Araby

by GRETTA MULROONEY

  I followed him into the bedroom. She looked bleary but intent.

  ‘I want to go out in the garden, just for a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Would the morning do? It’s cold.’

  ‘Now, I want to now.’

  ‘Right. I’d better carry you then, and Dad, you’d better take a chair out.’

  ‘Take me Captain’s chair.’

  ‘Right you are, Kitty, I’ll get it.’

  I helped her to sit up against the bed frame, then slowly moved her legs around to the edge of the mattress as the nurse had demonstrated. Her shins were mottled, the skin drying. She balanced, a hand propped at either side of her. I found a chunky cardigan and put it on over her nightdress, buttoning it up to her neck. Then I pulled a pair of the thick grey walking socks I’d brought with me onto her legs and fetched her slippers. She wouldn’t make the fashion catwalk this season, I told her, cocooning her in a blanket.

  ‘A hat now,’ I said, turning to the chest of drawers.

  ‘No. I want to feel the air on me head.’

  I was about to say that she might catch cold, but then realized the insignificance of that possibility. ‘Okay. Now I’m going to count to three, then I’ll lift you.’

  She was a featherweight in my arms. I had never thought that I would feel my mother’s bones. My father had switched the outside light on; the previous owners had had it installed, my parents would never have considered such a luxury themselves. I placed her in the chair that he’d positioned by her herb garden. She tilted her head back.

  ‘The air’s lovely,’ she said.

  ‘Look at the moon, it’s a crescent.’ I drew its shape with my finger.

  ‘Did Con have much news?’ she asked my father.

  ‘Oh, the usual class of thing; banjaxed tractors, foot and mouth, scrapie, BSE … the sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.’

  She sighed. ‘Con’s no farmer.’

  ‘He’s not. Maybe I should have stayed and run the place.’

  ‘What would that have been like, I wonder?’

  I’d moved aside to stargaze. For a moment it felt like the old life, when I used to visit before; my parents chatting in the evening gloom, my mother’s voice lilting, the whiff of my father’s cigarette on the breeze. They would be discussing what to plant next, the strange way the forsythia hadn’t done well this year, their suspicion that the man who delivered the turf was overcharging them, the odd manner of the doctor’s receptionist. I touched the cold wall of the cottage; a sense of despair nudged me for the first time. Up until now I had been so busy, wrapped up in the details of the sickroom, getting a commode delivered, fielding phone calls and visitors, trying to make sure she was comfortable. This sudden taste of what had been and would soon vanish forever was too unexpected and shocking. I pressed my fingers into the wall, hard, hard.

  ‘Take me back in, Rory,’ she said weakly. ‘Give me a bit of me rosemary first.’

  I bent down beside her and picked some, folding it in the hand she presented at the tip of the blanket. I could see she was exhausted. My father followed us in with the chair, saying that he was sure there’d be a frost, it was almost a certainty.

  I unwrapped her from the blanket and put her back in bed. She said to leave the thick socks on.

  ‘Did ye say Angela’s coming tomorrow?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Biddy, your sister.’

  ‘I thought Angela might come. I thought she’d want to see me.’

  She and Angela had enjoyed a mutual dislike from the first day they’d set eyes on each other. She’d accused Angela of taking me away from the church, even though I’d left it five years before I met her. I suppose it had eased her mind to decide that I’d been lured from the true faith instead of abandoning it.

  ‘I’m divorced from Angela,’ I said, but she was mumbling about her mother again; there had been milk spilt in the well, she said, and she’d got the blame but it had been Nellie who’d done it. She caught my hand.

  ‘I want to be buried with me mother,’ she whispered.

  ‘In Bantry?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  I felt sweat on my neck. The sour smell from the bed and the heat from the fire were making me dizzy.

  ‘But you’ve got a grave picked out with Dad,’ I whispered back, looking behind me to check that he couldn’t overhear us.

  ‘She was a good mother, a good mother,’ she said, rubbing her lips together and moving her legs restlessly. ‘’Twas Nellie did the milk, so ’twas.’

