Araby

by GRETTA MULROONEY

  ‘Do ye remember the time we were on the bus and ye suddenly told me ye’d no underpants on?’ she asked, steadying herself with her arms around my waist.

  ‘Yes. How old was I?’

  ‘Oh, four I think. We were after coming out in a hurry. Ye were always difficult about letting me dress ye, ye’d want to do it yeerself. Ye never wanted to hold me hand in the street. Ye called out about the pants in a loud voice. I was mortified.’

  In the kitchen I dried her hair, kicking the clumps that fell to the floor under the seat so that she wouldn’t see them.

  ‘Where’s yeer father?’ she asked, sounding worried.

  ‘He was with the hens and then he was going to get some turf in.’

  ‘’Tis getting chilly outside, he doesn’t want to be catching cold.’ She pressed the palms of her hands together. ‘I hate it when the evenings draw in, the place is terrible lonely. Call him in, will ye.’

  I went to the door and saw that he was opening the gate for the doctor’s car.

  ‘Dr Molloy’s here,’ I told her.

  ‘I can’t go to hospital, I’ve no clean nightdress.’

  ‘That’s no reason not to go to hospital. If you’re ill, you need to find out what’s the matter and Molloy is only a GP. You need the expertise in hospital.’ I crossed to her. ‘You won’t stay in there, you’ll come home again.’

  ‘Are ye sure, Rory?’

  ‘I’ll bring you home myself.’ I kissed her forehead. Now she smelled of peach soap and the talcum she’d asked me to sprinkle over her arms.

  Dr Molloy was business-like, which I was grateful for. I was ready to step in if he started taking her to task for misbehaving but when he saw her he just asked her how she was feeling. He spent two minutes examining her, glancing at her stomach, then straightened. He was going to ring for an ambulance, he told her; she must go into hospital that night. She said nothing. My father sat down beside her and said she must try to eat something; how about a bit of an egg custard? The doctor used the phone and I saw him to his car.

  ‘She’s dying,’ I told him.

  He swung his bag onto the passenger seat. ‘It doesn’t look good. Rapid, whatever it is. I can’t say more till the hospital takes a look.’

  He accelerated away, his lights fading into the gloom. Once his car had gone there was silence. The faint barking of the ratty dog from up the road floated on the evening air. I bent down to sniff a late rose that my mother had bought on a trip to the garden centre three years ago. I picked a few twigs of rosemary to put in her pocket, hoping that they would make her think of exotic places in the hospital’s antiseptic confines. Turning to the house, I opened the kitchen door. My parents were sitting side by side, hands clasped, looking into the fire.

  Nectar

  My mother believed in Santa until she was fifteen. When a parlour maid in Youghal laughingly revealed that he was a fiction she cried herself to sleep.

  She was born near Bantry, the third of six children. Her father drank and died – I never knew whether from a pickled liver or something else – when she was seven. Her mother struggled to bring her children up on a paltry widow’s pension, doing odd jobs locally and bartering eggs for milk and butter. I’d always had the impression that my mother had been frightened of her father; he was an unpredictable, boisterous man from what she said, although she rarely spoke of him. I suspected that he had been a wife beater. My mother placed great value on the fact that my father was teetotal and of a placid temperament.

  Food was always scarce when she was a child. The family existed mainly on potatoes and buttermilk. Meat and bought goods were for high-days only. Rations became even scarcer when she took her first job, aged fourteen. She went to work in a grand house near Cork city, for ‘a one with a big backside and her creenaun of a husband’. She was a maid of all work: cleaning silver, setting fires, helping the cook, polishing shoes, ironing. Up at six in the morning, she finished at eight in the evening.

  When I was a child, I would listen to her often-repeated stories with a sense of déjà vu, mildly bored; they had no place in the framework of London and a youth who was desperate to be trendy whilst doing exams and planning to go to university. They sounded like tales from another century, ranking with the reports of boy chimney-sweeps in my history book. Later on when I thought about them I found it hard to imagine what it must have been like for her. She would have missed her mother terribly up in her attic room which she shared with two other girls. A naïve child, she was expected to do the work of a mature woman and cope with the emotional cost of being out in the world alone.

