Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  My mother always had a crowd in on Saturday nights. There were gaggles of young women on the Crescent, mothers of my schoolfriends. They would go to the pictures and afterwards to the lounge bar in the Plaza or there would be uproarious card parties in the front room to which the husbands of these women would be invited. I recall peering over the banisters listening to their muffled explosions of laughter followed by tense conversations in the hall. There were frequent rows, raised male voices or the impassioned sobbing of women which my mother would airily dismiss in the morning as ‘just the drink talking’. The sounds of this unruly adult gaiety would drift up to Stella and me. Stella would often tiptoe down and be allowed to join the party until she fell asleep in a bundle on the sofa. Hours later my mother would carry her back upstairs and carefully tuck her in. I would pretend to be asleep while willing her to pause by my bed and be … be what? Be afraid for me like Jewel’s mother was for her. To wake me with endearments for fear I might have stopped breathing.

  ‘You’re a hardy one,’ she used to say, ‘you came back from the dead.’

  Grandfather Golden kept to his room during my mother’s ‘evenings’. In his latter years there was a bed set up for him in the back parlour because the stairs were too much for him. He spent his Saturday nights polishing our shoes for Sunday Mass. He would heave out the cardboard chip that held the polish and cloths and would carefully wind open all the tins – black, neutral, ox-blood – releasing their acrid, metallic fumes. He would gouge out a knob of polish and set to with a brush, rubbing at our shoes with vigour, spitting on the insteps to accentuate the shine, then worrying at the leather with a blackened rag. Afterwards he would line them up in pairs on a sheet of newspaper on the kitchen floor ready for us to step into. My mother’s were always the last to be filled.

  Darkness was Jewel’s doorway. At night on the verge of sleep, I would close my eyes and like the step in a dream, the one that finally wakes you up, I had only to take one blind leap to join her … a blazing fire. The soft blue-black pile of a hearthrug where Jewel stretched tracing with her finger its curlicued patterns. Against her cheek the rubbed freshness of pyjamas donned after a bath. The house has an evening feel, dusk gathering at the window, lights on but the curtains not yet drawn. The cold chill of the evening invades the house with her father. She makes for the kitchen. There is the scrape of his muddied boots on the red tiles, two stout overalled legs smeared with grease. At eye level the porthole hatch of the range which her father would open from time to time to feed. The sizzling of wet kindling, a burst of flame, the door closes …

  It was always like that. I was allowed only brief glimpses before I would wake from the dream of her life and find little seams in the air as if the skin of a new world had for a moment been peeled back and then hurriedly sewn up again leaving behind only the transparent incisions.

  I would find Grandfather Golden early on Sunday morning blowing on the coals in the kitchen grate while the kettle whistled on the hob, the debris of the night before – the empty glasses, the choked ashtrays – sitting accusingly on the draining board.

  ‘The merry widow’s been at it again,’ he would say surveying the mess. ‘When will that girl ever grow up?’

  His exasperation comforted me, somehow. As if he, too, wanted her to be a different kind of mother and was endorsing my wish for it to be so.

  GRANDFATHER GOLDEN FELL asleep in the August of my tenth year and never woke up. My mother came upon him in his chair in the parlour in the mid-afternoon. She was vacuuming his room, muttering at him, no doubt, under her breath as she worked. My mother approached housework with a slovenly determination. She pulled the bulbous machine around behind her (it was called the Baby Daisy, I recall, belonging to a time when household appliances had human names) as if it were a reluctant dog on a lead. Her lack of application was made up for by the amount of noise she generated. She clobbered the legs of furniture with the hose; she stretched it in under things until she hit an obstacle and would then surrender bad-temperedly as if chairs or the sideboard were deliberately thwarting her. She would emerge from these bouts, flushed and dissatisfied, hurriedly dumping the Baby Daisy under the stairs as if she were disposing of a body; there it would lie broken-limbed until she was forced to take it out again. It would have been in just such a mood that she discovered Granda’s body, his stillness unremarkable admist the racket she made. She would have shaken him irritably as if he were trying to scare her. Only when she picked up his limp, veined hand and found no pulse there would she have realised. She ran from the house, horrified by the unseemliness of it. Her father, sitting there … dead. By the time Stella and I got home from school, the curtains were drawn and a curious hush prevailed which forced us to speak in whispers. My mother sat on the bottom step of the stairs. Even her hair seemed bereaved, falling in wisps around her ravaged face. It was the first time I realised the sheer ugliness of grief. The puffy eyelids, the mottled flush, the messiness of it.

