Departures (11 page)

Too young for the pubs or for sex, too poor for the leisure centres, the bookmaker's, or the off-license, we had nowhere else to go, and would have come to the House had it offered its four bare walls and nothing more. At the very top there was a Reading Room, but as there was nothing more to read in it than what we ourselves had written on the walls, we used it for tumbling and wrestling matches whenever we were allowed inside. Downstairs there was the Games Room, with an aging snooker table and a dart board, pockmarked and cratered with abuse, but this room was often closed to us deliberately, as punishment for articles stolen the previous day. On the rationale that the House was ours and that its contents therefore belonged to whomever among us was able to take them, we stole everything we could fit in our pockets without being seen. The TV and Disco Rooms on the ground floor had fallen victim to theft so often that virtually nothing remained in them to distinguish them for what they
were. Just the television itself was left, too large and bulky to be carried away but inoperable nevertheless, for some industrious individual among us had at some point stolen the plug.

Only the Craft Room never failed us. Although it was small and poorly lit, it was a peaceful place, strangely sheltered from the arguments and uncontrolled activity on the floors below. Though its shelves and cupboards were sparsely stocked, the little they contained—stiff reams of gold paper, tubes of glitter, rolls of discarded Christmas wrap, nearly new; all the small implements for the making of crafts—fascinated us, and we were always eager for the few hours a week Big John let us inside.

He was invariably punctual, and usually the first of the volunteers to arrive, appearing no later than five minutes to three. From on top of the broken wall at the far end of the street we would wait to see him round the corner, some ten to fifteen of us, often having queued from half past the previous hour and clinging to the stone and plaster which crumbled like cheese and came away in our hands. Though we fixed ourselves to him like leeches, he could have been anyone come to open that door and we would have been as enthusiastic. Upstairs in the Craft Room, we would scramble and fight for a seat at the long table. Big John sat not at the head but at the centre of that table, and each week while we worked produced a new object for our duplication in the weeks that followed: toy boats from lolly-sticks or baby dolls from clothespins or tiny play houses from old egg cartons and bits of cloth. He never spoke to us while he worked, though we were never silent. We chattered on around him endlessly, but our narratives provoked no greater response than a slight deepening of his soft, faintly critical smile. He was twenty-eight when he came to us; he was just past thirty when he left,
and yet throughout his stay he remained aloof, detached, deliberately distancing himself from the situation into which he had chosen to come. It was as if he had sacrificed something by coming, had martyred himself emotionally or professionally, and daily struggled to suppress the contempt he felt for us all. The story went round that he could have been something had he only stayed at home, a doctor, perhaps, or even a judge, or he might have come into a fortune and been a millionaire had not some unknown set of circumstances forced him to come away.

Though the House itself was open every Monday through Thursday, Big John opened the Craft Room only once a week, on Wednesdays from half past three until ten at night. When the new estate was completed, we'd been placed in a house just ten minutes away, yet despite the insignificant distance involved, my mother, weak-kneed from reading the
Mirror
and the
Sun,
insisted that we be escorted both to and from the House once evening settled in. Someone would call to collect us, she promised, and we were not to leave the premises until that someone did.

At first my father had said he'd do it, he had nothing better to do since he'd been made redundant eighteen months before. And he did do it, regularly and without enthusiasm, just as he'd done his work in the shipyard before they'd let him go. But soon the layoffs came like contagion across the whole estate, and then he no longer had to suffer the humiliation of watching the telly alone in the house for hours on end with no better company than that of his wife and the women of the Road. Instead he joined the ranks swollen by the men of his own age and station with whom he had grown up, and ten days after Mandy turned six he took up his pint and his place among them outside the door to the Crown.

