Araby

by GRETTA MULROONEY

  She looked small in the high bed. I found the older nurse who’d helped her into it but was told that the hospital didn’t have hot-water bottles.

  ‘If I go and buy one, will you fill it?’ I asked.

  She looked dubious. ‘I’m not sure it’s allowed, it might burst and scald her.’

  ‘It will hardly burst if it’s new. Her feet are cold and she hates being cold. She’s frightened, her circulatory system isn’t working properly. It would bring her a little bit of comfort.’ My voice was rising with impatience.

  She looked around. ‘Well, I suppose …’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll pop out. Is there a late-opening chemist nearby?’

  She gave me directions and I hurried to tell my father I’d be gone for fifteen minutes.

  The chemist had a small selection of bottles. I chose one with a red furry cover and fumbled for money. I felt panicky, as if I must get this back to my mother as soon as possible; it was a matter of urgency to relieve her discomfort in whatever small way I could. I ran up the stairs at the hospital and found the nurse I’d spoken to in a sluice room. She filled the hot-water bottle and pushed the extra air out, securing it tightly. I was relieved that she seemed capable and compassionate.

  ‘Are you on duty on my mother’s ward during the night?’ I asked.

  ‘I am. I’ll see to it for her.’

  I sped to my mother and slid the bottle between her feet.

  ‘How’s that?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Grand. Ye’re an angel.’

  ‘When it gets cold, ask the nurse with the blonde hair in plaits to refill it. That’s the secret of being in hospital, learn who your allies are.’

  A shadow of pain crossed her face. ‘I feel a bit sick,’ she said. ‘It’s that butcher downstairs, hauling me around.’

  ‘Have a boiled sweet,’ my father suggested, ‘the sugar might help.’

  ‘Just half one.’

  He bit one and gave her a sticky portion. She moved it around in her mouth, disinterested. I thought, I’d give anything to have her demand ham and chicken with cold roast spuds and send us running around trying to find goat’s milk.

  At ten o’clock my father and I drove back to the cottage in silence. He took himself to bed as soon as we got in, grey with pain and worry. I knew that I would hear him moving about again by three in the morning, filling the kettle and coughing his dry smoker’s cough.

  I got a fire going and sat by it for a while, then dialled my brother’s number in Hong Kong. It would be about seven in the morning there, a reasonable hour. The last time I’d seen him was when we happened to visit at the same time five years previously. He had been here when I arrived, leaving two days later. I had felt awkward around him, not knowing enough about his life to converse easily. I was ignorant of the banking world which fascinated him and about which he talked constantly to my father. I had never met his wife or two sons; in photographs they looked handsome. He was an outsider who went his own way and seemed keen to put continents between himself and his origins. From listening to him I gathered that he was highly successful and proud of it, and of the fact that he’d climbed the ladder without much formal education. He never asked me about my job, except to enquire what I earned and congratulate me for getting out of the NHS and into a private clinic. Sometimes I actually forgot that I had a brother and found that people who’d known me for years exclaimed in surprise when I mentioned him in passing. At other times, when I was feeling low or witnessed friends enjoying the company of their siblings, I found myself wishing that I had a brother and then recalled with a start that I did.

  When he answered the phone I explained that I was in Ireland and that our mother was in hospital, very ill. I wanted to say that she was dying but you have to know someone well to be that honest.

  ‘It’s for real, she’s really ill?’ he asked. He had picked up a faint Australian twang along the way which sat on top of his Tottenham vowels.

  ‘Yes, it’s for real. They’re doing tests and it doesn’t look good. I’d get here soon if I were you.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. How’s the old man?’

  ‘Tired, stressed. She’s been playing him up.’

  ‘Tell me about it. I’ll book a flight a.s.a.p.’

