by Annie Murray
Lisa, my sister-in-law, is a hairdresser but she was on about her new idea of doing Botox treatments on the side.
‘You can earn as much in a day by just doing two treatments,’ she said. ‘Work from home – what’s not to like?’
She looked sleek, beautiful, her long brown hair falling forward over one shoulder, subtly iced with blonde highlights; sheer tights, high heels. Her girls are lovely to look at too, and more down to earth – I’m really fond of both of them. I told Emma I had booked a dental appointment for the New Year and she said, ‘Oh, as soon as I’m fully qualified you’ll have to come to me, Auntie!’
‘I will.’ I put my arm round Emma and squeezed gently. It was lovely to see her – her youth and sweetness and her face which had strong echoes of her dad, my brother. And Clare, more like her mother, has already grown into a little mother herself, on the go non-stop after Amy, a tiny blonde whirlwind. It was an aching pleasure to have their vibrant young life around me: all that went from our household in one stroke.
And as soon as Christmas was over – it passed busily, cracks being papered over as usual – Dorrie fell ill with a bad cold. So I’ve been looking after her ever since, going along to the house early morning, late at night and on and off all day. Ian even slept over one night. But she’s looking a bit brighter today.
In all that time Dorrie has not once said to me, ‘Have you read the writing I gave you?’ Because the truth is, I still haven’t finished reading all of it. When Dorrie gave it to me I thought, by the way she said it, that there was something she wanted to tell me. Something secret and important. But what I’ve read so far, although it was interesting, seemed to be just a collection of rambling memories. But I feel bad that I haven’t finished it. I realize for the umpteenth time what a selfless person Dorrie is, always one to step back and let everything be about everyone else as if she’s of no importance.
More people come into the waiting room – another family, three kids. Oh, no. Why didn’t I make the appointment for after the school term had started again? Another woman sits opposite me and seems to be trying to catch my eye. The last thing I want is a conversation. In desperation I reach over to the pile of dog-eared magazines.
There are Auto mags, others on home decoration, months-old Cosmopolitan. There’s a weekend colour supplement – that’ll do. The date on it is December – not too far back then.
Thumbing through . . . an article on somewhere in Eastern Europe, the boom in holiday homes; a sparky comment piece by some young journalist about dyeing hair – ‘To dye for?’ Her mugshot shows a young, pretty face surrounded by tumbling ginger waves. What the hell would she be doing bothering about dyeing her hair?
Turning a page, my eyes lock on to the words while at the same time the photograph seizes my attention, disorientating me. For a moment it seems so odd seeing them both together that I have to look again and check, almost like hearing my own thoughts called out loud by someone else.
The boy is Paul . . . No, he isn’t, yet he is – in essence. The photo is a close-up of a face, or three-quarters of a face, the left side cut off and fading into shadow. The boy is looking down, the light just catching his right eye, which gleams in the shadow. The eyebrow is thick, black. As I focus I realize the boy is Indian, hard to tell his age. But he is Paul – similar in age, the dark brow and sombre, closed-in expression. There is that essence of a deep sadness which we could feel coming from Paul as he grew older, emphasized by the fact that the face is framed by darkness.
‘That Night,’ it says underneath.
That Night.
It takes me a few seconds to absorb the whole headline.
‘That Night: 30 Years of Agony for the Children of Bhopal.’
My eyes skim over the words. Bhopal. The name is familiar, an echo in my memory.
‘The night of 2 December 1984, thirty years ago this week, Nasreen Iqbal, then a young mother of four children, settled down for a night’s sleep. Theirs was a humble dwelling, no more than a shack alongside the railway, a neighbourhood on the north side of the city of Bhopal in central India. Nasreen and her husband Ghusun shared this cramped home with his mother and uncle. Nasreen had no idea that by the end of that night she and her six-month-old baby would be the only members of her family left alive.’
‘Mrs Stefani?’
I jump, gasping.
‘Sorry – didn’t mean to startle you! Would you like to come through now?’
Gathering my things, I scoop up the magazine and take it with me.
Afterwards, I pop in to see Dorrie, heat some soup and carry it up to her in bed. The sunken look she has had for the last few days has lifted and she smiles as I walk in. I’m so relieved, I go and kiss her. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Dorrie now as well.
Like the rest of the house the bedroom is immaculate: pale green walls, pretty curtains dotted with green and mauve flowers, bed with a pale green counterpane, dressing table, chair, a picture of the old Pears Soap ad on the wall, showing the little lad blowing bubbles. A small framed photo on the bedside table shows Ian and Cynthia when they were kids. Little else.
‘You look a lot brighter,’ I tell her.
Dorrie tuts a bit, adjusting herself to get comfy. We bought her a little table to go over the bed, like in a hospital.
‘Proper old nuisance, aren’t I?’ She waves away my protest. ‘I don’t feel quite so anyhow today. Thanks, bab – I’ll see if I can get some of this down me.’ Her shaky hand lifts the spoon with infinite care. ‘You not having any?’
‘I’m all right. I’ll have something at home.’