My mother had planned a party for Mandy's birthday. It was to be a small affair, but it would have been the first party she had given, for a child or for anyone else, and she'd spent weeks planning it. I'd discovered her clipping coupons and digging out the tinsel and other Christmas trimmings two months after they'd been put away, but as usual I took no notice. She was forever rearranging furniture and redecorating rooms, always subjecting us to unusual recipes and exotic foods, forever dying and cutting and restyling her hair. These eccentric overhauls occurred so often that Mandy and I had come to follow our father's example and pay her no heed, whatever she did to her person or our home.

In the end, as she must have known he would, my father said we had no money for such things, and sure, a child of six didn't need a party. My mother had been like a train derailed, and in anger had answered too sharply. He spoke sharply in return and raised his fist, and though he did not strike her she cried for hours all the same. Having expected no celebration neither Mandy nor I was disappointed when none was forthcoming, and so my mother was left alone with her loss, waiting for the summer and a fortnight's holiday with relations in Strabane. Using the rift as an excuse for his absence, my father would leave for the pub as soon as it opened, and because he would not appear again until after it had closed, my mother began collecting us for our tea.

The first night my mother came for us she stood at the bottom of the stairs and called, telling us to hurry before the meal turned cold. Ten minutes passed and still we ignored her. She'd grown impatient waiting downstairs in the open doorway, self-conscious and shivering in her summer cardigan and slippers, shy in front of the volunteers. They were men and women her own age yet they
looked much younger, young people without the facial pallor brought on by an early marriage and children arriving before the ring. Go on up yourself, they told her when again she called us and still we did not appear. Go on up, they urged, have a look around.

It's been over ten years since that evening and still I regret whatever childish prank or preoccupation kept me from seeing my mother's face that first time she saw him. I imagine her arriving short of breath and irritable at the top of the stairs and seeing him sitting there, head bent over a pot of yellow paint, surrounded by children so much smaller than himself, two of them hers by another man. I would have liked to have seen if she loved him immediately, if her face flushed with the unexpectedness of it all, if her breath had gone gasping from her throat when she saw him, if her hand had reached out to steady herself from the fall of falling in love. My father and his family have always told me that what happened was an ugly thing, and all too expected from a woman who was never satisfied. They said she'd always been that kind of woman, and a drinker, long before their marriage, long before the dole and debt and his own drinking could take the blame for anything at all. But still, I should have liked to have seen.

Despite her eccentricities, my mother's was the voice of law and order in our home. It was not that our father was weak; he was merely indifferent, a natural state of existence only accentuated by unemployment. His role, as he saw it, was to sire his children and keep us all fed, if not with a wage packet then with a benefit cheque. Now and again he issued sanctions against what he perceived to be the overexpenditure of money. But he had nothing to say about the state of his house as long as it was as clean as his mother's. He cared little for the progress of his children's
education, social or intellectual, so long as their names did not appear in the local papers and were not part of the evening news. It did not matter to him that publicity could be a mark of achievement as well as a disgrace. Once, when our class had taken top honours in some scholastic endeavour and I had shown him the picture of me in the paper, bright-faced with hair unbrushed and leaning too far forward over the girl in front, he'd dismissed my success with the grim prediction that I'd soon be sorry I'd won. Why couldn't I be like the other girls from the Road, he'd asked, and thus avoid their envy? As for his wife, he cared less still, just so long as she remained his.

Consequently it fell to my mother to deal with any requests for pocket money and all permission slips from school in need of a signature. It was also she who meted out punishment, regardless of the nature of the offence. For all I would have muttered and Mandy would have cried, had she commanded us to come home even once in those first few weeks we would have gone. But she did not, and gradually some adult part of me recognised the pretext for what it was. After that first encounter, she would arrive at the House early every Wednesday, sometimes as much as two hours ahead of time, and come directly up the stairs to the Craft Room whether we were up there or not. There she would sit like a truant schoolgirl, her eyes brightly coloured above her lashes, her lips slightly parted and pinkened thickly before she'd left home.