  She quietened then, seeming to settle. I went to phone Dermot, to tell him it was time to fly back.

  The Same Blood

  In the spring of 1990 my father pulled a muscle in his back while he was lifting a bag of compost. I was staying with my parents at the time. We were giving the garden a rejuvenating work-over of hoeing and feeding. My mother was trimming with the secateurs, snipping away at dead branches and cos-setting the magnolia she’d planted the previous year. I’d told my father not to touch the heavy bags, but he said that it was what he did all the time I wasn’t around to help and there was life in the old dog yet. His muscle pinged as he bent down and he was in agony for a couple of days. I massaged his bony back and applied frozen peas, keeping my mother at bay with her hot poultices, rubbing alcohol and unguents. He improved gradually and was able to move about less gingerly, but still needed to take it easy.

  On the third morning after his mishap my mother called to me as I was finishing breakfast. She’d been outside since before I got up, digging potato trenches. I’d lain in bed, hearing the rhythmic slice of the spade and the rattle of stones as she’d thrown them into a heap. Her voice, carrying on the early morning air, warned the cats to keep out of her way or she’d give them the order of the boot. The previous night she’d wound an elastic bandage around her stomach and announced that she was well and truly done for; her guts were rumbling like an express train and we may as well check the insurance policy and measure her up now. She’d swallowed half a jar of bicarbonate of soda and dragged herself to bed. Obviously, some kind of miracle had taken place overnight.

  I took my cup of tea and went out to find her; she was sitting on a stool near the back door, balancing her right foot over her left thigh and rubbing an old cheese grater against the ball of the foot.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘you’re out of cheddar.’ I peered down at the feathery flakes of skin on the concrete. ‘No; parmesan, I think.’ She could still amaze me; this was a little foible I hadn’t witnessed before.

  ‘’Tis the only thing that helps me corns,’ she said, grating furiously.

  ‘That isn’t the grater you actually use in the kitchen, is it?’ I waited nervously for her reply; last night we’d had cauliflower cheese, the cauliflower later being blamed for her gaseous intestinal spasms.

  ‘Don’t be an eejit. ’Tis an ould one I found in the cupboard.’

  ‘You ought to be careful not to nick your skin. That thing’s rusty. You could end up with blood poisoning and then corns would be the least of your troubles.’

  ‘Yerra, ye needn’t worry about that. There’s enough hard skin here to keep me going for weeks. It makes walking pure purgatory.’

  ‘You can buy special plasters for corns, to soften them.’ I looked down at my cooling tea; I seemed to have lost my taste for it.

  ‘Them ould things are useless, they come off. I do this and then I soak them. Wait ’til you get them, then you’ll be sorry you weren’t more sympathetic’

  ‘I am sympathetic. I’m just not sure that’s the best way to tackle them.’

  ‘Oh, ye and yeer science, ye think ye have the answers for everything. It’s not many corn plasters me poor ould mother had.’

  ‘Ah, but did she have corns?’

  She looked up at me, stumped for a moment. Then she wielded the grater again, saying, ‘Ah ye should have been on the stage, ye’re such a comedian. They must miss ye at the London Palladium.’

  I moved
away from the scene of skin shaving, expecting her to draw blood. It was a still, warm day with just a hint of breeze. The garden looked new, uncloaked. The faint growl of a tractor came from a few fields away and a wren darted by the hedge, watched carefully by the ginger cat. I closed my eyes and raised my face to the sun wondering, as I sometimes did when I stood on this spot, what my life might have been if instead of emigrating and meeting in London, my parents had settled in this house.

  There was a parallel universe that crouched in my imagination, one where I had attended school in Fermoy, maybe gone to university in Cork or Dublin. What kind of person would I have become? If I’d grown up in Ireland, perhaps I would have headed for the priesthood, and be the Reverend Father Keenan tending to his faithful flock. Instead of being agnostic, divorced and childless, I might have married an Irish woman and made a success of my marriage for the glory of God, producing freckle-faced children. Or, of course, I could have turned out to be one of those men who never leave the family fireside; I could be living now with the Mammy and Daddy and going to dances in Fermoy but deciding that no girl could give me the kind of home comforts I got in the cottage above the valley. Maybe I would have emigrated, as daunted by the lack of prospects in Ireland as many of its youth, trained as a physiotherapist in London and be living much the same life as I did now. I liked to tease myself with the possibilities of those other Rorys.

