Mother of Pearl (21 page)

Granny Spain duly wiped her eyes and ran a creviced hand through the stray strands of her hair. She reached into the pockets of her apron and fished out a florin.

‘A handsel for the child,' she said and pressed it into my hand. Silver across the palm. It would bring me good luck, she said.

We left her there, sniffling on the street as my mother bustled us into the house leaving Granda Golden to deal with the photographer. The picture was never taken.

‘What did Granny Spain mean when she said I had been taken away?'

‘Trust your granny to say the wrong thing,' my mother said.

‘But what did she mean?'

‘You nearly died, that's all she means.'

It was then she told me the story of my birth. The birthmark on my face, a small rosy blemish which has since faded away, and the cord around my neck. I came into the world almost strangled by my mother's lifeline. A caesarean. I had to be cut out, forcibly removed, a bloodied stump lifted out of her like a part that didn't work, an appendix, a spare rib. And then there was the incubator, a warm, glass tent, the whoosh and gush of its workings like the burble of the womb and me like a tiny, trapped insect inside. A sort of living limbo. For those babies almost lost. A nurse must have taken me there. I see a woman in white rushing through the corridors, hear a beating heart, panic, seizure and flight. A woman, not my mother, on the run, clutching me to her, yet taking me away. To Intensive Care, my first home.

 

THE LANDMARKS OF
my childhood are all gone now as if the very city were trying to forget itself. The pot-bellied hospital where I spent my first days, has been demolished. The mysterious streets ironed out into carriageways. Grandfather Golden held out until all of Mecklenburgh Street was levelled around him and the shop stood alone in a field of debris, a picket fence to mark out the boundaries of what was once his enclosed territory, dwarfed by the glinting, wall-eyed gaze of office blocks that had sprung up all around. When his money finally came through we all moved. The house on the Crescent was a big step up for my mother. It was respectability, three bedrooms and a garden. The back parlour was Granda's domain. He sat there, strangely defeated, in his tightly laced shoes gleaming redundantly. He was bad on his pins and seemed to have developed a stoop from his long years of service. He was adrift in our new house, surrounded by the furniture from Mecklenburgh Street which looked old, brown and dissatisfied in our midst. My mother chased him from the fireside with hectoring advice.

‘What about a walk, Da?'

And when he obligingly took a shuffle down the crazy-paving path, thwacking at the weeds with his stick, she would frown and mutter to herself: ‘Doesn't lift a finger around here and expects to be waited on hand and foot.'

His quietude unnerved her; she took it as reproach. Or she suspected it.

‘What have you been telling her?' she would bark at him if she found us together playing draughts, or simply sitting in the parlour steeped in one of his brown silences.

‘It's not up to me to tell her anything,' Granda would warn darkly.

‘I'll thank you not to tell me how to raise my own children,' she would reply, steering me out of the room. As usual, I would ask Stella, what this was all about. I always felt – and still do – that she was in on things that I had, somehow, missed, as if I were absent for a time, here only in spirit.

‘The facts of life,' Stella would say, ‘you know, where babies come from.'

I leaf through these memories of childhood as if they do not quite belong to me, or rather as if I do not belong to them. There I am in the midst of family snapshots, smiling bravely for the camera. Seaside pictures, my mother resplendent in a bathing suit that never got wet (she was afraid of the water), an arm apiece around Stella and me, sodden and shivering from spending too long in an icy sea. And Granda, rumpled-looking, a tartan rug around his knees, sitting in a canvas chair set at a dangerous angle in the sand. Whoever took these pictures – some stranger on the beach, I suppose – wielded the camera carelessly so that frequently one of us would be out of frame, reduced to a glimpse of forearm or a disembodied hand. The nuclear family. They remind me now of those Civil Defence booklets dropped through our letter box. Mammy, Daddy and two children, a haunted foursome, eyes popping in the frightful darkness, huddled together beneath an unhinged door laid up against the wall. Our photos seemed to have the same air of rigid startlement. These manuals fascinated me, their lurid graphics of skin bums; the menacing fluff of the mushroom cloud. What to do in the event of fallout. Pile your shelves high with canned goods and hide. Hide out in your own house and wait to be discovered. The threat of The Bomb was much more acute than any of the dangers of the small, real war in our city. When we were children, that hardly impinged. Strange perhaps for orphans of one of its first casualties. My father was murdered at his place of work, a cinema on the north side. We never found out why; mostly there is no why. He was a south sider – these days that's enough. Or it may have been a bungled robbery attempt. Stella was only a few months old. And what age was I, I used to pester my mother, anxious to be part of the drama. You would have been – she would stop, frowning, and do a quick, mental calculation – you would have been, let me see, nearly three. It always bothered me, this hesitation.

