Everything She Forgot (15 page)

“Are you handless?” she said, holding the plate in midair.

“I got belted,” he said finally.

His mother put the plate on the table and turned over each of his palms. “That's a bloody disgrace. How many times?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six! What on earth for?”

“Writing wrong.”

His mother pursed her lips. Today was the worst belting he had had at school, but George knew that it counted as a small injury at home.

She took his palms in hers and raised them to her lips. “Kiss it better, shall I?”

He still couldn't eat the bread or grasp an egg from the pail, but he felt better when her warm, thin lips touched his bruised palms.

Sometimes his mother was days in her room after Brendan had been at her. George wouldn't hear her or see her, yet would be told to empty the basin of bloodied water. So much of his relationship with his mother was physical, unspoken: a kiss, fingers through his hair, a bowl of bloodied water. Neither of them ever needed to say a word.

George took a seat at the table. “Tell me about when you lived with your granny.”

His mother smiled and lit another cigarette and settled back in her chair, staring at the fire. She had told him the story so many times, but only when they were alone. She would whisper to him when he was in bed at night, or when he had been younger she had sat him on her knee and rocked him.

“When I lived with my granny,” his mother began, “that was when I remember being happy. She lived in a cottage by the sea close to Penzance, in Cornwall, near Land's End, right at the
bottom of the country, far away from everything. The cottage was all on one floor, no stairs, and there was no electricity and no running water, and the old place smelled of peat and the ocean. It was so cold in the winter that your hands would swell up until the fires were lit. There was a well out the back and sometimes my granny would ask me to get a pail of water and I was a wee skinny thing but I would carry it with two hands back to her, and then she would make breakfast: porridge and hot tea and sometimes eggs or a kipper . . .”

“Tell me about the oil lamps,” said George.

“Well, there was no electricity in the house and so when it got dark, my granny would light the candles. But she had a big oil lamp that she would carry around the house and light my way to bed. I loved the smell of it and the golden light that came out of it. When I was tucked up in bed I was always warm, with a crocheted blanket on top that my granny had made herself. Some of the patches were made of the softest wool and I would stroke those patches while she sat in the light of the oil lamp and sang to me.”

“Tell me about the morning.”

“In the morning, we would get up at daybreak, just after the cockerel crowed, and we would light the fires and clean the house, and we would listen to the waves crashing on to the shore, and we would decide what to do with our day after the work was done. Sometimes we would knit or crochet, or sometimes we would look for stones on the beach, and if the weather was bad we would just sit by the fire and tell stories . . .”

George closed his eyes. He could imagine the whole cottage almost as if the memory was his own. His mother had lived there until her grandmother died, and then she had come to Glasgow to live with an aunt and find work, and it was then
that she had met his father. But it was only the Cornwall piece of the story that George liked to hear. In his mind, the cottage was heaven: peaceful, distant, safe.

He was smiling at the bread on his plate when his brothers and sister burst into the room, tearing into the bread and butter and trading insults like marbles. His mother put her ashtray away and started to prepare dinner. She never tended to the others as she tended to George. She didn't ask them about their day, or cut them a slice of bread, or tell them to help themselves from the pail of pickled eggs in the bedroom.

“Patricia, will you do my maths homework for me?” said George, pushing the bread to the side of his plate and lowering his mouth to take a bite.

“What'll you give me?”

“A big smile,” said George, giving her one anyway. He had more than maths homework to do, but the teachers would think he had done his own maths. He couldn't ask anyone to do his other homework, as his ugly, backward letters were too distinctive. There was talk of him being held back a year or put in a class just for idiots.

“If you do everything I say from now till bedtime, I might help you out,” said Patricia, leaning back in the chair and looking down at him as she ate her bread. Patricia looked like her mother, but she was similar to their father in that she enjoyed power and control. George looked like his father, so everyone said; he couldn't see it himself, but his character was unlike him in every respect.

“Awright,” agreed George.

“Kneel down on the floor to eat your bread.”

George leaned forward onto the plate to take a bite, then got down on the floor as his sister requested.

“Eat your bread down there. Take it in your hands and eat down there.”

“I can't,” said George, laughing, showing her his palms.

“Wow. How many did you get?”

“Twenty-six.”

“That's unheard of,” said Patricia, raising her voice to her mother, who was stirring mince. “Wouldn't you say, for the primary, like?”

Their mother sighed and nodded.

“Well, just stay down there. I can feed you.” Patricia swiped his piece of bread and then forced a piece into his mouth, so that George had to twist away.

“You're my little puppy dog.”

George crossed his legs and accepted it. He liked his sister best and he needed his maths homework done.

T
HE
M
C
L
AUGHLINS OWNED
two flats side by side on the second floor of a tenement on the Shettleston Road. They had two bathrooms and two kitchens and four bedrooms, but one of the kitchens was unused. Each of the children was carefully conditioned to know the sound of their father's footfall on the stairs. Brendan did not follow regular patterns, so there was no particular time to expect him. Often he came home for dinner, but sometimes he did not. When his father was not yet home, George felt that his whole body, every inch of his skin, was listening for the sound of his hard heels against the stone steps.

While George and his sister were fooling around, everyone heard Brendan's footsteps.

“Get up off the floor and sit down at the table,” said his mother, but George was already getting up, using his stomach
muscles as it was too painful to press his palms against the floor.

His brothers, who had been fighting underneath the pulley—mock-stabbing each other below the drying sheets—stopped without being asked and sat down at the table. Patricia, with her sharp mouth, was silent. She got up and began to set the table, taking extra care over her father's place setting, seeing that the cutlery lined up and the glass was clean.