  One of the cats had been scratching at the newly-sprinkled compost, scattering it over the edge of the border. I kicked it back under a shrub. A clump stuck to my shoe and I shook it, the movement taking me back to when we used to go gathering horse manure. Many of my childhood Sunday afternoons had been spent stacking carrier bags of dung in the car boot. My mother would decide that the roses needed a good feed and we’d head off to Wormley Woods near Epping, where there were bridle paths and stables dotted around the countryside. My father would carry a trowel while she stuffed the carrier bags in her pocket. She would point as soon as she saw a pile of dung, then check to see if it might still be warm; the fresher the better, she maintained. Then my father would scoop while she held a bag open and eventually we would return to the car laden with garden nourishment. If she saw a horse in front of us she would slow down, saying we might as well hang about a bit, it would probably do its business and then we’d hit the jackpot. Once, during a period when the car was out of action, she had taken me to Epping on the Green Line bus, anxious that the roses were being deprived for too long. On the return journey we sat clutching several steaming bags each and, although there were plenty of passengers waiting at the stops, we had loads of space to ourselves.

  The sawing noise behind me stopped and she knocked the grater on the ground to clean it.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said, examining her feet, ‘I feel pounds lighter. Now, there was something I wanted to ask ye. Would ye take me out for the day?’

  ‘What, today?’

  ‘Yes. I asked yeer father and he wouldn’t mind. He can have a rest. I’ve left him a bit of soup for his dinner.’

  ‘It’s okay with me. Where do you want to go?’ This was an odd request. Usually, if I suggested an outing she refused, saying she didn’t want to be racketing around the countryside like a giddy goat.

  She stood up. ‘I’ll give ye directions,’ she said airily. ‘I’ll just be a few minutes. See if yeer father wants a cup of tea before we go.’

  She vanished inside. Her grated skin lay in a little heap. I shifted it with my foot, dumping it by a spread of forget-me-nots where it could join the great recycling scheme of things.

  My father still had tea in the big flask she’d given him earlier. The flask had a knitted cover in green, white and gold that she’d made for it. ‘You’re off out then?’ he asked, resting his book on his knee.

  ‘Looks like it.’ I donned my jacket and checked that I had my wallet.

  ‘That’s good. Your mother could do with a little break. She still misses her old London cronies.’

  ‘I always offer to take you out when I come.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s not the same as herself deciding to go,’ he remarked knowingly.

  She appeared from their bedroom. She had a clean dress and cardigan on, a pair of dark brown stockings held up with the home-made garters she wore, low-heeled lace-up shoes and she was carrying her voluminous handbag with the big brass clasp. She’d put on her thin-strapped watch; it caught my eye because she so rarely wore any ornamentation.

  ‘You’re going to be time-keeping then?’ I asked, lifting her wrist.

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to be stopping out late; ye might turn into a pumpkin. Now, Dan, the soup’s in the saucepan and the bread’s in the cupboard.’

  ‘I think I can manage a drop of soup,’ my father observed, obviously dying to get on with his book.

  ‘Tarra then, ducks,’ she yodelled, mimicking a woman who used to live in our street in Tottenham and who could be heard bidding her husband goodbye at their front door every morning. She picked up her blackthorn stick which was propped by the front door and gave the window behind my father a farewell rattle with it as she passed.

  In the car we had our usual tussle over her seat belt. She didn’t want to wear it; I insisted.

  ‘It cuts into me. It makes me feel all trussed up like a sack of spuds,’ she protested as I clicked it into place.

  ‘You’ll get used to it. Now, where to?’

  ‘Ye’ll want the road to Cork first.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll direct ye on from there.’ She sat back and folded her arms, her stick tucked in beside her.

