Araby

She glanced around, even though the curtain was a protective shield. It was her constant worry that other people might get to know her business. It never occurred to her that maybe no one was interested.

She’d woken up one morning to find that she’d been bleeding from ‘down there’, she told me. My father had called the doctor and she’d been admitted to hospital. Some kind of scan had been done and uncomfortable internal things.

‘Have you been having other bleeds?’ I asked her.

She said no but she looked down at her fingernails. ‘I’m having to wear one of them sanitary yokes,’ she said ruefully. ‘I thought them times were over.’

They ought to be, I thought, worried. She hadn’t worn those since the days of belts and thick looped pads that chafed the thighs. Stick-on winged discretion would be unfamiliar territory for her. I had a sense of things being out of kilter.

I knew that unexpected internal bleeding was not a good sign but I wasn’t sure what could cause it. I looked at her carefully. She had shrunk a bit more since I’d last seen her, her shoulders sloping further but at seventy-five that was to be expected and she was still plump. Her colour was good, the eggshell brown of summer days in the garden still evident and her skin, the skin that I had inherited, was clear.

‘Give me your specs,’ I said, noticing her fuggy glasses, ‘I’ll clean them for you.’ They were filthy, as usual, with tiny flecks of potato on the lenses from when she’d last been preparing dinner. Her eyes without them looked crêpey, vulnerable.

‘I expect I’ll need an operation,’ she said fatalistically. ‘I should have had one ten years ago of course, but yeer father wanted to move and I couldn’t leave him to do it on his own. Now I’m paying the price.’

I sighed quietly. She often referred to this operation she should have had but whenever I’d asked her what it was for she was vague, saying that it was to do with her womb. There was no good reason why she shouldn’t have had surgery if she’d needed it – the NHS was still on its feet in London then. I suspected that she was making it up, embellishing something a doctor had once mentioned to her, or that she had ignored medical advice and avoided going into hospital by using my father and the house move as an excuse. It was impossible to make sense of it; the line between imagination and reality where her health was concerned had always been blurred. She had told herself so many stories that even she found it confusing.

My father returned with orange juice which she examined closely before passing approval. It felt awkward with the three of us trapped behind the apricot-coloured curtain. My parents fell silent, oppressed by hospital inertia.

‘Did you hear about that hijacked plane?’ I asked. ‘I saw it at Stansted.’

My mother clapped her hands, energized. ‘I saw it on telly last night. Was anyone killed?’

‘I don’t think so. Some passengers were released early this morning.’ I gave them a full account of what I’d seen.

‘It’s supposed to be refugees that’s hijacked it, trying to get away from Saddam Hussein,’ my father told us. ‘I heard some of them had been tortured.’

My mother crossed herself. Hussein had replaced Khrushchev and Hider before him as the devil in human form for her. ‘Good luck to the poor creatures, may God help them,’ she said. ‘Don’t they deserve a bit of looking after.’

‘Ah, they might not get much sympathy in London these days. They might get sent back to that bastard.’ My father shook his head.

I left them, saying I needed the loo but intending to find a doctor. At the door I glanced back. My father had taken my mother’s hand in his and was showing her pictures of the hijack in the paper. I thought of their response to the story and then of the man in the shuttle bus at Stansted who’d said loudly, to general murmurs of agreement, that the hijackers should be taken away and shot. I was proud of my parents’ humanity, their decency, and glad that it ran through my veins.

A nurse showed me to a small cubicle where a young woman was writing up notes. She was introduced to me as Dr O’Kane and shook my hand, saying that my mother had been telling her about me. I could imagine that several extra degrees and doctorates had been added after my name during these discussions and I felt a familiar quiver of anger at my mother’s incorrigible urge for verbal embroidery.

‘I understand you’ve been carrying out tests,’ I quickly said.

The doctor nodded. ‘I’ve got all the results now. We’ve found nothing.’

‘So what do you think the bleeding meant, means?’

‘It’s hard to know. Your mother has stopped bleeding now. It’s not on-going. It could just be a blip, some matter the body needed to eject. We’ll keep an eye on her through her GP. She seems well apart from this incident. She’s on very strong tranquillizers, though.’

‘She has been for years.’

‘I see. Do you know why?’

My mother would have said they were for her nerves. I used a more acceptable phrase. ‘General anxiety. My mother’s always been very concerned about her health. You’re not thinking of stopping the tranquillizers, are you?’ I’d read that withdrawal for old people was traumatic; as far as I was concerned, my mother was completely hooked and should be allowed to stay that way at the latter end of her life.

Doctor O’Kane shook her head. ‘Most doctors wouldn’t prescribe such drugs now, of course, they’d look at counselling or other therapies but at your mother’s stage in life …’

The doctor came back to the ward with me and told my mother that the tests were clear and she could come home the next day.

‘You’re sure I don’t need an operation?’ she asked, fiddling with the sheet. Her voice was meek, anxious. She was always on her best behaviour in front of doctors, polite to the point of obsequiousness.

‘Quite sure. Just get a bit of rest and stop eating all those lemons, they’ll ruin your digestion.’ Doctor O’Kane laughed. ‘I’m not surprised you’ve had stomach pains.’

‘What lemons?’ I asked when she’d gone.