  The main theme of that part of her life was hunger. She never got enough to eat. Her rumbling stomach orchestrated the days. Sores developed at the corners of her mouth from vitamin deficiency. Her periods didn’t start until she was eighteen because she lacked iron. She would describe the small portions, how the sugar and butter were meagrely allotted and how she would try to slip bits of food into her mouth when the cook wasn’t looking, or pinch chunks of carrot or cheese between the kitchen and dining-room. The one with the big backside made marmalade and jam every year. It was kept in a larder at the side of the kitchen. Early in the morning, when the cook was still half-awake, my mother would sidle in there with a spoon and eat from a jar she’d opened and hidden at the back of a shelf. ‘Oh,’ she would say, smacking her lips at the memory of it, ‘that marmalade was pure joy, like nectar.’ She could still taste it years later, thick and dark and bittersweet.

  One of the dogs had once dashed into the kitchen and made off with a roasted pheasant. The cook chased it but quickly gave up, hampered by her age and girth. My mother continued; she was a slim young thing then and the smell of the pheasant juices on the breeze spurred her on. She cornered the spaniel, grabbed the pheasant from its jaws and gave it a good kick to despatch it. Then she crouched behind a bush with her trophy. She made short work of the meat, tearing it from the carcase and gobbling as fast as she could. Wiping her chin and fingers on her apron, she ran back, waving the skeleton. The dog’s name was mud thereafter.

  I would think of that story when I saw my mother foraging in the kitchen in Tottenham. An hour after a huge meal she would be out there, finishing off the apple tart or slicing a cut of cold meat, the chink-chink of cutlery on china giving her away. Her appetite seemed insatiable.

  When I reached my twenties and dabbled in psychology I concluded that those early years of deprivation had left her with a hunger that could never be sated. Before then, when I was more cruel and callow, she disgusted me. I saw her as a person with no self-control, no dignity. I was slim and tall, like my father. As I watched her reach for her sixth potato, her third portion of stew, I would wonder how I had ever emerged from that ungainly body.

  Meal times were a cavalry charge; my mother had to be at the table first, loading her plate before anyone else arrived. She could brook no delay; if there was one, she would start eating in the kitchen, taking spoonfuls from the saucepans and continuing to stoke up on her way to the table. She was an excellent cook, adding touches of refinement that she’d seen in the big houses she’d worked in. Her pastry was the best I’ve ever tasted and she had a way with puddings such as charlotte russe and chocolate soufflé that she’d served at the swankiest of gatherings. The spicy fruit cake she threw together – a fist of this and a fist of that, never weighing but always achieving exactly the right consistency – was heavenly, especially when warm from the oven. Despite all that I always sensed the onset of indigestion before I’d lifted my knife and fork. The table was too laden with emotion; desperation lurked in the dishes. Once she had satisfied her immediate hunger she started to press extra helpings onto the rest of us in order to camouflage her own excess. Refusal provoked the comment that she didn’t know why she bothered, she might as well serve up TV dinners instead of slaving over a hot stove. I was only seven when my brother left home, but I dimly recall him earning praise for his huge appetite; he gamely tucked away everything he was offe
red, eating so fast that it was hard to believe he tasted it. Once he’d gone, my father and I guiltily ploughed on, trying to accommodate another spoon of cabbage or slice of sponge cake to humour her.

  The dreaded diets brought havoc and much bewailing. Every now and again, when her blood pressure had risen or her hormones were playing up, she trotted to the doctors and returned grim-faced. She tormented every GP at the practice but to no avail; she was always told to lose weight. A diet sheet would be waved, listing terrible menus such as grilled fish, half a potato, a spoon of peas and stewed prunes. Forbidden items were pictured below a skull and crossbones; bread, cakes, casseroles, fried food, pies, all the things she craved. We would shift uneasily, wondering how long it would last this time.

