foley met my mother for the first time formally at Nelson’s Pillar in May, 1932.

  He had spotted her earlier. He noted in his diary for that month:

  Saw a beautiful blond girl coming out of Whitefriar Street church. She smiled at me as she passed. She sauntered along unhurriedly, apparently without a worry in the world.

  He had run out of cigarettes and stumbled upon a shop in the Liberties called Woodburn’s (at first he thought it was an advertisement for Woodbines). To his surprise, he discovered the same girl he had seen in Whitefriar Street standing behind the counter.

  ‘I do remember you,’ she said. She had such a joyful giggle. I wanted to ask her out but I lacked the courage.
It would be too rash, too soon; one must follow decorum – that’s why I’m a diplomat I suppose. I bought my cigs and bade her good day.

  ***

  The following day he returned to the shop, bought a large bar of chocolate and then gave it to my mother. They chatted. The shop wasn’t busy except for some little street urchins who came in to buy halfpenny mixtures. He was taken by how she dealt with them with great patience, opening and closing glass jars. She told him, opening the wrapper on the chocolate, that it was a treat to eat things which weren’t broken or bruised. He asked her what she meant. ‘Broken biscuits from Jacobs,’ she said, ‘and Tomás used to bring bruised fruit home from the market.’ She explained that Tomás was her brother who had been killed by the Tans. Patrick said he was sorry to hear about her brother but she said it was all right; it was a long time ago. She told him her mother had said he died ‘before disappointment’. She said they used to throw a lot of the plums into the dustbin if they if they couldn’t find a Peeler. She laughed. When he asked her if she could not sneak something from the shelf, she took a brooch from her blouse and held the pin upright. ‘As straight as that?’

  He finally plucked up enough courage to ask her to come out with him. She said she would, but that it was better not to call for her at the shop. She didn’t say why.

  As I cycled home to Rathfarnham, I wondered how someone as beautiful as she had not married as yet. Then who am I to talk at my age? I figure she is in her late twenties. I feel an outsider in the Liberties. Their twisting lanes and walls contain secrets unknown to me.

  ***

  They met at the Pillar, as agreed, and proceeded to walk along the broad thoroughfare of O’Connell street, observing all the hustle and bustle as the city made ready for the Eucharistic Congress. They saw diminutive, veiled virgins being trained for procession, and boy scouts and girl guides of different countries rehearsing. There were flags and banners everywhere. They were stopped by a group of young men who were marching imperiously along the street. They asked them if they were wearing their scapulars. My mother chuckled and said no but she was wearing her suspenders. The men were not amused as they marched away and Patrick records that he himself was taken aback by the brazenness of my mother’s retort.