Araby

by GRETTA MULROONEY

  My father returned with orange juice which she examined closely before passing approval. It felt awkward with the three of us trapped behind the apricot-coloured curtain. My parents fell silent, oppressed by hospital inertia.

  ‘Did you hear about that hijacked plane?’ I asked. ‘I saw it at Stansted.’

  My mother clapped her hands, energized. ‘I saw it on telly last night. Was anyone killed?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Some passengers were released early this morning.’ I gave them a full account of what I’d seen.

  ‘It’s supposed to be refugees that’s hijacked it, trying to get away from Saddam Hussein,’ my father told us. ‘I heard some of them had been tortured.’

  My mother crossed herself. Hussein had replaced Khrushchev and Hider before him as the devil in human form for her. ‘Good luck to the poor creatures, may God help them,’ she said. ‘Don’t they deserve a bit of looking after.’

  ‘Ah, they might not get much sympathy in London these days. They might get sent back to that bastard.’ My father shook his head.

  I left them, saying I needed the loo but intending to find a doctor. At the door I glanced back. My father had taken my mother’s hand in his and was showing her pictures of the hijack in the paper. I thought of their response to the story and then of the man in the shuttle bus at Stansted who’d said loudly, to general murmurs of agreement, that the hijackers should be taken away and shot. I was proud of my parents’ humanity, their decency, and glad that it ran through my veins.

  A nurse showed me to a small cubicle where a young woman was writing up notes. She was introduced to me as Dr O’Kane and shook my hand, saying that my mother had been telling her about me. I could imagine that several extra degrees and doctorates had been added after my name during these discussions and I felt a familiar quiver of anger at my mother’s incorrigible urge for verbal embroidery.

  ‘I understand you’ve been carrying out tests,’ I quickly said.

  The doctor nodded. ‘I’ve got all the results now. We’ve found nothing.’

  ‘So what do you think the bleeding meant, means?’

  ‘It’s hard to know. Your mother has stopped bleeding now. It’s not on-going. It could just be a blip, some matter the body needed to eject. We’ll keep an eye on her through her GP. She seems well apart from this incident. She’s on very strong tranquillizers, though.’

  ‘She has been for years.’

  ‘I see. Do you know why?’

  My mother would have said they were for her nerves. I used a more acceptable phrase. ‘General anxiety. My mother’s always been very concerned about her health. You’re not thinking of stopping the tranquillizers, are you?’ I’d read that withdrawal for old people was traumatic; as far as I was concerned, my mother was completely hooked and should be allowed to stay that way at the latter end of her life.

  Doctor O’Kane shook her head. ‘Most doctors wouldn’t prescribe such drugs now, of course, they’d look at counselling or other therapies but at your mother’s stage in life …’

  The doctor came back to the ward with me and told my mother that the tests were clear and she could come home the next day.

  ‘You’re sure I don’t need an operation?’ she asked, fiddling with the sheet. Her voice was meek, anxious. She was always on her best behaviour in front of doctors, polite to the point of obsequiousness.

  ‘Quite sure. Just get a bit of rest and stop eating all those lemons, they’ll ruin your digestion.’ Doctor O’Kane laughed. ‘I’m not surprised you’ve had stomach pains.’

  ‘What lemons?’ I asked when she’d gone.

  ‘Your mother’s had a bit of a craze on them,’ my father explained. ‘She has them grated and squeezed and sliced in hot water.’

  ‘I need the sourness. If I don’t have that I get this terrible coating on me tongue. What does that jade know about anything, she’s just fallen out of the cradle.’ Her shoulders had gone back and she was feisty again now that she’d been told nothing serious was happening.

