Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  ‘This is your red-haired Irishman, right?’ hiccuped Marla. She kept losing the plot.

  ‘Of course it’s her red-haired Irishman,’ declared Val. ‘Go on, Ange, tell us, what’s the sex like?’

  ‘Val-er-ie!’ shrieked Marla.

  ‘We ‒ haven’t ‒ um, I mean, I haven’t.’

  ‘Blimey, what’s stopping you?’ snorted Val.

  ‘Sssh!’ Marla swayed and waved an abjuring finger at Val. ‘Don’t be tasteless, Val. Angela lost her husband within the last eighteen months.’

  Val tried to access her good taste persona, but failed.

  ‘All the more reason to get back in the swing!’ she squawked. ‘It’s like falling off a horse or …’

  ‘Riding a bike. Yes, yes, I know,’ hissed Angela through pursed lips. ‘Why does everyone make sex sound like a skill you learn at an activity centre, with an accredited course and a certificate at the end?’

  ‘Well, it is an activity,’ pointed out Val. ‘Preferably an outdoors one taught by a hunky instructor. Maybe your bike still has stabilisers, Ange.’

  ‘Val-er-ie!’

  ‘Of course, there’s the other possible explanation for his sexual inhibitions,’ posited Val, with the inebriate’s crafty insight. ‘He’s Irish, you’re more or less Irish. Don’t paddies think women have ground-up glass between their legs?’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Val, he’s a father,’ said Marla uneasily. But Angela had already thwacked down her wine glass, ready to do battle.

  ‘What the hell are you on about, Val? You’re the one stewing your brains with booze. Look at me, more or less Irish, and not even half-addled. Isn’t that bucking the national stereotype?’

  ‘Eshnick minorities,’ slurred Val. ‘Bloody great chips on their shoulders, the whole lot of ’em. You can’t even tell Irish jokes now, when everyone knowsh the Irish make jokes about Kerrymen. Whassa difference?’

  Angela gritted her teeth, her heart thumping. She found it tricky defending an identity she felt ambiguous about at the best of times. ‘The difference is, you gormless bint, that you Brits have a collective responsibility to be nice to the people you treated like dirt in the name of colonial expansion. Look, there’s a black bloke in the corner, having a quiet meal. Go over and make monkey noises and see if he’s into self-parody.’

  An embarrassed hush fell around the table. Angela cringed. Things had got out of hand. Like all the righteously defensive, she felt as if she’d taken herself too seriously, mounted a soap-box and roused her audience to nothing more fruitful than a suspicion that she was a humourless paranoiac.

  A siren rose and died in the street outside the wine bar, sawing through lunchtime traffic and the silence at the table. ‘Oops, they’re coming for you Ange,’ giggled Val. ‘Someone’s tipped them off about the Semtex shtashed under your keyboard. In the interest of community relations, I’d just like to say it wasn’t me.’

  The extent of Val’s loose-tongued drunkenness finally reminded Marla who was boss. ‘I think we’ve had quite enough partying for one lunchtime. If you’d all care to stagger back to the office, and pretend to put in an afternoon’s work …’

  Pauline fell into step beside Angela on the walk back, Marla and Val stumbling ahead with linked arms.

  Angela grimaced. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t have risen to the bait. Us plastics are a sensitive species.’

  ‘What’s a plastic?’ asked Pauline, intrigued.

  Angela sighed. ‘A plastic paddy. That’s what the home-grown Irish call the second generation ‒well, the second generation who apply for Irish passports and still think about mailing dog-poo to the West Midlands crime squad, even though we’re all shaking hands across the sea now, not flicking each other the finger. Thank God for Riverdance! And Terry Wogan.’

  For all her dry humour, Angela’s skin was as thin as rice paper stretched across the surface of a drum. Drunken outbursts were always a conundrum. Were they a revelation of the speaker’s true opinion or just a stage on the way to the other, possibly unrepresentative stages of maudlin depression and declarations of love for the embarrassed drinking pals?

  Pauline insisted at her side: ‘I’m still intrigued. How does your Conor see you?’

