The Little Red Chairs (18 page)

It was a fish dish, but it was not like any fish she had ever tasted. Jasmeen told how she had prepared it, marinated it for forty-eight hours, then cooked it with bananas that were not the bananas usually seen in a supermarket, but green bananas, which could only be got in a market on Saturdays, quite a distance away. She then said that the daughter in the photograph
wearing cap and gown had graduated in biology and gone home to Africa to teach. She held up a phone, saying it was her special phone to ring Africa, which she did twice a week and lived for those conversations. Her other daughter, Jade, who had moved out some time ago, shared a flat with friends in the East End. It was more trendy and also closer to where her boyfriend, Ronnie, lived. Both daughters in the photograph were beautiful, tall, dark-haired, with polished skin, their eyes moist in wondrous anticipation. Jade, her mother warned, might at any moment reappear, as she often had big bust-ups with Ronnie. Being the younger daughter, she was indulged about everything, including her dreams of becoming an actress.

All of a sudden, Jasmeen jumped out and pulled out a bottle, still in its Christmas wrapping, from the cupboard on which the television rested. It was cava and she poured big glugs into tumblers. She was happy to have someone to talk to. She just nodded to neighbours without ever talking, because it was like that, in flats, in every city in the world. She knew her neighbours only slightly. The young woman they met on the way in, with the little girl eating an apple, had rid herself of a husband who was drunk and violent and the young man with a hood over him was obviously a new boyfriend, so the child had a newcomer in their small kitchen and in her mother’s bed. The man in the flat next to hers was from Zimbabwe and couldn’t walk very well because of a war injury and he too had a child, a little girl of about ten, but no sign of a mother.

‘You’re wondering why I brought you home,’ she asked and said it was because she never once forgot her own predicament when she first came to London and how lonely and famished she had been. She then went on to tell the story of her life, and those
who helped her when she first came. Her husband was an army man, quite high up and with a good income and she was used to privilege, a maid, a chauffeur and a dressmaker, but when the marriage was no longer working, what with a younger bride on the horizon, she set out for England with two daughters, one eight and one three and a half years old. She had a bank draft for two hundred dollars in her purse. Through the council, they found accommodation, one room, about three miles from where she now lived. In the one room there was a big bed with a flowered quilt and it was into that bed they crept every day around three o’clock in the afternoon, because they were so afraid of the dark. They had never known such darkness or such coldness, no more than they knew what troubles that darkness held. They had only bread to eat. It was given out in one of the charity places, where she walked, holding one child by the hand and the younger she carried on her back. It was another African woman that she met on the street who, seeing her and her children in such light clothes, stopped them and brought them to the Salvation Army shop. There they were given warm coats and knitted gloves and caps. That was the night, or rather the evening, that they didn’t go to bed at three o’clock, because now that they had coats, they could go out. They went to a restaurant over on the high street and the girls had fish and chips and she ordered one portion of chicken between them all. They didn’t say another word, feeling too intimidated, and when the time came to pay and she offered the cheque for the two hundred dollars, the waitress could not change it, so the manager was called. She asked where the bank was, only to be told that banks closed at night time and after a difficult pause, she wrote her name, her address and an IOU, promising to come back on
the morrow. She could read his mind, read that he was thinking to himself, ‘These people straight out of the bush haven’t got a clue.’ The elder daughter cried, as this was her first glimpse of the many humiliations that were to befall them.

