by David Thorne
‘Have you asked the police?’
‘Why?’ I say. ‘What would they do?’
‘So instead you come here,’ she sighs. ‘What did she do here? At least tell me that. Was she on the staff?’
‘She was a cleaner,’ I say.
The woman cocks her head in surprise. ‘A cleaner? Twenty-five years ago?’ She shakes her head and removes her glasses, lets them hang over her grey cardigan. ‘We wouldn’t have any record of that. Not now. And anyway, most of our cleaners come through an agency.’ She leans closer. ‘Most of them are foreigners. Somalis, Poles, God knows where they come from. But they don’t use their real names, they don’t pay taxes. I don’t get involved.’
‘You’re telling me that my mother is not worth finding?’
The woman does not like my tone. ‘I am telling you that there is nothing I can do.’ She laughs unkindly. ‘Twenty-five years ago.’ Like I’ve asked her to perform alchemy.
‘You won’t look? Check? I have her name.’
‘It won’t do any good. Our records won’t go back that far. Everything was computerised.’
‘I have a photo. If I could show people…’
‘Mr…’
‘Connell.’
‘Mr Connell, I am sorry but we are talking about ancient history. This is a hospital, not a museum. If you have lost your mother, then I am of course very sorry and wish you all the best. But there are proper channels and you cannot just appear at my desk and snap your fingers.’
I look at the woman’s hand and notice that she is not wearing a wedding ring and wonder whether she has been unloved for so long that her capacity for emotional engagement has atrophied, withered like an unused arm. I know that she will not help me, know that there is no better nature to appeal to. In any case, she is probably right; to find a casual worker from a quarter of a century ago is an impossible task. I nod and walk away but as I go she says, with a sharpness which I believe entirely unwarranted, ‘And I would thank you for not wasting the time of the hospital staff with your enquiries.’ She will be reflecting indignantly on my intrusion for hours, stewing until her microwave pings to announce dinner for one. I am tempted to wrench the door of the prefab off its hinges but instead I let it swing closed. Some people are lost causes.
I walk the corridors of the hospital and pass several cleaners polishing the linoleum with big machines like benign lawnmowers or towing trolleys loaded with sprays and cloths, but none of them is old enough to have been working twenty-five years ago; looking at them, the futility of my search hits me. I am chasing a ghost, somebody who may well have cleaned the corridors I am now walking but who did it a lifetime ago. I see a sign directing me to the exit and decide that there is nothing that I can do, that I might as well give up. As I pass through reception, the pretty girl from behind the desk sees me and calls out.
‘Did you find her?’
I shake my head and keep walking but she runs out from behind the desk and catches me up, ringlets bouncing.
‘You didn’t find her?’
‘No.’
‘You went to Personnel?’
‘The woman there wasn’t much help.’
‘She’s a bitch.’
I smile. ‘That’s the word I was looking for.’
‘What did she do here, your mum?’
‘She was a cleaner.’
The receptionist is quiet for a time. ‘It’s such a long time ago,’ she says.
‘I know.’
‘Thing is with this place, cleaners are here, like, for a month? Nobody remembers them.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Even other people, doctors, twenty-five years… Did you talk to Nurse Abbotts?’
‘Who?’
‘She’s been here for ever. Nobody knows how long, it’s like a joke. Only she’s nice, yeah, she’s lovely.’
‘You think she’s worth talking to?’
‘You’re not just going to give up?’
‘I don’t know.’
She looks at me in amazement. ‘When you’re this close?’
‘This close? I’m looking for a cleaner who probably worked here for a week, before you were born.’
She flaps a hand. ‘Someone’ll remember her. You just need to keep trying.’
‘You think?’
‘You’ll find her,’ she says. She puts a fist to her heart. ‘I just know it.’
