Araby

My mother had graduated from second-hand clothes shops to bric-à-brac emporiums in the mid-sixties; the kinds of places that later on, when old artefacts had become the rage, would call themselves antique centres with names like ‘Granny’s Attic’ and ‘Times Past’. In her shopping heyday they were known as ‘Fred’s’ or ‘Bert’s’ and fairly valuable pieces from early in the century went for knock-down prices. She referred to them by the appearance or characteristic of their owners; so the one in Walthamstow was ‘The Foxy Fella’, the one in Haringey ‘Ferrety Nose’ and her favourite in Seven Sisters, ‘Snakey Tongue’.

I had been dragged around them numerous times, shifting from one leg to another in musty back rooms while she threw herself into the rough and tumble of the market-place. She would beaver around, poking at furniture, peering at pieces of silver, holding china to the light, examining for hallmarks and faults while silent men kept a watchful distance, waiting for her to engage them.

‘How much for the tongs?’

‘Five pounds to you. They’re solid silver.’

‘Hmm, I can’t see a mark. Are ye sure they’re not just silver-plated?’

‘Solid silver guaranteed.’

‘I’ll give ye three pounds ten and that’s robbery.’

Because they knew she’d be back again, a cat drawn irresistibly to the cream, they sold. At other times there were no purchases, just the satisfaction of haggling and a point scored.

‘That’s an outrageous price!’

‘Can’t go any lower, Mrs, it’s not worth my while.’

‘Ah well, I’ll be off then.’

‘See you again.’

‘Through the window ye will!’

While all this was going on I would gaze in a trance at stacks of chairs, bureaux, chests of drawers, jugs and candlesticks until the gloom would make me giddy and I’d slip outside and watch her gesturing through the dusty glass.

Despite my boredom I had been thankful for the change of focus from clothes shops. She still made the odd foray to the ‘nearly new’ or charity places; Sue Ryder shops were her favourite due to a tortuous connection based on the fact that Sue Ryder was the wife of a war hero, Leonard Cheshire, who was the friend of Douglas Bader, the pilot who had attempted to escape from the Nazis despite having tin legs. I think my mother must have had a crush on Bader or perhaps just on Kenneth More who played him in the biopic because she spoke of him in reverent tones and said that she’d rather give her few pence to a charity that helped the disabled than to them ould fat cats in the High Street.

Once the thrill of antique hunting took over I was spared the worst excesses of the second-hand clothes she used to buy by the bagful. Outings to the nearly-new shops had always been a rainy day activity, the damp drawing out the must and lingering residues of sweat from piles of discarded garments. My mother would scavenge with a practised hand, enthusing about an alligator belt, a lace collar, a paisley scarf. Yellowed, misshapen combinations would be held to the light and stretched to see if they had a breath of life. Candlewick bedspreads were examined for signs of moths or a tell-tale trace of camphor. Unlikely and awful articles were fitted against me; thick jumpers past their best, the wool lumpy from too many washes, boys’ shorts or trousers with shiny seams and baggy seats and large outdated jackets that I could grow into. The base line, the true test of worth, wasn’t whether a thing was attractive and desirable; it didn’t matter that it was too big or lacking buttons, it was real angora or lambswool or astrakhan or pure silk – ‘ye could pull that through a thimble’ – and it was bought.

One of my worst memories which can still make me shiver was the greenish tweed coat with a fur collar that she bought me one winter. It was three-quarter length, double-breasted, too big for me and ten years out of date. I twisted and turned as she did up the walnut buttons and teased out the collar with a clothes brush. The King of England, she told me, couldn’t wish for a better bit of cloth on his back. It sat on my dejected shoulders like a mouldering blanket, the fur making me sneeze. I knew that I would be a laughing stock if I was seen with it in school so I took it off at the bus stop and shoved it in my bag. For a couple of days I left the house each morning wearing it and shrugged it off around the corner. I froze in the December winds, my teeth chattering in the playground, until I got a chance to nip into the school boiler room and stuff it in the furnace. As the flames licked it I did a little war dance, and worst crime of all, poked my tongue out at my mother as far as it would go. At home I reported sadly that the coat had been stolen from the cloakroom, causing my mother to visit the school and complain. I stood feeling hot in assembly, trying to look suitably bereft, as the head-teacher lectured us on the sin of taking from other people and told us how shocked she was because nothing like this had happened in her school before.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the bags full of clothes were intended for my uncle’s family in Waterford. He and his wife Una had eight children and my mother despatched a huge brown parcel to them three times a year. I would watch with satisfaction tinged with pity as dresses and shirts which had been the height of fashion circa 1954 were folded into piles for a remote farm where Peter Pan collars and voile petticoats had never been seen. The threat to myself waned as string was tightened and secured with sealing wax and my father commented, apparently without irony, that they’d think all their Christmases had come at once.

My father indulged my mother in the purchases which cluttered up our small house, even when she acquired outlandish items; a walnut commode, an accordion inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a huge Spanish galleon made from matchsticks. When she produced a pair of bagpipes he made a fool of himself trying to press notes from the floppy cloth. I used to wonder if he feared what she might get up to if she abandoned this relatively harmless occupation; he may have been thinking of the time she set about home improvements, knocking bricks from the fireplace and almost undermining the chimney-breast.

On that hot morning she smoothed her Crimplene skirt, head lowered, and fired a crafty salvo.

‘I didn’t think it was so much to ask,’ she said. ‘It’ll only take a couple of hours at the most. It’s just as well I didn’t think of meself the time I saved up for the trip to Rome.’

