Agnes Owens (43 page)

I had agreed and said the family should roast in hell for their miserable attitude toward an old woman. And here we were again, visiting Mary who did not know she would get put away in September.

‘Mind you,' I told her, ‘there's a lot of fine old folks' homes where you could be happy as Larry watching the television and eating good quality meals three times a day and having a game of bingo if you like it. Do you not fancy that?'

She said, ‘I told you already I won't be going. So shut your gob and have one of those Campbell's shortbreads.'

Gamely we took one each and I shoved mine into a pocket so hard it burst the lining.

‘And anyway,' said Mary, ‘they say the doctor in some types of home gets up early and rapes the old while they're doped up with their happy pills.'

Maisie and I howled with laughter at the idea.

‘If that's so,' I said, ‘I'll sign myself into one of those homes tomorrow.'

Next moment Mary was sound asleep and snoring.

‘Should we leave while she's so peaceful?' said Maisie.

I said, ‘Wait until the rain goes off.'

The room was so stuffy that I was about to doze off myself when Maisie said, ‘The worst of a home is they don't let you keep the bits and pieces that prove you were once a real person.'

‘They don't have room for them,' I said, ‘and they don't care what you were like before.'

‘I believe I was quite attractive at one time,' said Maisie.

I said, ‘I never thought I was attractive at all, but I must have been because I managed to get married.'

‘We hardly remember anything,' said Maisie, ‘but I remember fancying the coalman, though his face and hands were so black we daren't even kiss.'

‘If he was that black,' I said, ‘how could you fancy him? You couldn't see what he looked like.'

‘He showed me a photograph,' she said. We were silent for a while, listening to Mary's snores, then Maisie asked if I had ever fancied anyone apart from my old man.

‘I never fancied my old man much. He didn't have a lot in the way of looks and had a temper like a tiger, but according to him I fancied everyone in trousers, though I don't remember why he said that.'

‘Yes,' said Maisie, ‘everything's a blur nowadays. Do you want another of these shortbreads?'

‘Take one if you like,' I said, ‘I suppose one will do you no harm if you see nothing like shit on it.'

‘Do you have to say that?' said Maisie.

We noticed Mary had gone silent and stared at her as if thinking the same thing. I said, ‘She's not breathing.'

Maisie put her ear close to the old woman's chest, which was more than I could have done, then said, ‘She's alright.'

I said, ‘Thank God. I wouldn't like to be the last one to see her alive.'

‘Nor me,' said Maisie, ‘though it would save her from going into a home.'

‘True,' I said, ‘though I'd rather she didn't die in this hole. It's dark.'

We felt for the electric switch, put it on and found the room looked better in the dark. I disliked the litter on the table next to the bed recess, where a half-empty bottle of juice lay beside a bed pan. I said, ‘Let's go, now she's out for the count.'

But we looked sadly at Mary for a while. I said, ‘Maybe this is the last time we'll see her.'

‘Don't worry about that. She's the type that will live to be two hundred. But before we leave there's a question I'd like to ask you.'

‘As long as it's not for the lend of a fiver,' I said, laughing.

‘Is it true that years ago you had an affair with my old man?'

I was so shocked I could hardly speak, but managed to say, ‘Who told you that?'

‘Someone said that when my Alec was doing his night watchman along in Healy Street, half the time he was in your house shagging you rotten while your old man was asleep in his bed.'

For a minute I thought I was going to pass out I was so flabbergasted, but I pulled myself together and said, ‘Whoever told you that is a terrible liar! That's all I can say, and why did you not ask me that question sooner instead of keeping it to yourself all these years?'

‘I was always meaning to but I could never find the right words.'

‘So you had to wait until Mary was at death's door?'

‘It was old Mary that told me.'

‘Why the dirty old bitch,' I said, angry spittles flying from my mouth. ‘Let me tell you this, I wouldn't have your old man touch me with a bargepole. You'd better believe me than her lying there. Don't forget she was always a gossip and I hope she roasts in hell for all the damage she's done in her miserable life.'