I have absolutely no memories of him; it is as if we had never met. And so his death had no import. He belonged to some catalogue of large history like the lost airmen in World War Two or the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. What we knew of him was what my mother told us – his flashy good looks, his swaggering air.

‘He was just a boy,' she would murmur, ‘just a boy.'

We had a boy father, Stella and I, a boy who would never grow up. It made me feel tender towards him, or what we had of him, his photograph on the mantel, his high bleached forehead, a toothy smile, his gawky haircut.

Our lost sister was more troubling because she was so little documented. My father was dead and so finished with. But there was no gravestone for her so she was consigned to a nether region somewhere. Limbo, Stella used to say authoritatively. But I felt her closer than that. She hovered like a guardian angel on the margins of our lives. I felt her entwined with us like a picture-book goblin melting into the bark of a tree. There, but hidden.

At first, she remained just that, an airy presence, no more than a soft wingbeat of sadness. I sometimes wondered if it were not her I was expecting to materialise when strangers called to the door, or the rustle of trees would become suddenly menacing. But no, I reasoned to myself, she did not wish me any harm. How could she? We had shared the same early home, the cushioned softness of the womb. But where exactly had she gone? It worried me greatly that I did not know. I imagined her an orphan lost in a blizzard, her cries swallowed by the howling of an east wind, trapped in a globe of snow, frozen forever in winter, flurries of flakes falling from its endless heaven. Imprisoned in her lostness. I would wake at night, my own cries mingling with hers, seized by her panic in the throbbing darkness, to find my own world mercifully intact, Stella on the top bunk, the reassuring glow of the street light flooding our room on the Crescent, safe in a world that should have been hers. If she had lived, would I ever have been born? Because I had come straight after her, it seemed sometimes that I was just a substitute, a pale imitation, as if I were the ghost taking her place. Sometimes in the midst of our play, those hours of melancholy make-believe which suddenly seem to run out of steam, the floor strewn with the abandoned corpses of dolls and the faded remnants of my mother's dancing dresses, I would feel a yawning absence of conviction. ‘I'm bored,' Stella would say petulantly as if she too knew that I was not quite the real thing. It made me doubt myself. I worried that one night I would wake up and find that our sister had slipped into my place and that Stella, or my mother, would not even notice that I was gone.

And so I invented a life for her, so that she would not want mine, never dreaming that one day I would want hers. I rescued her and I gave her a name. Precious and treasure-like and as far away from my own as I could imagine. Jewel.

 

JEWEL HAD NOT
died: she had been abandoned. For some reason, she would not have been safe with us. Because she wasn't a boy, perhaps. Your father longed for a son, my mother told us mournfully, as if all her misfortunes could have been reversed by a boy-child. I imagined her stealing out at the dead of night and leaving Jewel in a basket hidden in the bulrushes with a note attached.
GIVE THIS CHILD A GOOD HOME
. There would have been a full moon. The bright tide would have gently borne her away – away to the other side and into the arms of Pharaoh's daughter … here is where my story fell down. In my mind the woman who discovered Jewel was not a princess. Even my imagination could not stretch to such exotica. No, she was more like Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, grown hopeless with the passing years, for whom a child would be a miraculous favour granted by the message of an angel.