  Angela considered. ‘As me, I hope. He knows I’ve a quixotic attitude to the auld sod, but that’s my mother’s fault. She’s spent half her life slagging off the place to the likes of me, and the other half defending it to the likes of Val. She has a refugee’s schizophrenia, a foot in both camps without feeling comfortable about calling either home. When I visited Ireland as a kid on holiday, the neighbours’ kids pelted me with cow-pats for having an English accent. Back here, the likes of Val take great pleasure in reminding me where I come from. Yet if I won a Nobel prize tomorrow, I’d be fêted as a true Brit. It’s enough to make you dizzy.’

  Pauline pondered. ‘It must be the same for black kids going to Jamaica on holiday.’

  ‘They get sunshine to make up for it.’

  ‘Look, just forget about Val,’ frowned Pauline, returning to the insult at hand. ‘There’s no real malice in her because there’s no imagination there, either. For a start, she can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a husband.’

  Angela studied the pavement, blushing. She longed to say something equally wise and comforting to Pauline. But she had only ever sensed Pauline’s unhappiness, never been privy to an exposé of its origins. She did know that Pauline had never been married.

  ‘I haven’t been dicing with death on any more Tube platforms,’ said Pauline presently.

  Angela took the opening. ‘Why were you ‒ you know ‒ so down on men that time, calling them shits?’

  ‘I’d just been loved and left by one, of course.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Thing is, Val’s quite right. Women rush in where any half-sober man would fear to tread. I trusted too soon and put all my eggs in one basket. I thought he loved my winsome chatter and close attentions. Turns out he thought I was a clingy old gasbag.’

  A small gasp escaped Angela. ‘Is that what he called you?’

  ‘Oh no. Phil was the latest in a long line of civilised, well-behaved shits. He wrote me a letter, would you believe? A dear Joan letter. Signed his name with a curly flourish. I don’t think he was sobbing with grief as he held the pen.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Angela.

  ‘The sex was good, I’ll say that for him.’

  Angela sighed inwardly. She was out of her depth again.

  ‘At least yours can’t just be in it for the sex if you haven’t had any yet,’ opined Pauline.

  ‘I think we’re both as nervous as each other,’ confided Angela. She hesitated, then came out with the lot. ‘You see, I’ve only had one lover ‒ Robert. Conor has had two. His ex-wife and a fling he had after she left. His son Shane didn’t hit it off with the woman, Rosie. We’re a right pair of greenhorns by the permissive society’s standards, which isn’t as hunky-dory as it sounds. Neither of us are skilled at making the first move.’

  ‘Forgive my cynicism,’ said Pauline cynically. ‘But do you believe him? Two women in a lifetime? Eunuchs have put it about more.’

  ‘He sounded convincing enough,’ winced Angela, remembering the previous week’s mortifying walk round the boating lake in Wilmesbury park.

  Conor had wanted to put things straight after the lunch fiasco. Angela had assumed he meant about Shane. But putting things straight had also involved a confessional blabbing. Throwing unshredded chunks of bread at alarmed ducks, Conor had revealed the bare bones of his love life, summing it up as inglorious but not too tawdry. Just as Angela had been about to seize the moment and ask him more about Kate, they’d been buttonholed by a furious woman who’d accused Conor of trying to stone the ducks with stale wholemeal.

  Angela, scuffing her toes in gravel, had felt duty-bound to offer a reciprocal account on the walk back ‒ starting and ending with Robert. Conor hadn’t been amazed, delighted or dismissive. He’d simply nodded and changed the subject to how spri
nglike it was for the time of year.

  ‘What do you think he was really getting at?’ Angela grumbled. ‘Trying to excuse or boast about his lack of forwardness? Preparing me for gauche fumblings when he does make his big move? Thing is, you’d never suspect sexual shyness to look at him. He has a tendency to verbally bulldoze his way out of awkward moments.’

  ‘Classic defence mechanism,’ said Pauline crisply. ‘Anyway, while I hate to give cheesy love songs any credit, as the song says, it’s in his kiss. If he was impotent or scared of women or a serial seducer, that’s where you’d pick up the vibes.’

  Angela walked on, considering. She hadn’t kissed Conor McGinlay since their brief tussle on the sofa, cut short by Shane. Cushionus interruptus.

  Frankly, she’d just made her relationship with Conor sound like a mutual crush between sixth-formers ‒ sweaty hand-holding, noses colliding with ears in the cinema’s back row ‒ while Pauline, habitually risking all for love, knew the real world of crumpled sheets and cruel letdowns.