I wait with her until she has had what she can manage – half a tin of tomato soup, a soft white roll with margarine spread, a small banana. Not bad. I watch her, fondly, thinking, I’ve been so wrapped up in myself. I’ve never really asked her anything much about herself, her life.
‘I’ll leave you to have a nap and I’ll be back later.’ I take the tray and help her settle for a rest. She looks dark against the pillow, wizened and sweet, like a little animal. ‘I’ve not had the chance what with Christmas,’ I say. ‘But now I’m going to settle down and read the rest of your writing – you know, what you gave me.’
‘Oh, ar . . . Well, don’t strain yourself.’ Dorrie seems a bit embarrassed, almost as if she doesn’t want it mentioned. Closing her eyes she says, ‘You’re a good wench, you are.’
Sixteen
Dorrie’s velvet-soft envelope rests on the sofa beside me.
But first, I pull the magazine out of my bag and read about India. About a chemical plant making pesticide, owned by an American company called Union Carbide. About the way the cows started dying from drinking water in waste ponds around the factory soon after it started production. And about the early hours of 3 December 1984, the clouds of choking, poisonous gas which escaped from the plant, drifting across the slum neighbourhood where Nasreen Iqbal and her family, along with thousands of others, were settling to sleep.
I read about the horror and panic as crowds of people tried to flee the toxic cloud enveloping their neighbourhood, many of them falling to the ground, vomiting, frothing at the mouth, their eyes and lungs burning.
Nasreen set out in panic with her family. She was carrying her little baby, covering his face with her shawl as she ran. In the mayhem she was separated from the rest of the family. She never saw any of them alive again.
I read about the bodies piled in the streets the next day, the rows of people sitting with cloths over their eyes, trying to relieve the burning pain. I read about the mass graves, the panic in hospitals whose staff had no real idea how to treat the effects of the gas. The way the company, in calculating denial, would not reveal what the gas was.
The compensation this rich, Western company finally paid out, for the gasping, agonized survivors who could no longer work or live a life that anyone would want, amounted to roughly 7p a day – an average depending, of course, on how long they survived.
But ‘that nig
ht’ was far from the end of the story.
A photograph on the second page shows the old plant, a gaunt collection of corroded pipes under a rusting roof standing like a bleak skeleton over a neighbourhood in which it caused such havoc, such pain and suffering. It stands there to this day, its abandoned chemicals still poisoning the water because no one will take responsibility for clearing it up. The poison is spreading year on year.
The facts of this filter into me. Thirty years since the gas leak. I remember it now, just. In 1984 I was busy in my first proper teaching job. December 1984? I struggle to think. Some of the images are familiar. An item on the news which I was mostly too busy to watch or read. News which I have assumed to be ancient history, one of those other awful events, but resolved long ago. Now, it’s all brought up close – what those people, the ones who lived, have been suffering every hour of every day since. But it seems that it’s not just them – the poison continues into the second and third generation, babies affected by its presence in their parents’ bodies, before they have even begun.
For long minutes, I stare at the face of the boy. He’s so like my boy. I stroke my finger down his cheek, almost expecting him to raise his eyes to look back at me. I lift the page to kiss his paper face, this boy of some other mother.
‘What’s your name?’ I whisper.
I lay the magazine down beside me, his sombre face my companion, and stare at it for a long time. Finally, I pick up Dorrie’s envelope and find the end of the page I had got to before.
‘What are my memories of my mother, in our little house in Deritend . . . ?’
Turning to the next page, though, the colour of the paper changes slightly and the ink is a darker blue. I finger through the pages to see if they have got out of order, but seeing nothing that seems obviously to follow on from the last one, I read from where I left off. Dorrie must have written for a long stretch to begin with. After that, it’s all more fragmented, as if she was snatching time between other things.
People nowadays have no idea just how filthy everything was back then.
When I was a girl in the 1930s it was all coal fires and the air was thick with it, gritty on your face – and that was on top of all the muck pumped out by the factories. You could hardly see across the streets and some days you’d be almost afraid to breathe. Keeping a house clean was the devil. They started sorting it out more after the war and the smog that killed all those people in London – but we had our share of pea-soupers in Brum I can tell you. The air left soot and metal on your tongue. I’ve seen washing turn colour on the line – there were always smuts but sometimes the whites would turn a sickly yellow. And everyone was coughing, all the time. You could hear them at night, people out on the street, hawking and spitting. My poor little sister Irene hardly had a day free of pain all her life which ended soon enough. God took her when she was only six years old.
Horses were everywhere, of course. I miss them. There was one used to come round with a cart with all the blocks of salt – lovely big brown and white horse he was and he’d sort of sniff at your hand if you held it out and I loved stroking his nose. Their muck was all over the roads, they brought on the flies in the summer like a green cloud and oil and mess everywhere.
On the next piece of paper:
I often think of my aunt Beattie. What a frightened young woman she must have been, left all alone with six young brothers and sisters to look after. Of course, by the time I knew her, her life had got to a point of calmer waters. I loved Beattie like no one else, not even our mother. I’m not ashamed to say it.
Mom was a harsh, unhappy woman. You might say she looked like a prizefighter. She must have weighed sixteen stone, she was dark as a gypsy and fierce with it. Drink gave her a tongue like a lash and she wore a little cat o’nine tails at her belt which didn’t go unused. Poverty and unhappiness and the drink make poor but frequent bedfellows.
