by Martha Long
‘OK, you sign on every Monday. You come in here and go over to that queue.’
‘How much will I get?’ I asked.
‘Two pounds ten shillings.’
Jesus! It will have to do. Two pounds ten shillings!
‘Thank you,’ I said, standing up and taking my labour card from her.
‘Are you all right now?’ the women asked me.
‘I’m grand, thanks.’
‘Well, if you’re sure,’ they said, not looking very sure themselves.
I walked off, dying to get out into the fresh air and get back to the room and make myself a cup of tea. I’ll go and see the landlord first, though. Just in case he doesn’t let me stay.
I walked back slowly, thinking, if I pay the two pounds ten shillings I get from the labour, then that will give me a roof over my head. All I’ll have to worry about is getting the money for the food and the electrical meter. I walk everywhere, and I don’t need anything else, except my cigarettes. I will manage somehow. I can always go into the Rotunda Hospital to have the baby and wear a wedding ring. They won’t be any the wiser. Then we’ll see what happens when the baby is born. That is enough for the moment. I’ll take it one step at a time.
I rounded the corner and turned into the works yard where my landlord has his office. And I went up the stairs and knocked on the door. I was now in a cold sweat and feeling faint again. Just get this over with and if everything works out – please God, grant that he will let me stay – that will solve all my problems for the time being.
‘Come in!’
I opened the door and he was sitting at a desk piled high with papers and a black telephone sitting beside his hand.
‘Sit down,’ he said, eyeing me, taking in my bit of bulge at the front.
I wrapped the scarf around my stomach, knowing it was too late.
‘So! What happened?’ he asked me, almost roaring.
I sat staring, not knowing what to answer.
‘This!’ He pointed to my stomach.
Oh, Jesus! The game is up. I’m out on my ear.
‘You’re a Dublin girl, am I right?’ he barked.
‘Yes,’ I whispered, feeling myself completely drained.
‘Now, you’ve been living in a bedsit. What does that tell me?’ he asked the door, looking straight past me. ‘You’ve come out of a convent! Am I right?’
I was shocked. Jesus! He’s very quick. I said nothing. Just waited quietly to let him say what he had to say.
‘So, who’s the father?’ he suddenly roared.
I twisted my mouth, thinking.
‘It’s that gobshite that’s always sniffing around you, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I muttered.
‘Right! That little bastard is going to marry you. Give me his work number! I’ll break his fucking neck when I get my hands on him. Don’t worry!’ he roared, lifting up the telephone. ‘I’m the man for him, the little shite! He won’t get out of this!’
I was laughing inside, thinking he was right, and it suddenly dawned on me that was exactly the thing to do. If I get married, then I’ll be a respectable married woman Then no matter what happens, the authorities can’t touch me.
‘I’ll talk to him myself, Mr Roberts.’
‘Tell him I said he’s going to marry you, OK? Or I’ll come after him! I mean that! All my kids are grown up now. My daughter is now a married woman. But if anyone treated her badly like you’ve been messed around, they would be planted!
‘So you can stay in the bedsit with pleasure, and if there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know, OK?’
‘Yes, Mr Roberts,’ I said, standing up and giving him a huge smile.
‘Here’s the keys. Go in and get yourself a bit of kip. You look all done in! And remember what I said. Any trouble from that little fucker, and I’ll sort him out.’
I went down the stairs and headed up to the shops. I wanted to buy a few messages. I needed to get meself that sup of tea and bread and cheese I promised myself last night. Then I went into the phone box and called the baby’s father. I was going to ask him to come and see me. But as soon as I heard his voice on the phone, I said straight out, ‘Listen! It’s me! I’m back.’
‘Where?’ he said suddenly, shocked.
‘Dublin. I’m back in my old bedsit.’
There was silence. Then I said, ‘Hello! Are you still there?’
‘That’s great,’ he said.
‘Yeah! Listen! We’re getting married. Straight away. So tell your mammy you are taking the time off work on Monday! We’re going to see the priest about arranging the wedding. I’m thinking a week from this Monday!’
There was a stunned silence. ‘Hello! Did you hear what I just said?’
