September Starlings

by Ruth Hamilton

  Les touches my shoulder. ‘Are you all right, girl?’ He’s very much a builder, is constructed like one of his thrown-together houses, straightish, tallish, but not very well appointed. Les always manages to smell of sand, cement and putty, even when he’s dressed up. We took him to a wedding once, and when he knelt in the pew, a screwdriver and a couple of washers clattered from a pocket of his good suit and rolled across the aisle, cheering up the proceedings no end. Today, Les is a bundle of rags, T-shirt, jeans, a tatty maroon cardigan. ‘You look a bit pale, love,’ he says.

  Tenderness cuts me these days, makes me brusque, puts me on my guard. ‘I’m fine.’

  He blinks, turns his head slightly, as if trying to hide his grief. ‘We’d have been out at West Lancs now, me and him.’ He jerks a gnarled thumb towards my husband. ‘After our nine holes, we used to skip the rest and sit in the clubhouse. Ben always had to be near a window with his binoculars. He loved a round of golf, even if he did spend half the time looking at the sky through the bloody binoculars. Him and his birds. They called him Birdy at the club, and it was nothing to do with his score card. I sometimes wonder what we’ve done wrong. I mean, why did he have to finish up like that? It’s no life for him, worse for you in a way.’ The thick lower lip trembles. ‘He’s a good man.’

  Ben stirs himself. ‘Sarah,’ he announces. ‘Light brown hair, ribbons. Running in the sand … dog.’

  I kneel, rub life into waxy hands. The weather is fair, predictably so because the forecast last night predicted storms. But there’s a chill in the air, the crisp nip of autumn, and Ben gets cold so easily. I turn on the fan heater, angle it towards him. ‘Sarah is Les’s daughter, Ben. She used to run on the sands with you and Hector. Do you remember Hector? He was a great dane – we had him before Chewbacca.’

  ‘Thousands of them,’ says Ben sleepily. ‘Millions. Where did they all come from? And under the stove …’ The eyes fix on me, yet I know that he is seeing somebody else. ‘The singing is so beautiful. Why is she angry? Why should the singing have to stop?’ He nods, snores, is gone again.

  Les shuffles towards the door. ‘Wharrabloodymess.’ The exclamation tumbles from his tongue as one angry, bruised word. He slips back into the bowels of Liverpool’s demolished slums when he is disturbed or worried. Twelve children, two rooms up, two down, a tin bath on a nail in the yard, accents like warm molasses. Out of such beginnings Les clawed his way until he owned his own business, until he managed to buy out several competitors. One of his favourite sayings to Ruth is, ‘Well, we’re all right now, don’t want for nothing, queen.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I call to his disappearing back. He can’t cope with the deterioration of his nearest friend, and I can’t offer comfort. I hold back, because there are no words for Les.

  I find a book of cheques, pay bills, write to my agent whose hand is outstretched for Georgina Dawn’s next magnum opus. Perhaps this time he will get 10 per cent of nothing, as I am too busy to write. And I’m working towards some kind of decision, trying to clear a path to the future. The pen pauses. I am remembering the day when he realized, when my poor husband began to talk about his ‘gaps’. ‘I am not always with you, Laura,’ he said. ‘So you must take care of all domestic bills, gas and rates and so on. I’ll show you how it’s done …’

  I sat here then, in my house by the sea, and I held out my arms, gathered him to me as if he were a child. There were papers for me to sign, witnesses to find. On that day, I removed from him the last of his small powers, the final shreds of his ragged dignity. He never went abroad again, seldom groomed himself, needed to be prompted to eat, to sleep, to put on the right clothes. He needed to be taught how to pretend to be alive.

  The phone rings, startles me. Like a frightened rabbit, I am bolt upright, listening to the instrument’s shrill cry. There’s an extra edge to it, an urgency. It’s my mother. Even from the bottom of the garden, or from the shore, I imagine that I can identify my mother’s demanding ring.

  ‘Laura?’ Annoyed, lively. God help me. Ben just sleeps on, has reached a place where she can no longer find him.

  ‘Hello, Mother.’

