She looked around, mystified. ‘We found it empty.’
He retrieved his rucksack from the aisle and balanced it between his legs, pointing at it. ‘I left this on the seat. Someone must have moved it.’
She rubbed her chin with a greasy finger, blinking. ‘I don’t know about that. These seats are ours.’
I stared at the floor. In these situations I repeated my seven times table over and over inside my head until it was safe to breathe again.
‘You’re winding me up,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere left to sit now.’
‘I’m sorry for yeer trouble but what can I do? Me son’s diabetic, he can’t stand for long. Are ye all right, pet?’
She gave my arm a gentle push and I nodded, my cheeks healthily fiery.
‘Seven sevens are forty-nine,’ I ranted to myself, focusing on his desert boots.
‘It’s not fair,’ he said, but you could tell that he was backing off. They usually did.
‘Ye’d hardly ask a diabetic child to stand while a fine strong fella like yeerself lolls in a chair,’ my mother said loudly.
Defeated, he picked up his rucksack and stomped away.
‘Would ye look at the cut of him,’ my mother said to the woman next to her. ‘He looks as if he was dragged through a ditch backwards. Would ye like a chicken leg?’
A small triumph accomplished, my mother puffed up and moved into social mode. Conversation ensued with the swapping of family details. She was all graciousness, sympathizing about her companion’s bereavement and promising a novena. The reek of vomit pervaded the decks and people staggered by, mouths covered with handkerchiefs. After a while I rested my head against my mother’s cushiony arm, my nose on the indented circle left by vaccination. The slippery material of her Tricel dress shifted scratchily beneath my cheek, its polka-dot pattern dancing under my eyelids as they drooped. There was a familiar smell of warm sweat perfumed by the face powder she applied for public appearances, imparting an odd orange glow to her skin. At other times I might have been pushed off because she was too hot or my forehead was too bony but now she was in good humour and replete with chicken. So I dozed, hearing my mother’s voice in the distance; ‘… me son, Dermot … off to a good position in Hong Kong … ye can’t beat a bank for security … oh this one here, Rory … I had terrible trouble … these hot flushes are pure murder … aren’t nerves the devil incarnate …’
I woke just after midnight to find that my mother had a splintering headache and we had to go and find if they had any Aspirin at the First Aid station. The chicken was fighting a rearguard action in her stomach. Everyone around us was asleep, heads dangling. Snores lifted and dipped with the ship. We rambled like drunks to the deck above, following the arrows to First Aid. My mother slapped the bell on the counter and after a minute a stout woman dressed in a nursing outfit appeared. She was as fat as my mother and her uniform was tight, trussed around the middle with a wide belt. She had various badges marching across her chest, attached with safety pins.
‘Yes?’ she said in a Welsh accent, her chin jutting.
My heart sank. I knew that this woman would be more than a match for my mother who wasn’t keen on the Welsh. She thought them squat and shifty. A Cardiff man had once overcharged her for a pound of bacon in Cooper’s on the High Street.
‘I’ve a terrible head,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Have ye any Aspirin?’
‘I don’t dispense Aspirin,’ the nurse said in a clear ringing voice. ‘Passengers can’t expect that kind of thing. I’m here for emergencies.’
‘Just a couple would do,’ my mother pleaded, holding her right temple. ‘I’ve a darting pain just here. It’s me time of life …’
‘Can’t do, Aspirin’s the sort of thing you should bring with you,’ the nurse said combatively.
‘Ah now, surely it’s not too much to ask,’ my mother challenged, her tone stronger. She pushed her glasses up her nose, a sure sign that she was ready for a fight.
‘Company policy, see,’ the nurse stated with satisfaction. ‘Emergencies only.’
‘So if I cut me wrists ye’d give me an Aspirin?’ my mother demanded.
The nurse looked disapproving. ‘I’d get your head down if I was you,’ she said, dismissing us and moving back towards her office.
‘I wouldn’t expect much from an ould jade like you,’ my mother snapped. ‘An ould jade held together with safety pins. Ye and yeer ould boat – safety pins is all that’s keeping you afloat.’
