A nurse stopped and asked if I was okay. I nodded and ran my hands over my face, settling my expression. As I walked towards my mother’s bed I saw that she was sitting propped up, a small dish of ice-cream in front of her.
‘Hi. How’s the ice-cream?’
‘Tasteless. What’s the matter with ye? Ye look as if ye’ve seen a ghost.’
‘No, I’m okay, it must be the heat in here.’
‘Ye’ve been talking to the doctor, haven’t ye? Have they had the results? ’Tis bad news, I can tell by yeer face.’ She was alarmed, twitching at the sheet.
‘They’re worried about your liver, it’s in a bad way.’
‘Oh.’ There was a world of knowledge in her expression. She pushed dismissively at the dish. ‘Take this ould ice-cream away, would ye? I told the nurse or whatever she is that I didn’t want it, but sure they don’t listen. I’m just a number in a bed.’
I moved the thawing creamy pool to her cabinet. The rosemary I had picked was lying there, a little tired but still faintly aromatic. I rubbed it between my fingers and held them under her nose.
‘Can you smell it?’
‘Just. Lovely.’
‘You can smell some fresh tomorrow. There’s good news; you’re coming home.’
‘I won’t be coming back in?’
‘No, you can say goodbye to this place.’ I flinched, thinking I sounded crass, but she didn’t respond.
‘What time am I going? Will ye take me? I don’t want an ambulance.’
‘All that’s being sorted out. I’ll tell them that I’m fetching you.’
She nodded. ‘Did Dermot get away safe?’
‘Yes. He rang from the airport.’
‘He didn’t stay long. I thought he might manage more than a stingy couple of days.’
‘It’s not easy for him to drop everything.’
‘Where there’s a will there’s a way, as they say.’ She pulled a face.
‘Have you any pain?’
‘Not much, just at the base of me spine from lying on this bleddy mattress. ’Tis as hard as nails.’
‘You’ll be in your own bed tomorrow.’
My father came slowly through into the ward, his joints seized with tiredness. Sitting down, he took her hand.
‘I suppose Rory’s told you, you’re out tomorrow.’
‘That’s if ye want me. I might be too much trouble to ye.’
He shook his head. ‘Ah now, Kitty, don’t be saying things like that.’
For once, I knew, she really meant it; it wasn’t just said for effect. Her deep fear was that we wouldn’t cope or wouldn’t want to. Her pale, waxy face looked up at us; her temples had sunk further and strands of her hair decorated the pillow. In that moment I felt the dissolution of years of tension and struggle; I saw that for now, none of it mattered. She was my flesh and blood and until her blood was stilled I would help her raise her banner.
It was arranged that she would be discharged at two the next afternoon. I spent the evening and following morning cleaning the cottage and moving furniture; she was going to be given a zimmer frame to walk with, so I cleared a path to the bathroom. My father phoned Dermot to give him the diagnosis and tell him our plans for her homecoming. We discussed sleeping arrangements and agreed that it would be best if she had the double bed in their bedroom to herself. The room was big enough to accommodate an extra single for him, so I carried one through from the spare room. I called London, explaining to the manager at the health clinic that I would be away for at least another few weeks and checking that my temporary replacement was satisfactory. Another call to a friend ensured that my house-plants would be watered and mail forwarded. I put the phone down and placed my other life on hold.
My father had slept badly again. I persuaded him to let me fetch my mother; he could have the kettle on for our return and keep the fire sweet. I hoped he’d have a nap during my absence. As I drove the weary road to the hospital I tried to banish the thought that this would be the last time she would come home, but it was there, whispering all the way.
She was ready when I got there, sitting in a wheelchair with her handbag in her lap. I fixed one of her woolly hats on; it was sharply cold outside. Two nurses helped us to the car and I tucked a blanket I’d brought around her, swaddling her like a baby.
‘Thank God and his blessed mother I’m out of that place,’ she said as we left the hospital behind. ‘I’m sure I was robbed in there, there was a shifty-looking cleaner and I’d swear she had a fiver off me.’
‘I didn’t know you’d taken money in.’
‘I had me purse, didn’t I? Still and all, I don’t know why I’m worrying me head over it. I won’t be needing money much longer.’
I glanced at her but she turned her head away to look through the side window. She stayed that way for the rest of the journey, gazing out, now and again extricating a hand from beneath the blanket to clear the glass. At the top of the lane she asked me to stop for a minute. The light was fading but the valley was still barely visible, a purple and grey hollow. The car heater hummed softly. She leaned forward slightly, shading her eyes as if there was a bright sun and then told me to drive on.
The hospital had loaned a zimmer frame, a rubber ring to place under her in bed, and a frame to rest pillows on so that she could be propped up.
‘Ye Gods,’ my father said when he came out to the car, ‘you have more equipment with you than the Queen takes to Balmoral.’
‘Never mind yeer ould talk,’ she said, ‘get me inside.’
I carried her in and sat her in her Captain’s chair by the fire. She sighed with gratitude at its licking flames and stretched her feet towards it.
‘That’s grand all together. It’s what you miss in them ould hospitals. The heat in there was terrible dry, it made me throat sore.’