  A sniff, deep and meaningful. An iciness seems to travel along the wire and into my hand. Sometimes, my imagination plays tricks with me. ‘You’ve not been to see me,’ she whines. ‘It’s Monday and you’ve not been.’ She would have made a fabulous diva had she been able to sing.

  I will be patient. ‘I told you last week. It’s a holiday, so I’m keeping Ben for a bit longer.’

  ‘What for? What bloody good will that be to him? He’s only tenpence in the bob, so it doesn’t matter where he is.’ The Bolton accent is stronger of late, as if she needs to be markedly different while living here among the Scousers. When I was a child, she was sometimes – not always – quite the lady. ‘Oh, my husband has a chemist’s shop on Blackburn Road, he’s a qualified dispenser, you know.’ And she deteriorated even further, became a total embarrassment when he made his fortune in McNally’s Cooling Tea. ‘He’s a genius, my husband, on a par with Einstein for brains.’ All her life, she’s been trying to prove something. To me, to my poor old dad, to anyone else who stood still long enough to be judged a captive audience. She certainly never told her husband that he was clever, never praised any soul who was actually within earshot.

  I try to relax. This is the woman who gave birth to me, clothed me, fed me, ruined my life, drove my father to a premature grave. ‘I’ll come tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ve no cigarettes,’ she screams.

  With the receiver held at a decent interval from an aching ear, I wait while she wades through the compulsory lecture on my selfishness, my lack of consideration for a good mother, my unfeeling attitude towards a sick old woman.

  I suck a mint while lending half an ear to what looks like becoming yet another revised version of the statutory sermon. Her monologue is a well-rehearsed one, contains all the familiar words, though not necessarily in the same order as last time. At last, a gap between words. ‘Smoking is bad for you, Mother,’ I manage. ‘You know what the doctor said to you last month—’

  ‘Don’t you tell me how to live my life!’ The blast of her temper cuts through my slow, careful speech. ‘All those holidays you’ve had lately without a thought for me. Remember, I can change my will any time, and that’ll be you in rags. I want my bloody fags and you’d best go and get me some.’

  It’s no use. It’s no use telling her that my ‘holidays’ were spent in hospital. That would just give her pleasure, would allow her to gloat about being in better condition than a woman who is thirty years her junior. And I need her money like a fish needs a bicycle. The writing has made me comfortable, while Ben has signed a small fortune to my name. Still, there’s no point in telling her that she’s completely useless. The last will and testament of Liza McNally is her only weapon, and she wields it like a sabre. Her sole pleasure in life is gleaned from the suffering of others.

  ‘Well?’ she yells. ‘Lost your tongue?’

  ‘Mother, I can’t leave Ben till Les comes at six o’clock. If he’ll stay for a while, I’ll nip down to the Ten Till Ten.’ The Ten Till Ten opens every day, makes its money from forgetful people like me who make lists and leave them in a safe place, too safe to be discovered until the next major clear-out. I spend hours in supermarkets, stare at the shelves, try to conjure up what has been written by me on the previous evening. I’m an incompetent, a total failure. Especially when my mother’s on the phone. ‘So you’ll have to wait,’ I add lamely.

  ‘What do I do till then?’

  As far as I am concerned, she can bite her toenails. And she probably could, too. She’s eighty-one years old, will be eighty-two in November. She marches every day to the shops, pretends to me that she has not been out, insists, mournfully, that she is permanently confined to barracks. The woman could complete a triathlon after three big meals and sixty Embassy Regal. She is a living monument to the saying about exceptions proving the rule, has defied medical sci
ence since the 1960s, during which decade she began to die. Now, almost thirty summers and winters on, she sits in a blue fug, terrifying the life out of a succession of cleaning women, many of whom have grown old during their first few days with ‘that rotten owld Woollyback’. My dear mother screams down the phone daily at me, at my cousin Anne in Bolton, at anyone who fails to pay regular court to her royal flaming highness. ‘There’s nothing I can do for you till six o’clock.’

