Last Train from Liguria (2010) (26 page)

‘Mm,’ her father replied. ‘And by God does he know how to use it!’

Bella knew then her professor was considered a bore. For some reason this made her love him all the more. She became a compulsive daydreamer; exquisite little episodes running around inside her head, which never seemed to reach a conclusion. They were all about the lead-up to something indefinite, but wonderful. There would always be a passionate declaration, a surrender of sorts, of course an embrace, the very thought of which set the butterflies flapping like mad. After that, things became a little hazy and the daydream would have to go back and find another beginning.

In the end Bella imagined her way into almost believing a romance existed. She took to writing love letters. At first she had the sense to burn them as soon as they were placed in envelopes, stinking of perfume and decorated with sweethearts. When this stopped being satisfactory, she took matters a bit further. This time she cut the little love words and phrases out from the letter, and slipped them into his overcoat pocket whenever she passed it hanging on the coat stand in the hall.

She put herself in the professor’s path whenever she could. On the stairs when he came out in the mornings - there she happened to be. In the garden where he took his sherry before dinner and read his newspaper, she would be waiting, often climbing out the scullery window to get to the bench before he did. Once when she knew he was giving a lecture in the College of Surgeons, she went all the way to Stephen’s Green on her own and hid behind the cab shelter until he appeared. She followed him down Baggot Street and when he went into a shop and came out again, she was there, tying a coincidental shoe lace. They walked the rest of the way home together, she playing up to him all the way, precocious and coy. He saying little, but slipping her long looks from the side of his eye. It might have been funny, just a mildly embarrassing memory, were it not for how it ended.

One Sunday morning when the house was empty and Vera had slipped out to late mass, Bella went to his room. She meant no harm - just a vague desire to familiarize herself with the sort of things she might see when they were married. (The framed picture of her second cousin, his present wife, and her third cousins, his two sons, she managed to ignore.) On the locker there was a medical book, a prayer book, and a glass of cloudy water, which gave off a peculiar whiff when she lifted it to her nose. A travelling case at the side of the wardrobe showed a label with his Edinburgh address - a discovery that caused her to silently shriek with pleasure. She could send him a birthday card, and a card next Christmas! No, she could do better than that - she could follow him to Scotland! Be waiting on the corner of his street when he returned from his work at the hospital - Oh, his face when he saw her! She would try to apologize, to say, ‘I know I shouldn’t have but…’ And he would silence her with kisses. ‘Oh my darling, my darling - I thought we would never see each other again.’ That’s what he would say then.

The bed was still unmade, and through the window, little meadows of sunlight fell across a haphazard eiderdown. She lay down, pulling his bolster pillow into her arms and pressing it to her chest. The crumpled sheets caressed her bare legs and arms. She closed her eyes, just as the door sprang open.

As soon as she saw him standing with his hand on the doorknob staring at her, she realized the measure of her mistake. What had got into her? He was awful. An absolute horror. Everything about him was disgusting. The pyjamas had been like something under a rock, grubby and stained, when she had lifted the pillow away. The water in the glass, cloudy because his smelly false teeth had been steeping there all night. There was a stink from the pillow. She had been blind as well as stupid. And now she was in serious trouble. Her parents would be angry, and worse, much worse, ashamed. Everyone would know and talk about it. Her aunts, her other cousins - one of whom went to her school and would be sure to spread the word. It would fill up the corridors and classrooms in September; the biggest news out of everyone’s news out of all the summer holidays. A snoop. A sneak. A pursuer of married men. Her teachers would get to hear about it. She might even be expelled. But first the professor would march her downstairs to wait in the study for her father’s return. He would lay the notes across her father’s desk, demand an explanation. He would say in his stupid Scottish voice, ‘This is the work of your beloved daughter.’ She could see the love words like jigsaw pieces across the walnut desk - ‘kiss’, ‘embrace’, ‘tender’, ‘desire’.

She jumped up from the professor’s bed and began a frantic show of making it. ‘I’m just, I’m just,’ she kept saying as she plumped the pillow and straightened the sheet. ‘Making the bed. To help Vera,’ she managed to add, as she moved towards the door. But he wouldn’t get out of her way. ‘Please,’ she began, hardly able to speak with embarrassment. ‘Please, professor, excuse me, please.’

‘I got your notes,’ he said. ‘Thank you most kindly.’

‘Notes? What notes? I don’t know what—’

‘Don’t lie to me, girl. I wouldn’t like you to do that, after all those nice things you said.’ He caught her by the arm. She could taste and feel his dragon breath, burning on her face.

