Last Train from Liguria

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  These are the half-cocked ideas that come into my head while I'm sitting at the bed waiting for Nonna to make up her mind if she's coming or going. Or while I'm sitting, half pissed, in the darkness of my flat watching crap on the telly, and wondering if I should have one more smoke before trying for sleep, or to hell with it – why not? – open one more bottle of plonk.

  I started the poem one night, I wrote on the top of a page – 'Loss' by Anna Moore. But that's as far as I got. I thought – if I write one word a day for the next six months, I could easily make up a poem. What's the big deal? One word. It doesn't seem much to ask of myself. By the time I'd finish it, Nonna would be gone. I could slip off myself then, if I wanted. I could follow her. 'Loss' by Anna No More, I decided I could call it then and chuckled ironically to myself for a few moments. Of course, before long I was crying again.

  One. Word.

  I have to, have to, get out of this place.

  *

  I lived with Nonna from the day my mother died until I finished college and moved to Belfast to be near, and finally get to know, my father. On and off over the years I have lived with her again.

  The flat is made up of six rooms, three each side of the entrance hall, which effectively cuts Nonna's home up the middle. To the left, the kitchen, sitting room and a small bathroom. To the right, two bedrooms and another, slightly larger bathroom. Because all these rooms were once bedsitters, there are Yale locks on all the doors. To get from one side of Nonna's flat to the other you have to cross over the hall, where, when I lived there anyway, there always seemed to be someone talking on the public phone and always letters and junk mail splattered all over the floor.

  It was my childhood home – I can't remember the Belfast house where I lived before my mother died – but I never really liked Nonna's flat. The sense of living in one room at a time, brought about by having to use a hall-door key to get from one room to another. And having to remember to bring the bunch of keys every time you crossed the hall; I hated that.

  The outside of the house was better. Granite steps to the front door, a small bedraggled garden; a permanent dome of mottled shadow from the huge trees on the road outside. There was a photographer's studio in the basement, which I used to imagine brought a touch of glamour to the house. For years a blown-up picture of a gawky-looking bride was stuck behind the bars of the window. As if she was in prison, Nonna sometimes said.

  I loved to sit on the granite steps – the sparkle and solidity of them, the way they held the heat in summer, warming the back of my legs. I liked to watch for the bus that stopped outside the gate, waiting to see who would get off. People who lived in the flats upstairs – faces I would try to match to voices overheard talking on the phone. Or scrubbed-up customers self-consciously making for the photographer's studio. Or my father, who never came by bus anyway, but always arrived in a taxi, pockets stuffed with oil rig money.

  His absence had, in a way, been worse than my mother's death. I knew he could come back, if he wanted. Whereas my mother could not. I also knew my mother was in heaven, but where my father was – I couldn't say. An oil rig meant nothing to an eight-year-old child. Nonna said no matter what, I should pray for them both every night. 'God bless Mammy in heaven,' was one thing. 'God bless Daddy on an oil rig,' never quite convinced, and I soon let him slip from my prayers.

  I was never inside any of the other flats in the house but thanks to the public phone in the hall, I got to know everyone's business. Whenever it rang a young man who was unemployed would come clattering down the stairs in his purple flared trousers – although the calls never seemed to be for him. If he happened to be out it was my job to answer the phone and trot upstairs to knock on the relevant door. A woman on the third floor with rollers in her hair gave me a pound note one time. 'Tell him I'm out, love, there's a good girl. No – on second thoughts, tell him I've moved on.'

  I came to know every brush-off, excuse and cock-and-bull story in the book, and that adults lie and find it easy to lie, especially on the phone when their faces can't be seen. I came to look on the phone as an instrument of deceit. So whenever my father called to tell me where he was, I didn't believe him. Once he rang to say he was in London and would be arriving in Dublin to see me the next day. 'Liar! Liar!' I had screamed down the phone at him and dropped the receiver, leaving it swinging from the cord, until his voice, condensed and slightly cartoonish, finally stopped calling my name.