  She inhales, fuels her lungs for a renewed assault on me, her beloved daughter. ‘You’re stubborn. You always were stubborn, you. Many a time you treeped me out, wouldn’t listen to sense, would never do as you were told. If you’d had half a brain, you’d have stayed away from the first queer fellow, and from the second one too. But oh no, you treeped me out even then, and I knew you’d finish up divorced from that Tommo, told you right at the start that you were going off your trolley. Madness, that’s what it must be. You’ve married wrong twice, but you still treep me out.’

  ‘Treeping out’, a term she culled from a mixture of Lancashire idioms, means not agreeing 1,000 per cent with everything she says. ‘I am not going to discuss my shortcomings on the phone,’ I say mildly. With Mother, it is best to be mild.

  ‘No, you’re not. If we talked about you and your waywardness, we’d be here till Christmas on my phone bill. King size.’ She means the cigarettes, not the bill. ‘And I want three packets, they’ll do me till weekend.’

  Three packets will do her till tomorrow. At the crack of morning, while all self-respecting birds are still snoozing, she’ll be toe-tapping outside Mapley’s, waiting to pounce on the Daily Mirror, which she will hide inside The Times, as the latter is a better class of paper to be seen in the company of a lady. A carton of 200 Regal King Size will sit in her handbag alongside rolls of money in rubber bands, my father’s death certificate and a heap of mouldering premium bonds. In the side pouch of the said handbag, there is always an apple and a small, sharp knife.

  The one time she was supposed to have been mugged, Mother put the boy’s eye out, impaled him on three inches of finely honed steel. The police accepted her sweet and appealing story. ‘Oh, officer, what have I done? My poor stomach cannot digest the peel of an apple, so I carry my little knife when I go to Moorside Park. I was just about to take the skin off, because there’s a litter bin just there, outside Mapley’s. So when that misguided young man grabbed me, the knife was in my hand, and I simply lashed out.’ Much wringing of hands accompanied this heart-rending ‘confession’. ‘What have I done?’ she cried repeatedly to me and to the sad police sergeant. ‘I shall never forgive myself. Never.’ In fact, my mother had waited years for this opportunity, always longed for the chance to fight back. I’ve often wondered who was the real criminal. Did he grab for her, or did she make the first move?

  These Scousers don’t know what they’re talking about, really, don’t know what they’ve taken to their bosom here. ‘Woollyback’ is a term applied decades ago to Lancashire miners who wore sheepskins on their backs as a layer of protection between skin and heavy burden. It is used these days as a derogatory yet affectionate name for Lancastrians, is comparable with the southern term ‘yokel’. But Mother has not the gentleness of those brave working men, could knock them into a cocked pit helmet plus lamp when it comes to sheer determination. And she’s no yokel, no simple-minded peasant.

  ‘Are you heeding me, Laura?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pored for weeks over local presses, even read about her heroism in several of the national tabloids. The boy has a glass eye and hunched shoulders now, could wear a raincoat and double for Columbo on the telly. Most people who come into contact with my mother look older than their years.

  ‘He’s dead downstairs, you know.’ The salacious lip-licking is audible. ‘Keeled over last night when his daughter brought him back from church.’ Another loud sniff. ‘She took him out twice a week, did Shirley. I said to her, “Shirley,” I said, “you’ve nothing to reproach yourself for, because you looked after him,” I told her. All of which is a great deal more than can be said for you, Laura McNally.’

  ‘Starling, previously Thompson.’ My response is automatic.

  ‘Stupid name. And Starling’s not his proper name, either. What’s he been hiding all these years? Is he one of them like Burgess and Maclean? You should put him away for good, send him where that Ian Brady’s kept. They’ve got all the lunatics there, so yon husband of yours would fit in a treat.’

  I hate my mother. I hate her and I forgive myself for the crime. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’? I cannot love her, cannot even like or respect her. At best, I manage to be another of her servants, a target for her barbs. My father, on the other hand, was a gentle man and a gentleman. All my affection went to him, because he was thoroughly lovable.

  ‘And me bowels are bad again.’ Mother is passionately involved with her digestive system, has suffered through thirty years from a plethora of disorders with interesting names, anything that caught her eye in a much-thumbed tome which sits constantly by her side. The name of her volume is something I cannot remember, as the lettering on the broad spine has been eroded by regular handling. It’s likely to be called Diagnosis for Beginners, or Treat Yourself to an Illness – some crazy name, anyway, probably compulsory reading for the average hypochondriac.

