Araby. Gretta Mulrooney

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СКАЧАТЬ with the windows wide open. During my teens I would hide upstairs, shamed because they singled our family out as different and because I instinctively loathed the sentimentality of the lyrics. My mother would sing along in her trilling soprano while I was reading up about the swinging London which seemed to be mysteriously inaccessible even though it was happening all around me. I would tune the radio to Sandie Shaw or The Beatles to drown her out. Her favourite singer was Bridie Gallagher who had a rich, swooping voice. I imagined Bridie as a big-busted woman with a perm, the kind you often saw in small Irish towns.

      My father came out to greet me, his braces dangling down over his legs and shaving foam on his chin. I hugged him, inhaling his combined smells of rough-cut tobacco and supermarket soap. He patted my arm, embarrassed by the contact.

      ‘The roses are nearly over,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s been on at me to prune them. I bet she mentions it again today.’

      ‘How is she? This seems to have been very sudden.’

      ‘Oh, not so bad. They’ve done the tests now, just waiting for results. I was hoping you’d talk to the doctors when we go in, you’ll understand it better.’

      I knew from the way he bent down to examine a rose bush that he didn’t want me to ask him any more about what had happened, this event that was specific to women.

      ‘I imagine she hates the hospital food,’ I said, to let him off the hook.

      He straightened up, back on safe territory. ‘Oh! Don’t talk to me! She has me worn out fetching in ham and such. And goat’s milk it has to be now; she says cow’s upsets her.’

      We went in. I made tea and prepared cheese with brown bread while he finished shaving. Everything in this small cottage was familiar, especially the trail of disorder that my mother always spread around her. All of their belongings had been transposed from Tottenham and situated, as far as was possible, in the same places and patterns. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine that I heard the throaty hum of a red bus. The only new thing they had bought for the house in ten years was a tea strainer because the ratty dog from the nearby farm had run away with the old one. Over the back of a chair lay a gaudy half-finished blanket with my mother’s crochet hook threaded and ready to go – she kept up a steady supply for the African mission she supported. I could only hope that the recipients liked bright, clashing colours. My father had seized the chance to make the kitchen ship-shape in her absence. His book, upturned on the table, was a spy story in large print.

      ‘It’s been too quiet without your mother,’ he said, coming in. ‘I’ve been missing my orders. Hard-boiled eggs have been requested for today’s menu. Can you do my top button for me?’

      Since smashing his elbow on an icy pavement in the seventies, he had been unable to flex his right arm fully. The joint was fused together with a metal pin. I could remember him walking the floor with pain during the nights before the operation, treading quietly so that he wouldn’t wake us. It had struck me that his genuine illness had to play a bit part while my mother’s trumpeted afflictions strutted centre stage. I reached up and fixed the shirt button, smoothing his collar.

      She was in a small ward for six. It was named after St Martin de Porres which would please her because she had prayed hard for his canonization, signing a parish petition to the Pope. For some unfathomable reason she was keen that there should be more black saints. I wondered if it was her own brand of political correctness, trying to ensure that Heaven had its quota of coloured representatives among the higher echelons. I had heard her express regret that Nelson Mandela wasn’t a Catholic as he presented good potential for sainthood, with just a matter of a few miracles to be discovered. Her second favourite holy man was St John Macias who had an olive-tinted skin and was known as the soft-hearted saint because he couldn’t bear to see suffering. He had once intervened with God to effect the rescue of a drowning sheep and was said to have wept blood when he came across a starving old woman. My mother had copied a line from one of his prayers into her mass book; ‘The world is hard and life can be cold and pitiless.’

      I could see her as we opened the door of the ward, sitting on her neatly-made bed, her towelling dressing-gown buttoned up and her hair brushed back. She looked like a resentful child who’s been dressed to go out and warned not to get mucky. She waved when she saw us and beckoned us on.

      ‘I told yeer father not to go bothering ye,’ she said, ‘but he never listens to a word I say.’ She leaned closer, lowering her voice. ‘Pull the curtains round. The ould one in the next bed wants to know everything, she has pointy ears from eavesdropping.’

      I arranged the curtains as she wanted them, pulled to overlap so that no one could see us. From habit, I cast an apologetic glance at the woman a few feet away, just in case she’d heard the aspersions on her character but she was absorbed in a magazine and a huge pack of wine gums.

      ‘Have ye brought grub?’ my mother asked.

      ‘I’ve got it.’ I took out the pack containing cold chicken, eggs, ham and plain yogurt.

      ‘Ham,’ she said, ‘I hope they didn’t palm any old fatty bits on to ye.’

      ‘It’s the best cut,’ my father protested, ‘off the bone. I watched it being sliced.’

      She examined it and nodded. Then she despatched my father for orange juice, giving strict instructions not to buy a brand that was full of pulpy bits.

      ‘Well,’ she said, when he’d gone, ‘what do ye make of this?’ She folded her hands across her stomach and made a steeple with her thumbs; her most confiding gesture. It would be all right to talk to me about what had happened because although I was male, I worked with bodies and had studied fat medical books. To my great mortification she had told several members of the Legion of Mary that she’d always known I’d do some kind of healing work; I had cool hands and a gentle manner. When she had hot flushes in her early fifties she would call me and ask me to put my lovely cool hands on her forehead.

      ‘Spill the beans,’ I told her. ‘What led up to you coming in?’

      She glanced around, even though the curtain was a protective shield. It was her constant worry that other people might get to know her business. It never occurred to her that maybe no one was interested.

      She’d woken up one morning to find that she’d been bleeding from ‘down there’, she told me. My father had called the doctor and she’d been admitted to hospital. Some kind of scan had been done and uncomfortable internal things.

      ‘Have you been having other bleeds?’ I asked her.

      She said no but she looked down at her fingernails. ‘I’m having to wear one of them sanitary yokes,’ she said ruefully. ‘I thought them times were over.’

      They ought to be, I thought, worried. She hadn’t worn those since the days of belts and thick looped pads that chafed the thighs. Stick-on winged discretion would be unfamiliar territory for her. I had a sense of things being out of kilter.

      I knew that unexpected internal bleeding was not a good sign but I wasn’t sure what could cause it. I looked at her carefully. She had shrunk a bit more since I’d last seen her, her shoulders sloping further but at seventy-five that was to be expected and she was still plump. Her colour was good, the eggshell brown of summer days in the garden still evident and her skin, the skin that I had inherited, was clear.

      ‘Give me your specs,’ I said, noticing her fuggy glasses, ‘I’ll clean them for you.’ They were filthy, as usual, with tiny flecks of potato on the lenses from when she’d СКАЧАТЬ