The Fowler Family Business (24 page)

Teresa Sullivan was not a failed suicide. She had never considered suicide even though the circumstances of her life might, in another child, another woman, have been propitious. Those circumstances included the legitimisation of the act by familial example. And if it’s not thus learned it may be passed down, this genetic gift of willed death.

Her blindness was the result, rather, of prolonged subjection to apple cyanide.

From the age of twelve she had drunk between fifteen and twenty pints of scrumpy most nights for going on two decades. This might be reckoned a slow suicide, but it wasn’t, there was no volition. She had every reason to despair, and suicide is, according to the Catholic superstition she was raised and steeped in, a sin of despair even if eschatological nous demands that it should be classified as a sin of presumption. She didn’t despair. She accepted her lot. It was all that she knew.

And if the arrangements and the harshly tiled corridors were unusual and if they were unlike those of her schoolfriends and, later, her workmates … well, Uncle Father Roy had always told her that she was special, that she was different from all the others. He hadn’t told her that scrumpy could blind, that the pips are left in the mash, that despite prunasin’s rapid evaporation a micro-residue remains and that whilst the accretion of that residue will improbably prove fatal it will very likely effect ocular impairment which will manifest initially with a diminution of night sight, then with a gradual turning of day to dusk and, in its tertiary state, with unalleviable omission.

Her mother Bridget had left her village near Galway within a month of feeling the first kick inside and before they might have begun to suspect. She did not doubt that her life there would have been perpetual disgrace, everlasting obloquy.

She had not told Sean Mullin. He was married and – witness how he had dammed her monthly blood – unreliable. He was, too, irregular in his observance, a drinker and a gambler. Besides, he was not the man for her. He never had been, save for that time on the treeless moor when she had stared beyond his ear at the seething black clouds in the sulphurous sky and all she had heard was the rasp of his rapid breath and she had felt him shudder in the moment of his vulnerability before those braggart ways returned and he complimented her on her decision to conjoin him.

She travelled to Britain. She confided in her brother Roy, begged shelter in the house of draughts on the Marches.

He said not yet, not until after the birth – for how would it look were she to arrive childless and then so soon for there to be the three of them. They didn’t count the months these people. Even if they believed she was his sister they’d put two and two together …

So through those long months she skivvied in a Welsh hotel owned by a Major Malpas, a backslapper who when asked where the toilet was would reply: ‘Off to destroy the evidence eh?’

During the week the men who undressed her in their head were reps. At weekends they were rheumy-eyed fishermen with whisky flasks to be filled through a funnel.

She resolved to love her child with her life. She would never give up her child the way Maria from Oporto who did the heavy lifting had. She planned her future-whilst walking the precipitously rocky path beside the river, prodding anthills with lichenous twigs. She stood on the metal bridge and stared down at the water churning over the worn striped stones. When the time came she told Major Malpas that she had to return home because of her family, which was only half a lie. She believed she might be forgiven it.

She rented a furnished room in the Birmingham suburb of Balsall Heath.

Six days later she left. Not because the shared bathroom was filthy, nor because the tiny clothes she bought for her dearest love took on the room’s clammy dampness but because after her first hospital appointment when she got off the bus at the ruddy public baths she saw, on the other side of the busy road, close as that, Sean Mullin’s cousin Patrick Geoghan chatting away to a fellow in the queue at a chip shop. She put her head down and her collar up, scuttled into the vestibule of the baths and inhaled bleach fumes for half an hour before she dared head back to the home she had already decided to abandon.

She did not risk going before dusk even though it meant walking with eyes averted through the groups of rouged garrulous prostitutes gathering for their evening’s work. They mocked her. They knew a prim virgin when they saw one.

The first stop on the first train was Kidderminster. She rued the wasted 3/6d she had put in the gas meter. It was the necessity of preserving her precious savings and of finding a room that very night which determined that that town should appear on the birth certificate of the 71b 110z child delivered without complications, father unknown. She elected ignominy for herself by giving her own patronym to the child of whose existence she hoped Sean Mullin would never learn, whom he’d never have a claim on if he did. She called her Bernadette Teresa, the first name for her mother, the latter for the song she loved to sing along to whilst peeling potatoes as a casual in a carpet factory canteen (perk: free seconds of carpet squares to insulate the cot with).

