I didn’t sleep well the first of January. You know that way? I felt anxious, as if I was waiting out the night. Maybe that’s just me looking back, but definitely, I rolled this way and that way on the pillows: it might be time to turn on a heater I remember thinking; despite the nice day it had been earlier, there was frost on the windows.
It’s murder not to sleep. Maria’s face kept floating in front of me, all the colours strange, like on television, people milling around her lifting glasses of drink and drinking out of them and laughing. She was a woman now and that was hard to believe. Ages since I’d been in London, you just don’t go, Maria wants to live her own life, she’s with a nice fella who used to live round here, and they say he’s looking after her. Not easy. I thought she’d given up showbusiness but then the phone rings and she says she’s doing that Hogmanay thing and they’re only up in Glasgow for one night.
I must have been dozing but at seven o’clock I heard a car passing outside and then the seagulls. I got dressed quietly. Rosa had asked me for her spare key back a while ago, so I couldn’t go straight up, but I thought I would chap Mrs Bone’s door, she was always up early.
She said, ‘Goodness, Alfredo,’ standing at the door in her housecoat with her rollers in. ‘Happy new year, Mrs Bone,’ I said.
I asked her if she’d seen Rosa and said I was worried and had she got a key for the café. ‘A minute,’ she said. When she came back Mrs Bone was wearing a raincoat and a scarf over her rollers and she came down with me. The café was dark. Strange the things you notice at a time like that. The stock was low in the cabinets, I noticed that, and most of the crisps boxes were down and the sweetie jars were sitting empty. Through the back the kitchen was all scrubbed. Up the back stairs you could hear a radio playing. Rosa was lying in the bath and as soon as I looked I knew she was dead. Floating in the bath around about her and lying on her chest were brown pill bottles and a vodka bottle was in the water. ‘No,’ I said.
Mrs Bone came in at my back. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ she said. ‘Oh Rosa. Alfredo. Oh my God.’
The radio was playing on the floor. I put my hand into the water and it was freezing and Rosa’s eyes were closed and I thought she’s wearing a shower cap, of course that’s right she wouldn’t want her hair to get wet, and I just kept saying, ‘Rosa, it’s okay, it’s okay Rosa.’
I don’t remember what else. I know that all the lights in the house went on and people came and I was sitting on the toilet seat talking to Rosa and that was that. Dr Jag appeared. He put his hands here and there and checked Rosa in the bath and he lifted some of the bottles and shook his head and he was chalk-white. I remember saying, ‘Dr Jagannadham, let me sit here a minute.’
They all went downstairs and I could hear talking and the telephone ringing, but I shut the bathroom door and just stroked my sister’s forehead for I don’t know how long, and later on I remember leaning down beside the bath and switching the radio off.
Just sitting here with mammo’s boxes. Once this is all over I’ll go and see my wee niece. She can’t make it home just now and I’d like to see her. Maybe she would like some of the things from this house, I didn’t think of that. This morning I took mammo out and we stopped for a mug of tea. As we walked up the seafront she pulled her coat in at her throat the way she always does and she told me how men used to come up the front years ago with rolled-up towels under their arms for the swimming.
I thought she hadn’t really understood what happened to Rosa, but this morning we bumped into Mrs Bone outside the Pavilion, and normally my mother and Mrs Bone would just pass each other, but this morning mammo stopped stone dead. Mrs Bone looked nervous at first, then a sad look came over her face. They hadn’t spoken to each other for years. ‘Here, Lucia,’ said Mrs Bone, and she put her arms around mammo and mammo lifted her hands onto Mrs Bone’s shoulders. When the two of them stood back they were crying. They cried quietly and the seagulls picked at the stones in the road.
‘Cold,’ said mammo.
‘Aye, it is that,’ said Mrs Bone. ‘This weather would put years on you.’
Half the pots in mammo’s kitchen have money in them. We’re going to put it to good use, get a wee car: by the spring me and Bill will be able to take her for days out to Loch Lomond and round to Dunoon, just the three of us. If you’re lucky and the roads are clear you can get a straight run all the way to Fort William.