‘Yeah! Yeah! That’s a great idea! I was just thinking the same!’
‘Right so. Now, listen to me carefully. When your mammy blows a fit, tell her you’re old enough to be a father, so we are getting married no matter what she says! Did you get that?’
‘Yeah, yeah! Don’t worry about Mammy. I will sort that out with her!’
So we did marry. We separated just as quick. But, no matter. I was still a married woman. Not a respectable one. No! I was now a single mother. But thankfully not an unmarried one. That would have made me and the baby social pariahs! No, I was technically a deserted wife! Just one step up. That got you a raised eyebrow, an inquisitive look. We were a shadowy lot. A hidden people. I didn’t meet many others. We didn’t openly admit it. We didn’t exist really. Because this was ‘Holy Ireland’. Marriage was sacred. ‘Let No Man Put Asunder.’
So then I started the next phase of my life as a deserted wife. The other women shunned me. Mothers at school. I might rob their husbands! The husbands chased me anyway. I was not under the protection of a man, so they thought I was fair game. They were the hunter, and I was the hunted!
Until now! The monk is the first man I have trusted enough to actually allow myself to become emotionally involved with. I wonder what makes him different? Does he remind me of someone? I suppose it’s because he’s a monk. Spiritual! That means he’s decent. He would be responsible. I would be safe with him. He wouldn’t try to use me, or hurt me then throw me away. Also, he’s working with the mentally ill. That makes him attractive to me. He would understand me. Not judge me for cracking up. I think he’s very mature as well. He always seems so calm and steady.
But nothing can come of it. He has his commitment. He’s not interested in marriage. But he’s actually helped me without knowing it. For the first time in years, I have been able to allow myself to want to get close to a man instead of always being wary of them. Yeah! Things are not as bad as we think. Looking back on the early days of trying to struggle with a baby – they were hard times.
But now I have my own home. Sarah is grown up, and I’m still in my early thirties. Yeah! Life can be a bowl of cherries if ye don’t weaken! Roll on the happy days! Thank God for all my blessings. I’m really very lucky. I just went through a very bad time. But that’s all in the past now! Ah, I can’t wait to get home and start again.
45
* * *
I was still staring out the window when Nikki came flying back in and sat down beside me.
‘Here! Hold that,’ she said, and rushed up to the counter, bringing back a tray with a pot of tea. ‘Now, let’s cheer ourselves up with a drop of this.’ She pulled out a half bottle of whiskey and poured a big splash into the tea, then more again, laughing.
‘Anyone watching?’ she asked, hiding the cups under the table.
‘No!’ I said, whipping my eyes around the room.
‘Now drink that,’ she said.
The heat hit me straight away as it slid down my neck. I felt a buzz in my head and suddenly the room started to seem brighter.
‘Doctor’s orders!’ she said, holding the cup to mine and laughing.
Trust Nikki to think of a way of cheering me up.
‘God, Nikki. We’re mad! We still have no s
ense,’ I said, thinking of all the trouble we got into over the years. ‘Remember the time we got stuck on the autobahn in Switzerland? The cops picked us up, telling us it was verboten! And you started yelling, “We bloody know that. It’s the gobshite’s fault that dumped us here because we wouldn’t travel to Istanbul with him in his bloody truck.”’
‘Yeah!’ she roared. ‘That was all your fault. I wanted to go but you said no!’
‘Yeah! He lost the rag and threw us out. That was because you’d eaten all his grub the night before, and he got nothing in return!’
‘God! Don’t remind me. You got the night’s sleep on the top bunk while I had to wrestle him the whole night, trying to save my virtue!’
‘Serves you right, Nikki! I took nothing from him, so he didn’t think I owed him something.’
‘What do you mean? You ate the whole bunch of bananas he put out for me!’ Nikki roared, still feeling sorry for herself after all this time.
‘Yeah! The cops dumped us in the village, telling us not to go back near the autobahn. Then we discovered everything was really expensive. We thought when they said, “Eine schilling,” that was cheap! Until they took a pound off us. Then it was back onto the autobahn again. It looked like bloody spaghetti junction. But we hit lucky. We got a lift from that man in his big Mercedes, and we took the ferry from the lake in Switzerland across to the lake of Bodensee, in Germany.’