I can see our mother now, in that rotten little kitchen full of steam from her boiling pot and the condensation running down the walls. It wasn’t the only thing running down the walls in those verminous houses either. No one has any idea these days.
She’d be wearing that big pinafore apron, the poker or a ladle or whatever the latest weapon was in her hand, waving it about and we kids cringing close to the walls or flying out the door. We lived out on the street all we could – most kids did, the cramped state of those houses. The thing was . . .
Another sheet of paper begins:
Our poor old Pa wasn’t much of a specimen, but he wasn’t cruel. Our mother was another story. By God she had a pair of lungs on her. You could hear her bawling from here to next Friday – no wonder our father almost lived in the Spotted Dog and came home too kalied to take any notice. Looking back now I’ve got to an age she never lived to see, I think to myself, Ethel Parsons, our mother – who was she really?
Dad did the one thing in his life that showed any initiative which was to leave her. It was the only time I ever saw her cry other than when he died – but I think it was more from worry and fury at being a deserted woman than from lost love. And she was no age when she died – forty-nine and it was cruel, everything about it. I wish she’d had a better life and maybe she’d have been a happier person, but I don’t have many good memories of her. She had a big laugh and on the rare times we heard it, it felt as if everything would be all right.
RIP, Mom.
On the next page:
The day that stands out in all my childhood was when Aunt Beattie took us to the zoo. I’ll never forget that, me and my brothers – tram rides and then to this new place they had opened not long before. It was shortly before the war, the summer of 1939. When we rode on the tram we saw the barrage balloons on ropes over Birmingham. So I would have been nine when we went and that would make Eric six and Bert nearly four. We’d lost our Irene by then.
All day the sun shone, not a cloud in the sky, and there was the Earl of Dudley’s castle with a moat and caves and then all the animals. So many I can’t say now but there were zebras, bears and elephants . . . so many different things. It was quite something for us kids who’d hardly seen anything but pet cats and dogs and the odd parrot in our old streets. Our life was lived going back and forth to Fazeley Street School, which was a happy enough place for me, and to the coal wharf when we had to make ends meet, picking up nubs of coal off the barges. And suddenly here we were in this paradise.
There was a little pony called Dot and you could stroke her. Her nose was like a velvet cushion, I love a horse’s nose, and she smelt lovely and she breathed on my neck. Beatt said, ‘Oh, she’s taken a liking to you Dorrie, she’s giving you a horse kiss!’
We had a picnic – and ice cream. Eric and Bert fell asleep on the way back, but I sat next to Aunt Beatt and she talked to me almost as if I was a grown-up. There aren’t many days in your life when you’re all buzzing with happiness, as if all of you is alive and skipping about in every part. I’ve had one or two days like that but that’s a story for another day.
‘What’re you doing?’
I just about hear Ian come in, later on after work, but I’m glued to the screen of my laptop, immersed in the website I’m reading.
‘Oh – just looking something up.’ I turn to look at him.
This is all I feel I can say. I find that I don’t want to show him the photo, can’t tell him, not yet, that something in me is grinding into movement, tiny grains shifting on the rocks which have been blocking all the light, in a way that I don’t even understand myself.
Ian nods politely, seeming distracted, and does not ask any more. In his work clothes, his hair untidy, he looks crumpled and forlorn. Even under the swarthiness he has inherited from Dorrie, he looks pale.
‘Tea’s nearly ready,’ I say, shutting down the laptop. Sauce for spag bol has been bubbling on the cooker for the past hour.
‘Smells good. I’ll just get changed.’
Soon I hear him moving about on the floor above. In the kitchen I curse, fi
nding the sauce sticking to the bottom of the pan. I’ve been too absorbed in reading, in looking at the photographs of Bhopal. There was one picture I knew I had seen somewhere before: the face of a dead infant. The picture was taken just as the child was being buried, its face and unseeing eyes the only part of it not cradled in dark earth. A man’s hand is gently stroking the dust from it, as if the father could not help but caress his child one more time before parting from it for ever. Unlike Nasreen Iqbal’s little baby, this one had not survived the gas.
While waiting for the pasta pan to boil, I stand under the bright kitchen lights, staring ahead of me. Eventually I tease spaghetti down into the boiling water, then grate cheese into a little blue bowl. Every day I go on doing what has to be done, cooking meals, bits of cleaning, wondering why I’m bothering.
There is a clinic in Bhopal now, I have read, especially for the children. These are children conceived long after the gas disaster. I saw a picture of a boy born with the bones in the lower parts of his legs curved like crossbows. He is looking up at the camera, a yellow flower held between his fingers as if it is something sacred. The clinic is called Chingari and it means flame, or ‘spark’ – the kindling of the fire of life within a person.
‘How’s Mom?’ Ian says, once we are sitting at the table with bowls of spaghetti. He sounds exhausted.
‘She’s getting there,’ I say. ‘She’s had some soup and she’s eating quite well now. I went in at tea time and made her some scrambled egg. You could go and check she’s all right for the night?’
