Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  Mr Doran, father of Tessie who sat next to me in class, was one I was particularly watchful of. He liked to give us frights, pouncing savagely from behind doors, and he did clowning tricks and funny faces where he pulled back his mouth making his lips thick and slug-like and turning his eyes into smooth Chinese slits. He would lend his body out as a landscape for adventure, cantering about their garden with Tessie on his shoulders, veering wildly over bushes and skirting the rigid arms of trees until they tumbled mightily in mounds of just-cut grass. Tessie would clamber on to his lap, sitting astride his knees as if he were a horse. He would growl and diving at her he would tickle her mercilessly. I would stand back and watch these displays with a fascinated kind of horror. I hated his onslaughts for their suddenness and ferocity, always fearing that one day his attention would turn to me and he would seize me and carry me off, kicking and screaming.

  We had Grandfather Golden instead. A stand-in, a substitute. Big, soft-faced and balding, he stood sadly in the centre of his dim, shoe-lined shop on Mecklenburgh Street and served. I remember being brought there to visit, or to be fitted for sandals. The slide and clack of the shoe gauge, the cold dull metal underfoot and Grandfather Golden pressing a thumb on my toecaps and declaring poignantly: ‘She should get two summers out of these.’ As if he was offering the gift of life.

  Watching him kneel before bludgeoned feet, what he seemed to offer was a miraculous cure. He would open the lids of the shoe boxes deferentially and parting the tissue paper, he would inhale briefly the whiffy balm of new leather. He drew each shoe out slowly as if it were a piece of delph. He would hold it delicately between his fingertips.

  ‘Diana,’ he would breathe. He knew shoes by their names. Calypso, Trouper, Pearl.

  He stood like a man bereft among his customers’ jaded footwear furrowed by grief and lying troubled at their feet, the resilient candour of working men’s boots, mud-grimed and thirsting from toil, the stricken elegance of stilettos. In the front hallway there were teetering fortifications of white shoe boxes lining the walls. They were like battlements of babies’ coffins. There, I imagined, standing in Grandfather Golden’s hall were the caskets of hundreds of unknown babies, their names inscribed on the nether end. I was afraid to be there after dark fearing that the dead children would call out in the night. And one, in particular, the ghost of my sister. I feared that one day I would find her name written there.

  There were other secrets in Grandfather Golden’s house, I was sure of it. Perhaps it was its dimness and the combination of smells, new shoes gone old and Grandfather’s own odour, musty and slightly sour. So much of the house was unused; the complete top half was closed off. My mother was oddly insistent that I should recall more of it. It was where we spent the first four years, she would say reproachfully, as if I were betraying her by not remembering. And this, she would say, was your room. I would stand in a cold bedroom with its icy lino and hangers jangling in the wardrobe and peer out at the view. This, I would tell myself, was once the frame of my world. Below the sill, the flat roof of the shop stretched out. On it an upturned bucket, a stick with an oily, black, high-tide mark, a coil of wire. Near the parapet, the leg of a doll. One rotting carpet slipper. A yardbrush, prone. How these things came to be there was a mystery to me. For years, I imagined that someone lived out on the roof, a strange, banished creature who needed exactly this combination of things to live.

  When we visited Mecklenburgh Street, Grandfather Golden used to take me to the river. I loved the enclosure of the city, the huddled streets offering, a grimy, decaying embrace, the secretive blind alleys. Oddly, I felt safer there than in our tall tower home where the troubles of the city couldn’t touch us. As we walked, Granda would point to the angels in the crumbling architecture, eyeless, yearning creatures reaching out into the air from their columns of stone, perched on pedestals holding lamps aloft, entwined into the arches of the bridge. We would stroll down the quays, hand in hand, or he would lift me up so that I could peer down into the green underworld. I remember still the exhilaration of being so close to the water, usually just a spit on the horizon, and the great sucking sounds it made. As we stood gazing down at the swirling, agitated depths, he would tell me the story of Moses. The child borne by a river. A foundling, abandoned by his mother, left in a basket among the reeds. The story seemed to belong here, to this river, to these seaweedy banks.