  Two weeks was the maximum. She would line up her boxes of calorie-reduced rolls like troops forming for battle. They were large and brittle with the consistency of polystyrene. One of those for breakfast with a poached egg and a glass of hot water with a dash of lemon juice; for lunch a portion of grilled liver with one tomato and a roll; dinner was a piece of steamed fish, the pathetic half potato and a roll and, joy of joys, purée of apricot. We lived the diet with her, shared every groan and imprecation. Guiltily we ate the calorie-blasted dinners she prepared for us, slipping butter onto our plates, going for gravy under cover of the newspaper, palming a sausage while watching sideways as she sliced a roll to reveal that it was made of air pockets. She ate slowly, making the most of every mouthful with the pained expression of an ascetic who has vowed mortification of the flesh. We forced down sugarless apple pies – so that she could scoop fruit from beneath the pastry – our eyes watering and palates tingling. We lied that we didn’t want cakes and biscuits, snaffling them quietly while she was in the bathroom or waiting until she’d gone to evening mass or benediction to raid the cupboards.

  The anguish of watching her battle became too much at times. I would find myself craving chocolate, ice-cream, sugar-dredged buns, in a way that I never usually needed them. There was one bitterly cold November night that I remember well. I had slipped out to the corner shop after dinner, devastated by the simmered prunes in my pudding bowl. I had to satisfy a desperate desire for a large chocolate bar with mint cream filling. As I reached the counter I saw my father in his belted mac and peak cap selecting a big slab of treacle toffee. We glanced warily at each other, completed our purchases and stepped outside. Wordlessly, we stood by a denuded plane tree and quickly gobbled our goodies, shivering as an icy wind whipped our legs. When we’d finished we returned home in a conspiratorial silence, licking our fingers nostalgically.

  ‘I was out for baccy,’ my father hissed at the gate.

  ‘I was getting my magazine,’ I confirmed, touching the rolled-up Look and Learn in my pocket.

  As the diet progressed, my mother’s expression would gradually become sourer, her mouth tighter. She drooped and sighed her way to a chair after meals. There was no energy in her legs, she would declare, she was as weak as water; those bleddy doctors were trying to kill her. How could a body survive on morsels? My father would step tentatively into the house at night, asking my brother or me if the diet was still on the go. An affirmative answer brought a deep breath and a scratching of the forehead. He would approach her stealthily, keeping his voice low, ready to beat a retreat.

  The day the diet ended was signalled as soon as you entered the house and smelled frying. Crumpled boxes of rolls were rammed into the kitchen bin and the diet sheet lay crisped at the back of the fire. The frying pan sat splendidly charred on the cooker, with traces of sausages, egg, tomato, bacon and mushroom offering evidence of the official cessation. An empty multi-pack of custard fingers stood abandoned on the table, the gaping box speaking of pillage and satisfaction. Tension dissolved through the house and whoever was first back – out of my father, my brother and myself – spread the word of a cease-fire to the other two, grinning with relief as our stomach muscles relaxed.

  FOUR

  The ambulance men were cheery and kind, wrapping a blanket around my mother and making her snug. They lifted her carefully into a wheelchair to take her out, but the slightest jolt made her wince and I heard a gasp of pain as they manœuvred through the narrow front door. I don’t have children, but I’ve heard friends who are parents say that they would do anything to take their children’s pain away, to make things better. I felt that about my mother as her newly-washed hair was skimmed by a breeze coming across the valley. She gripped the arms of the wheelchair and asked if I had remembered to pack her rosary; yes, I said, it was in her bag.

  My father travelled with her in the ambulance. I drove behind in my hired car, flinching for her at each dip in the rutted road. I felt a sense of powerlessness, as if she was being kidnapped and I couldn’t catch the people who had taken her. Being snatched away had been one of her greatest fears for her children. I had received numerous warnings from a very young age to avoid dark city streets and the approaches of strangers. White Slave Traders had caught her imagination after she’d read an article in the Sunday Express, and she had alarmed me with talk of men who enticed children and whisked them away to Eastern countries to be playthings. As she grew older she found life more and more alarming and the possibilities of personal harm endless; being knocked down, crashing in the car, contracting a sudden and deadly disease like bacterial meningitis, expiring in the dentist’s chair. These things were real, they had happened to other people. In the late seventies a woman was killed instantly in Harrow when a youth threw a large parsnip from the window of a moving car, striking her in the head. My mother was aghast; even vegetables couldn’t be trusted. Often I would turn my key in the door to find it bolted and she would demand to know who was there through the letterbox.