I am not a superstitious man and of course I did not take the receptionist’s words seriously; yet on another level, her enthusiasm for my lost cause gave me at least the strength of purpose to find this Nurse Abbotts and ask if she knew anything. The receptionist, who told me that her name was Maggie, showed me where I could find Nurse Abbotts: on the delivery ward which she ruled, and had ruled, for as long as anybody could remember. Maggie even put a call through to the ward for me, telling whoever was there that I was on my way and could they help. When I get there, I explain to the nurse guarding the door of the ward against desperate fathers unwilling to wait for visiting hours why I am here. She tells me to hold on, she’ll go and find Nurse Abbotts for me.
I expect a bosomy woman with pinned-back hair and a severe expression, a Carry On harridan with all the humanity of a stone. But instead Nurse Abbotts is a small, slender black lady with short hair and gentle eyes and an air of calm efficiency. She holds her hand out and I shake it; it is small but her grip is strong and she gives my hand two brisk pulls.
‘What is your name?’ she asks. She has a slight accent but I cannot place it, though I think it is from the Caribbean somewhere.
‘Daniel. Daniel Connell.’
‘Well, Mr Connell, come with me.’ I follow her down a main corridor, her quick steps making me feel as if I am lumbering behind her. On either side of the corridor are four-bed wards with women sitting up, many holding babies to their chests. She opens the door to a small room with a coffee machine and a sink and a table, around which are four plastic chairs. She sits down at one, invites me to take another. She puts both elbows on the table, hands clasped as if praying.
‘Now, the nurse tells me that you have lost your mother.’
I nod. ‘She was a cleaner here, a long time ago.’
‘Child,’ Nurse Abbotts says, ‘cleaners come and go. One week they’re here, the next they’re gone. You know that, don’t you?’ She looks at me and I can see a kind concern in her eyes; she has no more expectation of success than I do. I suspect that she is practised in delivering bad news to people in this room.
‘I understand. But this is all I know about her.’
‘How long ago we talking about?’
‘Twenty-five years ago.’
‘Goodness me,’ she says. ‘Goodness. Did she have a name, this mother of yours?’
‘Marcela,’ I say. ‘Marcela Cosma.’
‘Not much call for second names, not round here,’ she says. ‘Marcela. You have a picture of Marcela?’
I take out the shot of my mother holding her sunhat to her head, in the yellow mini dress. Nurse Abbotts takes it almost reverentially, for which I like her enormously. She looks at it for some time, then back at me.
‘I believe I remember a Marcela,’ she says. ‘But she didn’t look like this lady, no-uh. Nothing at all like this beautiful woman here.’ She passes the photograph back to me. ‘But I believe it is the same person.’
‘You do?’
‘A sad lady, this Marcela. She told me she had once had a child herself. The look in her eyes as she saw all these mothers, with children themselves…’ Instinctively, Nurse Abbotts reaches across the table and puts her small hand over mine. ‘I did so feel pity for her.’
Something in the way she says this makes me think that she is speaking of my mother in the past tense; Nurse Abbotts must notice the alarm in my eyes because she squeezes my hand and hurries to go on. ‘Oh, child, no, the last time I saw your mother she was well. As well as I ever saw her.’
Nurse Abbotts asks me if I would like a coffee; I say no, but she tel
ls me that she would, that she has battled with caffeine for over thirty years and that she is ashamed to confess that caffeine has always been the victor. She tells me that she will not drink the coffee from the machine in the nurses’ station, that there is a Starbucks not five minutes away. I have to walk fast to keep up with her as she strides briskly down corridors, greeting people along the way, down a flight of steps and we are outside, and then out of the hospital grounds completely. She does not talk and I do not ask her any questions; I believe that she has something to tell me but wants to do it in the right environment.
She is known in Starbucks and they ask her if she wants her usual; I order a cappuccino but when I try to pay nurse Abbotts will not allow me.
‘As bad as drinking alcohol,’ she says. ‘Lord knows I try, but without my coffee I’m useless as a hen.’ She sighs to herself in disappointment at her weakness and we wait in silence while our coffees are prepared. We take them to a table and now I cannot wait any longer and I say, ‘Please. What do you know about my mother?’
Nurse Abbotts smells her coffee, then looks at me. She has a small silver crucifix around her neck and I can see the shape of her collarbones underneath her skin.
