My Name is E

by Frederick Lightfoot

  Was that true? Was I so much in her debt, or was the nastier truth that in owing her I owed myself?

  We remember because the dead cannot tell, and I was willing to dance to that, there on the shoreline, as wave upon wave reached towards me, white crests all, coming back to that shore, as the tide must have been doing for thousands of years, speaking someone’s name, from somewhere in the depths.

  All the while I was there I saw her eyes peering at me, the surfaces glossy and moist, two tiny mirrors reflecting the dull coloured world wrapped around her, the shore winds blowing, rifling through her, but without sound, her bruised and abused figure taking it in in silence, with a patience and expectation that only silence can engender. Then I left her on the shore where she was safest, where in memory she had always been safest, in as much as that can be relied on, left that impression of her, which is not mine to ever be parted from, and went to call on the matriarch.

  If she was surprised to see me she showed no sign of it, though from her general lack of greeting, little more than an inclining of her head, she was suspicious of my coming.

  ‘‘You seem to be wondering about me,’’ I said.

  She considered for a moment, then shrugged, threw more seed to her scrawny bantams and pullets, then eyed me calmly, a smile apparent around her lips: ‘‘Wondering what?’’ she asked. ‘‘What would I have to wonder about?’’

  ‘‘I didn’t expect that you’d still have chickens.’’

  ‘‘No one grows tired of poultry, no one throws up at the repeated taste of fowl.’’

  ‘‘There’s a supermarket three miles away.’’

  The ghost of a smile vanished away, replaced by something far more bitter. She dispensed two more handfuls onto the muddy ground and made to go indoors, but turned on the threshold and asked me if I was through. I shrugged, as much as to say I didn’t understand. It wasn’t an interrogation, not openly declared anyway. She said she had nothing against my coming inside. It struck me as a singularly guarded welcome. She had nothing against it, but presumably nothing for it. I followed her in without another word.

  The house had never been modernised in Martha’s lifetime, the floor still lain with green flagstones, half-covered with an old threadbare rug, the walls whitewashed over rough plaster. We had gone down the lobby to the back room she called the kitchen, the front room, the parlour, closed. I had never been in there but could guess it, the cabinet with a few ornaments and the sideboard with her best crockery and cutlery which she had probably used twice in her lifetime, when Harold was married and when she claimed Abby. Certainly in one of the drawers, probably a top drawer, the one most accessible, would be her shroud, stowed there for decades, along with the policy book to pay for the funeral and perhaps a spot of tea, though who would be there to celebrate or mourn who could guess. Someone like Martha commanded respect or fear, or some intermingling of the two, but whether that would mean a well attended funeral only time would tell. There was something brutally lonely about the prospect.

  I commented on the fact that everything was just the same, nothing changed, noting a marked defiance in it. She scowled at the comment as if I were being needlessly romantic, my language embarrassing. She was right, I suppose, my language had become embarrassing, for her, for me, the old accent overlaid with niceties, with new words, new tones, new subtleties, though the old hesitancies, knowing my place, knowing my point of permission, remained. Donald revelled in picking out those inconsistencies, the new voice and the old voice. Martha simply sneered at the existence of either.

  She began to make tea, spooning out loose leaves from an old, grubby caddy, adorned with cartoon sketches of Indians and Chinese. She commanded me to sit. There were two chairs tucked up close to a leather based hearth, one a rocking chair, the other a rough horsehair armchair, a settee of similar style was pushed against the wall at the back of the room. An extendable table was shoved against another wall covered over with an oil-cloth. In the centre of the table, pushed against the wall, was an old box radio. I sat in the armchair, keeping to the edge, determined to show my discomfort, the extent to which my skin was crawling and tightening.

  To think that Abby had lain, silently, like a resting faun, pressed between settee and wall, as if in a sanctuary, a haven, a place in which to grow into her natural self, hearing no evil, was almost unbearable. I felt a rising tide of revulsion for this graceless woman arrogantly making me tea, but I had to contain it, swallow down the taste of bile and cabbage the room emitted, she emitted, the stink of camphor, the digest of a different era, different timescale, different life expectancy.