  Early on in my mother’s apprenticeship as a sick person, a hiatus hernia was favourite, but this was forced to make way for colourful descriptions of gastric reflux caused by gallstones. She invested in enough Milk of Magnesia to warrant a substantial wad of shares in the company, then enjoyed a brief flirtation with slippery elm food. After a liverish episode – ‘don’t you think the whites of my eyes are on the yellow side?’ – she placed her trust in an ulcerated colon, which merited many X-rays and visits to a private clinic. ‘I’m all bunged up,’ she announces now to me and, judging by the volume, to every other resident in the retirement apartments. ‘I am suffering from chronic constipation.’

  ‘Then take some un-bunging medicine.’

  ‘You don’t care, do you? One of these days, I’ll be stretched out at that funeral home and you’ll wish you’d listened to me. It’ll be too late then. Oh and make sure they put me in the green suit, I’m not going in a shroud. Shirley won’t be feeling it as bad as you will, because she looked after that daft man downstairs who was her father. Nothing was too much for her, nothing at all. Whereas you’re not worth the paper you’re written on. I shouldn’t have bothered getting that birth certificate, because you’re no daughter of mine. “John,” I’d say, “I think they’ve given me the wrong one here.”’

  I’ve had enough now. But she’s waiting for me to reach the point of saturation, wants to be able to tell her cronies that her daughter’s a nasty piece. ‘I hear you won at bingo last week, Mother.’ My voice is soft. ‘So nice for you to have an interest that gets you out.’

  Stunned silence. Then, on top note, ‘Somebody picks me up and takes me in a car, a nice big comfortable car with good springs and plush upholstery, not like that boneshaker you drive. They know I can’t walk, so they help me down the steps and drive me to the Legion.’

  She wants driving. With a whip, like beef on its way to market. Except that I don’t approve of cruelty to animals, even though I have eaten a cow or two in my time. No, a beast should never be whipped, though my mother deserves … I squash my wicked imagination. ‘You walked for your prize, though. I was so thrilled to hear how you managed to move so quickly all the way to the stage without help. It’s wonderful to hear that your health is improving. Must go now, Mother. Ben needs a drink.’

  My hand trembles as I place the receiver in its cradle. She frightens me with her venom, has always scared me. I am a woman well into middle age, because few humans survive to the age of 100 and a bit. Real middle age is reached at about thirty-eight, and I passed that marker some considerable time ago. But with her on the scene, I remain a child, her child, her property. My sons have not visited her
for some time, while my daughter, who is a force to be reckoned with, chose the occasion of her own twenty-first birthday as a suitable opportunity to tell Granny to eff off.

  I gaze through the window. A few brave souls tramp up and down the erosion, dogs at their heels. A clutch of children flies past, all jumbled limbs and colourful training shoes. Two men are in the water, fishing lines extending from their arms. Surely there can be nothing edible in that muck? The tree in my garden looks worried, leaves beginning to curl and darken. Seasons are changing, breaking the rules. Summer arrives earlier now, spills backward into spring. Perhaps Christmas will bring a heatwave in a century or so.

  I feed Ben, wait for Les, nip out for Mother’s shopping, rush back and wait for the nurse. A lot of time is spent waiting these days. She comes, bustles off upstairs, returns with a decision plastered across her face. ‘Mrs Starling, he needs changing more regularly than this. I suggest that you have him home for just one day from now on, because he is developing sores. If you insist on full weekends, then you will need a nurse in residence.’

  Her words make me weak, take away my breath. Her anxious face swims in and out of focus as I absorb the message. I am about to lose him altogether, will not even have his shell at the weekends. ‘No,’ I gasp. ‘Please.’

  She forces me into a chair. ‘Look, let’s cut the bullshit, as the Americans say. No more games, Mrs Starling, no more little holidays. I’ve friends in the hospitals, you know. I’ve been told about your operations and about your breakdown.’

  I narrow my eyes to achieve a clearer picture. ‘What about Hippocrates?’