‘She was a good cleaner, your mother,’ says Nurse Abbotts. ‘Ordinarily I wouldn’t remember a cleaner, but Marcela, she was with us a long time. Years, maybe, goodness, maybe five years it would have been.’
‘Was she okay?’
‘She was a sad woman. I believe that she had led a difficult life. We all knew that she had lost a child, but she never told us how it happened.’ She looks at me. ‘But she didn’t lose you, because here you are as large as life. Even larger, goodness knows.’
‘She was taken away from me. Against her will.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ she says. ‘The poor girl.’
‘But she wasn’t… hurt?’
‘Hurt? No, least, not physically. She was a beautiful girl but I so rarely saw her smile.’ Nurse Abbotts tries her coffee and exhales with pleasure, then remembers where she is and puts it down. ‘I would ask for her, on our ward,’ she says. ‘The only time, in thirty years here. But your mother, she had a way about her.’ She pauses, losing herself for a moment in thoughts of the past. ‘She would always work nights. Never days. Never saw her during the day, in all those years.’
Nurse Abbotts drinks more coffee and I am silent; I do not want to interrupt her reminiscences, as if she is in a trance, which, if broken, will cause me to lose my mother for good. ‘There are two kinds of nurses,’ she says eventually. ‘There are the kind who see it as a job, and those who… You know what I mean by a calling?’
‘A career you are naturally adept at,’ I say.
Nurse Abbotts chuckles. ‘One way of putting it, child,’ she says. ‘I have never heard it described that way before.’ She chuckles some more. ‘Your mother was a cleaner, but her way with people, she was naturally adept. Yes she was. I would have her on the ward and my nurses, they would give out pills, do their job. But your mother, she had the touch. The number of times I saw her with her arm around some poor new mother, reassuring her, just talking.’ Nurse Abbotts shakes her head sadly and her right hand instinctively caresses her crucifix. ‘Just talking to them, and her with no child of her own.’
‘So what happened to her?’
‘We had a pregnant girl on the ward, her baby was not well. The heartbeat, we kept losing it. We gave her an emergency caesarean but it was too late, the poor baby died before we could get her out. There is no sound more distressing than the cries of a young mother who has lost her baby, the grief. Of course we hear it all the time but there is so much pain, so much… And we have so little time, we are always so busy…’ Nurse Abbotts looks out of the window, into the street, lost again for a moment. She turns back to me with a smile. ‘Your mother stayed up with this poor girl, stayed with her until her parents came the next morning. The next night the same thing. I believe the third night she was not supposed to work but she came in anyway, and of course I did not say anything. I was glad to have her.’
A man in a suit holding a coffee nudges past our table, jostling Nurse Abbotts as he passes. He does not apologise and I am half out of my seat before I feel Nurse Abbotts’s hand on mine again. I look down and she is chuckling. I am no great admirer of religion, but clearly Nurse Abbotts’s faith makes her impervious to fear; or perhaps it is simply her innate nature. Either way, she reacts to my latent aggression with an amused indulgence.
‘What are you doing, child? Sit yourself back down.’ She tuts to herself. ‘I can see you’re an angry one.’ The amused light dies from her eyes. ‘But what am I saying? Poor child like you, and growing up without a mother.’ She wags a finger at me. ‘Get you in trouble much, that temper of yours?’
‘Now and then.’
‘Now and then he says.’ She tuts some more. ‘I should think so. She wouldn’t be impressed, let me tell you.’
‘She’, Marcela, my mother, had formed some kind of bond with the bereaved girl over the course of those three nights, Nurse Abbotts explains to me. Perhaps it was a shared sense of bereavement; perhaps my mother really had found her calling, offering comfort to a girl she could identify with, whose pain approached the levels of her own. Whatever connection they forged, it carried over to the girl’s parents. They were well off, Nurse Abbotts did not know what it was the father did but he spoke well and drove a big car, and they too found comfort in my mother’s presence. Just a fortnight later the girl’s father showed up at the hospital and offered my mother a job as their housekeeper; a job, he made clear, and a place to live. A home.
