Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘What do you want with her?’

  Charlie, used to resistance on the doorstep, ignored Stanley’s hostile tone. He wondered vaguely what ailed the man.

  ‘So this is the little girl I didn’t see the last time,’ he said chucking Pearl under the chin. ‘You must be nearly six, is that right?’

  ‘No,’ the child said stoutly, ‘last week was my birthday. I was four.’

  ‘Aha!’ Charlie said, ‘already telling lies about her age. They start young these days, eh Stannie? Then it must be your sister I’m thinking of. Last time I was here she was only a babby, and that’s coming up to six years, would you believe?’

  It was the blatancy of this lie that enraged Stanley, the sheer bare-facedness of it.

  ‘You can’t have her, she’s ours now, we’ve made her ours, do you understand?’

  He pushed Pearl behind him. She started to wail.

  ‘Steady on there, Stannie, what’s all this about?’

  ‘If you as much as lay a finger on her, I’ll throttle you, understand?’

  Stanley stepped belligerently out on to the street. Charlie took a step back and raised his hands but not in time to fence off Stanley’s first blow which landed squarely on his chin. He staggered backwards and Stanley landed a fist in his lungs (Charlie’s weak spot). He fell, winded, the street reeling around him. His last sight before the door was shut on him with a resounding thud was the child peering around the doorframe, sobbing with fright. He saw the birthmark and before the darkness claimed him, two words imprinted themselves in front of his eyes, written in the black, block capitals of a screaming headline. BABY SPAIN.

  It had been the talk of the country. How many kitchens had Charlie Piper sat in, his samples spread out on the table, talking to housewives about the Baby Spain case? The baby who had simply disappeared. Into thin air. The papers had been full of it for weeks. How, asked enraged editors, was it possible for a complete stranger to walk into a hospital and make off with a child? For months Baby Spain had been the property of every gossip and crank. She had been spotted being taken on a ferry to the Mainland; she had been sold to an American couple who were childless; she had been kidnapped by an evangelist church which was desperate for recruits. Daily there had been a siege at the baby’s home. Charlie remembered the father. Shady character, he had, thought, feckless-looking. Charlie knew the type. He had met their wives in a hundred parlours across the countryside. At Christmas and for the baby’s birthday, the reporters went back to Mr Spain, Charlie recalled, and he repeated his pleas to whoever would listen: Please give us back our baby. But the years went by and everyone forgot about Baby Spain, including Charlie Piper. He presumed she was dead; she had been a sickly child. Someday a shallow grave would be found in a ditch or behind a hen house. The country was full of such secrets. If there had even been a picture of her, Charlie thought, her memory might have survived longer.

  But she had only been a few weeks old. Her only distinguishing feature was that birthmark, like a tiny strawberry, they had said, on her chin.

  He rang his friend in the Castle. Mullarney was a drinking companion, an unkempt man, his jackets like boleros on his vast torso, his shirt tails always trailing outside his pants. Moon-faced and silver-haired he was like a superannuated fat boy. But he had a good heart. Once or twice when Charlie had got into scrapes – after-hours drinking and the like – he had rung Mullarney who had put a word in for him. In return, he had kept his eyes and ears open. It was, Charlie considered, a professional relationship between two men of the world.

  ‘Mullarney,’ a voice barked in his ear.

  ‘Con,’ Charlie started, ‘Piper here, Charlie.’

  ‘Charlie, old son, how’s she cutting?’

  ‘Grand, grand.’

  ‘Are you about?’

  Charlie could hear Mullarney shifting the phone to his good ear.

  ‘No, I’m north side.’

  ‘Ah, pity,’ Mullarney said.

  ‘Listen, Con, there’s something I want to talk to you about …’ He hesitated, the strange excitement of the past few hours since his flash of insight on Jericho Street, turning now to a kind of dread. ‘Confidentially,’ he added to cover himself.

  ‘Shoot …just hope it isn’t the licensing laws again. I’m beginning to wear out my welcome in that department.’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ Charlie said.

  He was very nervous now. The consequences of his dangerous knowledge were only beginning to dawn on him. He was breaking one of the unspoken rules of Granitefield, grassing on a fellow inmate. And thinking of Granitefield he remembered with a pang what they used to say about the women patients, how sometimes the treatment meant that they couldn’t have children. But his own tense alarm, his need to have the thing confirmed, or dismissed out of hand, was more urgent.