  At the hospital she was wheeled away to see a doctor. My father and I waited in a small airless room with copies of pictures by Impressionists hanging crookedly on the walls. He massaged his legs. Evening was his worst time for pain and he looked drawn. He always slept badly, waking every couple of hours during the night and getting up to brew tea and read. During the day he cat-napped, making up the lost sleep, but this routine had been thrown.

  ‘Have you brought your tablets?’ I asked him.

  ‘In me pocket. It’s another hour before I can take them. They wear off quicker and quicker, me system gets used to them.’ He shrugged. ‘We’re a great pair of old crocks, aren’t we?’

  ‘It’s all that fast living years ago,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh! You’re right, we should have kept away from the fleshpots.’

  They’d hardly ever gone out; just the occasional church whist drive and the cinema now and again, films with a religious flavour like The Ten Commandments. Sunday jaunts in the car to Epping had been a popular pastime. My mother liked going into country churches and pointing out loudly that they would have originally been of the true faith, before that monster Henry the Eighth got above himself. ‘Of course,’ she’d once told a startled vicar while I lurked behind a brass shield, ‘this is stolen, it was one of ours, the only Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.’

  ‘Is it all right to have a smoke, do you think?’ my father asked.

  I looked around. ‘I can’t see a no-smoking sign.’

  He took out his tin and rolled a thin cigarette, pinching off the wisps of stray tobacco and letting them fall to the floor. They reminded me of my mother’s hair, drifting down.

  ‘I got her to have a bit of boiled egg anyway, something to line her stomach.’ He got up and wandered to the window.

  After a short while a nurse came and told us that my mother was going to be transferred to a ward and we could go up with her. She was in her nightdress – the one clean one I’d managed to find – and looking downcast.

  ‘How are you?’ my father asked.

  ‘Don’t talk to me. They treat you like a slab of meat.’

  We rode up in the lift in silence. Two nurses helped her into a bed. One of them turned to me and said that we should
only stay a short while because the registrar would want to come and see my mother. The younger of the nurses, a student, pulled a chair up and said that she just needed to ask a few questions. She had a clipboard with a form attached.

  ‘What name do you like to be called by? Is it Katherine?’ she asked, pen poised.

  ‘Kitty.’

  ‘Do you have any special dietary needs?’

  My mother shook her head.

  ‘Do you have a religious belief?’

  ‘RC,’ my mother said.

  ‘How about leisure activities? What do you do for a hobby?’

  My mother gave her a look of incomprehension and shivered.

  The ward was tropically hot. I wanted to snatch her clipboard and shout, ‘Can’t you see she’s dying, for God’s sake! She can’t eat and hobbies are the last thing on her mind.’ Instead I said that my mother liked TV and asked that the rest of the questions be left for the moment. The nurse looked put out but clasped her clipboard to her chest and moved away. My father fussed around taking my mother’s talcum and wash things from her bag and installing them in a locker.

  ‘Ye think I’m going to be here for a while, then.’

  ‘Ah, Kitty,’ he said, ‘I’m only trying to make things comfortable.’

  ‘Ye’d better let Dermot know I’m in hospital, he’ll want to come and see me.’

  ‘I’ll ring him,’ I told her.

  ‘Me feet are like blocks of ice. Would they ever have an ould hot-water bottle?’

  I put my hand beneath the sheet and felt her feet, rough with corns and hard skin. They were freezing. I chafed them with my hands, kneading the toes gently. I was wearing socks and trainers; I unlaced my shoes and took my socks off, then slipped them onto her feet.

  ‘Oh, they’re warm,’ she said. ‘Ye’re warm-blooded.’

  ‘I’ll ask the nurse for a hot-bot as well,’ I said.