We installed the equipment in the bedroom and I placed the zimmer near her chair.
‘Ye needn’t think I’m using that ould yoke,’ she told me, ‘I can’t get the hang of it at all. I told that ould bossy one in the hospital. I might as well have been talking to the wall.’
‘What hang is there to get? You just pick up and lean, pick up and lean.’
She shook her head, pulling a face. ‘I might fall, I don’t trust it. I’ll use me blackthorn stick.’
‘You probably will fall if you rely on that, it’s not enough.’
‘Don’t be going on at me,’ she said petulantly, ‘I’ve a splitting skull.’
My father stacked the fire higher for her while I made tea. She drank a few sips and then fell into a doze, her feet raised on a little wicker stool made in one of Father Bhattacharya’s mission workshops. My father sat by and watched her, pretending to scan the paper.
I prepared dinner, peeling their home-grown Golden Wonders, washing carrots and trying to remember what you did with chicken. In the end I stuck the bird in a roasting dish and put it in the oven. When I first became a vegetarian, in my early twenties, my mother said special novenas for me, convinced that I would slowly starve to death in front of her eyes. She had never encountered a vegetarian and couldn’t accept that a body could be kept together without meat. She came to the conclusion that I would suffer a gradual diminution of essential bone marrow because I had no intake of flesh, that eventually all my bone marrow would be used up and I would collapse inwards. She wouldn’t brook my explanations that bone marrow couldn’t vanish; I think that she was confused by advertisements featuring dogs who needed marrowbone jelly and applied this principle to all animals, including humans. For several years after I swapped to a vegetarian diet she would make a point, when I visited, of cooking meals involving meat recipes that I had previously enjoyed. Finding that she couldn’t tempt me with these, she would describe how she had found a butcher that sold tasty faggots or a delicious new turkey dish they were doing in Salisbury’s. Once she realized that these tactics weren’t working, she weighed me down with bags of nuts, fruit cakes bursting with raisins, sultanas, apri
cots and almonds and packs of dried fruit; a grown man needed to eat more if he was a vegetarian, she warned me, because meat solidified the flesh and gave a body a bit of ballast. I pictured myself with my skeleton folding inwards, floating through the air and presumably colliding with other vegetarians who had suffered a similar loss of gravity.
My mother slept for a couple of hours. She ate a small piece of chicken for dinner and drank half a glass of milk. Afterwards she perked up and suggested a game of cards; what about twenty-fives? My father found a pack, the same dog-eared ones we used to use in Tottenham. My mother had been a terrible cheat at cards, trying to con tricks and getting uppity if she was challenged. Once, she had become so belligerent during a game of whist that my father had swept the cards up and thrown them to the back of the fire, saying that gambling only ever brought trouble. Now, after a couple of hands her concentration lapsed; she was looking into the fire instead of at the cards. She was ready for bed, she agreed. She made her way to the bathroom using her blackthorn stick, wobbling along. My father hovered behind her, hands out. They looked like a pair of sauntering drunks. My heart was in my mouth. I expected to hear a cry and I went outside for a moment to take some gulps of air, telling myself that when you’re dying, you’re allowed to be bloody-minded and anyway, why should she change the habit of a lifetime? She managed to get back safely to the bedroom. I helped her into bed and gave her her tablets for the night.
‘The nurse will be in in the morning to check on you,’ I said, ‘and the doctor’s coming in the afternoon.’
‘Am I some kind of curiosity?’ she asked. ‘Is the whole of the countryside going to come and have a gander? Are ye selling tickets?’
‘Stop that now, Kitty,’ my father said, carrying in her hot-water bottle, ‘that’s a load of old nonsense.’
‘I haven’t heard the priest mentioned at all,’ she countered. ‘I want to see Father Brady.’
‘I’ll ring him in the morning,’ I promised.
‘Do you want your radio on?’ my father asked.
‘No. Ye could read me something from Ireland’s Own.’
My father went to fetch his glasses. I bent down to kiss her. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I put a vase of rosemary by the bed.’
‘So ye did. Ye’re a good child, when all’s said and done.’
‘If you need me in the night, just call. I’ve put the stuck-up lady by the bed.’
It was a brass bell, shaped in the form of an Edwardian lady with a parasol. My mother had bought it from The Foxy Fella and rung it around the house, saying it would come in handy if anyone was ill and needed to call. The lady had her nose in the air, hence her title.
I washed up and gave Dermot a ring to say that she was home. He said that he’d call tomorrow to speak to her. I poked the fire and sat down with a book. I could hear my father reading to her, a story about banshees; he always read in a flat, monotonous tone. It was good for encouraging sleep.
After a while I heard him close the door and go to the bathroom. He came and sat opposite me to roll a cigarette.
‘Will we bother to plan for Christmas at all?’ he asked me.
‘Why not? I think we should keep things as normal as we can.’
‘I thought I might give Con and Una a ring. They’d maybe like to see her.’
Con was his brother in Waterford. ‘Ask her first, you know what she’s like about visitors.’