The nurse slammed her door and my mother gave the desk bell a farewell ringing slap. Honour satisfied, we rolled back to our seats. I was thankful that the ship was asleep and there had been no witnesses. My mother cooled her temples with 4711 cologne and we broke into the grated carrots. They tasted fresh and sweet in the sour-sick air of the cabin. Midnight feasts were the best ones, my mother said, digging me in the ribs and chuckling. She downed a fizzing bottle of soda water and, burping loudly, said that that felt better, it must have been the wind giving her gyp. She crossed her ankles and waggled a foot, saying that we’d the back of the journey broken now. Her right arm around me, she clasped my head into her huge swell of bosom.
‘Settle down there now, dotey,’ she said, ‘and we’ll be in Cork before ye can blink.’
TWO
I hired a car at Cork airport, my usual practice. My parents would shake their heads, saying that I shouldn’t waste my money when my father could pick me up. But I knew that the arthritis riddling his bones made driving for any length of time an endurance test. Also, I needed to know that I could get away sometimes during my stays, especially on days when my mother was sunk in gloom, dwelling on her real or imaginary pains.
Ever since I could remember, she had been a mass of symptoms. I had no idea what she actually suffered with and what was conjured up. I supposed it didn’t much matter; to her it was all real. The National Health Service had always been her Aladdin’s cave, a box of goodies for plundering. She had been so impressed at its inception after the war, she seemed to think she had a life-long duty to make full use of its services. Compared to health care in Ireland where you still had to pay for the doctor’s visit, it represented all that was best about England, especially in the fifties, a decade awash with free vitamins and orange juice. The remedies she was given were put on trial when she got them home; if they didn’t bring dramatic relief within a couple of days they were discarded with allegations that they were causing heart irregularities or looseness of the bowel. If the medication was ineffective but she liked the look of it she would arbitrarily double the dosage; for my mother, more always meant better. When she met church buddies in the street she would chant her dosages like a litany, going over with relish the numbers and orders of medicines she had been told to take. ‘Under the doctor’ was one of her favourite phrases, imparted with a significant nod. Visiting the surgery gave her days a shape and meaning and staved off boredom. Tending to her health was a career and each new symptom and medication a promotion.
Her illnesses framed my childhood, trapping and bewildering me. She had taught me to count using her bottles of pills. I had picked the shiny orange and black capsules from her palm, lining them up on the table in tens. We’d done adding up with the round yellow tablets and the oval-shaped pink ones and multiplication with bright red bullet-shaped pills. In primary school, when we sat chanting our tables, I would see those red pills, the colour of phone boxes, dancing before my eyes. Whenever the teacher introduced sums involving questions of the sharing out of sweets or money, I pictured the ranked lines of tablets on the shelf over the radio or thought of Mr Hillard the chemist, who blanched when he saw my mother steaming towards him with yet another prescription.
Whether the washing had been done, the dinner cooked, the shopping fetched or the fire lit, depended on the state of her constitution on any particular day. Everything was unpredictable and subject to change at the last minute; a morning that had started promisingly would degenerate because a headache/attack o
f nerves/shooting pain in the stomach/hot sweats dripping down her skin or swelling of the legs had suddenly disabled her. I used to look at school friends and wonder how their mothers managed to stay healthy. There seemed to be some obscure code I hadn’t broken. I would envy them, knowing that they wouldn’t reach home to find a groaning figure splayed in a chair amidst the detritus of the breakfast dishes; they wouldn’t immediately be asked for a cup of weak luke-warm Bovril and two of the blood pressure tablets by a frail voice emanating from behind a pair of home-made eye shades.
The thought of her on bad days used to make my teeth ache. Her dramatic maunderings struck me into a paralysed silence; what could be said to someone who found no solace in words? As I got older that silence was tight with rage and I would ignore her and her requests for drinks and tablets, telling her to take a walk outside and think about something else. But now, as I stepped on the accelerator, I was acknowledging that you weren’t usually admitted to hospital for imaginary pain.