  Two men in gaberdine coats came to coffin him. I remember still the ominous thumps that emanated from the parlour as if a tussle were in progress and Granda was putting up resistance. The last we saw of him was his casket like a giant shoe box being manhandled out of the house. I could not quite believe that he was gone. I fully expected that when all the fuss had died down that he would be back again in his spot by the fire. It made me more firm in my conviction that people did just vanish inexplicably, that in a moment’s carelessness they could simply be taken away. I was only grateful that once more I had managed to escape seizure.

  Our households chimed evenly now, three in Jewel’s, three in mine. With Grandfather Golden gone, I felt the tug of her life more keenly as if she were a neglected twin demanding my attention. Desperately she tried to distract me. Like a conjurer she devised daring tricks for me. There were outings, clamorous parades on the streets with the bellicose boom of drums, the screech of penny-whistles, the gilted triumph of banners. They were fearful occasions with their heave and push of bodies but she always had her father’s hand to grip and the musty comfort of his Sunday suit. Her mother would wait on the doorstep for their return, worried that Jewel might get lost in the crowd. She was nervous of the throng. She heard menace in the drummed-out messages and imminence in their brassy righteousness.

  If I were ill, Jewel produced dangers. I remember coming down with mumps. The crumpled sickbed, my boiling temperature, the lumps in my throat made me prey to a fevered melancholy. Even though I could hear my mother moving about the house I feared that she would forget about me. When she came with hot drinks I didn’t want her to leave. I clung on to her hand when she made to rise from the bed not wanting to be alone in a darkened room haunted by Jewel’s father who kept vigil, reading from the Bible. Of fallen cities and children rescued from the river. And her stricken mother stood leaning over her; mopping her brow. A recurrence of her old illness. Clogged lungs, a congested chest, a croupy cough.

  When I learnt to swim in the public baths Jewel dabbled at the water’s edge. She is with her mother. A metallic blue day by the river. She is crouched down feeding bread to the ducks. They are squabbling over the morsels, the gentle ripples they make giving way suddenly to a furious flap of feathers, an aggravated honking. I dogpaddled bravely out of my depth, knowing she was safe.

  She is both frightened and delighted by the sudden commotion she has caused, this crazed pecking for crumbs.

  ‘Look, look,’ she cries and turning around she loses her balance and slips into the water.

  There was a sudden rush of chlorined water in my lungs. I put my legs down and found them wheeling uselessly reaching for the solid ground that was no longer there. I went under; drifted slowly downwards, my hair rising in a plume above like the silvery whiskers of a jellyfish. The water is a murky green. I am with her now on the muddy river-bed. The little bubbles we make rise to the surface, but it is peaceful and silent in our underwater world, joined at last. Jewel and I. And then there is a great thrashing overh
ead; Jewel’s mother is wading in the water gathering up fistfuls of weeds and mud as she claws at the river floor. She scoops Jewel up and carries her away.

  Some air, someone hisses, gesturing at the knot of people who have gathered, give her some air. Jewel’s mother draws her shoulders up and inhaling gaspfuls into her lungs she presses her mouth to Jewel’s. She rubs her chest frenziedly, pummelling her.

  ‘Please God,’ she urges, ‘please.’

  And then suddenly Jewel gurgles and spews up something green and watery. Her mother falls upon her, bending her face close to Jewel’s, cradling her sodden head in her arms and whispering into her hair. Her mother has breathed new life into her.