‘Penelope, the poor girl’s name was,’ says Nurse Abbotts, and I cannot help but admire her capacity for empathy, that memory which retains individual names over years, decades. ‘The surname… Of course she had no husband, no boyfriend.’ She clucks her tongue, in sympathy rather than disapproval. ‘So hard, for them all.’ She sets down her cup, takes a moment, lost in contemplation of the pain she has witnessed over the years. She comes back to the here and now with a smile of suppressed triumph. ‘Latimer. All three of them, Latimer. I remember, I admit I asked about them. For Marcela’s sake. But they were respectable. Decent people.’ She nods, satisfied that she acted properly all those years ago. And satisfied that her memory has still not betrayed her.
‘And that was the last I saw of Marcela,’ she says. ‘I thought of her often, prayed for her for years. But I never saw or heard from that dear girl again.’
27
‘SO TELL ME, Mr Connell.’ Mr Latimer dabs at his mouth fastidiously with a white linen napkin, then folds it shakily back on his lap. He raises his eyebrows, inquisitive rather than interrogative, and picks his knife and fork back up. ‘Why now? After all this passage of time?’ He talks slowly with the ponderous, portentous air of a man who is used to people hanging off his words; a cardigan-wearing academic of some obscure and irrelevant subject. My regard for him is plummeting by the second.
Next to him, his wife gives me a quick encouraging smile but her innate middle-class good manners cannot hide her abiding suspicion. Her daughter, Penny short for Penelope, does not bother hiding her hostility; she is drinking from a wine glass but I can see one eye glaring at me from behind it, the other obscured by her tipping hand. Mr Latimer has not waited for an answer before going back to sawing at his steak, as if to reassure me that this is not the third degree and that he does not expect an answer immediately, our dinner is just as important. The atmosphere around the table is as crisp as the white tablecloth, as fragile as the wine glasses.
‘There was a lot of secrecy,’ I say. ‘I was discouraged.’
‘By?’ Mrs Latimer tries to soften her curt question with a smile but we both know where we stand. I am as welcome in their comfortable lives as a cowboy builder trailing dog shit.
‘My father. I believe that he was ashamed. He was complicit in her… In what happened to her.’
Mr Latimer nods, a slow nod of absolute und
erstanding as if my account tallies with various other similar stories he has heard or experienced. But he has the serene air of a man who has lived an entire life sheltered from such brutal realities. He has soft white hair like a cat’s fur and lines at the corners of his blue eyes as if he is accustomed to smiling and having much to smile about and he has told me that he is a retired auctioneer. I imagine he lives in a large house that sits up a gravel drive behind high hedges. He is merely being polite; he cannot understand a single thing about me.
‘And so what happened to make you seek her out?’ he asks. He puts down his knife and fork, plants his elbows and steeples his fingers, folds them together. His daughter Penny slurps wine loudly, finishes her glass and sets it down clumsily. All three are looking at me and I get the strange feeling that I am an interviewee and that I had better satisfy their questions or this is as far as I will get.
A waiter comes into our small room and hovers; Mr Latimer flicks his fingers at him discreetly, dismissing him with the practised gesture of a man who is used to dealing with underlings. The waiter disappears as noiselessly as he arrived, leaving us alone again in this small panelled room, a private dining room off the main restaurant. It is in a converted bank and you have to climb wide stone steps to get through its heavy wooden doors, to step echoingly on its black-and-white tiled floors. A woman met me and when I gave the name Latimer showed me to our place of honour, crossing rows and rows of white linen-covered tables under a high domed ceiling, some kind of battery-chic dining, which Manchester somehow seems to believe is exclusive. But the food is not bad, modern British and price-wise falling narrowly the right side of taking the piss; the company, so far, is vinegary and strange to my coarser palate.
‘My father had a heart attack,’ I say, answering Mr Latimer’s question. I will spare these people the details, of my crossing the path of Vincent Halliday, of my meeting with his ex-wife. Already the story of my mother and me is dirty enough. ‘And with it, a change of heart.’
‘Is he on the mend?’ Mrs Latimer asks, her good manners too deeply ingrained to be forgotten, even now.