  As she put down a tray with teapot, cups with saucers, milk jug and a plate with slices of ginger bread and apple cake, she informed me I was mistaken, entirely wrong. Everything had changed, everything worsened, everything was now incorrect. She said incorrect with the glimmer of a hard smile briefly altering the tough, weathered fissures of her face, but the satisfaction of that complaint quickly receded and the former sullenness and anger at something unspecified but constant reasserted itself. There was no doubt about it, Martha, the matriarch, was a frightening woman, effortlessly disclosing an absence of pity. Should she choose to find a person unworthy, there would be no forgiveness, no respite, only gloating punishment. I had only one option, to brazen her out, defy her with likeness.

  I thanked her for the tea, the excellent cake, which was in fact disgusting, half-cooked apples squeezed together in glutinous layers, the ginger bread, which I simply picked up and quickly replaced, stale and solid. She eyed me sceptically, certain of the joke, the preposterous insulting hospitality, yet bothered to treat me to a speech about home baking, the dying art of ingredients which my precious supermarket was doing away with. I told her I had never made any claims for the shop, simply pointed to its existence, an existence she obviously wanted to do without. She swallowed, frowned, and assured me she could manage quite well without all manner of things. She picked up a piece of the stale ginger bread, sat in the rocking chair and began to munch, rocking gently as she sucked and gnawed at it. I eyed her all the while, growing dispirited and deflated by her easy arrogance, her apparent sway over me. I had to resist. After all, I had made the move. I had entered her kitchen, willingly accepted her tea, even suffered her cake. She wasn’t going to dismiss me with such simple symbols of life inconsequential.

  ‘‘Why do they name you the matriarch?’’ I asked, making sure I betrayed no excitement or true meaning in the question.

  ‘‘Do they?’’ she replied, as if she really doubted such a thing.

  ‘‘They always did.’’

  ‘‘That’s an altogether different thing.’’

  ‘‘Why?’’

  ‘‘Because a family was a wholly different thing, a family was a family.’’

  ‘‘Still,’’ I persisted, pressing her.

  ‘‘I was a Sempie,’’ she flashed, as if the name alone justified any query. I don’t know that she understood what I was asking, simply knew there was something she needed to defend.

  Maybe the simple truth was that neither they nor she knew what the word meant, other than it was something about family, about something which legitimises a family, legitimises the past to which that family claims to belong, thereby stating a claim on the present and the future. Martha was the matriarch because she was a Sempie. It was a statement of ownership and defiance. It named physical violence, threats, intimidation. Martha was a Sempie mother. Except, she wasn’t. Harold wasn’t a Sempie, not entirely, unless Martha had fashioned it so that only her blood ran through his body, sluggishly to be sure.

  ‘‘And now,’’ I said, as if my new tone, my polished diction could question what she was claiming for herself, ‘‘don’t they call you that? Has the name been consigned?’’

  ‘‘I wouldn’t know,’’ she replied flatly. ‘‘I don’t listen anymore, I don’t bother. I find most conversation tedious, dull, most people gutless. I talk about the weather and seed and that’s en
ough to keep me correct.’’

  I was lost for words. How dare she say she didn’t bother to listen? I wanted to strike her down where she sat, where once Abby must have sat, perhaps in her lap used as a breed of pet, a dog of kinds, though without canine ability to detect sound and sincerity, but I controlled myself. It was imperative. There were things I needed to know. I couldn’t let her refusal to hear, or my failure to speak, win out. I had to confront her with meaning, with deafness, with sign.

  Matriarch, with son, you, who, a name.

  I signed at her, signed and watched her shock, her disapproval, her disability.

  ‘‘Sempie, Shaughnessy,’’ I uttered, still signing, outlining Abby’s known lineage. ‘‘The Shaughnessys, family, like …’’ Then I brought it to a close and began again. ‘‘You must know of Owen Shaughnessy’s epic journey as well as anyone,’’ I said.