  A giant hook saved me, I was hoisted suddenly, gasping and thrashing, to the surface and landed like a fish at the poolside. The lifeguard wagged a finger.

  ‘Stay away from the deep end.’

  ‘This,’ said Sister Raphael, ‘is one of Mother Nature’s wonders. It may not be visible again in our lifetime.’

  These words both excited and chilled me, like the notion of infinity. The sky was a pale, frightened blue. It was the sort of day on which the world might end, so still and expectant was it. We carried the bucket out on to the hard tennis court and set it down between the tramlines. We gathered around, an ill-assorted group of twelve-year-olds. The bigger girls, those tall enough to open windows and wipe the topmost part of the blackboard were put standing at the back of the circle. The rest of us, front-row fodder for group photographs, had to squat uncomfortably on the ground. Sister Raphael, a tall, young nun with close-set eyes which made her seem both mean and noble, stood with her hands clasped to her mouth, her fingers forming a steeple of admonishing solemnity.

  ‘The moon will pass between us and the sun …’

  The bucket shifted suddenly and water slopped around our feet.

  ‘Someone’s kicked the bucket, Sister.’

  A ripple of mirth ran around the circle; once started it could not be stopped. Hands to mouths, we vainly tried to keep it in, wincing and spluttering into our palms.

  ‘Girls!’

  We sobered up.

  ‘The dark body of the moon will be projected on to the sun’s bright disc …’ She gestured to the clenched ball of light in the sky. ‘It will cover it completely, obscuring for us, the light of the sun. Only temporary, of course, but for a moment or two, our part of the world will be cast into darkness …’

  The waters, still agitated, lapped gently in the bucket.

  ‘Hence the word ‘eclipse’, to obscure, deprive of lustre.’

  ‘What’s the bucket for, Sister?’

  ‘Because, my dear, there are some things we cannot bear to see. The fierce light of the sun would blind you if you gazed on it directly, so we look down on its reflection instead.’

  We stared into the bucket and waited. The waters darkened …

  Here is my last memory of Jewel. A hunt for blackberries. The ground underfoot is muddy and wet from a recent shower. Her father towers above her, leaning over her head to pick from branches too high for her to reach. She crouches at his feet shod in wellingtons. She is fascinated by the crenellations of their raised toecaps. Beside her is a bucket housing a rising tide of blue-black mulch. He drops fresh berries into it from his vantage point. She has stopped picking and is instead fingering the pulpy crop, squeezing them between her fingers and smearing the juice around her mouth. There is the soft squelch of approaching footsteps. She looks up. Her mother, headscarved, cries out.

  ‘No, no, don’t do that. They’ll make you sick. We have to wash them first. Stanley …’

  The name reverberates. Stanley.

  And falls away …

  Above there was a vast shifting of cloud sulkily reflected in the pail.

  ‘Did you see it, girls? The sun’s corona, the bright ring around the edges?’ Sister Raphael asked excitedly.

  I had missed it; a secret never to be repeated in my lifetime.

  THE BLACKBERRY SMELL of menstrual blood. Jewel tiptoes gently away into the hallucinatory past. By my mid-teens she was no more than a fancy I recalled forgivingly, a cross and garlic for the despair and frights I had ascribed to childhood. At a certain age she just stopped growing, which is perhaps a way of saying that I outgrew her. Once, she had been my equal, but she fell behind along the way, limping in my wake. She reminded me of Kate Burgess, a girl at St Columba’s. Retarded, stuck permanently in Senior Infants, she towered above her smocked five-year-old companions. She sat in their midst, wedged uncomfortably into the miniature desks of the nursery or prowled the corridors – classes were not compulsory for her – tall and ungainly, with her pigeon-toed walk, and her glasses askew. She was the school mascot. She led the cheering at our matches; she brought us luck. Katie, our Katie. Everyone called her that as if we all had some claim to her. We indulged her and exploited her in equal portions, passing her forbidden sweets and fizzy drinks – she was inclined to fat – then sending her off on courtly, whimsical errands. Fetch my gym shoes from the cloakroom; tell Clodagh Dunne I’ll see her in the bicycle shed. She loved to do messages. It gave her aimless wandering a purpose. She would march forth, frowning with concentration, elbows sticking out and telling anyone she passed the task she’d been assigned. That was her way of remembering. Otherwise, she would end up in the toilets or the assembly hall like a dazed explorer who has wandered off the map. Fixtures fascinated her. Taps and stopcocks. Light switches. Toilet chains. She tested them tirelessly. Cause and effect. Was she aware of the passing years, I wondered, the growing disparity between her size and our progress? In my final year Kate Burgess was four inches taller than me but still turned rope on the playground. She is probably still there, for all I know. A woman-child playing in the sandbox.

