Mother of Pearl (20 page)

As a child I was afflicted by an awful watchfulness. At school, I dreaded the unexpected knock on the door. If an older girl came into Senior Infants I expected to be beckoned forth. A note folded over and handed to the teacher was always a poisoned communication. I would watch as she scanned it, trying desperately to decipher from her features the message it contained. If a stranger walked into the room I believed it was for me he had come. The playground was full of terrors. Leaves would be suddenly swept in a whistling arc across the pitted tar and I would wheel around expecting someone to be there, someone who had caused this flurry. The Angel Gabriel with tidings. There were shadowy places from which an emissary might materialise. The back of the grotto was one such place. It was dark and domed and full of rubbery-leaved shrubs. Here a stranger could stand eclipsed by shadow, reaching out to grab you as you passed. Superstition prevented me from lingering there for long. Instead, I skulked close to the wall near the piled-up crates where our daily ration of milk soured in the sun, or joined frantically in games in the hope that in the confusion somebody else might be taken.

At home people who came to the door unlocked a sensation of recognition as if I had been waiting for them all my life. I remember particularly the man who collected the rent – Mr Hackett. He excited my attention because he came back, time and time again. He was a tall, sallow-skinned man with a moist, almost tearful expression, and bad teeth. He wore a soft felt hat which he carefully took off if he were asked in (he usually was since my mother never had the money ready when he called and would have to hunt down small change in the kitchen). The deliberateness of this ritual seemed to me full of imminence, as if he was about to make some kind of declaration. He would stand patiently in the hallway fingering the rim of his hat with his long, parched fingers. Once when my mother's fevered search was taking longer than usual he produced from his pocket a nougat wrapped in cellophane. I glanced over my shoulder before taking it; we had been warned about strangers offering sweets.

‘It will be our secret,' he said putting a finger to his lips.

I popped the sweet quickly into my mouth, balling up the wrapper in my fist to destroy the evidence. I watched him intently as I chewed, certain that now he would reveal some secret to me. He was about to say something else when my mother appeared in the kitchen doorway. I gulped and the sweet went down the wrong way. I could feel it lodging in my throat as I retched to catch my breath. My mother swooped, thumping me on the back and then, suddenly, she swung at me and I was upended. The hall spun around me and I had a bulging-eyed view of Mr Hackett's shoes as she shook me violently. Finally it popped out, a putty-coloured mess on the good carpet. There it sat, like a lie, like my sly, concealed longing for a different kind of love.

She righted me and the hall swung back into place. But the shock of it stayed with me, this violent seizure by my mother's hand, the tipping up of my world as if a storm had overtaken us and all the solid, grounded things had slid away beyond my vision, never to be reclaimed.

Wilful and careless, her retribution seemed to hover insistently. Another memory comes to me. The greengrocer's shop, pungent with bananas. The stout girth of women with straw baskets or string bags queueing patiently while Mrs Pidgeon purred at them from behind the counter. She was a big, blowsy woman, oddly glamorous despite the fact that she hefted crates of fruit around and had dirt under her fingernails from weighing out potatoes. She always wore lipstick and a bright headscarf which swept her hair back from a smooth forehead. I imagined her as some kind of native chieftain, who in her colourful apron and bandanna might well have climbed up trees herself to pick the fruit which appeared in her shop. While we waited, I wandered around the tiered displays touching the dimpled skins of oranges, the caked potatoes still bearing the traces of the earth from which they had so recently been torn, the purple turnips, beaten and battered, the whiskered bunches of scallions with their virgin-looking bulbs like newly-born infants, raw and screaming. So engrossed was I in this strange, uprooted world that when I looked up, my mother was nowhere to be seen. I lurched wildly from one set of skirts to another but none bore the smell of my mother or the slippery static of her frocks. I blundered on, a heart-stopping panic rising in my throat. I started to wail. The great bulk of Mrs Pidgeon hoved into sight.

‘There, there,' she said, beaming, as she swept me up in her fat arms.

‘We don't want you, of all people, getting lost, Mary Spain.'

