Araby

I confirmed that I would. I went into my mother to tell her. My father had given her a cup of tea and she was holding it, untasted, in her lap.

‘I’m mucky, Rory,’ she said. ‘Look at me, I haven’t even had a cat’s lick for a week. What will the doctor think at all?’

I smiled. ‘A cat’s lick’ was the name we’d always given to a quick rub of a flannel on the face.

‘Would you like to have a bit of a clean-up?’ I asked her. ‘I’ll wash your hair for you too. You’ve always liked your hair to look nice.’

I didn’t want Molloy turning his nose up at my mother; I wanted her to have dignity as he probed. I wasn’t sure how she would react to my suggestion. This was the moment when my mother needed a daughter and I wished for a sister to leave delicate tasks to. I was used to manipulating the limbs and kneading muscles of both sexes, but I had never been in the bathroom at the same time as my mother and the barrier of propriety was a strong one.

‘’Tis a fine state I’m in when me son has to help me wash,’ she said but she nodded her agreement.

She let me lead her to the bathroom, walking slowly and giving little groans. Inside she held onto the sink.

‘That was my life-blood draining away when I bled,’ she said flatly.

I smoothed her hair back, paralysed by this sudden insight. She knew the symptoms of cancer; a woman who lived across the road in Tottenham had died of it and my mother had watched her waste away. She had always said the word in a hushed tone, as if to invoke it might bring its wrath on her. I didn’t know what to say. I took the coward’s way out.

‘You’re not well at all, Mum, that’s for sure.’

‘I should have had that operation, years ago.’

‘Maybe. But that’s past now.’

‘Oh everything’s past now.’

There was a silence. My eyes were heavy.

‘Shall we do your hair first?’ I asked gently, pulling up the chair that they threw towels on.

‘I couldn’t be climbing on that,’ she said fearfully in a child’s voice, clutching my arm.

My heart juddered. ‘No, no. No climbing. You can sit on this and rest your head back, like at the hairdresser’s.’

She acquiesced and I helped her lower herself down. I wetted her hair and poured on shampoo, lightly massaging it in. Her temples had become concave and I imagined that if I pressed too firmly my fingers would penetrate her scalp. Strands of hair came out on my knuckles, threading them together. Her hair had been a source of huge pride, thick and wavy into old age. She would often say that it had drawn many compliments in her youth, a honey-coloured delight. For years she had kept it long because she hated hairdressers. They pulled you about, she said, and made an eejit of you. Her scalp was sensitive and the slightest tug on her hair hurt her; she didn’t like anyone touching it. It was still well-coloured with little grey but as I witnessed how thin it had become tears filmed my eyes. This was the first time I had washed my mother’s hair and it was slipping away, swirling into the plughole. Her head seemed weightless in my hands and the brown furry ball webbing my nails emphasized that she was giving up, letting her pride and joy go without a fight. Any hope that I had trickled away with the soapy water. I wanted to weep but I reached for a towel, passing it unobtrusively across my eyes before wrapping it carefully around her head.

‘Now,’ I said, sitting her up as you would a child, ‘was that okay? I didn’t hurt, did I?’

‘No, ye’re very good. The water was lovely.’

‘I was better than those old jades of hairdressers, then?’

She nodded but I didn’t raise a smile. I helped her unbutton her cross-over apron and she stood up so that I could turn the chair around. I soaped a flannel and she ran it around her face and neck and under her arms. The tops of her arms, where there used to be solid quivering fat, were wasted. I turned away and fiddled with the soaps and shaving gear on the shelf behind me, rearranging them. She ran out of energy half way, leaning against the sink rim, so I rinsed the flannel and went back over her skin, wiping away the soap. Her large stomach, slightly exposed beneath the apron, was a yellowy colour. She said that she could manage her other bits herself so I ran fresh water.

‘Shall I help you with your knickers?’ Although she thought of me as a medic, we’d never been in this kind of personal territory before. I hovered, unsure.

‘Just slide them down for me.’

She eased them from the top and I pulled them slowly by their elasticated hems. Then I left her to see if I could find fresh clothes. In the bedroom I searched the chest of drawers and collected clean underwear and a cotton dress. When I got back to her she was resting in the chair, the damp flannel in her hands.

‘All done?’

‘All done,’ she said, ‘mission accomplished.’

Putting her clean knickers on was the hardest part of dressing. It hurt her to raise her legs so I had to carefully lift each foot and manoeuvre the voluminous Aertex garment she liked up her calves and thighs. She moved them upwards, leaning against me, her head pressed to my chest.

‘Do ye remember the time we were on the bus and ye suddenly told me ye’d no underpants on?’ she asked, steadying herself with her arms around my waist.

‘Yes. How old was I?’

‘Oh, four I think. We were after coming out in a hurry. Ye were always difficult about letting me dress ye, ye’d want to do it yeerself. Ye never wanted to hold me hand in the street. Ye called out about the pants in a loud voice. I was mortified.’

In the kitchen I dried her hair, kicking the clumps that fell to the floor under the seat so that she wouldn’t see them.

‘Where’s yeer father?’ she asked, sounding worried.

‘He was with the hens and then he was going to get some turf in.’

‘’Tis getting chilly outside, he doesn’t want to be catching cold.’ She pressed the palms of her hands together. ‘I hate it when the evenings draw in, the place is terrible lonely. Call him in, will ye.’

I went to the door and saw that he was opening the gate for the doctor’s car.

‘Dr Molloy’s here,’ I told her.

‘I can’t go to hospital, I’ve no clean nightdress.’

‘That’s no reason not to go to hospital. If you’re ill, you need to find out what’s the matter and Molloy is only a GP. You need the expertise in hospital.’ I crossed to her. ‘You won’t stay in there, you’ll come home again.’

‘Are ye sure, Rory?’

‘I’ll bring you home myself.’ I kissed her forehead. Now she smelled of peach soap and the talcum she’d asked me to sprinkle over her arms.

Dr Molloy was business-like, which I was grateful for. I was ready to step in if he started taking her to task for misbehaving but when he saw her he just asked her how she was feeling. He spent two minutes examining her, glancing at her stomach, then straightened. He was going to ring for an ambulance, he told her; she must go into hospital that night. She said nothing. My father sat down beside her and said she must try to eat something; how about a bit of an egg custard? The doctor used the phone and I saw him to his car.

‘She’s dying,’ I told him.

He swung his bag onto the passenger seat. ‘It doesn’t look good. Rapid, whatever it is. I can’t say more till the hospital takes a look.’

He accelerated away, his lights fading into the gloom. Once his car had gone there was silence. The faint barking of the ratty dog from up the road floated on the evening air. I bent down to sniff a late rose that my mother had bought on a trip to the garden centre three years ago. I picked a few twigs of rosemary to put in her pocket, hoping that they would make her think of exotic places in the hospital’s antiseptic confines. Turning to the house, I opened the kitchen door. My parents were sitting side by side, hands clasped, looking into the fire.

Nectar

My mother believed in Santa until she was fifteen. When a parlour maid in Youghal laughingly revealed that he was a fiction she cried herself to sleep.

She was born near Bantry, the third of six children. Her father drank and died – I never knew whether from a pickled liver or something else – when she was seven. Her mother struggled to bring her children up on a paltry widow’s pension, doing odd jobs locally and bartering eggs for milk and butter. I’d always had the impression that my mother had been frightened of her father; he was an unpredictable, boisterous man from what she said, although she rarely spoke of him. I suspected that he had been a wife beater. My mother placed great value on the fact that my father was teetotal and of a placid temperament.