Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘Where’s my baby,’ she tried to say but as in a nightmare no voice came out.

  ‘Hush there,’ a nurse said kindly, ‘it’s all over now.’

  ‘But…’ She stretched out a hand, appealing, but found only thin air. There was a lot of movement suddenly, an urgent clamour, and she realised that it was she who was moving. Doors swung open and she was drifting through them. The boat was afloat again, the harbour in sight. She lay back, she surrendered.

  As Mel Spain stepped out of the hospital – just for a walk, he told himself, a breath of fresh air – he was lighthearted for the first time in months. He felt as if he was leaving a great burden behind. The bustle of the labour ward reassured him. Its officialdom, the white coats, those capable nurses with their tiny watches pinned to their breasts relieved him. It was as if they were taking charge of all of his unwanted responsibilities. With a wave of the hand, they had seemed to absolve him. There was an end to this mess; they would take care of it.

  It was chilly outside and beginning to rain. The lights of a pub across the street caught his eye. There was a golden gleam from its windows, the brasses on the door winked merrily at him. As he pushed his way through the crowd, the hearty sound of revelry cheered him. He felt he was rejoining the world. He sat by the bar and ordered a drink. All around him was a crush of bodies, a woman’s clear laughter within earshot. In the mirrors behind the bar he could see his reflection, a lone, young man in the midst of a Friday night throng. At first he felt tempted to talk to the barman, to tell him he was about to become a father. But the longer he sat there the more buoyed up he felt by his own anonymity. There was no need in this company to admit who he was. Nobody knew him here and nobody cared. He could be a commercial traveller passing through the city, a sailor on shore leave. In his pocket he had a brown envelope with his wages for the week. He was out and he was free.

  The obvious simplicity of escape astounded him. Ten years earlier, Alfie Spain, father of six, had left the Mansions one Sunday morning to buy a newspaper and had simply never come back. He wasn’t even wearing a coat, a fact that Lily Spain clung to for years as proof that some tragedy had befallen him. Mel and his mother scoured the early morning dockers’ pubs, the seamen’s hostels and hunted among the down-and-outs squatting in doorways. He could have lost his memory, she said, and when that excuse wore out, she insisted that he must have been set upon by thieves. On her insistence, the river was dragged. Every body that was washed up had to be viewed. By the age of twelve, Mel Spain had seen more corpses than an undertaker. It was only when he rebelled and refused to go to the city morgue to check out one more bloated or mangled body that his mother gave up the ghost. But she still set a place at the table for his father and for years she expected that he might just rove in one day, the paper under his oxter, as if he had just popped down to the newsagent’s and been delayed. He had been a law-abiding man, a dutiful father, a loyal husband. He had shown no irritation at his circumstances, straitened though they may have been. They were always short, but Lily got by using cheap cuts and strict rations, and resorting to the pawn shop coming up to Christmas. Alfie Spain had left no debts. He was the kind of a man who handed over his wages every week to his wife, keeping back just enough for a few pints on a Saturday night which he drank quietly at the bar while Lily sang her head off and joined in the knees-up in the ladies’ snug. Years later, a neighbour claimed he had spotted Alfie on the Mainland working on the roads. There were rumours that he had a second family over there but Lily put that down to bad-mouthing.

  If the Spains were stretched before Alfie left, they were downright poor after he had gone. Mel’s two elder brothers were put to work; Michael inherited his father’s job on the docks, Peter was apprenticed to a printer. His sister, Bonnie, was taken out of school and sent to the shirt factory; Esther was dispatched to relations. Baby Martin – even as a grown man he was lumbered with this title – took on a paper round. Lily did charring and battled with the moneylender and in time, it seemed, that they didn’t need Alfie Spain any longer, if they ever had.

  It didn’t stop Mel wondering, however, how his father had managed this extraordinary trick of disappearing into thin air. He had become invisible by simply walking out of his life. Ten years after the event, as he nursed his fourth drink of the night, Mel finally understood how easy it must have been. It was not, as he had always thought, a daring but calculated move; it was a matter of impulse and exquisite selfishness.