‘I’m only fourteen,’ she whined without knowing quite why she mentioned that.

‘You should have thought of that before now, shouldn’t you?’

By now her breathing was shallow and sharp, causing her breasts to heave up and down. She saw him looking at them, and knew somehow they were going to make things worse. She wished she could just cut them off and throw them away.

‘Fourteen,’ he said, putting his hand on one breast, so that now his hand too was lurching up and down. ‘Aren’t you a great big girl for your age, even so?’

He pulled her to him. Then pressed her up against the wall. The vileness of him, the spit from his mouth, the sound of his breath in her ear, his mouth snuffling at her hair.

‘Would this be what you’re after?’ he said. ‘Is this what you’ve been looking for? Is it? Is it?’

She was pinned to the wall by his forearm and one of his legs. A long strand of her hair was caught in the cuff button of his jacket. It tore at her head anytime she tried to move. His hand went down and slipped into the narrow space between them. She could feel his knuckles move against her stomach and after a few seconds realized he was unbuttoning his flies. He started to pull her hand down, to try to make it touch him there. She resisted. Her hand, like something on a spring, shot back and forward between them. She tried to make it smaller, less able, by clenching her fist. But as it curled her knuckles tripped off his thing. A cool-skinned thing compared to his body, which was sweaty and feverish. It was as if it had nothing to do with the rest of him; a small animal he had managed to trap.

He began rummaging at the cloth of her dress, and she wriggled as best she could under his weight. Instinctively Bella knew that no matter what, she must prevent that dress from going up. Then suddenly he stopped trying. Instead, he began pushing and shoving into her. His hand now across her mouth, he kept saying
shhh
,
shhh
, although she wasn’t saying anything at all.

Bella thought he was going to suffocate her, she was gagging against his palm, these were her last seconds, she was going to die, there was no way she could survive another moment of it. Then he seemed to go weak in himself and his hand fell away and his eyes nearly popped out of his head. He looked like the devil. She could feel a surge of something wet on her dress. For a moment she thought he had peed on her. But it was heavier than pee and seemed to rest in an upright pool, right in the centre of her skirt. Warm, then cold.

Her mouth and hands now free, she found her breath and began to scream. She ripped her hair with her two hands to free it from the button cuff of his jacket, then pushed past him, surprised at how easily he yielded when he had been so strong a moment ago. Now it seemed as if he had no bones, only fat and skin.

She screamed her way out to the landing and to the top of the stairs. Stayed there screaming down at her mother and Aunt Margaret, who were in the hall, looking up at her, both frozen in the act of doing something - her mother pulling off gloves, Aunt Margaret removing a straw hat.

Her aunt moved first and as she came hurrying up the stairs, her eye lowered to Bella’s dress. Bella looked down. It was stained and the cotton glued together in crumples and peaks. She continued to scream.

*

Her father had examined her before. The time she had fallen down the stairs and hurt her back so badly he had to bring her to hospital. When she had measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever. When she had twisted her ankle, and was stung by a wasp in the same sorry accident. When she had gastroenteritis and had vomited all over him. Whenever she was ill he had always taken care of her. He had always spoken kindly and constantly to her. His hand had always been steady.

Now, his hand was shaking and he wouldn’t even look at her face. Nor would he speak to her. Any questions he had were put through Aunt Margaret (her mother had already been sedated and put to bed).

Bella couldn’t really understand these second-hand questions with their heavily pronounced words that seemed to labour around in slow circles until eventually Aunt Margaret began to ignore her father and composed her own. ‘Bella - now this is important. And please, darling, I promise - you are not in any trouble. But has anything like this happened before?’

‘No.’

‘It was the first time?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re absolutely certain, he never touched you - in any way touched you?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Now, dear, I just need to ask you this. Did he touch you? Did he touch you, under your dress?’

‘No. He tried to, but I stopped him from pulling it up.’

‘Good girl. Good girl. And he definitely didn’t pull it up or get anywhere near your underwear?’

‘No. Definitely not.’

‘That’s fine, dear. That’s all we need to know.’

But then her father instructed Aunt Margaret to remove Bella’s underwear. Bella got a fright and folded herself up. He came at her. He told Margaret to pull her legs down and hold them open. Bella began bucking against him, sobbing.

‘Please, Harry,’ Aunt Margaret said. ‘Is it necessary? I mean to say, the poor child.’