Unexpected visitors had always panicked her. In Tottenham, she had been known to hide in the cupboard under the stairs in case the person knocking on the door should glance through a window. I had once been unceremoniously bundled behind the sofa when a particularly persistent neighbour, a Mrs Cox, had called. My mother had lain on her stomach beside me, breathing stertorously and crushing me against the wall, her feet sticking out past the end of the furniture. The neighbour had looked through the window, seen her legs and feet, decided that she was dead or unconscious and called an ambulance. My mother, beetroot red, had had to respond to the subsequent urgent knocking and I was told to keep my gob shut while she put on her most baffled look and said that she had been spring cleaning behind the sofa and can’t have heard Mrs Cox over the noise of the Hoover. When the frustrated ambulance men had gone, Mrs Cox had been cursed as a nosy jade who’d do better to mind her own bleddy business and stop bothering people in their own homes. She had been struck off the Christmas card list.
‘If she needs anything during the night, make sure to call me,’ I told my father.
‘I’ll be up anyway, I always am. You might as well get your sleep and let me have naps in the day.’ He re-lit his cigarette and wound a loose thread around a button on his cardigan. He spoke so softly I wondered if he was talking to himself. ‘I never thought I’d hear myself say the words, but I hope she goes quickly.’
The Picasso of Tottenham
Maybe Angela was right about my mother; maybe all those years of marshalling her pill bottles, spending days prostrate in an invalid’s chair, plotting battle tactics against Assumpta, scouring second-hand shops and stuffing herself to obesity were the activities of a woman who’d never found a productive way of channelling her energies. Perhaps a lot of it was done to attract my father’s interest, an effort to get him to express something, anything. Certainly, the books of Angela’s that I read in an effort to be a new kind of man suggested as much. The irony for my mother was that she succeeded in driving my father further in on himself; how many times had I seen his guarded, shuttered expression when he walked through the door? He had a habit of rolling his eyes right up under the lids and closing them. When the emotional atmosphere held a particularly high charge, he vanished to the allotment for hours or crawled under his car outside. I identified with him as a boy, aligning myself with his controlled, low-key responses to her. The irony for me was that Angela’s books helped me to understand my mother a little better, to allow an adult compassion into my heart, but for reasons I still haven’t fathomed they couldn’t help my struggling marriage.
During the periods when my mother had one of her part-time jobs, life was less subject to surprises. I was always pleased when she announced that she was making a start in a new ‘situation’ as she referred to it, even though the down-side was that she would be stashing a new supply of loot to go jaunting with. She had a variety of employments; usually she went for cleaning work – which always struck me as odd given that her own home was a grimy mess and she showed absolutely no interest in tidying it – but she also dabbled in a bakery, a sweet shop and an outsize ladies’ clothes store. These jobs would end because she was subject to her nerves again or because some ould one had looked pass remarkable at her or there was a maggoty manager who had no sympathy for a woman with murderous hot flushes.
The lulls between jobs were the times when I kept my head down. There was no knowing what might be going on at home, but it was certain that a new hobby would be enthusiastically introduced. We lived through lace-making, when every chair was treated to a frothy head-rest and our plates and cups had to sit on lace doilies; crocheting, when our jumpers and chair cushions grew peculiar woolly fringes in contrasting colours; candle-making, when all sizes and shapes of candles burned around the rooms, giving the impression that someone was conducting black masses; and – one of the most alarming – poker-work, which involved small round burn marks appearing on many of the wooden items in the house like a rampant outbreak of measles.
I would travel back on the school bus sunk in gloom and with a sense of trepidation. I eyed my friends chatting around me; none of them were returning to an eccentric woman with a penchant for sudden and strange interests. My two closest friends had mothers who did part-time secretarial jobs, attended the Women’s Institute, sang in church choirs and made jam or chutney in season; how wonderful that was, how acceptable and intensely comforting. How I envied them.
I might turn my key in the door, for example, and sniff a powerful aroma of paint and varnish. She would be ensconced at the living-room table. The
unwashed breakfast dishes would have been swept to one side and the rest of the surface covered in plastic flowerpots and piles of shells. In her overwhelming enthusiasm for her new hobby, she would have forgotten to take her hat and coat off. Then the story would spill out; she had been looking through the window of a craft shop in Forest Gate and seen a gorgeous display of shell-covered pots and boxes. The shop owner had sat down with her and gone through a book called Hundreds of Ways with Shells which illustrated all the fascinating uses these simple objects could be put to. They could be varnished, painted, stained, polished or left au naturel and glued to – well, to anything, basically.
She had bought six large bags of shells, a box of oil paints, a bottle of varnish, a tub of glue and a dozen pots to start her off so that she could get the hang of it. She’d be like Picasso yet, she assured me, straightening her hat and reading the directions on the glue. That was my cue to sink down despairingly and watch her busying away at a pot. Shells were daubed in bright colours, left to dry, glued and randomly attached to the plastic surfaces. I heard a documentary commentator’s voice in my head, circa the year 3,500: ‘these examples of primitive art were unearthed in the London area which was known as Tottenham. They demonstrate an interesting naïveté and were obviously done by an untrained hand, but what they lack in artistic merit is perhaps compensated for by the sheer enthusiasm they express.’ There had been a bronze and an iron age, I thought; why not a shell age?
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