  I thought of the morning near my eleventh birthday when she’d kept me off school, convinced that she had heart trouble. Clutching her chest, she made me ring the doctor and ask for a home call. It was in the days before we had a phone and I raced to the phone box, gabbling my message, running back in a fearful sweat to the house, convinced that when I got there she’d be dead. She was propped up in bed saying the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary in a breathless voice. I fretted until the doctor arrived, attempting to clear up so that he wouldn’t see the worst of the jumble we lived in. Her bedroom smelled cheesy but she wouldn’t have a window open, saying that the row the buses made jangled her nerves. When he marched in I hovered near the bedroom door and listened to him clicking his stethoscope. She weakly explained to him that she’d had severe pains in her chest, just here. I heard him tell her snappily that she should lose weight and stop eating the rhubarb that was causing heartburn. For a moment I froze, thinking that heartburn meant a fatal disease but he continued that her heart was as strong as an ox; being so overweight, however, must put strain on it long-term. Fewer calories and more exercise, he threw at her, pushing past me on his way out and giving me a stern look which seemed to accuse me of complicity in this time-wasting. I hung my head and felt a hot blush on my neck. After he’d gone she’d cast her beads aside, bounded out of bed, cooked a huge fry-up and instructed me not to tell my father about his visit or that I’d missed a day’s school. I watched her shovelling down sausages and bacon and swallowed bile, promising myself that she’d never fool me again.

  ‘Ah, but six lemons a day, Kitty, that’s going it some,’ my father was pointing out.

  ‘Six! Think of all that acid,’ I said to her.

  She put on her obstinate face, the one I imagined she’d worn as a toddler when life tried to thwart her. ‘They’re good for me,’ she insisted, ‘they clean out me system, keep me from being bunged up.’

  I shrugged. There was no talking any sense to her, she’d go her own way, she always had.

  The Beardy Fella

  It was a hot, sticky summer’s day, August 1966.1 was fourteen and I thought I looked pretty far out in my cream cotton flares and orange T-shirt from Bazazz Boutique in the High Street. Despite my trendy clothes, I was dissatisfied. I had no money and nowhere to go. I was at that stage of moody adolescence when home seems like a shuttered prison and your parents are an embarrassment.

  I could tolerate being seen with my father who was mildly spoken, tall and slim; with his neatly-trimmed moustache and erect bearing he looked vaguely military. The possibility of being publicly associated with my mother made my skin clammy. She was unacceptable from every view point; grossly fat, loud-voiced, horribly gregarious, unpredictable and toothless. Pyorrhoea had caused the loss of all her teeth in her mid-forties. She had been supplied with a false set but only wore them for photographs or important occasions, maintaining that they were pure torture. When she did insert these brilliant white gnashers her mouth looked over-crowded and horsey. The rest of the time she gummed her food and spoke indistinctly, spraying spittle. I had started to put carefully planned avoidance tactics into practice. I attended a different mass and found reasons not to help her with the shopping. If anyone called at the house I ducked into my bedroom, shot the little bolt I had fixed to the inside and lurked behind a locked door until they’d gone.

  She didn’t seem to notice; in fact, during the summer holidays she sought my company, bored by herself. She had few friends and no job, my brother had emigrated and my father was at work. Most mornings, unless it was a day for a jaunt or a visit to the surgery, she would lie in bed late listening to middle-brow radio and singing along with Doris Day, ‘que sera sera’. At about half-ten she would get up and eat a substantial breakfast; two boiled eggs from one of those double-jointed egg cups, half a loaf of bread smothered with marmalade, a couple of pots of tea and to finish with, a grapefruit to deceive herself that she was following a light diet. She would wash down h
er happy pills with the dregs of her tea and then install herself by the window, still in her loose cotton nightie, to watch the neighbours and see if she could catch anyone spitting into the hedge.

  On that baking August morning I was planning to sidle off to the library where I could sit in the shady reference section and read Frank Yerby whose historical novels were sexually titillating. I was dismayed to hear my mother moving around at half-nine and to find that she was fully dressed in a good Marks and Spencer floral skirt matched with one of her white cotton charity shop blouses. This meant that she was off on a jaunt, probably a bargain hunt.

  ‘Ah, ye’re about,’ she said, ambushing me as I came downstairs. ‘That’s great, we’ll get a march on the day and we can be back for lunch.’

  ‘What?’ I said, mulish.

  ‘I’ve found a new dealer, a beardy fella. He does house clearances up at Archway. There’s a picture he has that I want but I’ll need a hand with it.’ The gleam of the chase was in her eye.