‘Your mother’s had a bit of a craze on them,’ my father explained. ‘She has them grated and squeezed and sliced in hot water.’

‘I need the sourness. If I don’t have that I get this terrible coating on me tongue. What does that jade know about anything, she’s just fallen out of the cradle.’ Her shoulders had gone back and she was feisty again now that she’d been told nothing serious was happening.

I thought of the morning near my eleventh birthday when she’d kept me off school, convinced that she had heart trouble. Clutching her chest, she made me ring the doctor and ask for a home call. It was in the days before we had a phone and I raced to the phone box, gabbling my message, running back in a fearful sweat to the house, convinced that when I got there she’d be dead. She was propped up in bed saying the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary in a breathless voice. I fretted until the doctor arrived, attempting to clear up so that he wouldn’t see the worst of the jumble we lived in. Her bedroom smelled cheesy but she wouldn’t have a window open, saying that the row the buses made jangled her nerves. When he marched in I hovered near the bedroom door and listened to him clicking his stethoscope. She weakly explained to him that she’d had severe pains in her chest, just here. I heard him tell her snappily that she should lose weight and stop eating the rhubarb that was causing heartburn. For a moment I froze, thinking that heartburn meant a fatal disease but he continued that her heart was as strong as an ox; being so overweight, however, must put strain on it long-term. Fewer calories and more exercise, he threw at her, pushing past me on his way out and giving me a stern look which seemed to accuse me of complicity in this time-wasting. I hung my head and felt a hot blush on my neck. After he’d gone she’d cast her beads aside, bounded out of bed, cooked a huge fry-up and instructed me not to tell my father about his visit or that I’d missed a day’s school. I watched her shovelling down sausages and bacon and swallowed bile, promising myself that she’d never fool me again.

‘Ah, but six lemons a day, Kitty, that’s going it some,’ my father was pointing out.

‘Six! Think of all that acid,’ I said to her.

She put on her obstinate face, the one I imagined she’d worn as a toddler when life tried to thwart her. ‘They’re good for me,’ she insisted, ‘they clean out me system, keep me from being bunged up.’

I shrugged. There was no talking any sense to her, she’d go her own way, she always had.

The Beardy Fella

It was a hot, sticky summer’s day, August 1966.1 was fourteen and I thought I looked pretty far out in my cream cotton flares and orange T-shirt from Bazazz Boutique in the High Street. Despite my trendy clothes, I was dissatisfied. I had no money and nowhere to go. I was at that stage of moody adolescence when home seems like a shuttered prison and your parents are an embarrassment.

I could tolerate being seen with my father who was mildly spoken, tall and slim; with his neatly-trimmed moustache and erect bearing he looked vaguely military. The possibility of being publicly associated with my mother made my skin clammy. She was unacceptable from every view point; grossly fat, loud-voiced, horribly gregarious, unpredictable and toothless. Pyorrhoea had caused the loss of all her teeth in her mid-forties. She had been supplied with a false set but only wore them for photographs or important occasions, maintaining that they were pure torture. When she did insert these brilliant white gnashers her mouth looked over-crowded and horsey. The rest of the time she gummed her food and spoke indistinctly, spraying spittle. I had started to put carefully planned avoidance tactics into practice. I attended a different mass and found reasons not to help her with the shopping. If anyone called at the house I ducked into my bedroom, shot the little bolt I had fixed to the inside and lurked behind a locked door until they’d gone.

She didn’t seem to notice; in fact, during the summer holidays she sought my company, bored by herself. She had few friends and no job, my brother had emigrated and my father was at work. Most mornings, unless it was a day for a jaunt or a visit to the surgery, she would lie in bed late listening to middle-brow radio and singing along with Doris Day, ‘que sera sera’. At about half-ten she would get up and eat a substantial breakfast; two boiled eggs from one of those double-jointed egg cups, half a loaf of bread smothered with marmalade, a couple of pots of tea and to finish with, a grapefruit to deceive herself that she was following a light diet. She would wash down her happy pills with the dregs of her tea and then install herself by the window, still in her loose cotton nightie, to watch the neighbours and see if she could catch anyone spitting into the hedge.

On that baking August morning I was planning to sidle off to the library where I could sit in the shady reference section and read Frank Yerby whose historical novels were sexually titillating. I was dismayed to hear my mother moving around at half-nine and to find that she was fully dressed in a good Marks and Spencer floral skirt matched with one of her white cotton charity shop blouses. This meant that she was off on a jaunt, probably a bargain hunt.

‘Ah, ye’re about,’ she said, ambushing me as I came downstairs. ‘That’s great, we’ll get a march on the day and we can be back for lunch.’

‘What?’ I said, mulish.

‘I’ve found a new dealer, a beardy fella. He does house clearances up at Archway. There’s a picture he has that I want but I’ll need a hand with it.’ The gleam of the chase was in her eye.

‘I’ve got plans. I’m going out,’ I told her, picking at a flake of peeling paint on the door jamb.

‘Where are ye going?’

‘The library.’

‘Sure ye can go there any time. No wonder ye’re short-sighted, with yeer head always stuck in a book.’

‘I’m not interested in going to the beardy fella, those places make me feel funny.’