11
This Is Your Life
Maria left the Hogmanay Show and collapsed in the hotel. Everyone knew she wasn’t fit enough.
‘I want to sing,’ she had said to Michael.
‘Give it to the summer,’ he said.
‘No, I’m ringing Marion. I know she could get me a booking if she wanted to.’
They argued. Maria said she was ready for a comeback but Michael said she was kidding herself. ‘You just want me to lie in this bed like a fucking baby for ever,’ she said.
‘No, Maria,’ he said, ‘I want you to weigh more than six stone. I want you to build up your strength. If you take a booking you know you’ll just starve yourself for it.’
‘You want me to fail,’ she said.
‘It’s not a failure. I want you to stop fighting yourself.’
‘This is my life,’ she screamed.
He drew his hand through his hair. ‘Is it?’ he asked. ‘Is this your life, Maria?
‘I just want to sing, that’s all,’ she said.
‘Your life,’ he said.
Marion said the booking was in Glasgow and she’d make sure it wouldn’t be tough: just one song at the Bells.
Michael couldn’t deny how replenished she seemed at the thought of facing an audience. The first two months after coming out of hospital were great: she allowed him to cook things for her, and she ate them, some of them, and her face filled out and she said she was ready to strike out into the world. She told everybody she was in love, but after those first months she began to lose weight again. She wouldn’t eat with him, she was taking laxatives, the doctor said she could die.
Michael was upset at his desk one day. ‘No use crying over girls,’ said Betty, blowing on her tea. Over in the other office Martin’s talking computer was spelling out a document; the android female voice had Paul the dog spinning in his basket.
‘Fuck off,’ Michael said.
He went into his boss’s office and sat there for a while. He spoke to Philip about the possibility of a posting with St Clare’s in Rome; they discussed apartments and logistics. When he came out he went up to Betty’s desk. With her tiny aggrieved nose twitching over her typewriter, her glasses low, she was winding two sheets of A4 and a sheet of carbon paper under the roller. ‘I’m sorry to swear at you, Betty,’ he said. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I heard much worse in the war.’
Michael tried to back Maria up as best he could. When the day came for the trip to Glasgow she agreed to drink some Bovril; she ate some grapes and a mint at the airport. A car picked them up in Glasgow and took her to a hair appointment. She fell asleep in the chair, and Michael told the stylist to leave her there for a while, and when she woke she loved her hair and they went to the rehearsals at Queen Margaret Drive.
She collapsed in the room after the show. The ambulance took her to the Southern General Hospital. Michael spoke to the consultant on his own. ‘I’m so weak to have allowed this.’
‘We’re all weak when it comes to this,’ the man said.
Maria knew the ward when she woke up and she immediately noticed the feed bag; Michael was sleeping in a chair by the bed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Do you hate me?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.
‘Was last night good?’
‘Everybody said you were fantastic.’
‘I don’t need it any more,’ she said.
‘We’ll see.’
‘I’m not giving any concerts,’ she said after a long pause.
‘You don’t give concert
s, Maria,’ he said, ‘you give yourself.’
*
Michael banned newspapers from her room. He had spoken to Alfredo and they had both decided not to tell her yet. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said to Alfredo.
‘Say a prayer.’
When the day came, he sat smoking cigarettes in the corridor next to the lifts, the sound of the electric ropes screeching and toiling above and below him. She was looking better and was sat up in bed reading old magazines and eating toast. He didn’t want her to know: out there, in the corridor, with the lift-noises and people going past in their slippers, he wished to God for once they could be free of other people’s stories.
She was pretty in bed. Hair in a bun. She put down the magazine when he came in. Woman. He saw the headline lying on the bed. ‘I Had My Throat Stapled and Lost Eighteen Stone’. She looked from the magazine to his face. ‘It’s all rubbish in those things,’ she said. He closed the door.