In silence we crept down the outside stairs of the building. I looked back at Mary's dark window. To think of her lying there, not even dead! I'll tell you this much, I won't be visiting her again, the old gossipmonger, and may God have mercy on her soul.

M
y mother's family were a funny lot, always playing tricks and frightening each other half to death. That's what my mother told me when we were looking through old photos, some so faded I could hardly make them out.

‘That's your Uncle Sanny,' she said, pointing to a snapshot of a young man wearing what looked like baggy dungarees. ‘He was the worst of the lot. He pinned a poster of a big stork on the wall just before my sister Agnes came home. In those days you found posters of storks all over the place advertising Stork margarine.'

‘What had that to do with your sister Agnes?' I asked.

‘Well, you know a stork has long thin legs?'

‘Yes.'

‘So had Agnes. She wasn't bad-looking but her legs were long and thin.'

‘I still don't get it,' I said.

‘Sanny had said her legs were like a stork's so at the sight of that poster on the wall she chased him round the room hitting him with her handbag until he headed out the door laughing. And then there was my sister Jeanie. She liked to think she was a lady and would ask a female to tea in our shabby old parlour, and before you could say Jack Robinson Sanny would invite the guest to sit on a chair shoved against the wall for show because it had only three legs. You can imagine the outcry when it and the guest crashed to the floor. And there was my brother John who came to school barefoot, just to give me a showing up when he was sent into my class to get the belt. Mind you, I can laugh now when I look back and think of him. He never got to be a
grown man. He was killed at the Somme on his first day in France.'

How rotten, I thought, that I never knew my uncles. They sounded fun, so unlike my mother who I thought a bit of a snob. She said, ‘The most awful joke Sanny played was when my Granny died. Her coffin was put in the parlour, which was really our dumping ground for bits of furniture we couldn't bear to throw away. It lay on a big table covered by a red velvet cloth. The lid was slid down so we could see Granny's head rested on a white ruffled pillow that reminded me of the paper you get wrapped round a layer cake. When the coffin was closed a single red rose was tastefully displayed on the lid. I remember thinking that if Granny could see all this she would have been pleased. It only needed the bagpipes to play her off. But as we couldn't even pay for the funeral bagpipes were out of the question.'

‘Then who paid for the funeral?' I asked.

‘My Uncle Chairles was going to pay, but it was like getting blood out of a stone. I haven't told you the awful thing Sanny did.'

‘What was it?' I asked, trying to sound interested.

‘A neighbour came into the parlour to pay her respects to Granny and heard low groans from the coffin that would have made your hair stand on end. Then she seemed to hear Granny's voice screeching, ‘Get that dirty brute oot ma sicht.' This was Sanny hiding under the table cover. Then a black cat dashed out miawling like mad and the neighbour fainted, though mind you I think she was putting it on a bit. Did you know your great-granny was in the Crimea War?'

‘No,' I said, startled. ‘Did she fight like a soldier?'

‘She was a nurse, a sort of nurse. She tended to the wounded and the dying. Do you know she had to wipe their wounds with the bottom of her petticoat because there was nothing else to wipe them with?'

‘Did she really?' I said, thinking it typical of this family to wipe soldiers' wounds with a dirty petticoat instead of wiping their
fevered brows with a cold cloth like you see in the films. But perhaps there were no films in those days. I was about to ask when Mother said her granny had married a soldier called Gregor Grant who died of pneumonia, and after that married another soldier called Stewart who went back to being a ploughman when the war was over.

‘She seemed to have a liking for soldiers.' I said. ‘It's a wonder we're not related to Bonnie Prince Charlie.'

‘I wouldn't be surprised if we were. Which reminds me I told you my Uncle Chairles said he would pay for his mother's funeral, but apparently never did.'

‘Oh yes?' I said, wanting to go and play with my new skipping ropes in the cold spring sunshine.