‘Margaret, would you kindly do as I ask? I am speaking as a doctor now. Hold her down. I don’t want to have to sedate her just yet, until I’ve had a chance to establish all the facts.’

‘Look at her, Harry, please.’

‘Margaret, for Christ’s sake - I need to see if she’s
intact
. Now will you understand and kindly do as I say?’

‘But Harry. We have already established that it never happened before. You believe her, don’t you?’

‘Of course I believe her, but—’

‘Well, look at her dress, for God’s sake, Harry. Can’t you see what’s happened? He lost control before he had a chance. You only have to look at the dress to know she’s still intact.’

There was silence for a moment, then her father pulled her dress back down over her legs. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Yes. She may go now. Put her to bed, and give her this to help her sleep. Just. Just take her out of here.’

Aunt Margaret put her arm around Bella and brought her across the room. When they got to the door her father spoke.

‘I won’t ask, Margaret, how you, as a single woman, should know such things,’ he said.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Harry,’ Aunt Margaret said through her teeth.

*

Doctor Eaton is speaking to Bella although it takes her a moment to hear him. ‘I said - you may come over to him now, Miss Stuart.’

‘Oh yes, thank you, doctor. Sorry, I was—’ Bella sits on the side of the bed, puts her hand on Alec’s cool forehead.

‘Is it my birthday yet?’ he asks.

‘Yes, Alec. You were ten yesterday,’ she says.

‘Did I miss it?’

‘You’ll catch it up. Don’t worry.’

Around her she hears the day starting up. There is a sound of carts and trucks passing outside on the way to the flower markets. A factory horn from Ventimiglia stabs into and rips across the belly of the sky. The back door shudders and slams as Rosa arrives. A few seconds later the furnace gives its first gurgle. The door of the bedroom gently clicks and when she looks to the wall Edward has gone.

June

SOMETIMES I WONDER WHAT she does hear in there, if anything. I close my eyes and try to decipher it all through her ears. Can she tell the difference, say, between the uptight clatter of a hospital morning and the easier sounds of the evening wind-down? Would she know the tea lady’s whine from Thelma’s childish delivery? Does she recognize, maybe even dread, the brisk snarl of curtain around her bed and know that it’s time for a drip to be changed, a tube to be ruthlessly inserted? Is she earwigging away while the nurses exchange gossip over her head? Does she sense the sudden charge in the atmosphere when a doctor makes a rare appearance?

And does she ever get afraid, I wonder that too, when it all goes wrong and gets out of control? As it does now and then, when something might happen, or even nothing might happen, except inside the head of a patient who suddenly and unaccountably becomes distressed. One setting off another, setting off the next. Does it upset her, all that noise and emotional chaos? Old men crying for their mammies. Old women howling over torments from the past.

*

I went back last week to the house on Pembroke Road and the flat where I used to live with Nonna. Dust-sheeted and stuffy, but completely unchanged since she left it for the nursing home a few years ago.

After I had a good root around, found nothing of any consequence, and put everything back the way that it was - as if Nonna would somehow find out - I walked all the way home to my own place on the far side of town. It took a good hour and a half, I think. There were angelus bells when I came out of Nonna’s anyway, and when I opened the door into my flat, the lazy brass music of
Coronation Street
was coming from the telly. I can’t honestly recall one step of the long walk home. Some days are like that.

The following afternoon, up in the hospital, little Nurse Blondy gave me a pat on the arm as she unlocked the ward door to let me out. ‘God, you’re as good,’ she said. ‘I mean, the way you give her so much of your time.’

I could have replied, ‘I’ve got buckets of the stuff. What else am I going to do with it?’ but I didn’t like to spoil the moment.

Since breaking up with Hugh, and even more again since leaving my job a fortnight ago. Time.

When the headmistress finally got round to discussing her ‘concerns’ regarding my future, I couldn’t have made it easier for her. ‘Lack of commitment, quite simply,’ she began. ‘Too many excuses for too many absences, basically. You may well be having personal problems, Miss Moore, but essentially your duty lies with the students. We’re talking Leaving Certificate students here. We’re talking portfolio preparation.
The future of our young people
.’

To listen to her you’d think she was headmistress of Eton or Harrow and not some dive where the teachers don’t know who to be more afraid of, the pupils or their parents, and where the police have to be called on a regular basis.

‘Try to put yourself in my shoes,’ she continued, ‘then ask yourself - is it any wonder I’m having reservations with regard to renewing your contract?’