Next day, in the place where they were given bread, a woman brought her to the bank and after much explaining, entreating and paperwork, the cheque was cashed. She paid the restaurant and on the way home, from a street vendor, bought sweet black grapes for her daughters, which they ate sitting on the bed, and put the seeds into an envelope to plant in the patch of green outside. In time, Sabrina, the elder girl, went to school, where she excelled herself in sport and athletics, growing taller and more beautiful by the day, and Jade was placed in a crèche, where she made friends that she wanted to live with. Meanwhile, she herself went from one place to another to find work and eventually, was hired as a chambermaid in a hotel in Edgware Road. Maureen was the first Irish woman she had met, the one who had helped them and ever after, Jasmeen had a soft spot for the Irish. Maureen, who lived in the flat opposite, agreed to be child minder, collecting the children from the school and the crèche until their mother got home at seven in the evening. It was Maureen who helped them the night a big stone was put through the bedroom window. Jasmeen was in the kitchen, with Jade, preparing a supper, when suddenly Sabrina came screaming. She had been sitting on her bed doing her homework when the stone came hurtling into the room. They went to look at it, the huge stone and broken glass all over the floor. They ran into the hallway to get help, but, as she said, it was not easy to get help because they were black; they were in fact the only black family in that large block. Maureen happened to come in, asking if a letter for her had been delivered
there by mistake and instantly brought them across to her place, to ring the police. She was quite firm on the phone, explaining the ugly situation, saying how lucky that the girl had not been badly injured and insisting that they be moved from there.

Next morning, both women went to the station, where she gave a statement and after four weeks they were given another flat, where black people were more acceptable. This assault was an eye-opener for her. She vowed that she would not be a chambermaid for life and started studies, in order to get on the ladder and make a better future for her children. Four nights a week she went to class, where, with thirty others in the same boat, she learned English, phrasing and parsing words over and over again and eventually, after three years, she got a degree, which enabled her to look for proper work.

It may have been the cava that made her nostalgic, but she jumped up, saying there was something she must show Fidelma. She returned carrying a ceremonial dress on its hanger. It was a silk dress, gaily coloured, with a hat to match, a hat that could be dented into different shapes and which she donned proudly. Then she walked around holding the dress in front of her, a sway to her body, the panels softly undulating, the various silks bestrewn with big apricoty blossom.

‘When I am wearing this dress … I am reaching out,’ she said, and she curtsied and smiled, harking back to that other time, her maid, her chauffeur, her dressmaker, her luncheons, her green and salad years.

Fidelma

I dread my dreams. I dream of one or other of them nightly, along with all the other muddle, journeys, crowded carriages, in the Underground unfamiliar, blank, hostile faces. I dream of Jack and our daily routine, putting porridge in the oven overnight to cook and sometimes I dream of him in different circumstances altogether, walking Auburn the red setter that died and that he had cremated in Belfast, keeping the ashes in a silver pot on the mantelpiece. Another time he is walking her on a crocodile leash, somewhere in the warm Mediterranean, reciting a poem by Walter de la Mare, stressing his favourite lines, poor Jack, that were in fact his life’s motto –

Tell them I came and no one answered,

That I kept my word.

His tirades in the town were shocking, walking around with a loaded revolver, asking everyone if his wife had done the decent thing by drowning herself, so that he could take his own life with honour. Sister Bonaventure relayed it to me. She was one of the people he accosted, his cheeks hollow, the eyes with that mad blue glitter, talking manically to himself. The nuns took me in. ‘
The swallow hath her perch.’
Sister Bonaventure led me up the stairs that smelt of wax polish and along a corridor, to their one spare bedroom. I was given my meals on a tray in a private room
that was without a window. To all extents and purposes, I had left Cloonoila and nobody knew my whereabouts. There were a few practicalities to be attended to. Sister Bonaventure managed to sell my little car, along with the few antiques from the shop and my jewellery. I kept my locket with my mother’s hair in it and I can say it was my first acknowledgement of her importance in my life, the thing called motherhood. In all, I accrued a few hundred pounds so as to set off. They spirited me out of there by night, with my new passport and the photograph of me taken for it, in which I might have been dead, so sepulchral did I look. Father Eamonn came to hear my confession and I knelt on a little kneeler in the room without the window. He kept his eyes lowered throughout and gave me absolution, without my having to enumerate my sin.