  ‘This is a mystery tour, is it?’

  She tapped the side of her nose with a forefinger. I had the feeling that she’d been planning this outing for some time, waiting for the right day. The request might have been made casually, but I’d never known her get ready so quickly to leave the house; usually her purse was lost, her shoes unpolished, her bag not hanging where she’d last left it.

  ‘Isn’t the spring lovely?’ she said as we joined the main Cork road. Her voice was light and optimistic.

  ‘It is. It lifts your spirits after winter.’

  ‘I always loved the spring the best. Don’t drive too fast, now.’

  ‘Give me a clue where we’re going,’ I said, ‘animal, vegetable or mineral?’

  But she wouldn’t be drawn. She started to hum a jig, doing little steps with her feet.

  ‘Let’s have a verse of an ould song,’ she suggested.

  ‘Okay, which one?’

  ‘“The Galway Shawl”, that’s a grand air, me father used to sing it when me mother put her bonnet on to go to the market.’ She started and I joined in:

  In Arranmore in the county Galway

  One pleasant evening in the month of May,

  I spied a colleen, she was fair and handsome

  Her beauty fair took my breath away.

  She wore no diamonds, no costly perfume,

  No paint or powder, no none at all

  But she wore a bonnet with ribbons on it

  And around her shoulders a Galway shawl.

  ‘Mind,’ my mother said when we’d finished, ‘there was no danger that he’d buy me mother diamonds or perfume. She lived hand-to-mouth, the poor creature, she was lucky to have her bonnet.’

  ‘What did your father do?’

  ‘God knows. He was missing half the time and when he was with us he’d had a skinful. I remember though, the time he took meself and John-Jo to Ballyboy Races. He had a flutter on a horse called “Bantry Bugler” and didn’t he win five pound. Oh, then he was in the best of tempers and he bought us glasses of gooseberries and gave us a penny each. I got meself a stick of Peggy’s Leg and a blue balloon. Sure I was beside meself completely, we weren’t used to things like that.’

  ‘Do you think your mother saw any of the money?’

  ‘Yerra I doubt if she saw a pound. Didn’t he get roaring drunk and we had to get a lift home on a pony and trap. He w
as like yer one in the story; when he was good he was very, very good and when he was bad he was horrid.’

  ‘We’re near Cork,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Take the road to Bandon when ye see it, that’ll be fine and dandy.’

  As we approached Bandon she said that she was starved with the hunger and we should have a bite to eat.

  ‘Is it much further?’ I asked as we went into a pleasant-looking café.

  ‘Oh no, we’ve the back of it broke. Now, d’ye think they do chips?’

  They did and she had a plate of them with two fried eggs while I chose soup.

  ‘Remember that time in Cork when you threw tea on the table?’ I said.

  She looked askance. ‘I did not! What makes ye say that?’

  ‘Yes you did. You didn’t like the service or the food so you accidentally spilled the tea. There was a matter of some jam, too, as I recall.’

  She shook her head. ‘Ye must be thinking about something else. Sure I wouldn’t do such a thing.’

  I dropped the subject and tucked into my soup. She made short work of the egg and chips and ordered a chocolate éclair. The young waitress was friendly and efficient.

  ‘She’s a nice girl,’ my mother said through a mouthful of cream. ‘She’s the type would suit you.’

  ‘Oh, is she?’

  ‘’Tisn’t good for a man to be on his own.’

  ‘I think I should find out a bit more about someone first though; she might have skeletons in the cupboard or a mad husband in the attic’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of ye and Angela getting back together?’

  I could never work out, when she made that kind of remark, if she’d genuinely blotted out reality or was trying to draw me on the subject of my personal life. ‘I shouldn’t think so; last time I heard from her she was planning to marry again.’

  My mother shook her head and dabbed up the last of her cake. ‘’Tisn’t natural, all these broken marriages and marrying again. It flies in the face of God.’

  I rarely ventured into conversations on such topics with her, but the unexpected shape of the day had relaxed me.