It sounded strange to me, my own name. It was as if for a brief moment I had become somebody else there among the fruit and earth of another place. And then, my mother rushed in.

‘My god,' she cried, ‘where did you get to? I looked around and you were gone.'

But it was
she
who had gone.

Mrs Pidgeon bashfully set me down. My mother wagged a finger.

‘You're
never
to do that to me again, do you hear? Never!'

 

I WAS ASHAMED
of our loss. That's what it was called. Having no father. It made both Stella and me wary of the species. Other people's fathers were a strange breed, large and threatening. We approached them with caution. There they sat, in sofas, behind newspapers, appearing in doorways they always seemed to fill or on the prowl in other children's houses looking for spectacles, or a freshly ironed shirt. They tinkered with things. They climbed ladders, disappearing into attics so that all we could hear was their heavy footfalls up above, venturing into unknown and dark parts of houses. They lay spreadeagled under cars, only their legs showing, large feet shod in scuffed, lace-up boots splayed outwards. Or they squatted on their hunkers in pairs, their heads twisted sideways, peering under the chassis or into a steaming bonnet.

‘It's the exhaust alright, there's a hole here you could put your fist into … you're talking shillings here …'

I noticed the way fathers talked – the price of things, how they worked, how they fitted together – and how convincingly they traded information. And there were places they went to which seemed to us necessary and mysterious. Pubs, bookie shops, racetracks, where further business was transacted and deals were struck.

Mr Doran, father of Tessie who sat next to me in class, was one I was particularly watchful of. He liked to give us frights, pouncing savagely from behind doors, and he did clowning tricks and funny faces where he pulled back his mouth making his lips thick and slug-like and turning his eyes into smooth Chinese slits. He would lend his body out as a landscape for adventure, cantering about their garden with Tessie on his shoulders, veering wildly over bushes and skirting the rigid arms of trees until they tumbled mightily in mounds of just-cut grass. Tessie would clamber on to his lap, sitting astride his knees as if he were a horse. He would growl and diving at her he would tickle her mercilessly. I would stand back and watch these displays with a fascinated kind of horror. I hated his onslaughts for their suddenness and ferocity, always fearing that one day his attention would turn to me and he would seize me and carry me off, kicking and screaming.

We had Grandfather Golden instead. A stand-in, a substitute. Big, soft-faced and balding, he stood sadly in the centre of his dim, shoe-lined shop on Mecklenburgh Street and served. I remember being brought there to visit, or to be fitted for sandals. The slide and clack of the shoe gauge, the cold dull metal underfoot and Grandfather Golden pressing a thumb on my toecaps and declaring poignantly: ‘She should get two summers out of these.' As if he was offering the gift of life.

Watching him kneel before bludgeoned feet, what he seemed to offer was a miraculous cure. He would open the lids of the shoe boxes deferentially and parting the tissue paper, he would inhale briefly the whiffy balm of new leather. He drew each shoe out slowly as if it were a piece of delph. He would hold it delicately between his fingertips.

‘Diana,' he would breathe. He knew shoes by their names. Calypso, Trouper, Pearl.

He stood like a man bereft among his customers' jaded footwear furrowed by grief and lying troubled at their feet, the resilient candour of working men's boots, mud-grimed and thirsting from toil, the stricken elegance of stilettos. In the front hallway there were teetering fortifications of white shoe boxes lining the walls. They were like battlements of babies' coffins. There, I imagined, standing in Grandfather Golden's hall were the caskets of hundreds of unknown babies, their names inscribed on the nether end. I was afraid to be there after dark fearing that the dead children would call out in the night. And one, in particular, the ghost of my sister. I feared that one day I would find
her
name written there.

There were other secrets in Grandfather Golden's house, I was sure of it. Perhaps it was its dimness and the combination of smells, new shoes gone old and Grandfather's own odour, musty and slightly sour. So much of the house was unused; the complete top half was closed off. My mother was oddly insistent that I should recall more of it. It was where we spent the first four years, she would say reproachfully, as if I were betraying her by not remembering. And this, she would say, was your room. I would stand in a cold bedroom with its icy lino and hangers jangling in the wardrobe and peer out at the view. This, I would tell myself, was once the frame of my world. Below the sill, the flat roof of the shop stretched out. On it an upturned bucket, a stick with an oily, black, high-tide mark, a coil of wire. Near the parapet, the leg of a doll. One rotting carpet slipper. A yardbrush, prone. How these things came to be there was a mystery to me. For years, I imagined that someone lived out on the roof, a strange, banished creature who needed exactly this combination of things to live.