  ‘I’ve got plans. I’m going out,’ I told her, picking at a flake of peeling paint on the door jamb.

  ‘Where are ye going?’

  ‘The library.’

  ‘Sure ye can go there any time. No wonder ye’re short-sighted, with yeer head always stuck in a book.’

  ‘I’m not interested in going to the beardy fella, those places make me feel funny.’

  My mother had graduated from second-hand clothes shops to bric-à-brac emporiums in the mid-sixties; the kinds of places that later on, when old artefacts had become the rage, would call themselves antique centres with names like ‘Granny’s Attic’ and ‘Times Past’. In her shopping heyday they were known as ‘Fred’s’ or ‘Bert’s’ and fairly valuable pieces from early in the century went for knock-down prices. She referred to them by the appearance or characteristic of their owners; so the one in Walthamstow was ‘The Foxy Fella’, the one in Haringey ‘Ferrety Nose’ and her favourite in Seven Sisters, ‘Snakey Tongue’.

  I had been dragged around them numerous times, shifting from one leg to another in musty back rooms while she threw herself into the rough and tumble of the market-place. She would beaver around, poking at furniture, peering at pieces of silver, holding china to the light, examining for hallmarks and faults while silent men kept a watchful distance, waiting for her to engage them.

  ‘How much for the tongs?’

  ‘Five pounds to you. They’re solid silver.’

  ‘Hmm, I can’t see a mark. Are ye sure they’re not just silver-plated?’

  ‘Solid silver guaranteed.’

  ‘I’ll give ye three pounds ten and that’s robbery.’

  Because they knew she’d be back again, a cat drawn irresistibly to the cream, they sold. At other times there were no purchases, just the satisfaction of haggling and a point scored.

  ‘That’s an outrageous price!’

  ‘Can’t go any lower, Mrs, it’s not worth my while.’

  ‘Ah well, I’ll be off then.’

  ‘See you again.’

  ‘Through the window ye will!’

  While all this was going on I would gaze in a trance at stacks of chairs, bureaux, chests of drawers, jugs and candlesticks until the gloom would make me giddy and I’d slip outside and watch her gesturing through the dusty glass.

  Despite my boredom I had been thankful for the change of focus from clothes shops. She still made the odd foray to the ‘nearly new’ or charity places; Sue Ryder shops were her favourite due to a tortuous connection based on the fact that Sue Ryder was the wife of a war hero, Leonard Cheshire, who was the friend of Douglas Bader, the pilot who had attempted to escape from the Nazis despite having tin legs. I think my mother must have had a crush on Bader or perhaps just on Kenneth More who played him in the biopic because she spoke of him in reverent tones and said that she’d rather give her few pence to a charity that helped the disabled than to them ould fat cats in the High Street.

  Once the thrill of antique hunting took over I was spared the worst excesses of the second-hand clothes she used to buy by the bagful. Outings to the nearly-new shops had always been a rainy day activity, the damp drawing out the must and lingering residues of sweat from piles of discarded garments. My mother would scavenge with a practised hand, enthusing about an alligator belt, a lace collar, a paisley scarf. Yellowed, misshapen combinations would be held to the light and stretched to see if they had a breath of life. Candlewick bedspreads were examined for signs of moths or a tell-tale trace of camphor. Unlikely and awful articles were fitted against me; thick jumpers past their best, the wool lumpy from too many washes, boys’ shorts or trousers with shiny seams and baggy seats and large outdated jackets that I could grow into. The base line, the true test of worth, wasn’t whether a thing was attractive and desirable; it didn’t matter that it was too big or lacking buttons, it was real angora or lambswool or astrakhan or pure silk – ‘ye could pull that through a thimble’ – and it was bought.