Back in her village Teresa would have been considered a presumptuous name in a family like hers. It was a name for the daughters of a hundred acres or more. She revelled in her freedom to take such liberties even if times were hard and she lived in fear that the contemptuous, suspicious National Assistance officers would discover that she undertook piecework for a tailoring firm which supplied funeral directors. There was always freezing fog along the canal where she pushed the battered pram. One afternoon she pushed it up the hill to the Bromsgrove Road. She marvelled at the riches required to afford the big houses with patterned bricks and fancy metal along their roof ridges. She reached a place where men on earth movers and bulldozers were working among uprooted laurels and mud Alps to flatten a building site. A sign said ‘A New Home For Doctor Barnardo’s Children’. She didn’t walk that way again.

When Bernadette Teresa was seven months old her mother took her to live in the house of draughts on the Marches. A holy house it was, attached by a cold cloister to the great stone church whose spire was said to be visible from five counties in two countries. The smell of God was the smell of Cardinal Red Polish. There was always Goddards for the plate and Duraglit for the brass, there was so much brass there never seemed to be an end to it. The tiles were back-breaking. After a year her hands were the colour of salted meat, calloused, cracked, so rough she hesitated to stroke her darling bundle with them.

Her big brother Roy was now Father Roy. He would become Uncle Father Roy when the little girl learned to speak. His congregation was sullen. The lanky few who spoke in a desiccated English drawl claimed recusant blood and forebears who had conspired in the Gunpowder Plot – an event they talked of as though it were within living memory. They referred to Father Roy Sullivan as ‘our Maynooth chappie’. They regarded his clumsy attempts at ingratiation with amused distaste and were shocked by his greedy appetite for drink and food. He assumed that an invitation to a second helping was meant literally, he was too thick or thick-skinned to realise that it was merely a locution.

And while the congregation’s majority (superstitious mumblers who worked in hop yards, orchards, makings, cider mills, psychiatric hospitals) were respectful of their priest’s office they were ill at ease with the man. His predecessor, the skeletal Father Gagini, scion of an Evesham market-gardening family, had spoken their language, had understood them, had lived as frugally as they did.

Father Sullivan weighed 24 stone by the time he suggested to his newly motherless niece that they share a bed for the sake of the heating bill, and for comfort too. He couldn’t bear to hear her moaning like a whelp in her chilly room as she tried to excise from her memory the snapshot of her mother hanging from a bough in Young Vodden’s drowsy orchard where sheep grazed and bees hummed and fruit crates to kick away were teetering temptations, stacked between the lichenous trees.

The noose: plastic-covered wire, baby blue. It put Teresa off washing lines for life.

Apples were different.

Sure, they were agents of pain. That death was indelibly bound to orchards, to trees ranked across slopes, to post-and-rail, to constellations of blossom, to boughs that sag beneath their red burden, to panniers full of fruit radiating smiles like the severed cheeks of happy, unorphaned children.

But apples were also solace. Let them ferment and they become a dependable friend. They also obliterated the pain they caused. They scrapped inhibition: they enabled her to talk aloud to her mother, as if her mother was in the room, beside her in the meadows and orchards, listening to the roster of her days, to her confidences and fears. They were vectors of sweet anaesthesia. Scrumpy was liquid forgetfulness, amnesia in a glass. It-would become a demanding friend. Uncle Father Roy knew that. But he was never so mean that he discouraged her or warned her or refused her money to spend in taps where they turned a blind eye to her age and at the farms where Heale’s New Missus, Nigger Llewellyn and Fancy Lewis filled her empty bottles and plastic jerrycan from barrels in barns and outhouses. She seldom went to Fancy Lewis’s even though it was closer than the others because he was a known lecher and the holes in his rusting corrugated-iron lean-to reminded her of lepers’ faces in mission magazines and, anyway, his brew was so sharp it scraped her teeth. The bottles jangled in bags hung from the handlebars. She stood on the pedals to push against the slope in ragged hedged lanes sunken so deep beneath the fields that she could only hear the kine lowing at pasture. She imagined even then what it would be to be blind and to deduce the bulky bodies and slow trusting eyes from the sound they made and from the taste of their milk and of the cheap cuts of their meat.