When we visited Mecklenburgh Street, Grandfather Golden used to take me to the river. I loved the enclosure of the city, the huddled streets offering, a grimy, decaying embrace, the secretive blind alleys. Oddly, I felt safer there than in our tall tower home where the troubles of the city couldn't touch us. As we walked, Granda would point to the angels in the crumbling architecture, eyeless, yearning creatures reaching out into the air from their columns of stone, perched on pedestals holding lamps aloft, entwined into the arches of the bridge. We would stroll down the quays, hand in hand, or he would lift me up so that I could peer down into the green underworld. I remember still the exhilaration of being so close to the water, usually just a spit on the horizon, and the great sucking sounds it made. As we stood gazing down at the swirling, agitated depths, he would tell me the story of Moses. The child borne by a river. A foundling, abandoned by his mother, left in a basket among the reeds. The story seemed to belong here, to
this
river, to
these
seaweedy banks.

My mother never accompanied us on these trips. Instead she sat in the kitchen behind Granda's shop and sulked. The river itself seemed a source of terror for her, because of its proximity to the other side, I suppose. It was a kind of river blindness. She couldn't get far enough away. Look, she would say disparagingly as we kicked through peelings on the path in the brooding dusk, just look at it, as if Mecklenburgh Street were an errant child dirtied by play. But to me the ramshackle houses, the sad shops, even the litter rustling in the gutters, seemed, as the river did, like the battered but much-loved remains of tales as old as Moses.

Granny Spain also lived on Mecklenburgh Street. In the Mansions – in my father's house there were many mansions, it seemed. The tobacco-coloured flats with balconies at prow and stern, which eclipsed the street's view of the river, were strictly out of bounds on our visits to Grandfather Golden's, a place deemed dangerous, full of rough types, as my mother called them. I remember meeting Granny Spain only once, and that was by chance on the street. It was my First Communion, a brave, bright, blue day of late spring and I am standing in the doorway of Grandfather's shop, shoes curtseying in pigeon-toed tiers to the right and left of me. A street photographer is about to take a snap; he has one of those box cameras held at his chest and he is gazing down as if it were a crystal ball. Granda Golden, my mother and Stella are grouped all around him at the kerb as if it is they who are the subject of a family portrait and I am the observer. It is to be my first ceremonial, part of the official record. A picture for the album. And just as the photographer says ‘cheese!' a woman approaches, and then hesitates. A thickset, silver-haired woman with large, baggy breasts and bruised-looking legs. My mother tried to head her off at the pass.

‘Rita, love,' Granny Spain said mournfully.

‘Lily,' my mother responded, smiling tightly.

There was some enmity between them which I could never understand. My mother always referred to ‘those Spains' as if they had nothing to do with us. I expected somebody fiercer, half-woman, half-wolf, I suppose.

Grannies, like fathers, were a strange species.

‘Is this Baby Mary?' she asked as she fingered the stuff of my veil. Her breath smelled of cough drops. ‘She's the image of her father, cut out of him.'

‘It was me she was cut out of,' my mother said sourly.

‘And this must be the little stray,' Granny went on patting Stella's fair head.

‘
This
is the baby,' my mother replied. ‘Stella.'

‘Ah yes, Stella,' Granny Spain said absently, turning her attention again to me.

‘Did you know what a precious little girl you are?' she asked. ‘We nearly lost you, you know, when you were a baby. You were taken from us …'

My mother coughed loudly.

‘If only Mel had lived to see this …' Granny Spain's eyes watered. She sank her face into a large handkerchief and snuffled noisily.

‘It's not the time to dwell on the past,' Grandfather Golden said pleadingly to her. ‘Not today, of all days. A family occasion.'