  My mother never accompanied us on these trips. Instead she sat in the kitchen behind Granda’s shop and sulked. The river itself seemed a source of terror for her, because of its proximity to the other side, I suppose. It was a kind of river blindness. She couldn’t get far enough away. Look, she would say disparagingly as we kicked through peelings on the path in the brooding dusk, just look at it, as if Mecklenburgh Street were an errant child dirtied by play. But to me the ramshackle houses, the sad shops, even the litter rustling in the gutters, seemed, as the river did, like the battered but much-loved remains of tales as old as Moses.

  Granny Spain also lived on Mecklenburgh Street. In the Mansions – in my father’s house there were many mansions, it seemed. The tobacco-coloured flats with balconies at prow and stern, which eclipsed the street’s view of the river, were strictly out of bounds on our visits to Grandfather Golden’s, a place deemed dangerous, full of rough types, as my mother called them. I remember meeting Granny Spain only once, and that was by chance on the street. It was my First Communion, a brave, bright, blue day of late spring and I am standing in the doorway of Grandfather’s shop, shoes curtseying in pigeon-toed tiers to the right and left of me. A street photographer is about to take a snap; he has one of those box cameras held at his chest and he is gazing down as if it were a crystal ball. Granda Golden, my mother and Stella are grouped all around him at the kerb as if it is they who are the subject of a family portrait and I am the observer. It is to be my first ceremonial, part of the official record. A picture for the album. And just as the photographer says ‘cheese!’ a woman approaches, and then hesitates. A thickset, silver-haired woman with large, baggy breasts and bruised-looking legs. My mother tried to head her off at the pass.

  ‘Rita, love,’ Granny Spain said mournfully.

  ‘Lily,’ my mother responded, smiling tightly.

  There was some enmity between them which I could never understand. My mother always referred to ‘those Spains’ as if they had nothing to do with us. I expected somebody fiercer, half-woman, half-wolf, I suppose.

  Grannies, like fathers, were a strange species.

  ‘Is this Baby Mary?’ she asked as she fingered the stuff of my veil. Her breath smelled of cough drops. ‘She’s the image of her father, cut out of him.’

  ‘It was me she was cut out of,’ my mother said sourly.

  ‘And this must be the little stray,’ Granny went on patting Stella’s fair head.

  ‘This is the baby,’ my mother replied. ‘Stella.’

  ‘Ah yes, Stella,’ Granny Spain said absently, turning her attention again to me.

  ‘Did you know what a precious little girl you are?’ she asked. ‘We nearly lost you, you know, when you were a baby. You were taken from us …’

  My mother coughed loudly.

  ‘If only Mel had lived to see this …’ Granny Spain’s eyes watered. She sank her face into a large handkerchief and snuffled noisily.

  ‘It’s not the time to dwell on the past,’ Grandfather Golden said pleadingly to her. ‘Not today, of all days. A family occasion.’

  Granny Spain duly wiped her eyes and ran a creviced hand through the stray strands of her hair. She reached into the pockets of her apron and fished out a florin.

  ‘A handsel for the child,’ she said and pressed it into my hand. Silver across the palm. It would bring me good luck, she said.

  We left her there, sniffling on the street as my mother bustled us into the house leaving Granda Golden to deal with the photographer. The picture was never taken.

  ‘What did Granny Spain mean when she said I had been take
n away?’

  ‘Trust your granny to say the wrong thing,’ my mother said.

  ‘But what did she mean?’

  ‘You nearly died, that’s all she means.’

  It was then she told me the story of my birth. The birthmark on my face, a small rosy blemish which has since faded away, and the cord around my neck. I came into the world almost strangled by my mother’s lifeline. A caesarean. I had to be cut out, forcibly removed, a bloodied stump lifted out of her like a part that didn’t work, an appendix, a spare rib. And then there was the incubator, a warm, glass tent, the whoosh and gush of its workings like the burble of the womb and me like a tiny, trapped insect inside. A sort of living limbo. For those babies almost lost. A nurse must have taken me there. I see a woman in white rushing through the corridors, hear a beating heart, panic, seizure and flight. A woman, not my mother, on the run, clutching me to her, yet taking me away. To Intensive Care, my first home.