  I put the phone down, feeling hollow and slightly nauseous. I remembered that I hadn’t eaten since my snack on the plane. The flight seemed like it had happened days ago, something I’d dreamed. I made a pot of tea and some toast and ate by the fire with a tray on my lap. My mother’s foul-smelling tube of unguent for aches and pains was lying on the mentelpiece, a yellowing dribble oozing from the cap. I’d bought her odour-free gels that were just as effective, but she swore by her creamy ointment that reeked of camphor and irritated the eyes at fifty paces. She was also convinced of the efficacy of salt bags for removing rheumatic aches. It wasn’t unusual to walk in and find her with a home-made muslin sack containing sea salt strapped to the back of her neck or knee with a linen napkin – one of a set she’d bought from Snakey Tongue in 1964. She was keen on binding and bandaging; when her left knee was giving her gyp she tightened a thick leather strap that looked as if it originally would have been part of a horse’s harness around it. When she walked, the leather creaked and the buckle jangled, causing passersby to look around, startled.

  Her pièce de résistance in the self-medicating stakes was the invention of the hot-water bottle hat circa 1977. It was a particularly cold winter and she caught a flu that left her with sinus headaches which could only be alleviated by warmth. When she was well enough to venture out she came back saying bad cess to the blasted weather, she’d never survive the winter if this carried on. She disappeared upstairs for an afternoon and appeared triumphantly at tea time, wearing the kind of fluffy woollen beret she favoured, but one that sat strangely high on her head, as if she was a Rastafarian with curled up dreadlocks. Removing the beret, she revealed a round brass hot-water bottle with the stopper like a belly-button in its middle. She had constructed a little nest for it in the beret, securing it with strips of old flannelette sheet sown in with her big stitches. It could be eased from its nest to be re-filled. It was grand, she said, gorgeous and warm; now she’d be as toasty as old Nick himself when she went out. She made my father try it on and he pulled silly faces, putting his hands on his hips, pretending to be a model. I skulked away, picturing my friends or their mothers meeting her in the High Street and being transfixed by the pudding-shaped growth on her head. Luckily, the invention proved unsatisfactory, the brass bottle exhibiting a tendency to lurch to one side and perch like a bulging tumour over her right ear. The contraption was donated to the cat and her six newly-born kittens, giving their cardboard box central heating.

  I kicked off my trainers and stretched my bare feet in front of the glowing fire. I hoped that my mother’s were warm now and that the high bed wasn’t too hard on her tender bones. I thought of her there, alone amongst strangers and the picture became one of a timid young girl arriving at a big house where she knew no one and being shown to a bare, chilly attic room.

  I put my cup down and listened. A hawthorn branch scratched at the window, but otherwise the silence that she had longed for in London blanketed the valley. The house felt wrong, unbalanced, the way the house in Tottenham had felt when my father was having the operation on his elbow. My mother had roamed from room to room, ill at ease, reminding me of a restless pacing tiger in the zoo.

  What will he do without her? I thought. He hadn’t yet realized that she was dying. Before he went to bed he’d said that as soon as the doctors sorted her out we must get her home and feed her up; a few good helpings of spuds were what she needed. I’d always assumed that he’d go before her, because of his arthritis and the powerful combination of analgesics and steroids he took daily, and also because men usually predeceased their wives. Knowing that she would be terrified of being alone in this remote cottage I’d imagined with great trepidation that I would ask her if she’d like to come and
live with me in London. She would jump at the chance, I’d thought with a traitorous heart. After my divorce six years previously she had alluded to the space I must now have, commenting that whichever one of them went first, it was comforting to know I’d be able to put the other one up.

  I’d visualized the whole awful scene, playing it over to myself many times; my vegetarian house filled with meaty smells, the cooker spattered with grease from frying, the rooms gradually filling with tat as she resumed her old acquaintanceships in Haringey and Archway, the awful possibility that she would produce nearly-new clothes for me straight from the early eighties. I would come home to find furniture moved or covered in cloths embroidered with women in crinolines gathering violets, terrible oil-paintings of religious scenes or ships in storm-tossed waters hammered to the walls, religious icons with votive candles perched on my bookshelves. Friends who visited would be subjected to Bridie Gallagher songs or stories about my mother’s youth which they would be unable to comprehend because of her thick accent and lack of teeth. The pictures I conjured up made my scalp tighten in the old familiar way and brought back all those hours of seething frustration I had spent in her company before I escaped to university. I imagined myself regressing to a mutinous, powerless child. Now I knew that I’d been let off the hook, and I felt an icy blast of guilt because that knowledge brought relief.