  She felt Pauline staring at her, and looked up to catch her smile. ‘Funnily enough, a lot of Val’s ramblings made sense,’ said Pauline. ‘Go more carefully than I’ve ever done. Because, alas, it’s true ‒ how well do you really know him?’

  Val cornered Angela in the ladies’ loo just before knocking-off time. ‘Listen,’ she croaked, gazing in the mirror to avoid looking at Angela. ‘I was out of order with the Semtex thing.’

  ‘And the rest,’ said Angela grandly. She was going to milk this on behalf of every plastic slighted by thoughtless English folk, with their phoney sense of ‘fair play’ that was just an excuse to ignore the bloody partiality of their imperial past. Some days (days like this), Angela surprised herself with her dislike of the very Englishness that had shaped her own character. Maybe she was Irish, all along. Scratch a plastic, and find the real McCoy.

  The call came early on Wednesday morning, shaking Angela out of her cosy pre-work routine and idle thoughts on Conor McGinlay. ‘Oh my God,’ wheezed Angela down the phone as she heard the news. ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’

  ‘Get a grip!’ snapped Mrs Ambrose on the other end of the line. ‘The doctor’s been and says she’s OK, just a bit shaken up and cold from lying on the bathroom floor half the night.’

  Angela shut her eyes in horror. While she’d been lying in bed, having a DIY orgasm, Sadie had been upended on her bathroom floor like a stranded beetle, the phone out of reach.

  ‘She’s getting on a bit,’ said Mrs Ambrose accusingly. ‘She should be in a bungalow with a warden and round-the-clock surveillance.’

  Annoyance helped Angela get a grip. ‘Thank you, Mrs Ambrose. I’m even now speeding round to see her.’

  Angela called a taxi, fighting her propensity to tears. She felt irrationally tearful. It was just too bad of her mother to issue a health warning while Robert was still a raw memory. Was this fall ‒ however accidental ‒ a fated, subtle reminder of Angela’s daughterly neglect?

  She knew about the arthritis, of course she did. But only Sadie’s version of sporadic, easily deflected pain. If Sadie had been concealing her true frailty all along, she had only herself to blame for ending up on the bathroom floor. A bathroom floor that Robert and Angela had offered to carpet a few years ago, along with the coldly tiled kitchen and hallway.

  Fortified but unfooled by these delusions of her past helpfulness, Angela swept into Sadie’s in combative mood. ‘I haven’t brought grapes,’ she announced, then paused on the threshold of Sadie’s living room, too shocked to speak.

  Sadie lay across the settee. Purply legs protruded from a grubby dressing-gown. Her uncombed hair lay flat and grey on her scalp, a cold sore forming in the cracked hinge of her lips. Sadie’s petiteness suddenly smacked of diminishment. Angela was used to her mother moving about briskly and fully dressed, all corrugated curls and support stockings that camouflaged her varicose veins.

  ‘I’m absolutely fine,’ croaked Sadie, reading Angela’s face. ‘The doc says I’m as healthy as a horse.’

  ‘Maybe he meant Shergar.’ Angela moved into the room, deciding jokey briskness was the best policy. She got precious few opportunities to tell Sadie what to do.

  ‘Had breakfast yet?’ she asked, turning up the single bar on the gas fire to a blazing three.

  Sadie puffed like a mad Englishman sweltering in the tropics. ‘That’ll singe Binky’s fur and give me blotchy legs. Can you ring work and tell them I won’t be in till tomorrow?’

  ‘You should take the rest of the week off,’ frowned Angela.

  ‘No, I’ll be right as rain by tomorrow. Speaking of work, hadn’t you better get your skates on?’

  Light dawned on Angela. ‘Oh God, I haven’t rung in yet. Hang on a sec.’

  She grabbed her mobile and went to make the call, followed by Sadie’s quavering imperative, ‘Don’t skip work on my account, lovey. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of your boss!’

  Gritting her teeth, Angela changed direction in mid-dash and ran upstairs to get a blanket for Sadie’s legs, to protect them from fire-blotch.

  She grabbed the duvet off Sadie’s bed and ran downstairs again. Even in so flying a visit, she’d thought Sadie’s bedroom shambolic and unwelcoming-looking. It was beginning to look horribly like an old person’s room when the old person had given up on dust, sheet-changing and talcum powder spillages peppered with paw-marks. And was it her over-critical imagination, or did the whole house smell of cat ‒ of l’air du litter tray, to be precise?