  Mel staggered out of the pub at closing time. The seething wet streets greeted him, the sizzle of tyres. The street lights glimmered. He stood in a hazy blur, his resolve momentarily dissipated. The pillared rotunda of the hospital beckoned like a great belly. He turned his back on it. A fog horn bellowed in the night as he made his way up the quays. Flocks of seagulls swooped low over the river, cawing for rain. He passed huge, bleached warehouses and the belching urns of the brewery, the copper dome of a church; he felt himself walking into the silhouette of the city. The mail boat was already berthed, its great hulk yawning in the night. It would swallow him up. He felt invisible among the crowd of passengers gathered on the quay weighed down by suitcases and kitbags. Unlike them, he was shedding his old life, not carrying it with him.

  Only the ghostly figure of his father accompanied him. He had only ever considered his father from the perspective of one left behind. He had become all absence, the vacant place at the table, the man who had never materialised as the nameless body in the morgue. There were times when Mel had longed for him to be dead, so as to rid himself of the anxious imminence his mother had cultivated in all of them. Now that he was here, literally following in his father’s footsteps, Mel felt his father becoming a presence again, his pulse racing as Mel’s was, his palms sweating, his glance darting here and there, fearful of being detected, as if the enormity of his intention were obvious from his features. He had already committed a crime by just being here.

  ‘Mel!’

  For a moment, Mel thought he had conjured up a ghost as if this was as far as his father had got, locked in a purgatory of being forever on the brink of departure, a man condemned to the quayside for having wanted to escape.

  ‘Mel Spain!’ the voice called again.

  A gloved hand was clamped on his shoulder. He turned slowly, expecting to see an incarnation of his father, or a live policeman, and found Arthur Prunty. Captain Prunty was the manager of the La Scala, an ex-army man whose voice boomed as if he were still commanding parade drill, his exchanges like hearty attempts at boosting morale.

  ‘Impossible to find anyone in this mêlée. I’m looking for the sister-in-law. Coming to stay with us for a spell.’ He grimaced.

  ‘Are you seeing someone off? One of the wife’s people, is it? Any stir on the baby?’

  Mel gulped. Every one of these questions was a trap.

  ‘Ah, there she is!’ He pointed to a frail, arthritic-looking woman perched on a suitcase and gripping two others on either side of her. ‘How on earth did she think we’d find her here? Oh well, the mountain must come to Mohammed.’

  ‘Bernie!’ he shouted and grasping Mel’s arm propelled him towards her.

  ‘Give us a hand there, Mel; my god, would you look at the amount of luggage she has. All that for a few weeks!’

  He handed Mel two of her bags while he unceremoniously heaved his sister-in-law up and swinging the last of her suitcases, he frogmarched her through the now thinning crowd, with Mel dejectedly following.

  ‘I have the old jalopy outside,’ he shouted to Mel over his shoulder, ‘I can drop you off.’

  Delia Prunty and her sister chattered in the back while Mel was ordered to sit up front with Captain Prunty. He treated the car gingerly as if it were new or delicate. It was like a black bathtub on wheels, Mel thought. Though he talked of it dismissively, Captain Prunty was inordinately proud of the car. He liked it to be admired, its patient gleam, its doughty engine. He wanted to be congratulated for it, in the same way as other men would appr
opriate compliments to their wives, or bask in the scholarly achievements of their sons. As Mel watched him wielding the crank handle he realised with a foolish sense of shock that he had allowed Captain Prunty to bundle him away, to bully him – albeit good-humouredly – out of his chance of escape. Was this how lives were turned, he wondered, on such small, banal choices? For him a careless kiss on the corner of Mecklenburgh Street in the boredom of a long summer’s evening, and a chance encounter on a quayside with a man whom he had always considered to be a puffed-up old fool. The windscreen was clouding over with a fine rain. He made to wipe it, to clear a space through which he could see clearly, and realised that it was his own eyes that were misting. The drink, he told himself as Captain Prunty with one last yank of the handle set the engine throbbing.