  ‘Spit it out, Charlie, I haven’t got all day,’ Mullarney interjected. It was probably all in his head. The next time he and Mullarney met, he would be introduced to the lads as the joker who thought he had solved the Baby Spain kidnap single-handedly. This gave him courage – the prospect of being laughed at.

  ‘Remember the Spain case,’ he ventured.

  ‘Yes?’ Mullarney said doubtfully.

  ‘Remember, the baby who was kidnapped?’

  ‘Yes, Charlie, we’re not likely to forget, are we?’ Mullarney replied testily. ‘Our biggest unsolved case.’

  ‘Well,’ Charlie said, his voice cracking as he lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I think I know where she is.’

  ‘Speak up, Piper, line’s terrible.’ Mullarney’s voice was fading away.

  ‘I know where she is!’ Charlie shouted.

  He had not meant it to sound so emphatic. Afterwards he would speculate if the telephone connection had been better, it might never have come out as a certainty. There was an astonished silence at the other end. He heard the phone being dropped noisily on a desk, then a hubbub in the background with Mullarney’s excited voice rising above it: ‘Get the Super. Break in the Baby Spain case.’

  Charlie Piper had saved very few mementos from his time in Granitefield. He was not nostalgic by nature and once the memories of the pain with its accompanying loss of invincibility, had slid away, he recalled with no small sense of pride the little triumphs over the system, the busy trading he had mastered and the illicit goods he had managed to smuggle inside. In its way it had been a life of terrifying simplicity. He had been like a war racketeer and the years in Granitefield were in retrospect like a long campaign in the trenches. The same rules applied. Pleasure when it came had to be grasped quickly; in the midst of danger and death it acquired a gritty edge. The creature comforts – drink, tobacco, sex – were all tradeable commodities and acquired a price. Even information was valuable. Charlie Piper had not only dealt in oranges and cigarettes, but also medical verdicts. He had made it his business to get to know Mrs Guthrie in the records office. A young war widow, she was ripe and gullible material for the brand of doomed idealism that Charlie Piper peddled. She believed his story about wanting to devote his life to finding a cure for TB. ‘When I get out of here,’ he would tell her, ‘I’m going to take to the doctoring. If I could have a peep at some of the files here, just overnight, so I can study them. Get myself prepared …’

  In time he had seen almost every patient’s charts and X-rays. He did not offer information but if he was asked he saw no reason not to sell it. He had his ethics too. Like a fortune-teller, if he saw signs of the grim reaper, he did not divulge it. They would know soon enough, he reasoned. And the information was not all for gain. He chose Irene Rivers’ file out of curiosity, and because she was no longer a patient, he kept the X-rays out after he returned her file to Mrs Guthrie. Even when he was stowing them away in one of his secret stashes he was not quite sure why he wanted them. They were, after all, only shiny black and white sheets which showed the world in reverse. What was light outside, was shade inside, the bones an eerie luminescence, while breath was rendered a d
ark, solid mass. He knew there was something lurid about his interest. He remembered the evening when she had stripped for him; it was as if she had been showing him this – he held the X-rays in his hand – her cloudy and mysterious interior. He was looking for clues, he realised, something inside that would explain her to him. And when he left Granitefield, he could not bear to jettison them. He saw them as a good-luck charm, an illicit gift. And he felt absurdly grateful to her as if she had offered him her very soul. And now, he realised, too late, how he had betrayed her. Standing as he always had on the threshold of her life. Holding the hand of a child who could have been his. He felt like a spectre, a man cheated by a death that had not occurred. His own.

  ‘That’s the last we’ll see of him,’ Stanley declared, ‘I showed him, didn’t I, Pearl?’

  Pearl nodded weakly.

  Irene imagined the scene. Stanley, meek at first, then suddenly enraged, towering over a sprawling Charlie Piper, his arm raised weakly against Stanley’s boot. Irene had seen this transformation before. Stanley might be slow to anger but once he was … But she saw how useless his aggression was in the midst of this intricate mess. But then, Stanley didn’t know. How could he understand the enormity of his crime?