She was fourteen when she procured the first of her four abortions by drinking pennyroyal tea for six days. She had picked the grey-leaf herb in ditches where it lurked prostrate unable to bear its weight. She would have been shocked by its ultimate etymology:
pulegium
= that which drives away fleas. The foetus she sought to expel was more than a flea. It was a precious part of her whose brief existence she could never reveal to Uncle Father Roy lest it upset him. He was a man who coped badly with divergences from their homely routine. She was innocent of the renal, hepatic and neurological damage she might do herself. That night she drank scrumpy as never before, bled as never before. The blood flow stopped. She drank as never before for as long as they lived in the house of draughts.

The further south the orchard the more potent the fermentation. She knew from Nigger Llewellyn that three miles made all the difference: ‘It’s the sun what gives ’em strength.’ She put on so much weight that the bed she shared shrank and groaned. She got a reputation as a drinker but not, like the other girls who drank, as a three-villages bike. Uncle Father Roy had instructed her that it was God’s will that she should not sully herself and betray herself and debase herself by going with boys or men. Men were like Fancy Lewis – he always boasted, he always told. When she heard him telling that Ronwyn Jessup had nipples like a Massey Ferguson’s starter button she gave him such a look that the snug went silent. Without looking up Fancy said: ‘That’s one who’s not gonna lose her cherry. No one wants to go pumping up her tyres – Japanese wrestler.’ She blushed red as a pearmain then waddled outside near tears. Wreaths of winter breath fogged her eyes as she stumbled back to the cold house, to the moulting hop-bines, to Uncle Father Roy snoring. She was a diligent student who wore an overcoat to do her homework. She sat at her table in the window chewing her pen cap, pretending that the sun in the western sky was a submerged fire beneath the perfectly blue surface of a salt lake surrounded by clouds that were rock formations crenellated and honed by a million years’ winds.

It was the blinding lapis streaked with molten gold that she missed when they moved to a new house, new parish, new skies. Starlings swarmed over the Kentish Weald like iron filings. Their black flocks morphed from the letters of a forgotten alphabet to the shapes of fishes and cuddly toys. The central heating in the small-roomed, modern clergy house took some getting used to. She ascribed her headaches to the stuffiness. She took time to make friends at the Tech where she studied shorthand and typing with office-management option.

It wasn’t till her second term that she met the Ramsey twins, Alf and Alf a.k.a. ’Alf and ’Alf a.k.a. the Dids, the Pikeys. They weren’t like the other girls whose parents went ‘up’ to London every weekday and lived in gabled, paste-beamed houses. The twins wished to live in such a house. But they lived in a mobile home which was immobile save when shaken by the north.-easters off the North Sea (’There’s nothing between us and the Urals,’ they cried as one). It rattled in those winds. It was stacked on breeze-blocks on Sheppey but was never blown off them. Alf and Alf’s dad, Alf, liked to touch Teresa above the knee. She didn’t mind once she was over the surprise, but she knew to squirm when his hand crept high, and he was a gentleman. His black hair was lustrous. He was proud to live in a 100 per cent metal carapace; metal was the product he broked. He told her a tale of her mother’s and of Uncle Father Roy’s country, of how convoys of Dids would park up in a village with their dogs and not move on till they were paid to. Ransom? she asked. Blackmail? It’s a living, he replied. He told her another tale: they’d all park up
just outside
a village with their dogs and not move on till they were paid to. His wife, the mother of Alf and Alf, had gone out one day and not come back. She was that sort of Did.