‘You look so beautiful,’ he said. She put out her hand to him. ‘No matter what,’ he said, ‘we’ll get through this.’ Her mouth grew thin and her fingers stiffened.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I’d do anything not to tell you this,’ he said. ‘It’s terrible news. Your mother died.’
Maria drew a breath and it seemed then as if she would never stop breathing in, as if she were drawing water into her lungs instead of air. She gasped, and all breath seemed inadequate, thick and unmanageable, then she sobbed, and her tears ran onto the bedclothes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, holding on to her, and for almost an hour she knocked her head gently against his shoulder and cried.
At last she looked up at him. ‘Did someone kill her?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said, stunned by the question. ‘She took her own life.’
‘Is that true? Is that what my mum did, she killed herself?
‘Yes. I love you, Maria. I’m so sorry.’
When she fell asleep that night, he went to the telephone and rang his parents. As he dialled the number he pictured them sitting by the fire on the farm at Scalpsie Bay. ‘Hello stranger,’ said his father, his adoptive father. ‘We were just talking about you. A big frigate is moored over towards Arran.’
‘Dad,’ said Michael, ‘did you know about Maria’s mother?’
‘We read it in the Herald,’ he said. ‘There’s been no answer on your phone.’
‘I’m in Glasgow with Maria. She’s back in hospital.’
‘It’s a sorry business, son. Remember we’re here. Your mother wants to speak to you.’
‘Poor Maria,’ his mother said. ‘Poor the lot of you.’
‘Come and see us for your holidays some time,’ Michael said.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘we’ll do that.’
‘Somewhere sunny, maybe.’
‘Wherever you say. Just let us know.’
‘Somewhere sunny.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Apart from you, Michael,’ Maria said next morning, ‘everything is like a black hole and I’m going further and further in.’
She left Scotland for the residential clinic in Kennington. She complained that her static was worse: the street is grey, she said, there’s a wall of static between me and the world. One week there was a break-in at her house in Shepherds Bush and a great horde of showbusiness memorabilia was stolen. ‘Nothing means anything,’ she said to the counsellor. ‘I feel dead inside.’
Michael had to go to work but his mind was elsewhere. The Queen came to Rottingdean to open a new swimming-pool. ‘I might not have good eyes,’ a St Clareite said, ‘but I can tell that you’re not yourself, Michael.’
‘Just stuff, Simon. There’s your queen coming now. Do you want me to describe what she’s wearing?’
‘Bugger off,’ he said. ‘Just describe the way to the nearest pub.’
Those months, Michael came back to the clinic in the evening and Maria was folded up in herself, dark-minded, starving in a big jersey. He climbed up on the bed. ‘Wish I could live inside you,’ she said one night, ‘just here.’ She placed a fist on his stomach and Michael looked at the soft downy hair along her jawline and above her Hp. She was five stone. After she was washed and tucked in the bed he looked at her as she slept for hour after hour, her bony arms outside the blankets in two straight lines, her delicate neck, the jaw so tight that her mouth seemed wider and her eyes retreated back from her face. She opened them and stared unblinking into the lamp overhead. Her eyes had never appeared so green, her blonde hair spread out on the pillow. Lying there she was finally like a doll. She was motionless. Then like some unblinking personage in a fairy story, she would move her large eyes and say something. ‘Michael. Are you there? Is there a glass of water?’
‘It’s a story of ups and downs,’ said the doctor. ‘Losses and gains. But it can’t go on for ever.’
Michael took her home for a week. She told him one day he couldn’t watch over her all the time. ‘Go to work,’ she said, ‘and I’ll lie down on the sofa and later maybe I’ll cook you something.’
‘Don’t cook,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry. Go to work.’
She was drawn in by the afternoon TV shows. They made her rock with wakefulness and think of recipes, and there was some long segment about women who cheat and hours of this seemed to pass in minutes. She spoke to the television, imagined she was being interviewed about her years in the business, and then the programme was finished and it was horse racing but still she stared at the arm of the sofa and spoke to the interviewer about being famous.