Only Patricia was allowed to pour him a glass of lager and, as she heard his key in the lock, she took the can from the fridge. In their neighborhood, the McLaughlins were the only people with a fridge. Patricia took her father's glass and tilted it the way that Brendan had taught her. The can had a picture on one side of a blond woman in white underwear and a negligee.

Brendan closed the door, and George slipped his hands under the table and cast his eyes to the floor. The kitchen, which had been so noisy—Patricia bossing him, his mother frying and boiling and sighing, his brothers punching and scratching and shouting—was suddenly so silent that George could hear the bubbles burst in his father's lager.

All the children sat; his mother wiped her hands on her apron.

“When do you want it served up?”

“When I've drunk this,” said his father, throwing off his coat and winking at Patricia for the carefully poured beer.

George had never been winked at by his father, nor had he been aware of his father winking at his brothers. Patricia preened silently.

George loved his sister, second to his mother (he only loved his brothers a little, and his father not at all), but his sister's callousness seemed to be directly related to affirmation from
her father. George had noticed on more than one occasion that Patricia could be vicious for the sake of Brendan's approval.

His father smoked and read the paper, and drank his beer in silence, and they all waited in silence for him. His father didn't really read the paper; he merely glanced at it, hunting for stories on people he knew. When he was finished, he folded it and tossed it aside.

After the newspaper fell to the floor, the kitchen was filled by the scorching sound of his father's last inhalation of a cigarette. The smoke appeared down his nose, like a dragon, and then he crushed the butt in the glass ashtray. There was half a glass of lager left, and Brendan sipped it.

George suddenly began to feel very itchy. His palms itched most and he remembered his mother telling him that wounds itch when they heal and that made sense after the belting, but then his back began to itch, and his scalp. It was not nits. One or two children at school had nits at the moment, but George's mother insisted he, his brothers, and sister were dooked and combed every Sunday. The itch was all his childish energy, trapped inside his still body.

George wriggled slightly to ease the itch, but then realized that his movement was gently rocking the table. Cutlery sounded off plates.

“Would you sit still?” said his father, putting his glass down, hard, on the table.

George nodded. His father rarely focused attention on him. He was five years younger than his sister Patricia and his place in the family was very much that of an afterthought.

“Sit still, I said.”

George looked his father in the eye. He was not sure if he had ever done it before, and after this moment he would never
do it again, but they looked across at each other, each at either end of the table, like two opponents.

Brendan left his half-glass of beer and stood up. The furniture in the room seemed to shrink before his height. It was as if even the chairs and the table were afraid of him. Every object in the room, even his mother and his brothers and his sister, became smaller, while Brendan's presence swelled.

George tried to make himself smaller too, so that he couldn't be seen. He put his hands between his knees and hunched his shoulders and looked at the placemat in front of him, which bore a picture of a primrose. He stared straight at the yellow flower, wishing that he were two-dimensional like it was, or indeed possessed no dimensions at all: invisible.

George felt his father's vise grip lock onto his shoulder, and turned to him only then.

“I'm talking to you, sir.”

“I'm being still,” said George, his whole body wincing, aware of how weak he sounded.

“Not still enough,” said Brendan. His eyes were filled with that same watery rage as when he beat their mother. There was a sheen over his too-blue eyes, like the clear eyelid of a crocodile when it submerges its prey. George knew the look, but would always, for years to come, be unable to articulate it. There were times when the look in his father's eyes changed and it meant murder.

“It's all right, love, he's just had a hard day. He'll stop his fidgeting,” said his mother, sealing his fate.

George's mother never spoke up for
any
of them, and George knew that the fact that she spoke up now meant that he was in for it, and probably she was too. It meant that his mother had
calculated in her head the damage to him against the damage to herself.

“Hard day?” said Brendan hoarsely, gritting his teeth. Their father never raised his voice.

“People are either shouters or thumpers, one or the other,”
George's mother had told him.

“Hard day? What kind of hard day can you have when you're seven?”

George was silent, staring at the primrose on his mat until it started to blur and morph into tumorous monsters.

“I'm talking to you,” said Brendan, pulling George to his feet by the shoulder of his sweater.

George stared straight ahead, at his father's brown tie and cream shirt. He could feel every pore in his body: the roots of his hair, the soles of his feet.

Brendan lowered his voice to a whisper. “What kind of bad day did you have?” He spoke while leaning down so that he could look George in the face. George could smell aftershave on his father's skin and lager on his breath.

“He got belted,” said Patricia.

If his brothers had spoken then, Brendan would certainly have slapped them because they were not being addressed, but Patricia had certain privileges.

“What for?” said Brendan, still addressing George, not Patricia, standing up but staring at George, his hands on his hips.

George took a deep breath. “Writing with my left hand.”

“And were you?”

George panicked. “What?”

“Were you writing with your left hand?”

“Yes.”

George blinked in quick succession, expecting a blow. His father threw back his head and laughed. He laughed for a long time: long enough for Peter and Richard to start sniggering too. Suddenly, Brendan stopped laughing. As a conductor silences an orchestra, so Brendan silenced the room. No one wanted to be caught out laughing when he was not.

Brendan grabbed George's sweater and shirt with two hands and lifted him off his feet. George closed his eyes.

Brendan set George down on the table, so that his brothers and sister were looking up at him. Stood on the table, he was almost eye to eye with Brendan, but George chose not to look him in the face. He stared at his father's Adam's apple instead. Brendan began to pace back and forth.

“Only
you
could get belted for writing with the wrong hand. There's a lot of good reasons to get belted at school, but that's the most ridiculous I ever heard.”