‘No. God, no. No wonder at all,’ I said, weak with relief as I realized the drawing I’d made of Foster hadn’t surfaced after all. For over a fortnight I had lived in dread of it, sick with anxiety every time I walked into the classroom where I kept expecting to see it pinned to the blackboard, or anytime his little brother looked in my direction or there was a message waiting in the staffroom pigeonhole to say someone - in this case, the headmistress - wanted to see me.

‘You must understand—’

‘Oh, but I do understand, really. It’s fine. I don’t blame you. Indeed I don’t. Well, goodbye, and good luck with the replacement. Thanks for everything.’

‘But Miss Moore?’

‘Look - what else am I supposed to do? You don’t want me here. And to be honest I don’t want to be here either.’

‘You’re leaving? Now, this minute? Without so much as handing in your notice?’

‘My contract is nearly up anyhow.’

‘But I haven’t dismissed you - you do realize that? I’m simply putting you on a warning.’

‘No need - I’m resigning.’

‘If I could ask you to put that in writing please?’ she said, obviously relieved.

‘Absolutely.’

‘All right then. Well, what about a reference?’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘But where will you…? I mean how will you…?’

‘Really. It’s grand. I’ve been meaning to give up this teaching racket anyhow.’

I came straight out of her office and drove up to one of those cash-for-cars joints in Smithfield frequented by alcos and gamblers. There I exchanged my car for not all that much cash. Even though the car had nothing to do with the school - I usually walked to work anyway - it seemed the right way to finish the morning. And I suddenly wanted to be rid of all burdens. Even a car seemed overly needy; between feeding it petrol and finding it parking and sticking money into the meter on its behalf, then worrying about whether it’s been stolen during the night. Besides I was running low on cash.

Walking back up Parnell Street a few minutes later, all I was able to think of was - well, thank Christ I won’t have to tell Nonna anyway, won’t have to listen to her trying to find ways to twist the blame away from me and back onto the headmistress. But best of all, I won’t have to answer her questions with lies. Nor would that Shay Foster bastard have anything on me either. He could show the drawing wherever he liked, he could hang it up in his dive of a pub - they couldn’t fire me for it anyhow. I quit while I was ahead. I felt elated for a while, although that feeling soon enough dwindled.

And so this is how, twice, sometimes even three times a week, I can go to see Nonna. By the time I walk down to Abbey Street, take the bus all the way out to Portrane, make my way up the long avenue, dish out the smokes to the two boys who will always, no matter how I vary the day or the hour, be watching and waiting on the steps for me. And, by the time I spend an hour at the bedside filling up the air between Nonna’s face and mine with meaningless words she can’t, in all likelihood, hear; a chat with the nurses; a trip to the smoking room, a sit-down by the bed for another short while before doing it all over again in the opposite direction, maybe stopping at the off-licence or chipper on the way home - well, that’s
that
particular day more or less seen to. One seventh of a week. Gone - just like that! And I won’t have minded a thing for most of it, and I won’t have noticed too much either. Except that three years on, the taller of the two smoking lads no longer has such beautiful teeth.

My doctor calls it depression. A term that’s too vague and self-indulgent for my liking. A malaise without just cause. I think maybe it’s loss that I’m feeling. If I had to put it in a poem, that’s what I’d call it anyway. ‘Loss’. Last year my father, this year Hugh. You could also include my grandmother, who it turns out can’t really be my grandmother but who has, in any case, always been more like my mother. So in a sense I’ve lost my mother again. And in another sense, I’ve even lost
me
.

These are the half-cocked ideas that come into my head while I’m sitting at the bed waiting for Nonna to make up her mind if she’s coming or going. Or while I’m sitting, half pissed, in the darkness of my flat watching crap on the telly, and wondering if I should have one more smoke before trying for sleep, or to hell with it - why not? - open one more bottle of plonk.

I started the poem one night, I wrote on the top of a page - ‘Loss’ by Anna Moore. But that’s as far as I got. I thought - if I write one word a day for the next six months, I could easily make up a poem. What’s the big deal? One word. It doesn’t seem much to ask of myself. By the time I’d finish it, Nonna would be gone. I could slip off myself then, if I wanted. I could follow her. ‘Loss’ by Anna No More, I decided I could call it then and chuckled ironically to myself for a few moments. Of course, before long I was crying again.

One. Word.

I have to,
have
to, get out of this place.

*

I lived with Nonna from the day my mother died until I finished college and moved to Belfast to be near, and finally get to know, my father. On and off over the years I have lived with her again.