  She altered her position, not suggesting unease or anger, just a change of position, weight redistribution. Of course, the suggestion was absurd. Even if she knew of it in finest detail it meant nothing to her: not epic, triumphant or tragic, but squalid; not human endurance or faith, but depravity, dirt, the Shaughnessys trash. I didn’t let it go though. I wasn’t here to play games. I was here to tear open and expose, lay bare the hatred and revenge it. ‘‘You never had a great deal of time for the Shaughnessys.’’

  ‘‘Tramps, criminals, no, I never had a great deal of time, I never had any dealings.’’

  ‘‘But Harold married one.’’

  ‘‘Yes Harold married one.’’

  ‘‘And there was Nora.’’

  She conceded there was Nora.

  After that, she was through. She adopted silence. I was raging. I had determined to choose when to stop, but I let it go. It was all right. I would take all the time it took.

  I stood up to leave. She made no effort to see me out but remained seated staring obdurately into the empty grate.

  From the door I spoke to her, demanding the right to one more question. ‘‘Tell me this, what did you say to Abby the day you dragged her out?’’

  ‘‘I want you to leave now.’’

  *

  Sometimes Abby saw herself, felt herself, was sure she had to be, a beetle: certainly some species of crawling creature, something with a preference for dark, confined habitat. Even on the shoreline she sought concealment. Even when we signed for her different shapes, new shapes, fantastic shapes, shapes personal and peculiar to three newly discovered sisters, she stuck by a certain exclusion, refusing to accept she didn’t possess some insect life.

  She sidled away with baleful, disbelieving eyes, pulling herself across the sands as if her body were a dead weight, her legs, which were perfect in every way, devoid of function. We couldn’t work out the line of her thinking, but we fully recognised that only a creature with reason would have crawled towards concealment the way she did, just as only a creature with reason could have learnt to love the way she learnt to love, trusting it and believing it despite so much evidence to the contrary. She signed it. I you love Judith Salt, you love Grace Powers. I deaf you love.

  Harold tried to beat that love out of her though, in the same way he tried to beat all reason out of her. She couldn’t work out what he was scared of, none of us three loved sisters could, but she knew it. She signed fear whenever he was named. The same way the chambers of the sea made her say her name, so Harold made her quiver with his fear. I don’t suppose even Harold could have said just what it was that terrified him, but there was no doubting it. Why else would he have lashed out at a quiet girl who had learnt the sign for love?

  *

  At first I didn’t love enough and then too much.

  Donald never understood that. It would never have crossed his mind that I was sick of feeling nauseous, sick of honest charity and wanted to stop acting the cripple. He took all of my protestations for the truth and never for a second recognised I was another of the world’s great liars. I always knew that love, real love had to be painful, as painful as a dagger.

  When Abby crossed her two hands in front of her chest, signing love, the pain of it cut right through me. Her love was like violence, my body scarcely equal to its explosion. Many were the times I thought love would tear me into pieces.

  Donald didn’t threaten to destroy me like that. He didn’t come close. Not to begin with anyway. I convinced myself it wasn’t love I felt for him but a desire for exposure, the desire to be tall, plumb-straight Judith Salt. So, I revealed small frames of nakedness. This is my breast, Donald, which you are free to suck, this is my anger which you can observe without comment, and this is my shame which I am trusting to you, a gallery of staged intimacies given without constraint. Donald wouldn’t have guessed such a thing, though. Not that he was either certain or complacent about love, but he was certainly less interrogative than I was.

  Mind you, when I stand on this shore now, not old at sixty, certainly not as old as I felt when I was twenty-five determined that someone was going to die, though burdened by a certain sentimentality, I wonder how I can ever have had the confidence to assume to know his thinking. Isn’t that the whole reason we tame existence, because at heart we are terrified of the gross freedom of someone else’s thought? Ultimately all understanding is based on guesswork and trust. One’s loneliness is never ultimately breached. We invent an inexact language to try and achieve some compromise, but my blue is never yours, your hurt singular, your frown all your very own.