The drive from Cork took forty-five minutes. I rolled down the window and inhaled deeply. The air was peat-smoked and fragrant. My parents’ cottage was on the outskirts of a small village, looking down into the valley. I stopped the car momentarily on the curve of the road to examine its whitewashed walls and glossy blue windows. Smoke idled from the chimney. It was just like one of the houses pictured on the sleeves of the terrible records my mother used to play in London. ‘If We Only Had Old Ireland Over Here’ was her favourite. It featured maudlin songs about cruel landlords, grieving silver-haired mothers and lonely travellers far away from Erin’s fair shores. They made me hot with embarrassment, especially in summer when my mother played them loudly with the windows wide open. During my teens I would hide upstairs, shamed because they singled our family out as different and because I instinctively loathed the sentimentality of the lyrics. My mother would sing along in her trilling soprano while I was reading up about the swinging London which seemed to be mysteriously inaccessible even though it was happening all around me. I would tune the radio to Sandie Shaw or The Beatles to drown her out. Her favourite singer was Bridie Gallagher who had a rich, swooping voice. I imagined Bridie as a big-busted woman with a perm, the kind you often saw in small Irish towns.
My father came out to greet me, his braces dangling down over his legs and shaving foam on his chin. I hugged him, inhaling his combined smells of rough-cut tobacco and supermarket soap. He patted my arm, embarrassed by the contact.
‘The roses are nearly over,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s been on at me to prune them. I bet she mentions it again today.’
‘How is she? This seems to have been very sudden.’
‘Oh, not so bad. They’ve done the tests now, just waiting for results. I was hoping you’d talk to the doctors when we go in, you’ll understand it better.’
I knew from the way he bent down to examine a rose bush that he didn’t want me to ask him any more about what had happened, this event that was specific to women.
‘I imagine she hates the hospital food,’ I said, to let him off the hook.
He straightened up, back on safe territory. ‘Oh! Don’t talk to me! She has me worn out fetching in ham and such. And goat’s milk it has to be now; she says cow’s upsets her.’
We went in. I made tea and prepared cheese with brown bread while he finished shaving. Everything in this small cottage was familiar, especially the trail of disorder that my mother always spread around her. All of their belongings had been transposed from Tottenham and situated, as far as was possible, in the same places and patterns. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine that I heard the throaty hum of a red bus. The only new thing they had bought for the house in ten years was a tea strainer because the ratty dog from the nearby farm had run away with the old one. Over the back of a chair lay a gaudy half-finished blanket with my mother’s crochet hook threaded and ready to go – she kept up a steady supply for the African mission she supported. I could only hope that the recipients liked bright, clashing colours. My father had seized the chance to make the kitchen ship-shape in her absence. His book, upturned on the table, was a spy story in large print.
‘It’s been too quiet without your mother,’ he said, coming in. ‘I’ve been missing my orders. Hard-boiled eggs have been requested for today’s menu. Can you do my top button for me?’
Since smashing his elbow on an icy pavement in the seventies, he had been unable to flex his right arm fully. The joint was fused together with a metal pin. I could remember him walking the floor with pain during the nights before the operation, treading quietly so that he wouldn’t wake us. It had struck me that his genuine illness had to play a bit part while my mother’s trumpeted afflictions strutted centre stage. I reached up and fixed the shirt button, smoothing his collar.
She was in a small ward for six. It was named after St Martin de Porres which would please her because she had prayed hard for his canonization, signing a parish petition to the Pope. For some unfathomable reason she was keen that there should be more black saints. I wondered if it was her own brand of political correctness, trying to ensure that Heaven had its quota of coloured representatives among the higher echelons. I had heard her express regret that Nelson Mandela wasn’t a Catholic as he presented good potential for sainthood, with just a matter of a few miracles to be discovered. Her second favourite holy man was St John Macias who had an olive-tinted skin and was known as the soft-hearted saint because he couldn’t bear to see suffering. He had once intervened with God to effect the rescue of a drowning sheep and was said to have wept blood when he came across a starving old woman. My mother had copied a line from one of his prayers into her mass book; ‘The world is hard and life can be cold and pitiless.’
