Araby. Gretta Mulrooney
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.
‘See,’ my mother said as the bus swayed into view, ‘it’s only half-eleven. Didn’t I say we’d be back for lunch?’
I spent a few days with my mother after her return from hospital. She seemed hale and hearty. On the first evening back she headed for the roses with the secateurs, saying that they were getting blowsy. I shopped in Fermoy and bought her a packet of sanitary towels, knowing that she’d be too embarrassed to ask for them herself and wouldn’t mention such an item to my father. She threw them into the kitchen cupboard, saying that I’d had no need to get them ould yokes, wasn’t it all sorted now.
She and my father settled into their routines; feeding and cleaning out the hens, tending the vegetable patch, weeding flowers, collecting juicy nettles for the two rabbits, Collins and Dev. My mother did a good deal of pointing and instructing with her blackthorn stick while my father pulled his old beret down and wielded the hoe. She had started a small herb garden and picked a daily clump of rosemary to put in her pocket. Rolling it through her fingers she sniffed deeply, smiling; it smelled, she said, of Araby.
‘Do you still miss London?’ I asked her as she watered her busy Lizzies. This was a question I would normally avoid, dreading the tale of loss and loneliness that would pour out. But the frightened look in her eyes when Dr O’Kane approached her hospital bed had touched me and I’d felt protective towards her. I suppose I was trying to reassure myself as much as discover her feelings.
She picked off dead leaves, rolling them in her fingers. ‘Some mornings I’d give me right arm to hop on a bus and stop at Rossi’s café for egg and chips.’
‘You could have egg and chips in Fermoy.’
‘It wouldn’t be the same. Yeer father would be worrying at me to get home and there’s no bus.’
‘This is what you always said you wanted when you were in Tottenham; a cottage and half an acre.’ For years she’d complained about the traffic and the noise and the smallness of her garden. I remembered her standing at the back door in the summer, looking out on the patch of drying lawn and saying wistfully that it would be a fine day to be in Kinsale.
‘So I did, so I did.’ Her martyr’s voice took over. ‘Of course I only came here because yeer father was so keen. He had his heart set on it and I couldn’t disappoint him.’
This self-deception left me breathless, even though I’d heard it before. As I recalled, she had been the one to promote the idea; she had bought copies of the Irish papers to look at property. I felt the old familiar guard coming down, the one I’d carefully constructed over the years to protect myself from her manipulations and the webs of illusion that she spun.
‘’Tis terrible lonely here sometimes,’ she said.
‘You could get to know people if you tried; there’s the church.’ I heard my tone; even and dry, distancing myself and warning her to back off. This was a record that we’d played many times before and the lyrics were always the same.
‘Oh, I can’t be doing all that at my age, I’m an old woman.’ On cue, she changed the subject. ‘Do ye ever see the beardy fella?’
‘No.’
‘I wonder is he still there. Do you think would he remember me?’ She looked across the fields, twirling a flower by its stem.
‘I’m sure he would, yes.’ I watched her, knowing that she would carry her discontent wherever she went. I thought of those lines from Much Ado About Nothing; ‘one foot in sea and one on shore’. If she ever reached Heaven there would be a honeymoon period when she would cultivate her preferred saints. Then she would start to find fault with the harps and the constant Glorias, declaring that they were splitting her skull. Saint Peter would be accused of giving her dirty looks.
Back in London I resumed work. At first I phoned each night, then settled back into my usual once weekly call. I was having some tiles replaced on my roof and I watched the workman scale his ladder, thinking that if my mother was here she’d have picked an argument with him before the day was out, alleging that he was hammering too loudly or that he’d scraped the paintwork or knocked over one of her flower-pots. I’d lost count of the number of people she’d fought with, relishing the injection of some drama into her slow-moving days. A plumber who’d come to fix the toilet in Tottenham had been convicted