‘Ah, yeah!’ Nikki said. ‘Then we met the mad German, Helmut. He brought us to the Austrian Alps.’
‘Yeah! He took me skiing, Nikki, until he discovered I couldn’t ski. Then I spent the afternoon on the nursery slopes while you were still sunning yourself back at the Gasthaus, sitting in hair rollers and trying to make yourself gorgeous, hoping to get him off me.’
‘Bloody bitch!’ Nikki moaned. ‘I had to entertain meself with little Adolf, the owner of the inn! His wife kept screaming at him and waving huge knives at me while she was cutting up the vegetables for the evening dinner!’
We snorted laughing into our cups, then my eye slid to the piano. No sight of the melancholic.
‘Come on! Let’s have a go,’ I said, dashing over to the piano. I lifted the lid and started to bang out ‘Soft as the Voice of an Angel’. The only thing I could play properly. Nikki banged on the other end, and we played a duet.
A thin, white-faced, elderly man in his sixties came creeping over and sat down at a table beside us. I started to sing softly. I had been in the church choir when I was in the convent. We sang Latin hymns for the Mass. Yeah! Until I got booted out for telling the choir nun, when she asked me: ‘Martha Long! Why are you scratching your head?’
‘I have ringworm, Sister Benedict.’
‘Out! Get out of my choir, you filthy creature!’ she screamed, banging on the gong, looking for Sister Eleanor with one hand, holding me in an iron vice grip with the other.
‘Why did you tell her that?’ Sister Eleanor roared at me, red-faced. ‘You have no such thing!’ she said, tearing her eyes and fingers through me head, then looking at my neck.
‘Oh! I thought I had. I heard one of the other kids saying they had it, and it sounded interesting to me, like something I might have!’
‘Come on! Play “When the Saints”.’
‘Right!’ I said, banging away with two fingers while she banged the other end.
‘Oh! Oh! Oh, when the Saints! Oh, when the Saints! Oh, when the Saints come marching in! Tra la la la,’ I wailed, not knowing the rest of the words. But it sounded great!
When we finished, the little man came shuffling over with his hands in fists held out in front of him, and leaned into us, asking with rheumy eyes filled with sadness, ‘Will ye ever play “If You Were the Only Girl in the World”. Do ye know it at all?’ he asked us hopefully.
‘Yeah! Yeah! I know it!’ I said, delighted.
I banged away at the keys, looking for the right note to start. ‘OK! You sing,’ I said, starting off slowly, playing by ear.
Nikki tinkered away at the other end, getting the key, then we were away.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Tom!’ he said.
‘OK, Tom.’
I sang low to get him started. Then his voice lifted, ‘If you were the only girl in the world, and I was the only boy,’ he sang in a very sad, hauntingly lonely old man’s voice. It was beautiful, and I felt tears at the back of my eyes, and my chest started filling up. I was back in the little bedsitting room all those years ago. When I was seventeen, living on my own, lying in bed at night, listening to the old man in the room next door sing himself, and me, to sleep every night. He had come back to Ireland after working for years on building sites in England during the war. Now he was living out the last days of his life where he wanted to be buried, he said. He’d left enough money to be taken back to his beloved Sligo. And even had his grave ready. There were no living relatives left there, so he stayed in Dublin.
His voice haunted me, and his loneliness swept through the wall between us and wrapped itself around me, and I felt it mix with mine. We shared that loneliness. For that short while, in the late hour of the night, we were deeply connected, and he probably never knew. But I was young then and had it all ahead of me. I had the chance of shaking it off me, hoping for a bright future. Whereas he . . . his was all gone.
I looked at Tom, and tears were spilling down his face, and I reached out and gave him a hug and kissed his soft cheek.
‘Thank you,’ he muttered. ‘I enjoyed tha,’ taking out his hankie and wiping his eyes.
I laughed through my tears at Nikki, saying, ‘It’s good to cry sometimes.’
Tom lifted his head, smiling, and started singing, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary! It’s a long way to go! . . . Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.’