  As soon as Stanley told her, Irene knew they were doomed. She felt the cold creep of implacable recognition of one who has come face-to-face with death. Stanley thought he had seen Charlie off. Irene knew better. She knew that Charlie would work it out somehow. He would do it out of pride and curiosity. He was used to being well-liked; he would genuinely want to know what he had done wrong. When he collected debts on the wards, Irene remembered, he would be perplexed if patients grumbled about coughing up (coughing up, Charlie would grin, get it?) He had made a deal with them, after all. He might not come back here for an explanation, Irene knew, but he would find it elsewhere. Her heart sinking, Irene considered the neat inevitability of it. Charlie Piper delivering her to her fate.

  She readied herself for flight. From the attic she retrieved the suitcase she had brought from Granitefield. When she opened it, a cloud of dust billowed forth, releasing with it the pungent smell of must, sharp and green. Stealthily she packed for Pearl and herself; she had no plans, no idea where she would go, escape her only ambition. As she put Pearl to bed that night, she lingered longer than usual in the child’s room. She remembered Stanley hanging the wallpaper, birdsong on a summer’s night, the windows thrown open to dispel the smell of drying paint and paste. She gazed at the army of soft toys and rag dolls sitting in a row against the bed-head, a pillow of fur around Pearl’s head. Her small shoes abandoned, pigeon-toed, on the mat, her dress splayed in a fan across the chair. She sat on the edge of the bed as Pearl snuggled into the crook of her arm, already drowsing. She read from The Sleeping Beauty, the longed-for child, the grateful parents, the wicked witch … but she stopped short of the handsome prince. Pearl was already asleep, mumbling softly, already leaving her for another world. Tomorrow, Irene would tell her. She would recount the days of stolen happiness, the picnics on the windswept hills, the seaside outings paddling in the shallows, the day she first walked, tottering down the street after Stanley as Irene let go of the reins, the trip to the Causeway, Stanley and Pearl picking shells on the head-land, the pride Irene had felt pushing the baby carriage out into the sun by the front door, her first words. She would have to know the dangers there had been too … the polio that had nearly crippled her, the day she nearly drowned … Whatever happened, Pearl must know these things. Her history. But it was too late tonight. Irene rose and kissed Pearl on the forehead, inhaling the tactile warmth of the child’s skin and her milky smell, the soft shudder of her breathing already becoming a memory, a loss.

  It was noon, a Sunday morning, the shocked stillness of the Sabbath. Three constables stood at the door of Number 24, Jericho Street. Taylor led the expedition, a lean man with sandy hair, troubled with scruples about the task at hand. Procedure and jurisdiction had determined that this arrest was his baby. He squared his shoulders and rapped the wood with his knuckles, a brisk tattoo. Its clatter reverberated on the deserted street. As they waited, he turned to his companions and said: ‘Let’s make this as civilised as possible.’ But he feared the worst.

  Stanley answered the door. He was in his stockinged feet, a stocky man in crisp white shirt and braces, still wrestling with his collar studs. His jaw dropped. This guy knows, Taylor thought, guilty as sin.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr Godwin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’d like to have a word with you.’

  Taylor edged his foot between the door and the jamb and gauged Stanley’s weight and strength.

  ‘It’s about Mr Piper, I suppose,’ Stanley said. The bastard is going to press charges, he thought, couldn’t take his punishment like a man.

  ‘Perhaps inside would be better?’ Taylor ventured. He was thinking of himself. He didn’t want a scene on the street.

  ‘Anything you’ve got to say to me, you can say to me here,’ Stanley said blocking the aperture of the door with a stout arm.

  Taylor decided to change tack.

  ‘Is Mrs Godwin at home?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with her. It was a private matter between Mr Piper and me.’

  ‘And your daughter, Mr Godwin?’

  ‘What about my daughter? Now listen, here …’ He moved quickly to shut the door but Taylor, anticipating him, rushed at him, his two companions moving in behind.

  ‘What the …’ Stanley gasped as the three strangers tussled with him in the hallway, pinioning him to the wall. Behind him at the foot of the stairs, a woman stood holding a small girl by the hand.

  ‘Mrs Godwin?’ Taylor asked, releasing his grip on Stanley’s arm.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I think you know why we’re here.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘He knows nothing. I’m the woman you want.’

  Taylor knelt on his hunkers and took Pearl’s hand. Pearl frowned and looked up at Irene.

  ‘This kind man is going to take you on a trip,’ Irene said, her voice glittery, her eyes bright with tears, releasing her grip on Pearl’s hand and prodding her gently towards the policeman.

  ‘He’s going to take you across the river, he’s going to bring you home.’

