Araby. Gretta Mulrooney
pain just here. It’s me time of life …’
‘Can’t do, Aspirin’s the sort of thing you should bring with you,’ the nurse said combatively.
‘Ah now, surely it’s not too much to ask,’ my mother challenged, her tone stronger. She pushed her glasses up her nose, a sure sign that she was ready for a fight.
‘Company policy, see,’ the nurse stated with satisfaction. ‘Emergencies only.’
‘So if I cut me wrists ye’d give me an Aspirin?’ my mother demanded.
The nurse looked disapproving. ‘I’d get your head down if I was you,’ she said, dismissing us and moving back towards her office.
‘I wouldn’t expect much from an ould jade like you,’ my mother snapped. ‘An ould jade held together with safety pins. Ye and yeer ould boat – safety pins is all that’s keeping you afloat.’
The nurse slammed her door and my mother gave the desk bell a farewell ringing slap. Honour satisfied, we rolled back to our seats. I was thankful that the ship was asleep and there had been no witnesses. My mother cooled her temples with 4711 cologne and we broke into the grated carrots. They tasted fresh and sweet in the sour-sick air of the cabin. Midnight feasts were the best ones, my mother said, digging me in the ribs and chuckling. She downed a fizzing bottle of soda water and, burping loudly, said that that felt better, it must have been the wind giving her gyp. She crossed her ankles and waggled a foot, saying that we’d the back of the journey broken now. Her right arm around me, she clasped my head into her huge swell of bosom.
‘Settle down there now, dotey,’ she said, ‘and we’ll be in Cork before ye can blink.’
I hired a car at Cork airport, my usual practice. My parents would shake their heads, saying that I shouldn’t waste my money when my father could pick me up. But I knew that the arthritis riddling his bones made driving for any length of time an endurance test. Also, I needed to know that I could get away sometimes during my stays, especially on days when my mother was sunk in gloom, dwelling on her real or imaginary pains.
Ever since I could remember, she had been a mass of symptoms. I had no idea what she actually suffered with and what was conjured up. I supposed it didn’t much matter; to her it was all real. The National Health Service had always been her Aladdin’s cave, a box of goodies for plundering. She had been so impressed at its inception after the war, she seemed to think she had a life-long duty to make full use of its services. Compared to health care in Ireland where you still had to pay for the doctor’s visit, it represented all that was best about England, especially in the fifties, a decade awash with free vitamins and orange juice. The remedies she was given were put on trial when she got them home; if they didn’t bring dramatic relief within a couple of days they were discarded with allegations that they were causing heart irregularities or looseness of the bowel. If the medication was ineffective but she liked the look of it she would arbitrarily double the dosage; for my mother, more always meant better. When she met church buddies in the street she would chant her dosages like a litany, going over with relish the numbers and orders of medicines she had been told to take. ‘Under the doctor’ was one of her favourite phrases, imparted with a significant nod. Visiting the surgery gave her days a shape and meaning and staved off boredom. Tending to her health was a career and each new symptom and medication a promotion.
Her illnesses framed my childhood, trapping and bewildering me. She had taught me to count using her bottles of pills. I had picked the shiny orange and black capsules from her palm, lining them up on the table in tens. We’d done adding up with the round yellow tablets and the oval-shaped pink ones and multiplication with bright red bullet-shaped pills. In primary school, when we sat chanting our tables, I would see those red pills, the colour of phone boxes, dancing before my eyes. Whenever the teacher introduced sums involving questions of the sharing out of sweets or money, I pictured the ranked lines of tablets on the shelf over the radio or thought of Mr Hillard the chemist, who blanched when he saw my mother steaming towards him with yet another prescription.
Whether the washing had been done, the dinner cooked, the shopping fetched or the fire lit, depended on the state of her constitution on any particular day. Everything was unpredictable and subject to change at the last minute; a morning that had started promisingly would degenerate because a headache/attack of nerves/shooting pain in the stomach/hot sweats dripping down her skin or swelling of the legs had suddenly disabled her. I used to look at school friends and wonder how their mothers managed to stay healthy. There seemed to be some obscure code I hadn’t broken. I would envy them, knowing that they wouldn’t reach home to find a groaning figure splayed in a chair amidst the detritus of the breakfast dishes; they wouldn’t immediately be asked for a cup of weak luke-warm Bovril and two of the blood pressure tablets by a frail voice emanating from behind a pair of home-made eye shades.
The thought of her on bad days used to make my teeth ache. Her dramatic maunderings struck me into a paralysed silence; what could be said to someone who found no solace in words? As I got older that silence was tight with rage and I would ignore her and her requests for drinks and tablets, telling her to take a walk outside and think about something else. But now, as I stepped on the accelerator, I was acknowledging that you weren’t usually admitted to hospital for imaginary pain.
The drive from Cork took forty-five minutes. I rolled down the window and inhaled deeply. The air was peat-smoked and fragrant. My parents’ cottage was on the outskirts of a small village, looking down into the valley. I stopped the car momentarily on the curve of the road to examine its whitewashed walls and glossy blue windows. Smoke idled from the chimney. It was just like one of the houses pictured on the sleeves of the terrible records my mother used to play in London. ‘If We Only Had Old Ireland Over Here’ was her favourite. It featured maudlin songs about cruel landlords, grieving silver-haired mothers and lonely travellers far away from Erin’s fair shores. They made me hot with embarrassment, especially in summer when my mother played them loudly with the windows wide open. During my teens I would hide upstairs, shamed because they singled our family out as different and because I instinctively loathed the sentimentality of the lyrics. My mother would sing along in her trilling soprano while I was reading up about the swinging London which seemed to be mysteriously inaccessible even though it was happening all around me. I would tune the radio to Sandie Shaw or The Beatles to drown her out. Her favourite singer was Bridie Gallagher who had a rich, swooping voice. I imagined Bridie as a big-busted woman with a perm, the kind you often saw in small Irish towns.
My father came out to greet me, his braces dangling down over his legs and shaving foam on his chin. I hugged him, inhaling his combined smells of rough-cut tobacco and supermarket soap. He patted my arm, embarrassed by the contact.
‘The roses are nearly over,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s been on at me to prune them. I bet she mentions it again today.’
‘How is she? This seems to have been very sudden.’
‘Oh, not so bad. They’ve done the tests now, just waiting for results. I was hoping you’d talk to the doctors when we go in, you’ll understand it better.’
I knew from the way he bent down to examine a rose bush that he didn’t want me to ask him any more about what had happened, this event that was specific to women.
‘I imagine she hates the hospital food,’ I said, to let him off the hook.
He straightened up, back on safe territory. ‘Oh! Don’t talk to me! She has me worn out fetching in ham and such. And goat’s milk it has to be now; she says cow’s upsets her.’
We went in. I made tea and prepared cheese with brown bread while he finished shaving. Everything in this small cottage was familiar, especially the trail of disorder that my mother always spread around her. All of their belongings had been transposed from Tottenham and situated, as far as was possible, in the same places and patterns. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine that I heard the throaty hum of a red bus. The only new thing they had bought for the house in ten years was a tea strainer because the ratty