The flat is made up of six rooms, three each side of the entrance hall, which effectively cuts Nonna’s home up the middle. To the left, the kitchen, sitting room and a small bathroom. To the right, two bedrooms and another, slightly larger bathroom. Because all these rooms were once bedsitters, there are Yale locks on all the doors. To get from one side of Nonna’s flat to the other you have to cross over the hall, where, when I lived there anyway, there always seemed to be someone talking on the public phone and always letters and junk mail splattered all over the floor.

It was my childhood home - I can’t remember the Belfast house where I lived before my mother died - but I never really liked Nonna’s flat. The sense of living in one room at a time, brought about by having to use a hall-door key to get from one room to another. And having to remember to bring the bunch of keys every time you crossed the hall; I hated that.

The outside of the house was better. Granite steps to the front door, a small bedraggled garden; a permanent dome of mottled shadow from the huge trees on the road outside. There was a photographer’s studio in the basement, which I used to imagine brought a touch of glamour to the house. For years a blown-up picture of a gawky-looking bride was stuck behind the bars of the window. As if she was in prison, Nonna sometimes said.

I loved to sit on the granite steps - the sparkle and solidity of them, the way they held the heat in summer, warming the back of my legs. I liked to watch for the bus that stopped outside the gate, waiting to see who would get off. People who lived in the flats upstairs - faces I would try to match to voices overheard talking on the phone. Or scrubbed-up customers self-consciously making for the photographer’s studio. Or my father, who never came by bus anyway, but always arrived in a taxi, pockets stuffed with oil rig money.

His absence had, in a way, been worse than my mother’s death. I knew he
could
come back, if he wanted. Whereas my mother could not. I also knew my mother was in heaven, but where my father was - I couldn’t say. An oil rig meant nothing to an eight-year-old child. Nonna said no matter what, I should pray for them both every night. ‘God bless Mammy in heaven,’ was one thing. ‘God bless Daddy on an oil rig,’ never quite convinced, and I soon let him slip from my prayers.

I was never inside any of the other flats in the house but thanks to the public phone in the hall, I got to know everyone’s business. Whenever it rang a young man who was unemployed would come clattering down the stairs in his purple flared trousers - although the calls never seemed to be for him. If he happened to be out it was my job to answer the phone and trot upstairs to knock on the relevant door. A woman on the third floor with rollers in her hair gave me a pound note one time. ‘Tell him I’m out, love, there’s a good girl. No - on second thoughts, tell him I’ve moved on.’

I came to know every brush-off, excuse and cock-and-bull story in the book, and that adults lie and find it easy to lie, especially on the phone when their faces can’t be seen. I came to look on the phone as an instrument of deceit. So whenever my father called to tell me where he was, I didn’t believe him. Once he rang to say he was in London and would be arriving in Dublin to see me the next day. ‘Liar!
Liar!
‘ I had screamed down the phone at him and dropped the receiver, leaving it swinging from the cord, until his voice, condensed and slightly cartoonish, finally stopped calling my name.

Poor man, with his direct northern ways, was probably the only person I have ever known who had always given me the truth, or what little he had of it, anyway.

Once, when Nonna was having trouble with her back - lying on the floor, eyes glazed with pain and painkillers - she said, ‘You’re going to be beautiful, Anna, in another year or so. I hope it’s not going to get in your way.’

I would have been about seventeen at the time, sitting at the dining table doing my homework. ‘What are you talking about, Nonna?’ I laughed, it seemed like such a personal thing for her to say.

‘You should have a few pals. You know? Girlfriends - like you used to have before you started going steady with this new chap - Marty, isn’t it? He’s a nice boy, but you don’t have to drop your friends just because a man comes knocking on the door, you know.’

I felt like saying, How come you’ve no pals then, if they’re so bloody great? Because as long as I’d known Nonna I had only ever heard of one friend, a nurse called Dolores who phoned the odd time and whom Nonna had once gone out in her good coat to meet. Nor had she ever really encouraged me to bring friends home. Whenever I did she became slightly peculiar, never taking her eyes off them as if she expected them to steal something. On another occasion she had said, ‘Don’t trust anyone, Anna, not even your best friend.’ Although later she retracted that piece of advice, saying it might have been a ‘bit strong’.

‘You should watch those painkillers, Nonna,’ I said and went back to my essay. A few minutes later I could still feel her looking up from the floor at me. ‘
What?
‘ I asked her.

‘You get your looks from your grandmother,’ she said.

‘From you?’

‘No’, she laughed. ‘God, no. Your other grandmother. She was a beauty.’