We were cheering ourselves up, and the room was brightening. People started sitting around the piano and joining in. Others started peeling in the door, until we had a concert going. Someone started singing, ‘Non, je ne regrette rien!’
Ah! One of my favourites! The Great Edith Piaf! We all joined in, and the old man sang ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’.
People had tears in their eyes. So had I. But it was a nice sadness – we were not alone. Everyone was silently, within themselves, sharing their moments of joy and great sadness.
Then we got raucous and started roaring our heads off, singing, ‘AS I CAME HOME ONE SATURDAY NIGHT, AS DRUNK AS DRUNK COULD BE! I SAW A HEAD UPON THE BED WHERE MY AUL HEAD SHOULD BE! WELL, I TURNED TO ME WIFE AND I SAID TE HER, “WOULD YE KINDLY TELL TE ME WHO OWNS THAT HEAD UPON THE BED, WHERE MY AUL HEAD SHOULD BE!”
‘“AH! YE’RE DRUNK! YE’RE DRUNK! YE SILLY AUL FOOL!”’
We banged away, singing and laughing and crying, and then the nurses came in – some of them were here already.
‘Tea time!’ they roared, clapping their hands.
‘Everybody down to the dining room for tea, please!’ shouted Jam-jar, putting his hand around his mouth, trying to make a megaphone and herding everybody out.
I closed the lid on the piano, and Nikki said, ‘That was the best impromptu party I’ve had for a long while.’
She stretched, red-faced from all the whiskey she drank. I had about three; she drank the rest. She leaned over, giving me a hug and a kiss. ‘You take care of yourself and get back to life. The world is not the same without you.’
I felt a warmth sweep through me and was grateful to Nikki for her goodness at taking the time to come and spend the entire day with me. We have been friends for a long time – fought over men, then when we won, the man was forgotten and we were friends again.
‘Bye, darling!’ I said, hugging her. ‘Now, keep your beady eyes off that monk. Don’t you go robbing that fella from under my nose. It’s hands off! I saw him first.’
‘Ah, now!’ she said, with a mad glint in her eye. ‘I might just crack up and get meself a bed in here. Jaysus! Can you imagine! The pair of us stuck
in here together! Everyone would crack up, and the place would shut down.’
‘Yeah! I would go home feeling much better and taking the monk with me!’
We roared laughing, then she dumped the empty bottle in the bin and waved back, walking up the stairs and out the door. I watched her go, still wondering how I ended up here.
You never know what is in the future. People used to think I had it made. Even Nikki. My own home, a beautiful child, car, holidays on the Continent, and no man to answer to. That was in a time when women had to have a man if you had a child. Now look at me! I think now, what I had really wanted was a happy family. A decent man I would feel safe with, one who would love me for myself, accept me and never let me down.
I sighed, wondering if I’ll ever be happy. I can’t seem to get it right! I looked around at the people all heading up for their tea. Some of them are very gifted people. People who’d had very full lives. Some had professions, others had reared families, and I wondered what went wrong. They looked like the living dead, shuffling along, doped up to the eyeballs, pain written all over their faces.
Some had suffered breakdowns. I still don’t know what that really means. Couldn’t cope any longer, I suppose. Just riddled with terrible depression, and some are cursed with manic depression.
One woman walked out of here and managed to get on a plane and arrive in Paris! She didn’t even have a plane ticket, never mind a passport. The worst thing was they didn’t even know she was missing until they got a phone call from the police. She was discovered when she arrived back at the airport and tried to get on the plane without a ticket after having a lovely day out for herself walking the streets of Paris! She’s a manic-depressive, and she was flying high as a kite that day. Jaysus! She sure was. In more ways than one!
I joined in with the moving masses heading back up to the ward, wishing I was going home to a husband and children, planning what I would cook. It’s the simple things, the routine of having continuity. The knowing you are wanted and needed. Yeah! That is what I crave.
I crept into the dining room like a snail, my head feeling none the better from the booze. My eyes fell on Blondie having an argument with Maggie. They were pulling the jug of milk between them, slopping it on the table. Blondie was laughing, tormenting Maggie. She wouldn’t let her have the milk.