  I can still see the look of perplexity as he tried to reason with my self-doubts, my absurd accusations of unworthiness, never interpreting for a second that it was all in reverse, that I was bloated with self-confidence. I just wanted to hear his praise and protestations of love, though I never did touch him with anything other than lust and pleasure, never with that longing indicative of pain, never with those two hands of Abby’s crossed at her chest.

  In the end, though, when he was squirming and the cleverly crafted man began to slip, leaving him intolerant and quick to anger, I loved him, loved him too much, loved him so that it was a drain on all of his inner resources, but what went into that love, what terrible words, I don’t know. It wasn’t necessarily a turn around, just a change of emphasis, the same signs with slight inflections.

  Of course existence is not composed of a single love, the brimming essence of the one God, despite so much wishful thinking that it were. There is a whole directory of love. We dipped in at different pages. I deaf love you, like a whore, like a witch, like a demon, like a woman. In response to my crossed hands he threw up his, signing the certainty of the thing being untranslatable. We don’t mean anything forever though, only at the point of saying, within context, always within context, and besides who ever chooses to hear?

  *

  No, one is not old at sixty, though solitary confinement, punishment and separation do exact a heavy cost, the bonded body and mind pitted and pockmarked by the experience. Nevertheless, Judith Salt at sixty feels like a much younger woman than she once did.

  When I stood here at twenty-five, pregnant, determined that someone should die, I was crippled with age, with no space left for another thought, time against me. I wanted to beat back the waves that threatened to overwhelm me, but scarcely had the energy to lift my arms, the energy to sign my being there at all. Any strength I had was claimed by the child. Already it was demanding primacy. I was determined to stand firm, though. Abby was indelible. Her sign was everywhere, her name all around me, her waste abundant – and the fact that someone would pay, Martha, Harold, Agnes, Mr Drake.

  They never saw that time was a donation, a fund, a stipend. They treated it with contempt, but nevertheless stole it, stole it from her, from me, and it turned out we had so very little at our disposal. They were guilty of the most horrendous crimes against time.

  Wave after wave confirmed it.

  Me, old, a prisoner: Abby not even able to say her name; figures of eroded beauty.

  Chapter Four

&
nbsp; After Martha I went to call on Harold, called Sempie because Martha never would say any other. Whether in her heart of hearts she believed Sempie was his rightful name or not, I don’t know. My guess is that she did, except in those moments of brutal honesty when she admitted to herself how disappointing he was – though he was never the slow-witted, numb-skull she made him out to be. Deep down, I don’t suppose she ever really believed it herself. She never ceased insulting him, but only went so far. Of course he had committed a terrible wrong in her eyes. He had married a Shaughnessy.

  She treated Agnes like a wilful, disobedient child needing a firm hand. There was no doubting which she assumed the dominant family. Agnes had married into the Sempies. It was not the match Martha wanted, probably none could have been, but once made Agnes had to take her place as one of the matriarch’s subjects, in her case, the lowest of the low. That status to a certain extent immunised her from the worst of Martha’s bile. The significant feeling the Shaughnessys provoked was tempered by the insignificance of Agnes herself. Agnes was cast in the role of idiot, who could at least be bullied into some semblance of worthiness.

  Agnes, for her part, never retaliated, and on the whole played up to the role made for her. She allowed Martha to name her children – Abigail, Joseph, Ruth and Dennis, motifs the matriarch felt set the right tone, though she never explained what that tone was, but needless to say was something about propriety. Agnes even deferred over the question of religion. Her children could never be Shaughnessys as long as they were Church of England. Not that any of them were ever expected to go to church, though they did attend Sunday schools, alternating between the Church of England and Methodist, depending on which had a trip in the near future, as it got them out of the house on a Sunday afternoon.

  Even before Agnes married Harold she understood that it would be at the cost of her own faith. Martha never considered for a moment what a bold act of defiance that must have been for Agnes, what a fight she must have put up against Aidan and Hazel, demanding her right to be with Harold. Martha couldn’t countenance that the Shaughnessys might hold an opinion, a set of values: least of all in this case, given that she insisted Hazel was a whore and Aidan, who didn’t earn any comment, was deaf.