  THE LANDMARKS OF my childhood are all gone now as if the very city were trying to forget itself. The pot-bellied hospital where I spent my first days, has been demolished. The mysterious streets ironed out into carriageways. Grandfather Golden held out until all of Mecklenburgh Street was levelled around him and the shop stood alone in a field of debris, a picket fence to mark out the boundaries of what was once his enclosed territory, dwarfed by the glinting, wall-eyed gaze of office blocks that had sprung up all around. When his money finally came through we all moved. The house on the Crescent was a big step up for my mother. It was respectability, three bedrooms and a garden. The back parlour was Granda’s domain. He sat there, strangely defeated, in his tightly laced shoes gleaming redundantly. He was bad on his pins and seemed to have developed a stoop from his long years of service. He was adrift in our new house, surrounded by the furniture from Mecklenburgh Street which looked old, brown and dissatisfied in our midst. My mother chased him from the fireside with hectoring advice.

  ‘What about a walk, Da?’

  And when he obligingly took a shuffle down the crazy-paving path, thwacking at the weeds with his stick, she would frown and mutter to herself: ‘Doesn’t lift a finger around here and expects to be waited on hand and foot.’

  His quietude unnerved her; she took it as reproach. Or she suspected it.

  ‘What have you been telling her?’ she would bark at him if she found us together playing draughts, or simply sitting in the parlour steeped in one of his brown silences.

  ‘It’s not up to me to tell her anything,’ Granda would warn darkly.

  ‘I’ll thank you not to tell me how to raise my own children,’ she would reply, steering me out of the room. As usual, I would ask Stella, what this was all about. I always felt – and still do – that she was in on things that I had, somehow, missed, as if I were absent for a time, here only in spirit.

  ‘The facts of life,’ Stella would say, ‘you know, where babies come from.’

  I leaf through these memories of childhood as if they do not quite belong to me, or rather as if I do not belong to them. There I am in the midst of family snapshots, smiling bravely for the camera. Seaside pictures, my mother resplendent in a bathing suit that never got wet (she was afraid of the water), an arm apiece around Stella and me, sodden and shivering from spending too long in an icy sea. And Granda, rumpled-looking, a tartan rug around his knees, sitting in a canvas chair set at a dangerous angle in the sand. Whoever took these pictures – some stranger on the beach, I suppose – wielded the camera carelessly so that frequently one of us would be out of frame, reduced to a glimpse of forearm or a disembodied hand. The nuclear family. They remind me now of those Civil Defence booklets dropped through our letter box. Mammy, Daddy and two children, a haunted foursome, eyes popping in the frightful darkness, huddled together beneath an unhinged door laid up against the wall. Our photos seemed to have the same air of rigid startlement. These manuals fascinated me, their lurid graphics of skin bums; the menacing fluff of the mushroom cloud. What to do in the event of fallout. Pile your shelves high with canned goods and hide. Hide out in your own house and wait to be discovered. The threat of The Bomb was much more acute than any of the dangers of the small, real war in our city. When we were children, that hardly impinged. Strange perhaps for orphans of one of its first casualties. My father was murdered at his place of work, a cinema on the north side. We never found out why; mostly there is no why. He was a south sider – these days that’s enough. Or it may have been a bungled robbery attempt. Stella was only a few months old. And what age was I, I used to pester my mother, anxious to be part of the drama. You would have been – she would stop, frowning, and do a quick, mental calculation – you would have been, let me see, nearly three. It always bothered me, this hesitation.

  I have absolutely no memories of him; it is as if we had never met. And so his death had no import. He belonged to some catalogue of large history like the lost airmen in World War Two or the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. What we knew of him was what my mother told us – his flashy good looks, his swaggering air.

  ‘He was just a boy,’ she would murmur, ‘just a boy.’

  We had a boy father, Stella and I, a boy who would never grow up. It made me feel tender towards him, or what we had of him, his photograph on the mantel, his high bleached forehead, a toothy smile, his gawky haircut.

  Our lost sister was more troubling because she was so little documented. My father was dead and so finished with. But there was no gravestone for her so she was consigned to a nether region somewhere. Limbo, Stella used to say authoritatively. But I felt her closer than that. She hovered like a guardian angel on the margins of our lives. I felt her entwined with us like a picture-book goblin melting into the bark of a tree. There, but hidden.