  I remember the idleness of adolescence as if I was recuperating from a debilitating illness – called childhood, perhaps. A succession of monastic-like interiors. A round of cell, refectory and cloister. It was as if the world had been roofed over and outside, for all its airiness had been reduced to an arcature of sky and a bare quadrangle of green glimpsed briefly through a colonnade. I felt muffled up, a patient with a cold, troubled by sluggish limbs, watery eyes, a bulbous nose. Examining my face in the mirror I found it strangely blurred, the features stranded in growing fields of flesh. Puppy fat, they called it. I seemed a stranger to myself as if in the clutches of a volatile other, who was irritable, easily riled, hard to please, who sat with arms folded and demanded entertainment. It was she who paced restlessly in my room, going to the window, picking up a book, throwing it aside, flinging herself on to the bed, moved by an imperative which vanished as soon as she acted upon it, while I was happy to spend hours in absent rumination, a kind of mental sleepwalking, until I would be called forth and made to account for myself.

  I wake from this torpor in my final year at school and find it is the world that has been transformed, not me. Stella is already a young woman, round of breast, her long mane of hair tossed wilfully over one shoulder, looking preposterously overweaned in a school uniform. She bursts forth, fully grown, a neat aggregate of my parents – my mother’s fair, pretty looks, my father’s rakish height. Where has she been all these years? A sleeping beauty suddenly roused. But, of course, it is I who have been absent. I had been plodding on with my books presuming that she was following on behind me. But the very things I loved about school stifled her. The regimen of bells, the dress code, the order of it, these appealed to me. I liked the feeling that there was somebody reliable in charge. It was the one place I had no doubts about; I certainly belonged there. I am nostalgic now even for its battered geography – the loose parquet flooring, the scarred desks. Long corridors, wood to waist height on the walls, high sash windows. Below, the asphalt courts glinting as if they were paved with silver, rain drumming on the roof of the bicycle shed. The smell of saturated gabardine drying in the cloakrooms. From the classrooms the low rumble of irregular verbs. Funny how my memories of it are as the int
erloper, the girl put out on the corridor as punishment, although that is not how it was. It was not that I was a remarkable scholar, but I kept my head down – a practice of old – and it was mistaken for application. More often it was daydreaming and an earnest wish not to become the centre of attention. While all around me girls saluted the air with their hands hissing ‘Sister, Sister’, I slunk low in my chair and prayed not to be noticed. I wanted only to be invisible, to be passed over, left alone to blend in with the crowd. I had a horror of being singled out. There were times when I would catch a teacher looking at me appraisingly with something approaching grudging regard, as if a vague sense of distant celebrity hung about me. They looked at Ita Manners in much the same way. Ita Manners had been to Lourdes and left her crutch at the grotto, though she still wore calipers and walked with a limp. I put it down to my widowed mother, the pitying allure of orphanhood. I suspected they got the whiff of the workhouse. I seemed to get extravagant – and unasked for – praise for being mediocre. For even making an effort. Less seemed to be always expected.

  ‘See!’ Thirty-five resentful faces would turn on me.

  ‘Someone did her homework despite the power cut.’

  My orderly copybooks, my neat handwriting, these were hoisted up and passed around like pieces of incriminating evidence.