At first she did not realise that she could spend time with him only on Wednesdays. The Thursday following the day they met I took the day off from school. From my parents' bed where I always lay when ill, I listened with eyes shut tight as my father left with Mandy shortly after eight, waking only much later to the sound of her singing
and the watery rush of the tub being filled. Through the gap where the wall did not quite meet the ceiling came the scent of bath cubes crumbled over warm water, carried on a heavy, porous mist which clung to the windows and to the surface of everything in the room. For an hour the thickness of it cushioned me more gently than the duvet and pillows on which I lay. Then came the harsh, choking rasp of waste water draining, and I heard the sound of her toweling, a hazy, static noise amidst the soft click and clatter of bottles replaced and the soap dish recovered. When she came in a few minutes later, robed and turbaned and scented like a queen, I watched her, mesmerised by the methodical reconstruction of her outdoor face and hair. When she left more than three hours after she had begun I still had no idea where she was going, but I do know I pleased her when she twirled in front of me and I answered her, Aye, you are looking well.

She was back quite quickly with Mandy in tow, her face, like the child's, streaked with angry, indignant tears. She must have entered the House with some breezy greeting (“Hullo, just here for the children”), leaving herself with no other choice, when she did not find him there, than to simply take her daughter and go. For the next few weeks she made disparaging remarks whenever possible about the state of the House and the character of the volunteers employed there. She repeatedly questioned the level of discipline and even threatened to call the Health Board and demand that the place be closed down.

I suppose now that she must have blamed him for his absence, held him responsible for the embarrassment and humiliation of her mistake. But at the time the motivation for her behaviour was a mystery to me. In fact, so convincing was her performance that Mandy and I sincerely believed that we'd soon be prohibited from attending the
House altogether. Gradually, however, she did recover and was full of praise once more for the work we brought home and for those who had helped us with it. Aloud and within my father's hearing she began to remind herself to spend more time with us in the House. Considering how much time we spent there, she'd say, she'd hardly see her children if she didn't. And my father, dismissively, would agree.

I can recall quite clearly the image of her sitting, a woman over thirty, spending hours painting pictures of simple square houses, big-headed flowers, and smiling yellow suns like a child of six or seven. At thirteen the only cure I could find for the sharp twitch of embarrassment I experienced whenever I saw her was to ignore her completely, and I taught Mandy to do the same.

But it was a lesson my sister learned better than I. I tried not to look at them; I even tried to avoid them, to concentrate my attention on activities taking place in some other part of the House, but I could not. My mother's fascination with Big John fascinated me. On those afternoons when the Craft Room was closed I'd loiter downstairs and watch him play chess with the Over-Fourteens, studying his face as he studied the board, considering the length and shape of his fingers, the varying shades of his moustache and beard, but so much did my mother's performance disgust me I could see nothing attractive about him at all. At night and on weekends when my father was home I'd catch myself staring at him the same way, unable to penetrate what it was about what made them different that could effect a difference in the way she behaved.

That no one else commented upon it or even appeared to notice how doggedly she pursued him was baffling. That children younger than myself and lacking the family connection should be oblivious did not surprise me, but I
was convinced that the volunteers were more astute. My mother would inevitably be the last to leave at the end of the day, dallying with an air of studied distraction as she collected her belongings and apologetically summoned her children, who were usually already waiting for her downstairs. On one such occasion, eager to complete some project or another, I too had remained after the hour but still found myself impatiently urging her out ahead of me. Big John was standing in the doorway, holding it open, his usual signal that the room should be cleared. As my mother crossed the threshold he reached out abruptly and flicked on the light above the stairs. The gesture drew her up short; she stepped back and I stumbled into her from behind. I looked up irritably from whatever crushed creation I had been holding just in time to catch the warmth of the smile she flashed him, and the bold way she looked directly into his eyes. Perhaps she was flattered; no one had ever lit her path or held a door open for her before. She went down the stairs then, past some other volunteer on his way up, and I saw the look the two exchanged behind her back—Big John with his eyes towards heaven, the other's suggestive, sympathetic grin. I imagined them talking about us after we'd left and laughing at my mothers affectations, and I resolved to have no part of her from then on.