‘Well, he may have paid in the long run but for days the family were always looking out for a letter with money inside but none came. Then matters took a turn for the better. My mother and a friend attended a spiritualist meeting, which had become very popular in those days. Most families had lost someone in the Great War so everybody wanted to get a message from their dead son or brother. Mother had handed over a handkerchief belonging to Granny, one she had been clutching when she made her last gasp. Mother came home and said she got a message from the spiritualist in a voice that sounded just like Granny's, saying, ‘Don't worry, Chairles will pay.'

‘Did she say when?' asked my father who'd been about to pay for the funeral by taking a job as a coalman. Later he said he knew all along Chairles would pay, for he'd seen it happen in a dream. Whether this was true or not we never heard another word from Chairles, but the family's faith in spiritualism remained steadfast, because Granny had heard the piper's lament for the Stewart clan before she died, and not a single note of it was heard by anyone else . . . ‘Or was it the lament for the Grants that she heard?' said my mother doubtfully. ‘My memory's getting terrible nowadays.'

‘So we don't know whether we're descended from the Stewarts or the Grants?' I asked.

She said, ‘Does it matter? These clan folks are all the same when you come down to it, very superstitious, and that's a fact.'

‘So who paid for the funeral?' I asked.

‘I'm not sure. Maybe Chairles did eventually. He was supposed to.'

‘D
on't call me, I'll call you,' was the usual response I got on Alice's answering machine. She never phoned me until one early evening I heard her say, ‘You'll have to help. I'm in deep shit.'

I am not spiteful but those words sounded like music in my ear. I asked what was wrong.

‘I can't explain on the phone,' she said. ‘You'll have to come round.'

Alice and I had once been married for five years. She was a born flirt, I was a heavy gambler, so it was not a perfect relationship. To prove I wasn't a complete bastard I overlooked a lot of her bad points. She overlooked none of mine until we couldn't stand each other.

‘Two thousand pounds you owe me!' she flung in my face one day. ‘Clear out!'

I did, and things turned out well for me. I got a Post Office job. She, on the other hand, took up with a gangster called Tony the Teeth, and her answer machine told me not to interfere with that relationship.

She answered the door of our old flat, looking furtively past me up and down the corridor. I asked her what was wrong.

‘It's Tony the Teeth,' she said. ‘He's here first thing in the morning, last thing at night and three times a day when I'm out, according to the neighbours.'

‘I'm surprised,' I said. ‘I heard Tony's not such a bad guy. Can't you tell him to beat it?'

‘It's not as simple as that. I owe him a thousand pounds and he wants it back right away and he won't take no for an answer.'

I started to open my mouth but she went on, ‘He says I can pay him back in kind, if you know what I mean, but he wouldn't be content with just the once. He would want me to do it all the time. Actually he wants to move in with me.'

I gave a low whistle then said, ‘You are in very deep shit.'

Maybe it served her right for treating me as she had, but Tony the Teeth is the most unpleasant guy I've ever seen. His long yellow teeth stick out like rocks. His skin is so full of blackheads that you'd think his face had been dipped in coal dust. His smile is like a promise of certain death.

‘So you want me to give Tony the works?' I said in an incredulous tone. ‘I don't think I could manage that.'

‘I know,' she said, smudging her mascara as she wiped eyes that were as dry as a bone. ‘But maybe you could lend me a thousand pounds considering you already owe me two thousand.'

‘But that was long ago,' I pointed out. ‘And since we're divorced I now owe you nothing.'

‘Tony doesn't look at it that way. He says you're responsible for my debt, and nobody can argue with him.'

Almost speechless with anger I asked how Tony knew about me in the first place.

‘I've no idea. Maybe I mentioned it casually in the course of our relationship.'

‘You had a
relationship
with him?'

‘We were just good friends.'

‘So,' I said, ‘because you owe one thousand to someone else you expect me to hand over two thousand to you. Well, life isn't like that, so go fuck yourself.'

‘I wish you wouldn't swear. You know how I hate it.'

‘Yes, you were always a snob, but my answer is still the same. I don't have a thousand to spare, and don't get paid till Thursday, so haven't a penny on me.'