  Poor man, with his direct northern ways, was probably the only person I have ever known who had always given me the truth, or what little he had of it, anyway.

  Once, when Nonna was having trouble with her back – lying on the floor, eyes glazed with pain and painkillers – she said, 'You're going to be beautiful, Anna, in another year or so. I hope it's not going to get in your way.'

  I would have been about seventeen at the time, sitting at the dining table doing my homework. 'What are you talking about, Nonna?' I laughed, it seemed like such a personal thing for her to say.

  'You should have a few pals. You know? Girlfriends – like you used to have before you started going steady with this new chap – Marty, isn't it? He's a nice boy, but you don't have to drop your friends just because a man comes knocking on the door, you know.'

  I felt like saying, How come you've no pals then, if they're so bloody great? Because as long as I'd known Nonna I had only ever heard of one friend, a nurse called Dolores who phoned the odd time and whom Nonna had once gone out in her good coat to meet. Nor had she ever really encouraged me to bring friends home. Whenever I did she became slightly peculiar, never taking her eyes off them as if she expected them to steal something. On another occasion she had said, 'Don't trust anyone, Anna, not even your best friend.' Although later she retracted that piece of advice, saying it might have been a 'bit strong'.

  'You should watch those painkillers, Nonna,' I said and went back to my essay. A few minutes later I could still feel her looking up from the floor at me. 'What?' I asked her.

  'You get your looks from your grandmother,' she said.

  'From you?'

  'No', she laughed. 'God, no. Your other grandmother. She was a beauty.'

  The next time I saw my father I asked him what his mother had looked like.

  My father, brought up in a climate of suspicion, always seemed to be startled by the simplest of questions. 'My mother? What are you askin' about her for?'

  'I just want to know what your mother, my grandmother – looked like, that's all.'

  He thought for a moment, before answering in his sharp Belfast quack, 'The bawk of a bus, if you must know.'

  *

  Sometimes I have these imaginary conversations with Nonna where I bombard her with questions and cheeky remarks I would never dream of saying to her face – whether asleep or awake. I say things like: 'You're trapped now, Nonna, you may as well come clean. Come out with your hands up, tell us what the hell's been going on these past fifty-odd years.'

  Or I might get a little more personal. 'How could you go an entire life and still be a virgin, Nonna? I mean – the age you are and you still don't know what it's like? And that husband of yours, did he not mind having to go without? Did he leave you because of it – was that it? Did he not die in the war at all? Or did he ever even exist? And why? Why did you never tell me the truth? Did you think I would leave you if I found out we weren't really flesh and blood?'

  Other times I just tell her things. Like how much I've come to hate the flat she was good enough to buy for me, with Hugh's fingerprints and stains and thoughts all over it. That I can't even be bothered to clean it, that's how much I hate it now. And what's more that I never even made all that much use of the studio. In fact, I gave it over to Hugh a long time ago when he was preparing for an exhibition and needed the extra space. And I forgot to take it back or he forgot to give it back. He hadn't even had to ask if he could use it in the first place. My idea, my insistence and, if I'm to be honest, when he accepted – my relief.


  I know this would really get to her. The fact that I gave the studio away, wasted the chance, 'the talent', as she used to call it. 'You've inherited a talent, Anna, it would be a shame to waste.'

  The times I've heard her say that. I had always presumed someone from my father's side had a flair for art, because my mother and my grandmother – the only other relatives known to me – had none. Nonna called it talent, I would settle for mere ability – not quite the same thing. Whatever it is, it has always seemed to matter a lot to Nonna, anyhow. When I was a child she used to fill the walls of the flat with my pictures. When I got into art college she lost the run of herself and bought a bottle of champagne. Even when I disappointed her (though not myself), by taking a job as an art teacher in an inner city school, she paid my insurance and bought me my first little car.

  In these imaginary conversations I never lie to Nonna. Not like I used to do, all the time. Just for the sake of it, or just for an easy life. I used to feel bad about all those stupid lies. But not any more of course. Now that I know that all along there's been a pair of us at it.