  MEL SPAIN WAS missing for three days. He crossed the river and booked into the Seamen’s Hostel on the north side. The night had been misty; by the early hours of the morning it was a pea-souper, the perfect weather to disappear into. Foghorns groaned. Out there on the high seas – where he should have been – beneath the stroke and eclipse of the twin lighthouses which guarded the bay. He imagined his other self out there, living the life he should have had. A purser on a cruise ship, like the Queen Bea, or a musician in the lounge orchestra. A white uniform with golden epaulettes and squeaky shoes, the rich rustle of satin on the floor, the reek of cigars. The ocean lapping on the starboard side, a roving band of men for company who could speak several languages and could buy rum on the black market, a native girl in every port. Tropical music, the fruity pout of marimbas … A man groaned in the bed beside him. The dormitory stank of male sweat and musty blankets. The nights were punctuated by the snoring protests of dreams smuggled into the dark hours. He had missed the boat. Another foghorn moaned. Oh yes, Mel laughed sourly to himself, he had really missed the boat this time.

  He slept the days away in a nest of soiled bedclothes, venturing out only at night to the dingy dockers’ pubs down by the river where he wouldn’t be recognised. He drank his wages away, stumbling back to the hostel in a blurred daze, falling into bed again, muttering in his sleep. He woke to the grey dawn of the third day, penniless, his mouth tasting of ashes, stubble on his chin. He looked down at his rumpled, sour-smelling clothes, his hair slicked flat, grazed his fingertips against the roughness of his chin and came to his senses. What was he doing out here when his son needed him? (Mel never had any doubts on that score.) Vanity prevailed. He would have to go home, clean up, get washed and shaved, put on his Sunday best and order flowers for the mother of his son.

  Two hours later, the proud father arrived at Rita’s side, bouquet in hand, with a great welcome for himself. He had announced her name at reception with a proprietorial air – my wife, he could hear himself boom, Mrs Spain. And the porter had replied, with equal respect, Mel thought – this way, Sir! He had stopped at the nursery on his way up but he could see no lusty specimen who could possibly be his, so he marched with as much purpose as he could muster for a man trying to hide his foolishness at carrying flowers. Rita was sleeping and he stood over her just watching for several minutes, the glow of paternity extending even to her, his child-bride. From behind his ridiculous blossoms he reached out tentatively to touch her fingers. Her eyes snapped open.

  ‘You bastard,’ she hissed.

  Rita would have been surprised if she knew how Mel had spent his lost days. The last she saw of him was in the waiting room, his collar turned up, rattling small change nervously in his pocket. She suspected, of course, that he had been off with another girl. One of the usherettes at the La Scala, the small one, she thought, with the peroxide hair and the ladders in her stockings. She was amazed at how calmly she could consider a prospect which days ago she would have thought catastrophic. In the days since the birth she had been prone to sudden tears – over the puckered gash on her stomach and the empty cradle at the end of her bed. But her errant husband – she still had difficulty with the word – induced only a hard-headed spite. It did not much matter where he had been or who he’d been with; the fact was that he had abandoned her in her hour of need. Though still groggy – the room swung if she closed her eyes – she had never seen things so clearly. It was as if she had blinked and the world had exploded briefly like fireworks in the night sky, and she was now witnessing their fall to earth in a thousand false, glittery pieces. She had imagined that having a baby would have made her lighter; instead she felt anchored, weighed down by the facts of her life – she was eighteen, a mother of a baby who had been cut from her and taken away as if she were not a fit person, and married to a man – no, she amended, a boy – who profferred his ridiculous blossoms and beamed at her as if nothing had happened. As if nothing had changed.

  ‘It’s too late,’ she said turning away from him.

  ‘But I’m here now.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ she repeated.

  He felt something slipping from his grasp – his life, the only one he had.

  Everything about the baby alarmed Mel. A girl, her smallness, the birthmark. An angry strawberry pucker on her chin.

  ‘What’s that?’ he had asked his mother who brought him down to the nursery to show him his daughter. What he saw was a ragged-clawed little monster in a cage, the blue tributaries of veins and arteries like a relief map drawn on her skin, her fontanelle beating, furious and delicate.

  ‘Oh that,’ she said disparagingly.

  Nothing about birth – or death – surprised Lily Spain.

