Araby. Gretta Mulrooney

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СКАЧАТЬ moustache and erect bearing he looked vaguely military. The possibility of being publicly associated with my mother made my skin clammy. She was unacceptable from every view point; grossly fat, loud-voiced, horribly gregarious, unpredictable and toothless. Pyorrhoea had caused the loss of all her teeth in her mid-forties. She had been supplied with a false set but only wore them for photographs or important occasions, maintaining that they were pure torture. When she did insert these brilliant white gnashers her mouth looked over-crowded and horsey. The rest of the time she gummed her food and spoke indistinctly, spraying spittle. I had started to put carefully planned avoidance tactics into practice. I attended a different mass and found reasons not to help her with the shopping. If anyone called at the house I ducked into my bedroom, shot the little bolt I had fixed to the inside and lurked behind a locked door until they’d gone.

      She didn’t seem to notice; in fact, during the summer holidays she sought my company, bored by herself. She had few friends and no job, my brother had emigrated and my father was at work. Most mornings, unless it was a day for a jaunt or a visit to the surgery, she would lie in bed late listening to middle-brow radio and singing along with Doris Day, ‘que sera sera’. At about half-ten she would get up and eat a substantial breakfast; two boiled eggs from one of those double-jointed egg cups, half a loaf of bread smothered with marmalade, a couple of pots of tea and to finish with, a grapefruit to deceive herself that she was following a light diet. She would wash down her happy pills with the dregs of her tea and then install herself by the window, still in her loose cotton nightie, to watch the neighbours and see if she could catch anyone spitting into the hedge.

      On that baking August morning I was planning to sidle off to the library where I could sit in the shady reference section and read Frank Yerby whose historical novels were sexually titillating. I was dismayed to hear my mother moving around at half-nine and to find that she was fully dressed in a good Marks and Spencer floral skirt matched with one of her white cotton charity shop blouses. This meant that she was off on a jaunt, probably a bargain hunt.

      ‘Ah, ye’re about,’ she said, ambushing me as I came downstairs. ‘That’s great, we’ll get a march on the day and we can be back for lunch.’

      ‘What?’ I said, mulish.

      ‘I’ve found a new dealer, a beardy fella. He does house clearances up at Archway. There’s a picture he has that I want but I’ll need a hand with it.’ The gleam of the chase was in her eye.

      ‘I’ve got plans. I’m going out,’ I told her, picking at a flake of peeling paint on the door jamb.

      ‘Where are ye going?’

      ‘The library.’

      ‘Sure ye can go there any time. No wonder ye’re short-sighted, with yeer head always stuck in a book.’

      ‘I’m not interested in going to the beardy fella, those places make me feel funny.’

      My mother had graduated from second-hand clothes shops to bric-à-brac emporiums in the mid-sixties; the kinds of places that later on, when old artefacts had become the rage, would call themselves antique centres with names like ‘Granny’s Attic’ and ‘Times Past’. In her shopping heyday they were known as ‘Fred’s’ or ‘Bert’s’ and fairly valuable pieces from early in the century went for knock-down prices. She referred to them by the appearance or characteristic of their owners; so the one in Walthamstow was ‘The Foxy Fella’, the one in Haringey ‘Ferrety Nose’ and her favourite in Seven Sisters, ‘Snakey Tongue’.

      I had been dragged around them numerous times, shifting from one leg to another in musty back rooms while she threw herself into the rough and tumble of the market-place. She would beaver around, poking at furniture, peering at pieces of silver, holding china to the light, examining for hallmarks and faults while silent men kept a watchful distance, waiting for her to engage them.

      ‘How much for the tongs?’

      ‘Five pounds to you. They’re solid silver.’

      ‘Hmm, I can’t see a mark. Are ye sure they’re not just silver-plated?’

      ‘Solid silver guaranteed.’

      ‘I’ll give ye three pounds ten and that’s robbery.’

      Because they knew she’d be back again, a cat drawn irresistibly to the cream, they sold. At other times there were no purchases, just the satisfaction of haggling and a point scored.

      ‘That’s an outrageous price!’

      ‘Can’t go any lower, Mrs, it’s not worth my while.’

      ‘Ah well, I’ll be off then.’

      ‘See you again.’

      ‘Through the window ye will!’

      While all this was going on I would gaze in a trance at stacks of chairs, bureaux, chests of drawers, jugs and candlesticks until the gloom would make me giddy and I’d slip outside and watch her gesturing through the dusty glass.

      Despite my boredom I had been thankful for the change of focus from clothes shops. She still made the odd foray to the ‘nearly new’ or charity places; Sue Ryder shops were her favourite due to a tortuous connection based on the fact that Sue Ryder was the wife of a war hero, Leonard Cheshire, who was the friend of Douglas Bader, the pilot who had attempted to escape from the Nazis despite having tin legs. I think my mother must have had a crush on Bader or perhaps just on Kenneth More who played him in the biopic because she spoke of him in reverent tones and said that she’d rather give her few pence to a charity that helped the disabled than to them ould fat cats in the High Street.

      Once the thrill of antique hunting took over I was spared the worst excesses of the second-hand clothes she used to buy by the bagful. Outings to the nearly-new shops had always been a rainy day activity, the damp drawing out the must and lingering residues of sweat from piles of discarded garments. My mother would scavenge with a practised hand, enthusing about an alligator belt, a lace collar, a paisley scarf. Yellowed, misshapen combinations would be held to the light and stretched to see if they had a breath of life. Candlewick bedspreads were examined for signs of moths or a tell-tale trace of camphor. Unlikely and awful articles were fitted against me; thick jumpers past their best, the wool lumpy from too many washes, boys’ shorts or trousers with shiny seams and baggy seats and large outdated jackets that I could grow into. The base line, the true test of worth, wasn’t whether a thing was attractive and desirable; it didn’t matter that it was too big or lacking buttons, it was real angora or lambswool or astrakhan or pure silk – ‘ye could pull that through a thimble’ – and it was bought.

      One of my worst memories which can still make me shiver was the greenish tweed coat with a fur collar that she bought me one winter. It was three-quarter length, double-breasted, too big for me and ten years out of date. I twisted and turned as she did up the walnut buttons and teased out the collar with a clothes brush. The King of England, she told me, couldn’t wish for a better bit of cloth on his back. It sat on my dejected shoulders like a mouldering blanket, the fur making me sneeze. I knew that I would be a laughing stock if I was seen with it in school so I took it off at the bus stop and shoved it in my bag. For a couple of days I left the house each morning wearing it and shrugged it off around the corner. I froze in the December winds, my teeth chattering in the playground, until I got a chance to nip into the school boiler room and stuff it in the furnace. As the flames licked it I did a little war dance, and worst crime of all, poked my tongue out at my mother as far as it would go. At home I reported sadly that the coat had been stolen from the cloakroom, causing my mother to visit the school and complain. I stood СКАЧАТЬ