  My father was snoring in their bedroom across the passage, rumblings punctuated by whistling breaths. What was missing was the crackling of my mother’s little transistor radio, a cheap item she’d bought in Walthamstow market. She kept it on low all night, not quite tuned in so that there were buzzings and static accompanying the Irish music. My father’s poor hearing meant that he wasn’t troubled by it, but I had had to buy ear plugs because the tinny racket had kept me awake. I had laughed the first night I poked the sponge aids into my ears, thinking that my mother had a talent for reversing roles; wasn’t it the younger generation who were supposed to bother their elders with noise and music in the small hours? The radio was still in there, standing silent beside her bottle of Lourdes water and tin of lemon drops. She couldn’t be bothered taking it to the hospital with her, she’d said listlessly and I had touched it, thinking: she is letting go the things of this world.

  The Quare Crew

  Nowadays, my mother’s family would be called dysfunctional. She referred to them as ‘the quare crew’, citing their odd traits and characteristics with critical exactness, as if she had no strange quirks of her own.

  They had all emigrated to England and gone their various ways with negligible contact. My mother hardly ever spoke about her brothers and sisters, didn’t even know where her youngest brother lived. I had picked up the knowledge I possessed of them randomly; listening to my parents talking, my mother referring to the odd letter or overhearing her confide a family detail to a priest. Occasionally, if I slipped a question in when she was feeling talkative she’d fit another piece of the jigsaw for me. She always portrayed her own mother as a saintly woman, a hard worker with a heart of gold, but I had found her remote, her rare touch uninterested. I would wonder why, if she was such a paragon, all her children had left her, rarely visited her – apart from my mother – and pursued their adult lives imbued with a certain degree of chaos. My father had only one brother who had inherited the farm in Waterford; to me, he and his family didn’t count as real kin because they had stayed in Ireland and we didn’t visit them, we went to my grandmother in Bantry.

  Growing up in Tottenham I was surrounded by children who had close-knit families. My friends would come to school talking about the presents they’d had from aunts and uncles for their birthdays, family trips and holidays taken with cousins, celebratory family occasions. I would listen with envy and a sense of displacement, unable to reveal that I did have aunts, uncles and cousins, but I didn’t see them because they had been adopted or gone missing or because there was no contact. It all seemed somehow shameful in comparison to my friends’ wholesome networks. I sensed that certain markers were missing in my life, a wider safety net of relations who would have contributed to my identity and of whom I had been deprived. It added to my feeling of not quite belonging. I saw the lack of family bond reflected in my relationship with my brother and puzzled over this absence; was it part of the losses brought about by emigration, leaving ties of country and culture? Perhaps being dispersed without points of reference caused a rift that couldn’t be made whole again and this rift was passed on to children with their genetic inheritance.

  Nellie, the eldest in my mother’s family, had produced three illegitimate children. The youngest was born when she was only fifteen; at seventeen she ran off to Liverpool. The children were adopted and never heard of again. It struck me that three was more than misfortunate and when we visited Nellie just the once in her Liverpool house I stared at her, trying to visualize a wild-haired colleen in a permanent state of excitement. She had married a steady Englishman called Wilf who was twenty years older than her. He worked, oddly enough, for the Post Office, but behind a counter. They had no children and she treated him as if he was a spoiled son rather than a husband. He was allowed to sit in front of the TV to have his dinner which she delivered to him on a tray with a bottle of stout. We were fed chops, greens and mashed potatoes, but Wilf was apportioned chips and a fried egg with his chop because that was his favourite. For pudding we had gooseberry pie and cream; Wilf slurped pink packet whip and ice-cream, switching channels like an infant who gets easily bored. Nellie at that time would have been in her late forties, a trim woman with tortoiseshell glasses and neat movements. Her house was spotless, bare compared to ours and she cleared away after we’d eaten with great speed. I found myself wondering what it would be like to have her as a mother; I could see myself living in this normal-looking home with polished surfaces and no obvious medications.