  ‘Here you go, Ma.’ Breathlessly, she threw the duvet over Sadie, swaddling her legs. Peering helplessly out of her cocoon, Sadie looked defeated ‒ and manageable.

  Angela made her phone calls, laying it on a bit thick for Marla’s benefit to justify a whole day off. Then she scuttled into the kitchen to make breakfast, whether Sadie had already partaken or not.

  She had a few moments to collect her thoughts while the kettle boiled. It was at times like this she wished she’d moved away, like Owen. Not to avoid caring for Sadie, but because she was so crap at it. Social services would’ve done a better job and been appreciated more. Angela’s meagre efforts to cook and fuss, put the telly at the right viewing angle, and lay in supplies of Woman’s Weekly, would be undercut from the start by Sadie’s silent forbearance of Angela’s low caring standards, and her spoken dismay at ‘being a burden’.

  Face facts, sighed Angela, facing her distorted pout in the side of the kettle. I’m not martyr material. She had never risen to the heart-swelling challenge of being depended on. Look at the time Robert had got gastroenteritis.

  Angela, to her eternal shame, had hidden downstairs with a book while Robert staggered about upstairs, mopping up vomit that had missed the toilet. He’d even had to load the washing machine with the sheets and towels he’d ruined.

  He hadn’t spoken to Angela for a week afterwards.

  Angela tottered back into the sitting room with a mug of Bovril and buttered triangles of toast. ‘Ah,’ she harrumphed, surveying Sadie’s wan face. ‘Toast ‒ can you manage it? With dentures, I mean?’

  ‘Not wearing any.’ Sadie wrinkled her gums ghoulishly. ‘I’ll just suck the butter off the soft bits and leave the crusts. Then you can run upstairs and get my teeth from the bathroom.’

  ‘OK,’ shuddered Angela, annoyed at her revulsion. Bloody hell, she’d be old and toothless herself one day. Maybe incontinent. She arranged the food on her mother’s lap and plumped up the cushions behind her.

  ‘Mum, up in your room just now, I saw the electric blanket me and Robert got you was still in its bag.’

  ‘That’s right. I like to keep it clean.’

  Angela eyed her balefully. ‘It’s supposed to be on the bed, under the under-sheet.’

  Sadie picked up a piece of toast and looked pointedly at Angela until Angela looked away. Angela did so, trying not to flinch at the terrible suction noise as toast was sort of inhaled through her mother’s slackly moist lips. />
  ‘Truth is, I prefer my hot water bottle to that electric blanket yoke,’ revealed Sadie, plonking down a toast crust. ‘I don’t like the thought of electric volts zapping up and down the mattress. Does it short-circuit in a power cut, for example? Does the mattress catch fire if you forget to switch it off? Mattresses are very flammable, full of foam.’

  ‘I really don’t know, Ma.’ Perching beside Sadie, Angela struggled to hide her annoyance. She and Robert had bought the electric blanket to coddle Sadie’s stiff joints. ‘Lots of people use them without a problem.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning, just give it a try. I’ll put it on now for you, if you like.’

  ‘Sit there!’ Sadie pointed an imperious finger. ‘Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated by that tittle-tattle Ambrose. I’m neither too senile nor too immobile to put an electric blanket on my own bed!’

  Angela decided to regain the initiative by adopting an equally imperious bedside manner. ‘Never mind that. Tell me straight, Mum. Did you fall over from an arthritis attack? And why couldn’t you get up again? If you can’t cope …’

  ‘You might be lumbered with me.’

  ‘Yeah, it had crossed my mind. How do you feel about voluntary euthanasia? It’s all the rage for oldsters with a social conscience who don’t want to burden their relatives.’

  Sadie chased crumbs around the duvet with a moistened fingertip. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easily.’

  ‘I thought not. So don’t play silly beggars acting the martyr. Let me help you.’

  Sadie said slyly, ‘Are you back to your original offer of putting a carpet in the bathroom to cushion any future falls?’

  ‘God, you’re impossible!’ Angela leapt up, pushing her hands through her hair to stifle the impulse to wrap them round Sadie’s neck. ‘You are not sending me on any more guilt trips, Ma. I’ve packed up my rucksack of remorse and done the round-the-world trip. What I had in mind was getting you a mobile phone, or a phone extension next to your bed, so I’m never more than a few digits away.’