I could see her as we opened the door of the ward, sitting on her neatly-made bed, her towelling dressing-gown buttoned up and her hair brushed back. She looked like a resentful child who’s been dressed to go out and warned not to get mucky. She waved when she saw us and beckoned us on.
‘I told yeer father not to go bothering ye,’ she said, ‘but he never listens to a word I say.’ She leaned closer, lowering her voice. ‘Pull the curtains round. The ould one in the next bed wants to know everything, she has pointy ears from eavesdropping.’
I arranged the curtains as she wanted them, pulled to overlap so that no one could see us. From habit, I cast an apologetic glance at the woman a few feet away, just in case she’d heard the aspersions on her character but she was absorbed in a magazine and a huge pack of wine gums.
‘Have ye brought grub?’ my mother asked.
‘I’ve got it.’ I took out the pack containing cold chicken, eggs, ham and plain yogurt.
‘Ham,’ she said, ‘I hope they didn’t palm any old fatty bits on to ye.’
‘It’s the best cut,’ my father protested, ‘off the bone. I watched it being sliced.’
She examined it and nodded. Then she despatched my father for orange juice, giving strict instructions not to buy a brand that was full of pulpy bits.
‘Well,’ she said, when he’d gone, ‘what do ye make of this?’ She folded her hands across her stomach and made a steeple with her thumbs; her most confiding gesture. It would be all right to talk to me about what had happened because although I was male, I worked with bodies and had studied fat medical books. To my great mortification she had told several members of the Legion of Mary that she’d always known I’d do some kind of healing work; I had cool hands and a gentle manner. When she had hot flushes in her early fifties she would call me and ask me to put my lovely cool hands on her forehead.
‘Spill the beans,’ I told her. ‘What led up to you coming in?’
She glanced around, even though the curtain was a protective shield. It was her constant worry that other people might get to know her business. It never occurred to her that maybe no one was interested.
She’d woken up one morning to find that she’d been bleeding from ‘down there’, she told me. My father had called the doctor and
she’d been admitted to hospital. Some kind of scan had been done and uncomfortable internal things.
‘Have you been having other bleeds?’ I asked her.
She said no but she looked down at her fingernails. ‘I’m having to wear one of them sanitary yokes,’ she said ruefully. ‘I thought them times were over.’
They ought to be, I thought, worried. She hadn’t worn those since the days of belts and thick looped pads that chafed the thighs. Stick-on winged discretion would be unfamiliar territory for her. I had a sense of things being out of kilter.
I knew that unexpected internal bleeding was not a good sign but I wasn’t sure what could cause it. I looked at her carefully. She had shrunk a bit more since I’d last seen her, her shoulders sloping further but at seventy-five that was to be expected and she was still plump. Her colour was good, the eggshell brown of summer days in the garden still evident and her skin, the skin that I had inherited, was clear.
‘Give me your specs,’ I said, noticing her fuggy glasses, ‘I’ll clean them for you.’ They were filthy, as usual, with tiny flecks of potato on the lenses from when she’d last been preparing dinner. Her eyes without them looked crêpey, vulnerable.
‘I expect I’ll need an operation,’ she said fatalistically. ‘I should have had one ten years ago of course, but yeer father wanted to move and I couldn’t leave him to do it on his own. Now I’m paying the price.’
I sighed quietly. She often referred to this operation she should have had but whenever I’d asked her what it was for she was vague, saying that it was to do with her womb. There was no good reason why she shouldn’t have had surgery if she’d needed it – the NHS was still on its feet in London then. I suspected that she was making it up, embellishing something a doctor had once mentioned to her, or that she had ignored medical advice and avoided going into hospital by using my father and the house move as an excuse. It was impossible to make sense of it; the line between imagination and reality where her health was concerned had always been blurred. She had told herself so many stories that even she found it confusing.
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