  ‘That’ll disappear … in time.’

  Later she would come to rue these words.

  THERE WAS A hex on her, Rita believed. She blamed the tinkers. She remembered the woman who had called to the door at Mecklenburgh Street, the one who had divined that the baby was a boy. Once Rita had crossed the woman’s palm with silver she believed that she had entered unknowingly into some kind of demonic bargain. The spinning gold token held over her had been enough to cast the spell of ill luck. The tinkers had a claim on her child; she would never properly be Rita’s. She remembered, too, visiting the market on Great Britain Street with Mel. Every Saturday the tinkers set up along the crumbling pavements. Mountains of clothes, tangled limbs of scarlet and silver sat in the gutters. Women scavenged through the spangled mounds, drawing out slivers of green and ropes of white. The toothed cogs of machines, sprockets and hinges, washers and nails were piled on upturned boxes. Bits of engines sat on the cracked kerbstones, rust-coloured spare parts, the jaws of implements. Everything for sale looked unfinished as if it had been torn from something else. Mel loved the market. He was a hoarder by nature. Perhaps from the La Scala, he had picked up the habit of always looking at the ground. You wouldn’t believe, he would tell Rita, the things people leave behind them in the cinema. He pocketed what he found – umbrellas, hat-pins, single gloves, stray coins, and occasionally, a fat wallet.

  Rita, big with child, loitered by his side as he rummaged through greasy nuts and bolts, the strewn innards of clocks. This, Rita reasoned, must have been how the tinkers kept tabs on the baby she was carrying. Once, she was sure, she had spied the bruised woman who had come to the door. She was certain she recognised the threadbare shawl, the gold glint of her smile.

  Every morning as Rita padded painfully down to the nursery she thought of that woman, recalling what she saw now as the knowingness of her smile. Slack-bellied, scarred, her baby wrenched from her – all of these things seemed like bad omens. There was nothing she could do but watch helplessly as the little creature (Rita couldn’t even think of this stick-like being as a baby) laboured and struggled behind glass, a tiny blur of flesh. Rita could not bear to hear the horrible enlargement of her breathing, or to see her sprawled, frog-like, in the incubator, her tiny, claw-like fingers gnarled in her mouth. She watched, horrified, as the nurses slid her out from the glass tent to feed her and how she recoiled from the awful touch of another skin. Rita refused to hold her. The baby was too weak. Just looking at her hurt Rita. As if a look
from her might kill.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Rita,’ Dr Munroe said clapping a hearty hand on her shoulder, ‘she’ll be as right as rain in a few weeks.’ He stood beside her as if surveying his handiwork. ‘I’ve seen smaller scraps than this turn into great big hefty brutes. You’ll soon be back complaining that she’s eating you out of house and home! Isn’t that right, Mr Golden?’ He chuckled to himself as he walked away.

  ‘There, you see, Rita.’ Her father stood rubbing her arm appeasingly. Rita suspected he liked the feel of the dimpled stuff of her dressing gown.

  But she wasn’t comforted, not by him. Since the baby he had been tiptoeing around her as if she might turn nasty on him. He was ascribing some power to her that she did not have, but she did not have the energy to tackle him. Instead she let him lead her gingerly back to the ward.

  Mel’s mother was there admiring the eight-pound baby boy the woman in the next bed had borne. There was no respite here, Rita thought; it was a choice between viewing her own failed attempt or being surrounded by the squealing successes of others.

  ‘Aren’t you a little cutie,’ Lily Spain was cooing, nuzzling her lips close to the baby’s forehead. ‘Wouldn’t you just run away with him?’ Nobody, Rita thought sourly, was going to run away with hers.

  Lily hurriedly returned the baby to his crib at the end of the next bed. She settled herself down as Rita clambered painfully into bed. She was blissfully unaware of the underground resentment that accompanied her visits. No one had told her that Mel had abandoned ship for three days. For Walter it was no surprise; he treated Mel’s disappearance as only to be expected, while Rita had been too ashamed to admit the fact that Mel had left her. But both of them, separately, wanted to punish Lily Spain for her son’s fecklessness. Her very unknowingness seemed to provoke them.