  One of my worst memories which can still make me shiver was the greenish tweed coat with a fur collar that she bought me one winter. It was three-quarter length, double-breasted, too big for me and ten years out of date. I twisted and turned as she did up the walnut buttons and teased out the collar with a clothes brush. The King of England, she told me, couldn’t wish for a better bit of cloth on his back. It sat on my dejected shoulders like a mouldering blanket, the fur making me sneeze. I knew that I would be a laughing stock if I was seen with it in school so I took it off at the bus stop and shoved it in my bag. For a couple of days I left the house each morning wearing it and shrugged it off around the corner. I froze in the December winds, my teeth chattering in the playground, until I got a chance to nip into the school boiler room and stuff it in the furnace. As the flames licked it I did a little war dance, and worst crime of all, poked my tongue out at my mother as far as it would go. At home I reported sadly that the coat had been stolen from the cloakroom, causing my mother to visit the school and complain. I stood feeling hot in assembly, trying to look suitably bereft, as the head-teacher lectured us on the sin of taking from other people and told us how shocked she was because nothing like this had happened in her school before.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when the bags full of clothes were intended for my uncle’s family in Waterford. He and his wife Una had eight children and my mother despatched a huge brown parcel to them three times a year. I would watch with satisfaction tinged with pity as dresses and shirts which had been the height of fashion circa 1954 were folded into piles for a remote farm where Peter Pan collars and voile petticoats had never been seen. The threat to myself waned as string was tightened and secured with sealing wax and my father commented, apparently without irony, that they’d think all their Christmases had come at once.

  My father indulged my mother in the purchases which cluttered up our small house, even when she acquired outlandish items; a walnut commode, an accordion inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a huge Spanish galleon made from matchsticks. When she produced a pair of bagpipes he made a fool of himself trying to press notes from the floppy cloth. I used to wonder if he feared what she might get up to if she abandoned this relatively harmless occupation; he may have been thinking of the time she set about home improvements, knocking bricks from the fireplace and almost undermining the chimney-breast.

  On that hot morning she smoothed her Crimplene skirt, head lowered, and fired a crafty salvo.

  ‘I didn’t think it was so much to ask,’ she said. ‘It’ll only take a couple of hours at the most. It’s just as well I didn’t think of meself the time I saved up for the trip to Rome.’

  This was a reference to the holiday I’d gone on with the school when I was twelve. My father had said he couldn’t afford it but she’d stored up savings stamps, the green ones with Princess Anne’s profile on, sticking them in a book until the fare had accumulated. At the time I had appreciated it, but now it felt like an albatross around my neck, as it got a mention whenever she wanted something from
me.

  I shrugged and pulled a reluctant face. If I didn’t go she’d harp on about it for days. ‘All right, but it had better not take long.’

  She brightened, swivelling her skirt zip to the side of her waist. ‘Oh, ye’re an angel. Ye won’t notice the time flying.’

  The sun streamed into the bus as it swept us to Archway. My mother was humming, tucking stray wisps of hair back into the curled up sausage-bun on the back of her neck. I checked my cream flares; it was only the second time I’d worn them and I worried that I might get them smudged. We were on the long seat, opposite a dark continental-looking woman who remarked on the heat. My mother responded that it was fierce warm sure, bad enough to fry your brains. The dark woman removed her cardigan, hot fingers struggling with the buttons, revealing a low-cut bodice and the swelling tops of brown breasts. My mother poked me in the ribs.

  ‘Come on up the bus. I’m not sitting here with that ould one showing all she’s got.’ Her voice carried in the still air.

  The dark woman scowled and turned to stare out of the window behind her. The conductress looked up from her Daily Mirror and sniggered, winking at me. She was young and good-looking. I traipsed after my mother, seething. There wasn’t much room for me beside her on the two-person seat and I sat scrunched up, my thighs rubbery and a headache starting. I closed my eyes while my mother sang, ‘Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon, all I want is loving you and music, music, music’. A baby grizzled behind us, its cries piercing my skull.

  ‘Wakey-wakey,’ my mother said. ‘We’re nearly there. I could never have slept during the day at yeer age. Ye should take a tonic, something with iron.’

  I remembered that years ago I had heard her refer to a great-aunt who had started screaming one market day in Bantry. The nuns had taken her in and kept her until she died. After that day when she threw her groceries into the air and opened her lungs she never again spoke a sensible word. I wondered what had driven her to such a pass.