She pulled on jogging pants and a coat of Michael’s and Wellington boots and the clothes drowned her. Her face seemed pinched and strained as the wind blew in her face and she took small steps down the road feeling everything was fuzzy. She walked to the mini-supermarket on the green. Hanging from the ceiling in the aisle where you found the cans of beans and soup was a picture of a woman’s smiling face, a woman with her clean teeth bared in front of a spoon with steam rising from the spoon and her nostrils open and her eyes closed but happy.
The rows of coloured tins and packets seemed alive. Under the fluorescent strip-lights the rows moved as germs do under a microscope and spread and fell over each other. Maria walked under the lights and heard tunes with no words and saw a great spillage of milk and thought it was blood on the floor of the mini-market. She wandered through several aisles and near the end she turned and lifted a box of Quivers jelly and put it in the pocket of the coat and walked straight out the door.
‘Empty your pockets, madam.’
She was arrested for stealing an item worth forty-nine pence.
She would wake in the night. Michael was there. ‘Your skin,’ she said, ‘your skin is only yours and nobody else’s.’
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘try and sleep until the morning.’
But she couldn’t always sleep. Some nights she went around the house emptying bins and ashtrays. She smoked instead of eating. In the hours she couldn’t sleep she would do her private rants then sit very quietly in front of the living-room window, the shadow of net curtains falling over her and the wall beside her. She would smoke one cigarette after another, staring out, listening to her thoughts, her face lit up by the beams from a car often parked across the way, lamps on, lamps off.
I’m all right. Don’t panic.
The static settled down and she felt all right smoking cigarettes there and feeling watched.
Trained for this. Settle down now. Shhhhh.
One night by the window she imagined a scene. She’d thought about it before, the scene, but it had never been so complete, and as it began to occupy her head the light flashing into the room became steady, and the room brightened. Waves of applause fall from all the tiers of the Palladium; she feels high and clear-headed from singing. She stands still in front of the microphone and is almost see-through with the emotion of the songs and the endless applause coming down. Feeling the scratch of the sequins, she hitches u
p her dress and curtsies, then flowers and toys fall around her. She walks from the stage and takes a glass of water in the wings and walks back onstage to take another bow. A man approaches from behind with a red book.
A roar comes from the crowd. He touches her shoulder and when she turns his eyes are smiling. She covers her mouth and he waits for the applause to die down and says, ‘Maria Tambini. Singer and great star of British light entertainment. I’m Eamon Andrews and I’m here to say, This is your life.’ The theatre is filled to the high ceiling with noise and there’s a rumble of feet. She cries with happiness and is led offstage. It cuts to a studio where swirling music plays around her and she is led by Eamon Andrews onto a sound stage where people are waiting for her and a studio audience is clapping.
There’s an empty chair on its own and she is led to sit down. She reaches out beside her and her mother is sitting smiling and wiping tears away. ‘I’m so proud.’ Her mother mouths the words. Giovanni is sitting next to Rosa with his black hair slicked back and his smile glowing. Alfredo is laughing beside them, smiling in a new suit; further along is Lucia, like her photograph when she was young, with Mario, her husband and Maria’s grandfather, who folds away his pocket-watch and blows a kiss. Mrs Bone waves a hand and sniffles into a tissue. Dr Jagannadham and his wife are smiling in the back row surrounded by teachers and the priest from Rothesay and entertainers from the Winter Gardens. Maria sits in her chair and looks round as if she can’t believe it.
Her hair is beautifully waved and sleek, her eyelids are frosted blue, skin clear, lips glossy. She is wearing jewels and as Eamon Andrews opens the red book she looks up at him and the studio lights pick out her dress and her eyes and jewels dazzle together. ‘You are joined tonight,’ says Mr Andrews, ‘by a great crowd of family and friends, but there’s one or two people missing …’
A voice came over the air. ‘We were queens for a day once upon a time, Maria, and I’m still your number one fan.’
‘You haven’t seen each other since you were young girls together. Now working as an executive officer with a Glasgow health trust, she has flown down to be with you tonight. Your best friend, Kalpana Jagannadham!’
Personality Page 33