I stayed the first three nights in a B & B in Ebury Street, not far from Victoria Station. It was noisy, what with people coming and going at all hours, lugging their suitcases on wheels down the flights of narrow stairs, wheels, more wheels, as if the whole world was on the march. Pigeons cooed in the small back garden in the very early morning and I got up as soon as I had access to the bathroom and was off out, down the street and into another, quieter street, to an outside table and ordered coffee and brioche with strawberry jam. I liked sitting in the cold. I could have been any tourist, except that I wasn’t, I had to find work. Father Eamonn had given me a wholesome reference and there was an old write-up about the boutique, in which I was congratulated for being so fashion-conscious. I went to various places on the off chance, but without success, leaving my name and the number of my mobile phone. One shop sold cushions and hangings and I thought how I would fit in there and hide in all that sumptuousness.
In a shop on the high street in Kensington the assistants were all young, expertly made up and with false eyelashes and there were racks upon racks of clothes and belting music, but no vacancy. Lastly, I tried a wine shop. When the man who interviewed me asked me if I could cope being alone four nights a week, saying there was an emergency bell under the counter in case of trouble, I faltered.

It was after that that I went to the charity organisation, where I met Jasmeen. First it was a matter of waiting in a cramped room, the many faces all around with the same nervous expression and the one argumentative man with the eye patch.

I dream of Vlad too, his shadow disappearing up the street, his eyes so searching, kissing his ring once as if he were a bishop and the moment in Strandhill where he first made his feelings known to me. Except in that dream, along with the surfers, there are spectators, local men all waiting to kill him. They are goring him with pitchforks, but he is refusing to die.

In all my dreams there is blood. It gushes from the pump in Cloonoila, where several women stand to fill their buckets. They are blaming me for the terrible curse that I have brought on their village. It oozes from mattresses and spills onto the floor, out into the hall and the pathway that leads from Jasmeen’s apartment to the entrance gate. I dream of the little mite that I cannot imagine and will not ever give a name or a feature to.

Tomorrow I have an interview.

Bluey

Fidelma sat on a bench nailed to the pavement, killing time until her interview. The wall was too high to actually have a view of the river, but earlier she had stood and looked at it, the water a toffee colour, not like the silvery rivers of home. White pleasure boats were going up one side and down the other, and sometimes a police boat that was painted differently. Twice she enquired the time of passers-by, who looked at her askance.

Finally she got up and went towards the bank along a walkway, where a few young trees, hooped in metal baskets, had something of the tiredness of the city on them. A cradle hung from one of the very high floors of the bank, where obviously someone had been cleaning windows earlier on, and even to look up there at it, in its sway, gave her vertigo. She felt again in her purse for her passport and the two references from home. In the glass of the revolving door, her reflection, as it met her, was none too confident.

The young man who interviewed her had a friendly smile, short curly hair, thick branching eyebrows, full lips and bockled teeth. His name was Bluey and from the very first moments he sought to put her at her ease, fetching a cup of tea from the cafeteria and a weeny carton of milk on the side. They were on a high floor of the bank in a small room that overlooked a huge office. Traders sat at their desks, all of it so quiet, so hushed, with the solemnity of church. Night, as Bluey said, was no different from
day. Boats on the Thames, cruisers, pleasure boats, police boats, cargo ships, a part of the city that did not sleep. The place was all glass, glass walls, glass mirrors, everything spick and span and he was proud to tell her that his team of cleaners had won a certificate for excellence three years in a row. Above him was a manager, an administrator and a housekeeper. Pointing to the glass wall, he asked her how she thought it sparkled so. She wasn’t sure. Just water, he said, just plain water, as with chemicals of any kind, dust got ingrained in the glass and couldn’t be wiped off. He wore two earrings in the same ear; white gold inlaid with diamonds, a gift from his missus, as he said. He had been married for almost six years to an English woman and already he had booked the restaurant for their anniversary dinner.