  I imagine telling her about Hugh. 'He's left me, Nonna,' I say. 'He's not coming back.'

  'Is that so?' she quietly asks back.

  'He's left me, Nonna, he told me there was nobody else, but that all things have a time to end.'

  'Did he now, did he say that, well well?'

  'Nearly six years, Nonna.'

  'Six years! Was it really that long?'

  'Mmm. It turns out he's gone back to his wife.'

  I imagine her looking at me for a moment, measuring every word I've said, taking it all in. A slight slow nod, perhaps a pat on my hand. 'Ah well,' she says then, 'live by the sword, die by the sword – isn't it always the way?'

  *

  I only found out the truth about the house on Pembroke Road the first time I brought Nonna to have a look at the fancy nursing home in Chapelizod. We had spent the afternoon there and, when the grand tour was over, had come outside and sat in the car in the driveway for a while. A smitten Nonna smiling benignly through the car window at the house and its gardens. That was when she said: 'This is the one. This is the perfect place.'

  I couldn't understand where she was getting such notions. It hadn't been that long since she'd bought me the flat and now here she was talking about nursing-home fees, as if she were talking in telephone numbers.

  'It's lovely – isn't it?' she said. 'Don't they keep it lovely? Really though – I mean, look at that beautiful willow tree. I love the willow, I must say, despite its melancholy reputation.'

  'Nonna, it doesn't matter how lovely it is. It's an outrageous price. Jesus, you could stay in the Shelbourne for that amount. How in the name of God would you be able to afford it?'

  'I'll use the income from Pembroke Road.'

  'The rent you save won't pay for one day in this place – surely you must know that.'

  'I don't pay rent, I own it.'

  'You bought the flat on Pembroke Road?'

  'I bought the whole bloody house!' she said.

  'When?'

  'After the war.'

  'What? What are you talking about?'

  'Yes. I bought it from a German chap. You see, he'd left Germany in the thirties – he was so disgusted by the carry-on there and when it was all over he decided to go back to help out. Wasn't that very forgiving of him? A lovely man. I often wonder what happened to him after. It was very difficult to get accommodation after the war, you know. So I decided to divide the house up into flats and let them out. Then years later when your mother decided to go off and get married, I sold the little house we'd been living in and moved into one of the flats myself – where the kitchen is now. Then the bedsit beside that became available so I knocked the two of them into one. And as luck would have it, just before you came to live with me, didn't the flats across the hall become vacant? And so I took them, jigged things about a bit and, well, now do you see?'

  In all the years I'd lived in Pembroke Road I'd never seen her behave like a landlady. Nor had she ever been treated like one. I couldn't remember one single tenant ever knocking on our door to complain about a leaky tap or make an excuse about late rent. The only explanation I could think of was – poor old Nonna was losing her marbles.

  When we got back to Pembroke Road she tottered off to her bedroom and came back with a box of files stuffed with correspondence from a management company that for years had been taking care of the house and its tenants on her behalf. 'Now do you believe me?' she said.

  I thought of all the winter afternoons I had come home from school to find her sitting in her overcoat waiting for me to appear before she'd put on a heater or put a match to the fire. Or worse, the days when she would come to walk me home through the swanky roads of Ballsbridge, her stooping under trees to pick up twigs and sticks for the fire, me ready to melt with shame. And the row of jars on the shelf in her wardrobe – one for copper, one for silver – and how when each one was filled it would be changed to notes and stuffed into a stocking that she called a money-tuck. And when that could take no more it was transferred to what she used to call her 'little pin-money account'. Some pin money, Nonna!

  I handed her back the box of files. 'And I always thought we were poor,' I said to her. 'All the time poor. I used to think Dad was tight and only spent money on ice cream and show-off outings when he came to visit once in a blue moon, that he never sent anything otherwise, that it was my fault we were always short. I used to feel so guilty about that.'

  'Ah no. Your father always sent his money, every month of his working life.'

  'My God, Nonna, you're a miser! That's it – isn't it?'

  She shifted her shoulders defensively, her face a little pink. 'You'll be glad one day. When I'm gone and that other fella leaves you.'