I sent Jewel to live in a small, dark house on the other side of the city. She would know the claxen call of factories, the steep terraced streets, chimney stacks spouting steam into a bleached sky. Her world seemed mostly interiors, bound up in sensations of enclosure. Her mother, close by in another room, poised and watchful, who feared for her, who would not let Jewel out of her sight, who would grip her hand to reassure herself that this child was real, who would touch her fingers and the hairs on her head as if she were counting her blessings. I imagined her a sickly child. How else to explain the kind of fearful love she knew? Tubercular, I decided. Weak lungs, a rickety walk listing to one side. Hence her mother's exaggerated care, the enforced warmth, the muffling up against the weather.

Jewel knew the steady thrum of identical days. Her mother rising as dawn breaks, the stoking of the range below, the plish-plash of water in a tin basin as her father shaved. Oh yes, I granted her a father too, with rough, oily hands and a whiff of diesel, a man suffused with a bewildered but grateful reverence for the gift of a late and much-longed-for child. He would come into her room in the mornings to rouse her, carefully putting on her dressing gown and slippers, his breath a warm cloud on the icy air. It was often winter in Jewel's house. His big hands were clumsy with buttons; he often mismatched them. He carried her downstairs, his burly clasp around her waist, her arms tightly clutching his broad expanse of shoulder. Down the bright well of the stairs and along the dim passageway to the kitchen. From her perch on the high chair she would watch as her mother carved a loaf for sandwiches and boiled water for her father's flask, while he spooned out tea from a rusting caddy. I gave Jewel other props that did not belong at home – an oil cloth on the table, a scored and ancient bread board, a chipped enamel teapot. There was a quiet and purposeful air of industry as they worked together; her father's head bowing beneath the palsied sleeves of undershirts hanging over the range, her mother wielding a heavy pan, sizzling angrily, as she bore it to the table. They moved as if in a careful dance for the child on her wooden throne.

My mother always had a crowd in on Saturday nights. There were gaggles of young women on the Crescent, mothers of my schoolfriends. They would go to the pictures and afterwards to the lounge bar in the Plaza or there would be uproarious card parties in the front room to which the husbands of these women would be invited. I recall peering over the banisters listening to their muffled explosions of laughter followed by tense conversations in the hall. There were frequent rows, raised male voices or the impassioned sobbing of women which my mother would airily dismiss in the morning as ‘just the drink talking'. The sounds of this unruly adult gaiety would drift up to Stella and me. Stella would often tiptoe down and be allowed to join the party until she fell asleep in a bundle on the sofa. Hours later my mother would carry her back upstairs and carefully tuck her in. I would pretend to be asleep while willing her to pause by my bed and be … be what? Be afraid for me like Jewel's mother was for her. To wake me with endearments for fear I might have stopped breathing.

‘You're a hardy one,' she used to say, ‘you came back from the dead.'

Grandfather Golden kept to his room during my mother's ‘evenings'. In his latter years there was a bed set up for him in the back parlour because the stairs were too much for him. He spent his Saturday nights polishing our shoes for Sunday Mass. He would heave out the cardboard chip that held the polish and cloths and would carefully wind open all the tins – black, neutral, ox-blood – releasing their acrid, metallic fumes. He would gouge out a knob of polish and set to with a brush, rubbing at our shoes with vigour, spitting on the insteps to accentuate the shine, then worrying at the leather with a blackened rag. Afterwards he would line them up in pairs on a sheet of newspaper on the kitchen floor ready for us to step into. My mother's were always the last to be filled.

Darkness was Jewel's doorway. At night on the verge of sleep, I would close my eyes and like the step in a dream, the one that finally wakes you up, I had only to take one blind leap to join her … a blazing fire. The soft blue-black pile of a hearthrug where Jewel stretched tracing with her finger its curlicued patterns. Against her cheek the rubbed freshness of pyjamas donned after a bath. The house has an evening feel, dusk gathering at the window, lights on but the curtains not yet drawn. The cold chill of the evening invades the house with her father. She makes for the kitchen. There is the scrape of his muddied boots on the red tiles, two stout overalled legs smeared with grease. At eye level the porthole hatch of the range which her father would open from time to time to feed. The sizzling of wet kindling, a burst of flame, the door closes …