What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

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      It was Sal’s first holy communion today, so I made a rare guest appearance at church. Sal has been looking forward to the white dress and mantilla as much as she has been dreading her first confession. She did the confession last week. God knows what she confessed.

      The priest adopted his most ingratiating children’s hour tone of voice, speaking of mummies and daddies and how they must give a big hug to kind Mrs O’Leary, their catechism teacher, who had brought them to God’s great red-checked tablecloth. I’m so tired of these worldly priests. Here is my message to all novitiates: I don’t want to hear your petty prejudices. I don’t want to know about the cake sale or whether Team A or Team B is cleaning the windows this week. I want you to stand there and let God course through you to me. Go get me God. Otherwise, become a floor manager at the hypermarket, or find yourself a car park to guard.

      I leafed through the missal, thinking how all my childhood I heard these beautiful words spoken; their cadences and images – of that which is bound and that which is loosed, of those who look without seeing, of captors who ask for songs, of the vine and its branches, of the last become first, of He who will come after me and baptise with the holy spirit and with fire. And with fire. How my namesake must have relished the power in that. Surely these phrases entered me and stayed, like a template?

      I don’t know why Beth is bringing Sal up as a Catholic when she was so vociferously against the Church as a teenager. Is it true that we all eventually revert to form? I don’t think so. Beth sent Sal to Holy Cross because it is close by and because it is still small and run on principles of kindness, as it was in Beth’s day. Then I suppose it was simply a natural development that Sal, watching the teachers crossing their breasts with holy water, would ask to be part of that secret society of ritual and beauty, the cabbala that had already taught her to recite those deeply patterned prayers that never go away, even if one majors in sociology: Our Father; Hail Mary; The angel of the Lord declared; Hail Holy Queen; I confess to Almighty God; Holy, holy, holy; Through Him, with Him, in Him; Peace be with you; Go in peace.

      Beth is not quite right these days. She’s always been excessively active and efficient (she wears dungarees a lot), but lately there’s been something manic about her domestic and professional pre-occupations. I’ll catch her coming upstairs with a pile of laundry, at the same time talking on her cellphone to a client, while nodding or shaking her head at Sal’s questions about whether cows are born with teeth and has she ever seen a ghost. Beth stands in front of the linen cupboard as if she’s not sure if she should be putting the sheets or herself inside it.

      She’s become obsessive about the dilapidation of the house. It’s true that some of the front windows, the big ones that look over the bay, we no longer dare to open. Sea salt, constant moisture and years without maintenance have rusted the hinges and rotted the wood so that the slightest tug would leave us toothless, in need of boarding up. And it’s not just the windows. “Stand here, John,” Beth said today. “Do you feel this floorboard giving in? If only I could get a really big contract, I could get a man in to repair some of these things before we’re actually condemned.”

      I said I was sorry that poets weren’t really tongue-in-groove men, or only metaphorically. She looked at me distractedly and asked how much the Feinstein Trust would be paying me. I said I’d chip in what I could, but who could we get to do it, and at what price? I mean, the damp is actually infiltrating in the first place not just because of the gutters, but because the rain funnels itself right through the brick, in transverse cracks that are quite visible from the outside. Against one particularly bad interior wall we’ve had to hang a decorative cloth to disguise the impressive crop of fungus we seem to be growing. It’s not so much a question of getting a man in as contracting a firm of engineers.

      Maybe we could just cover the wonky floor with a layer of chipboard, I said. It’s hard for me to face real problems head on. Beth gave me a pained look.

      The house depresses Beth, or perhaps adds to an existing depression. I see her getting tearful at the ironing basket, but her tears are not for the floorboards or the window hinges. It isn’t her work even, though it may be the pressure of being a single parent on top of running a drafting and design business. Beth complains that her life is just drudgery, all work and motherhood. I said she really should take more evenings off; I’m here, I can take care of Sal. Beth said who would she go out with? Hadn’t I heard there were no single straight men in Cape Town? As she’s my sister, I didn’t take offence. Then she felt bad about her sarcasm and thanked me, saying she was so tired in the evening all she could think about was sleep anyway. I reminded her of her teenage popularity.

      “All the boys I kissed in those days,” said Beth, “all those skateboarders and red-eyed pot smokers, they’re all deputy provincial cabinet ministers and pop stars these days.”

      I knew which two she meant.

      While we were talking about the house falling down and Beth’s oscular gift, Sal came in with her language book. Beth said, “Let your uncle help, he’s the linguist.” What she means is that grammar interests me. Sal showed me the list of collective nouns and stock comparisons she has to learn for a test. A fleet of ships, a litter of puppies, a swarm of bees. As green as grass, sick as a dog, weak as a kitten.

      There are two reasons I can’t help you with this, I said. One, I refuse to endorse your school’s interest in perpetuating clichés. Two, I notice that these pages are all photocopied from textbooks, which is a breach of copyright. Publishing houses go under because of this kind of thing.

      Beth grabbed the book away from me. “Why do you have to be so damn clever all the time? Why can’t you do a simple thing and just help her with her homework? All you do is write poetry or think about writing poetry and look after number one!” She swept Sal away from me.

      I felt bad. We’ve never been a fighting family. After twenty minutes I went into Beth’s bedroom where the two of them were revising flocks of geese but probably not coveys of grouse, exultations of larks or watches of nightingales.

      I thought I’d bake some potatoes in the oven for your supper, I said, and fry some onions before I go out. Is that all right?

      “That’ll be lovely,” said Beth, “we’ll be down just now to make a salad.”

      They’re down there eating now. I can hear happy mother and daughter laughter.

      The thing about Beth is that Ron was such a pointless husband. I think she married him in a gesture of defiance against our upbringing, which was academic bordering on the bohemian. Ron is a tall yet strangely babyish notary and conveyancer who orders lime milkshakes when everyone else is drinking Scotch and who thinks the height of wit is to call milk “cow juice”, eggs “bum nuts” and orange juice “OJ”. I never saw him when he wasn’t claiming to be tired or hungry or both. Ma and I used to joke that we were keeping a bottle of champagne behind sealed glass, with a sign saying Break open in case Beth divorces Ron.

      Ron likes to watch. He watches sport and sitcoms and action movies and other people’s lifestyles. His big topic of conversation is a friend of his who is very rich and always buying new things. He slurps on his milkshake and his eyes go wide as he describes his friend’s flat-screen TV or imported digital camera. Ron would like to be rich and always buying new things, but at the end of the day (as he would say) he prefers to put his feet up on his couch and flick through the channels. He expects to win the lottery; that is another real thing in Ron’s life.

      When Beth came back here to Quarterdeck Road after three years of marriage, I feared that Ron would pitch up on our doorstep sobbing. But apparently he met her departure with relief. He remarried almost instantly, a very thin woman – Lilian – who always asks me solicitously whether I’m tired, by which I understand СКАЧАТЬ