  'He's not going to leave me. We're getting married. I told you, as soon as the divorce comes through.'

  'You'll be glad, because some day it will be all you have. But it will be all yours to have, Anna.'

  'You've already bought me a flat, Nonna, you don't have to give me your house as well.'

  'Ah, who else would I give it to?'

  We both sulked quietly for a few moments, and then Nonna spoke again. 'Something I learned a long time ago, Anna.'

  'What?'

  'You'll never really be lost when you have your own few bob. You'll always find somewhere to go.'

  *

  This morning as I stand in the hall of Pembroke Road, for the second time in a week, that conversation comes back to me. You'll never be lost. And it occurs to me that for the first time in my life I am, if not entirely lost, then certainly alone. No boyfriend – if a 35-year-old woman can use that term. Ever since Marty (his surname is gone now), one has replaced another. In school I was always going steady, and later in college the same. Steady – I think I used to love the word, more than the boy.

  Should the boy in question, later the man in question, happen to have sisters, or mates with girlfriends, then they would become my temporary pals. Dublin, Belfast, London, Dublin again; it has always been the same scenario. Apart from Shay Foster – and I'm refusing to count him – I've never had a one night stand in my life. I've never even had to go looking. I have always been asked. And it has never, ever occurred to me to say no.

  I've come back again to Pembroke Road, because I'm looking for something I didn't find last time around.

  This time I linger. Nonna's flat may have remained untouched but there have been a few changes to the house itself which I only half heeded the last time I was here. The basement has long since stopped being a photographer's studio – a private flat now with matchstick blinds and a bowl of polished pebbles in the window. The garden has been flattened by tarmacadam, white lines mark out six parking places; three each side of the granite steps. A sign on the wall says 'Residents Only'. The railings have been pulled down for access. There is an intercom on the front door, which throws not only a voice upstairs, but also a televised mugshot
to go with it. The single shade that used to hang over the light in the hall has been replaced by two rows of spotlights flush to the ceiling. The lino has been peeled off in favour of a varnished wooden floor. There is a plastic grey phone sitting unobtrusively on a table, in place of the big black chunk of tin that used to hang on the wall. There is still junk mail and letters for people who have moved on, scattered all over the floor.

  I go into the sitting room, open the curtains, the windows. Then I come back into the hall and unlock the rest of the doors on either side, holding them back with copies of my old children's encyclopedia. I stand for a while, letting light and air stream from one room to another. The front door opens then: a man and a woman I've never seen before. Both throw me a startled look as they step into the cross draught created by all the open doors and windows. A wary half nod then before they continue on up the stairs where I hear them mumble to each other, doubtlessly wondering who the hell I am.

  'What are you gawking at?' I feel like saying. 'This is my house. Watch it now or I might just turf you out.' I have to admit, I like the feel of this small unspoken remark.

  After a while I go into my old bedroom. The cerise carpet still there, darker than I remember but maybe that's down to dust. The rosette wallpaper is a bit on the faded side, a glob of Blu-tack in a few places, from long-ago posters. Everything has been tidied away into boxes. The boxes all labelled: Anna, aged 8–13. Anna, 14–18. Anna, 18–28. And finally Anna, misc.

  I can't bring myself to look inside but can take a guess anyhow: toys, books, photographs, drawings and paintings I've done over the years; keepsakes Nonna couldn't bring herself to throw out.

  'Ah what the fuck?' I ask myself out loud. 'What does it matter? Who she is or isn't. She loved you, didn't she? You stupid wagon – just leave her be. Forget it now.'

  But I know I can't do that.

  I stretch out on the bed, and for a few minutes watch the morning light on the ceiling, as I used to do, hands behind my head, thinking about this and that. The last time I was here I had gone through this flat with a fine toothcomb and found nothing unusual, just crates of useless ornaments, old clothes, books and handbags with the dry sweet smell of gone-off face powder. The general knick-knackery of a life quietly led. Yet I know it's not in Nonna's nature to throw things away. She must have left something. Somewhere.