This was a reference to the holiday I’d gone on with the school when I was twelve. My father had said he couldn’t afford it but she’d stored up savings stamps, the green ones with Princess Anne’s profile on, sticking them in a book until the fare had accumulated. At the time I had appreciated it, but now it felt like an albatross around my neck, as it got a mention whenever she wanted something from me.

I shrugged and pulled a reluctant face. If I didn’t go she’d harp on about it for days. ‘All right, but it had better not take long.’

She brightened, swivelling her skirt zip to the side of her waist. ‘Oh, ye’re an angel. Ye won’t notice the time flying.’

The sun streamed into the bus as it swept us to Archway. My mother was humming, tucking stray wisps of hair back into the curled up sausage-bun on the back of her neck. I checked my cream flares; it was only the second time I’d worn them and I worried that I might get them smudged. We were on the long seat, opposite a dark continental-looking woman who remarked on the heat. My mother responded that it was fierce warm sure, bad enough to fry your brains. The dark woman removed her cardigan, hot fingers struggling with the buttons, revealing a low-cut bodice and the swelling tops of brown breasts. My mother poked me in the ribs.

‘Come on up the bus. I’m not sitting here with that ould one showing all she’s got.’ Her voice carried in the still air.

The dark woman scowled and turned to stare out of the window behind her. The conductress looked up from her Daily Mirror and sniggered, winking at me. She was young and good-looking. I traipsed after my mother, seething. There wasn’t much room for me beside her on the two-person seat and I sat scrunched up, my thighs rubbery and a headache starting. I closed my eyes while my mother sang, ‘Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon, all I want is loving you and music, music, music’. A baby grizzled behind us, its cries piercing my skull.

‘Wakey-wakey,’ my mother said. ‘We’re nearly there. I could never have slept during the day at yeer age. Ye should take a tonic, something with iron.’

I remembered that years ago I had heard her refer to a great-aunt who had started screaming one market day in Bantry. The nuns had taken her in and kept her until she died. After that day when she threw her groceries into the air and opened her lungs she never again spoke a sensible word. I wondered what had driven her to such a pass.

We trudged up the hill at Archway, my mother bobbing along with little steps and stopping now and again for breath. A bell jangled as we entered the beardy fella’s and a man with a luxurious growth of hair on his chin appeared from the dark recesses of the shop, smiling when he saw who it was.

‘You’re back again then. After the picture, are you?’

‘Ah well now, that depends on what ye’re asking. I’ve brought me son – he’s a bit of an art conosoor, ye know.’

‘Oh,’ he said in mock amazement, ‘that’s too posh for me, you’ve got me there.’

He lifted a huge frame from behind a bookcase and turned it to the light. I was faced with a tapestry of a solemn-faced Jesus preaching to a multitude. The threads were in violent hues of green and yellow. Jesus had a livid purplish face with murky blemishes resembling chicken-pox scars. His followers were a brown blur.

‘You can’t buy that,’ I hissed, ‘it’s foul and anyway, we’ve nowhere to hang it.’ As soon as the words left my lips I regretted them, knowing that they would be taken as a challenge.

My mother rubbed her fingers along the frame, standing back and looking at it rapturously as if it was a long-lost Van Gogh.

‘I think it’s gorgeous. Look at the work that’s gone into it. There must be hundreds of threads in there and sure somebody did it for the glory of God. How much?’

I moved back and propped myself against a crumbling sofa with horsehair escaping from its seams. A fox’s head perched on one of its arms. Dust motes drifted across an ancient wardrobe with age-mottled glass. The air was so dry and thin it was hard to breathe. In Carnaby Street people were swinging and having their hair cut in geometric shapes. I’d read in the Evening Standard that Mick Jagger was opening a new boutique there this week. I felt a sullen rage.

The beardy fella was examining the masterpiece. ‘Ten quid and that’s a bargain. The frame alone is worth that.’

‘I’ll give ye seven, there’s a scratch on the corner.’

‘Eight.’

‘Ye’re a terrible blackguard. All right so.’ She was pleased. She took out a hanky and rubbed the glass. ‘Will ye give us a hand with it out the door?’ she asked him as she passed over notes.

‘How are you getting it home?’

‘On the bus, me son can help.’

‘Blimey! I hope you’ve got strong muscles, it’s bloody heavy.’ He cast a doubtful glance at my skinny frame.

‘Oh, we’ll manage,’ my mother said, pushing me ahead of her to the door. The beardy fella manhandled the tapestry after us and left us to it.

‘Now,’ my mother said chirpily, ‘we’ll hop on a bus at the corner. Ye go in front.’

The thing was a dead weight and difficult to grasp. We staggered up the road in the blinding sun, panting, stopping every few minutes to massage our fingers. My shoes were rubbing my toes. I felt a pain beginning in my side where the frame was gouging into me. I thought that it must have been like this carrying the cross through Jerusalem; all we needed to complete the picture were centurions and whips.

‘Never mind,’ my mother gasped encouragingly. ‘Not far to the bus now and then we’ll be on the pig’s back.’

I saw that she’d gone beetroot red and a savage satisfaction gave me the strength to make the last few yards. We leaned the tapestry against a low wall by the bus stop and I sank down beside it. My head was hammering, my mouth dry and sandy. I rubbed my bruised hands and noticed that my trousers were covered in dusty marks. Shreds of horsehair were clinging to the seams.