  At first, she remained just that, an airy presence, no more than a soft wingbeat of sadness. I sometimes wondered if it were not her I was expecting to materialise when strangers called to the door, or the rustle of trees would become suddenly menacing. But no, I reasoned to myself, she did not wish me any harm. How could she? We had shared the same early home, the cushioned softness of the womb. But where exactly had she gone? It worried me greatly that I did not know. I imagined her an orphan lost in a blizzard, her cries swallowed by the howling of an east wind, trapped in a globe of snow, frozen forever in winter, flurries of flakes falling from its endless heaven. Imprisoned in her lostness. I would wake at night, my own cries mingling with hers, seized by her panic in the throbbing darkness, to find my own world mercifully intact, Stella on the top bunk, the reassuring glow of the street light flooding our room on the Crescent, safe in a world that should have been hers. If she had lived, would I ever have been born? Because I had come straight after her, it seemed sometimes that I was just a substitute, a pale imitation, as if I were the ghost taking her place. Sometimes in the midst of our play, those hours of melancholy make-believe which suddenly seem to run out of steam, the floor strewn with the abandoned corpses of dolls and the faded remnants of my mother’s dancing dresses, I would feel a yawning absence of conviction. ‘I’m bored,’ Stella would say petulantly as if she too knew that I was not quite the real thing. It made me doubt myself. I worried that one night I would wake up and find that our sister had slipped into my place and that Stella, or my mother, would not even notice that I was gone.

  And so I invented a life for her, so that she would not want mine, never dreaming that one day I would want hers. I rescued her and I gave her a name. Precious and treasure-like and as far away from my own as I could imagine. Jewel.

  JEWEL HAD NOT died: she had been abandoned. For some reason, she would not have been safe with us. Because she wasn’t a boy, perhaps. Your father longed for a son, my mother told us mournfully, as if all her misfortunes could have been reversed by a boy-child. I imagined her stealing out at the dead of night and leaving Jewel in a basket hidden in the bulrushes with a note attached. GIVE THIS CHILD A GOOD HOME. There would have been a full moon. The bright tide would have gently borne her away – away to t
he other side and into the arms of Pharaoh’s daughter … here is where my story fell down. In my mind the woman who discovered Jewel was not a princess. Even my imagination could not stretch to such exotica. No, she was more like Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, grown hopeless with the passing years, for whom a child would be a miraculous favour granted by the message of an angel.

  I sent Jewel to live in a small, dark house on the other side of the city. She would know the claxen call of factories, the steep terraced streets, chimney stacks spouting steam into a bleached sky. Her world seemed mostly interiors, bound up in sensations of enclosure. Her mother, close by in another room, poised and watchful, who feared for her, who would not let Jewel out of her sight, who would grip her hand to reassure herself that this child was real, who would touch her fingers and the hairs on her head as if she were counting her blessings. I imagined her a sickly child. How else to explain the kind of fearful love she knew? Tubercular, I decided. Weak lungs, a rickety walk listing to one side. Hence her mother’s exaggerated care, the enforced warmth, the muffling up against the weather.

  Jewel knew the steady thrum of identical days. Her mother rising as dawn breaks, the stoking of the range below, the plish-plash of water in a tin basin as her father shaved. Oh yes, I granted her a father too, with rough, oily hands and a whiff of diesel, a man suffused with a bewildered but grateful reverence for the gift of a late and much-longed-for child. He would come into her room in the mornings to rouse her, carefully putting on her dressing gown and slippers, his breath a warm cloud on the icy air. It was often winter in Jewel’s house. His big hands were clumsy with buttons; he often mismatched them. He carried her downstairs, his burly clasp around her waist, her arms tightly clutching his broad expanse of shoulder. Down the bright well of the stairs and along the dim passageway to the kitchen. From her perch on the high chair she would watch as her mother carved a loaf for sandwiches and boiled water for her father’s flask, while he spooned out tea from a rusting caddy. I gave Jewel other props that did not belong at home – an oil cloth on the table, a scored and ancient bread board, a chipped enamel teapot. There was a quiet and purposeful air of industry as they worked together; her father’s head bowing beneath the palsied sleeves of undershirts hanging over the range, her mother wielding a heavy pan, sizzling angrily, as she bore it to the table. They moved as if in a careful dance for the child on her wooden throne.