  We had only visited because my mother was attending a special mass at the new Liverpool cathedral. She had won a place at the women’s-only celebration when the parish priest had drawn her name from a hat in the presbytery after benediction. She was dead set on going, even though it meant a dreaded journey, because she had entered our names in the book of the Sacred Heart that was kept on the altar and more importantly, although not acknowledged, because her archenemy from The Catholic Women’s Guild, one Assumpta Flanagan, would be there. My mother had no intention of letting Assumpta steal a march on her by racing ahead in the holier-than-thou stakes. My father and I had to loiter around the city centre while she and Assumpta out-prayed each other and brayed the hymns competitively. My mother was hoarse, hot but triumphant as she swaggered through the cathedral doors, ready for her dinner at Nellie’s.

  She quizzed Nellie about her parish priest, whether or not there was a convent locally and the laying of the foundation stone of the cathedral, sniffing out her sister’s lack of up-to-date information. When we left the house my mother remarked darkly on her apparent paucity of knowledge of the new place of worship, commenting on the awfulness of mixed marriages; wouldn’t anyone with sense know that her wedding a Protestant old enough to be her father could cause nothing but grief. Sure there hadn’t been one religious picture in the house, she’d said, crossing herself; that one was no more practising her faith than the Pope was turning Jew. The lack of bleeding hearts and po-faced statues had been a definite plus for me, making the sitting-room alluring. That was my only sighting of Nellie; like two of the other siblings, she didn’t attend her mother’s funeral and we heard that she’d died in 1985.

  Jack, born eighteen months after Nellie, was a mystery man. He’d done a vanishing act after leaving his wife and two young children in 1940. There was talk of a gambling debt and a vengeful card sharp in what passed for the Cork underworld at the time. It was believed that Jack had nipped off on the night-boat to Swansea and rumour had it that he might have been killed in the blitz. My mother had one photo of him, a dark-haired good-looking charmer. I had his eyes and the same shape chin. In Cork he h
ad worked in the building trade and sometimes, as I passed building sites in London, I would look at men’s faces, searching for a resemblance. I once heard Nancy, his abandoned wife, tell my mother that she still loved him and during more romantic phases of adolescence I would search faces even more keenly, thrilled by the thought that I might discover him, solve the mystery of his life and return him to the bosom of his family. Whenever there were famous disappearances, stories in the paper about Lord Lucan or a vanishing businessman or MP, I would wonder about Jack; had he maybe sailed on to Australia or America, or was he sitting lonely in a lodgings in Kilburn, wanting to go home but unable to find a way? Although I’d never known him, I felt that I missed him, he was an uncle to whom I’d lost my entitlement.

  John-Jo was five years younger than my mother and I thought perhaps she’d been fond of him years ago. She’d looked after him for a while when her mother was sick and had been allowed to take him to one of the houses she worked at for a couple of weeks. He lived we didn’t know where and was a drinker; feckless, my mother said. I saw him once, at my grandmother’s funeral, in a scene that was reminiscent of a Mike Leigh film. My father, mother, brother and myself were standing by the grave with the priest and a family called the Donavans who had been close to my grandmother. As the priest sprinkled holy water down on to the coffin, a portly middle-aged man with a high colour and a scruffy suit staggered forwards, crying, ‘Mammy! Mammy!’ He threw himself at the edge of the grave, hands clawing at the earth. My father and Mr Donavan tussled with him, their black ties snapping in the breeze while the priest held his hand to his mouth and I gaped, glancing at my brother and mouthing, ‘Who is he?’ My brother shrugged and glanced at his watch. My mother kept her head bent, fingering her rosary beads.

  I heard my father talking in low tones to the sobbing shape. ‘Come on now, man, for God’s sake and don’t be making a holy show of yourself. Think of your poor mother looking down on this.’