  Stanley watched blankly as Taylor led his daughter away. She went meekly, trusting Irene’s bright tone and mistaking Stanley’s incomprehension as compliance. From the street he could hear one of the constables saying to Pearl ‘We’re going in the car, would you like that?’ and the beginnings of Pearl’s whimpered protests as Taylor shut the door on them. He looked at Irene and saw a stranger. He had understood absolutely nothing. She turned her back on him and Taylor led her into the parlour. He was relieved that the operation had been achieved with a modicum of dignity. It was the last Stanley saw of his wife. The second constable ushered him out of his own home, the song of Solomon echoing in his head.

  ‘See, said the king, it is all. My child lives and thine is dead, on the one side, and Thy child is dead and mine lives on the other. Bring me a sword. So a sword was brought out before the king. Cut the living child in two, he said, and give half to one, half to the other. Whereupon, the true mother of the living child cried out, No my lord, give her the living child; never kill it! …’

  Taylor sat with Irene Godwin as the sun, tempered by sharp gusts, railed against the small house on Jericho Street, sank into a peach-coloured dusk. It was her only request – that she would be taken away under cover of darkness.

  PART TWO

  SHE WAS MRS MEL Spain. Who would have believed it? In the few months she had been married Rita struggled with the notion. She was in a constant state of amazement, bewildered as a dreamer who wakes to find the world has dispensed with all its jarring logic. She felt both omnipotent and helpless – all she had done was to wish for this. And yet, this life with Mel (her life she had to keep insisting to herself) still seem
ed outlandish. Every morning when she woke she would examine him lying there next to her. The thin menace of moustache, the clouded ridge of brow, the dark whorl of ear. She concentrated on these fragments in the hope that when she put them all together they would convince her. She watched his rituals avidly – how he smacked his face after shaving as if it were part of some rough penance, the vigorous grace with which he applied hair oil, the way he shrugged his shirt on as if he were a horse swatting flies from its flanks – in the hope that these might help her to believe. (His casual nakedness was still a shock, though. His pale haunch, a violet cargo of tongue and gizzard; she had not imagined it would be so ugly.) But so used was she to contemplating him from afar that she found this closeness rendered him unreal and mysterious. He remained the not quite attained dream, the distant object of longing, the youth with the shorn hair and cheery grin, the boy from the Mansions whom Rita really fancied. Like a birdwatcher, she had been satisfied with sightings. His figure emerging from a doorway, his hunched silhouette toiling up a rainy street. Even passing the dairy on Gloucester Street where bored gangs of boys lounged and smoked butts, was less of an ordeal if he were among them. Rita would suffer their sly, sidelong glances and the great guffaws of laughter in her wake just to get a glimpse of Mel Spain. As for Mel, if he knew he was being so intensely observed, he never pretended, greeting Rita with a hearty ‘How’rya!’

  It unnerved Mel to waken and find her, beached and blurred, scrutinising him, yet lost in a dreamy distance.

  ‘Give over,’ he would mutter, sour with sleep. ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘Like what?’ She was afraid he might detect her sense of disbelief.

  ‘Like you could see through me.’

  Mel Spain was twenty-two, an usher at the La Scala Cinema, vain as a trumpet player in his black uniform with the red piping. He stood in the foyer swinging a string of torn-off stubs, whistling and snapping his fingers as if a band had just struck up. It was a Saturday afternoon. Matinées at the La Scala were noisy, crowded affairs. Seats snapping in the artificial night, scuffling in the aisles and a furious scrabbling at ankle level. This accompanied by industrious chewing – toffees that left fingers and seats sticky, ice-pops, garish and gaspingly cold. Boys joined in on the on-screen battles, ducking, crouching, pointing fingers that were guns or puffing up their cheeks pretending to be bombs which exploded as a frothy burbling in their throats. The films were already old when they came to the La Scala. The prints were flawed. The huge blue skies of Westerns were flecked with what looked like the crushed bodies of insects. The soundtracks cracked and farted. The La Scala had once been a variety theatre and still wore its tatty, showy costume. Brown, flocked wallpaper, gilted boxes by the stage, swing doors with milky glass panels marked ‘Parterre’ and ‘Balcony’, a sweeping stairway in the foyer that flounced like a neglected belle. It hosted a cocktail of bad smells. Waves of disinfectant from the lavatories, stale cigarette smoke and the acrid smell of thwarted sex. Thwarted alright, Mel thought ruefully.