Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  ‘Does she not make them anymore?’ I wondered.

  ‘No,’ she replied, very quietly. ‘My mammy died when I was twelve.’

  And she stared straight at me with a lovely gaze.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t mind me sitting with you?’ I said, for no particular reason.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of nice.’

  So we ate our breakfasts with relish then, two orphans in the November mist, and afterwards I paid the bill to the woman behind the counter who was already sliding layers of lasagne into the oven for the dinners later in the day. I dropped my companion at the road for Dublin where she might hitch a lift and I headed back to my mother’s house.

  THERE WAS A time when every Cavan woman was my mother. In the old days, Cavan women had a tendency to force-feed other humans. Perhaps it was due to poverty in the Drumlin region, a place of small farms and millions of chickens. There was a shadow of hunger and famine on the drumlins, which women compensated for by stuffing as much food into other people – particularly children – as they possibly could.

  Or perhaps this compulsive behaviour in Cavan women was the effect of the Reformation, brought to the region by John Wesley, Presbyterians, and a variety of strict Christian sects, which repressed all urges of the flesh and created in Cavan people a tendency to express affection by way of verbal insults, accordion music and pinching each other on the bottom. In Catholic marriages, Cavan people’s vanity was intensely policed by the clergy and this resulted in a society of plain hairdos, unvarnished nails and lips without rouge. When young adolescents in Cavan emerged from the time of the bottom-pinching, they found themselves in marriages where affection could only be legitimately expressed with large plates of bacon and cabbage.

  Or perhaps the condition is endemic across the nation. Perhaps all Irish people live unconsciously within the force field of the eternal mother, the great Mammy.

  For instance, Glangevlin in west Cavan is intrinsically linked with the Myth of the Green Cow of Gevlin who provided milk for all Ireland every day, until a witch came to her owner and said, ‘I bet I can find a vessel that the cow will not fill.’

  The witch took out a sieve and placed it beneath the cow. ‘Try that,’ she said.

  They milked the cow for three days and nights until she bolted across the hills, her udder dragging behind and creating a gap in the Cuilcagh Mountains. And the cult of the great Mother endures. Young women in petrol stations and Gala shops and Centra cafés all around the country feed dinners to large, rugged truck drivers every day, in the name of the great Mammy.

  It’s something I can’t avoid when I’m travelling in the jeep, from Kenmare to Belfast, or from Letterkenny to Ballycotton, in and out of Birr, Athlone and other midland towns as I round the roundabouts and zigzag up and down the country when I’m doing readings, giving talks, telling stories and generally acting the cod for a living. Everywhere I see the same thing – grown men standing in queues, like little boys, as some young woman from Kraków or Gdańsk feeds them braised steak and asks them do they want gravy on their spuds. The great Mammy incarnates and is made manifest in a thousand different women behind the nation’s counters every day, all aproned for business; a vestment that can transform anyone into Mammy. A woman may be from Lithuania or Russia, or she may be only sixteen years old, but once she dons the apron she assumes matriarchal authority, and every middle-aged man on the road waits in line with the excitement of a ten-year-old child.

  Coffee, walnut and chocolate cakes, apple tarts, vanilla cheesecakes and banoffee pie. And soups. And ovens of roast pork, bacon or beef, and garlic potatoes. Teachers phone in their orders. Students queue and swarm around the hot pots, and old men from the hills, who have lived alone since their wives died and who can no longer bear to cook alone. Meals go out the highways and byways of rural Ireland six days a week, tens of thousands of dinners every day, and even more on Wednesdays when the local papers appear in the shops.

  I used to bring my own mother to such a food counter in Cavan every Friday, for many years, and we’d take the food back to her kitchen and eat it.

  ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ she’d say.

  And I’d say, ‘Yes, Mammy.’

  And she’d say, ‘Sure, you couldn’t cook as good as this.’

  And I’d say, ‘No, Mammy, I couldn’t.’

  And I can’t. Which is why, when I was staying in Cavan after her death, I went back to the same café every day at lunchtime for dinner, and often purchased an extra soup or a breast of chicken as well for my evening meal. I slept in the back room and spent the days sitting on the chair my mother had sat on and staring out the window at the cathedral spire in the distance, the hill of young ash trees and the copper beeches in a neighbour’s garden, wondering all the while what my mother had been thinking about as she had watched that view for almost forty years.

  A week later I was still in Cavan. The girls that forecast the weather on the television were promising snow. I played Chopin in my earphones and a pallid light folded the streets in ambiguity as if the world were dead. The trees were bare. The same old radio programmes persisted. The same old politics. The same old economy. Even the garden was dead. And it was the same old garden in which I had caught bees as a child. Even the young children on the streets going to school were the same – just another wave, another generation, another cluster of cuddly boys and girls in uniforms who think that their moment in time is unique.

  I went to Dunnes Stores and the post office and various places that I used to frequent with her when she was still mobile. We used to go to Bridge Street and I would tell the staff in the Roma Restaurant that they had the best chips in the world, and I’d get two bags and two fish and I’d explain to them that my mother was outside in the jeep.

  She would sit in the passenger seat, eating the hot, salty potatoes from a brown bag, relishing them, chip by chip. And relishing the view from the jeep. The same Bridge Street where she had grown up, minded her little brother Oliver and chased a cat.

  But now I went to the chip shop alone and asked for a single bag. And they said nothing. I returned to the jeep beside the river, and stared out at the empty car park hoping for snow. Not that it snowed much that winter. It was mostly cold and wet.

  I did see snow once. It was on a Thursday afternoon, and I had already seen the cold, blue flame in the fire the night before.

  The first of it fell from a grey sky, a low cloud in the winter light. There was a luminosity in which a single flake fell and then another; one at a time, one every twenty minutes as I stood at the front door of her house. I imagined a soul flying upwards to another life as each flake fell down and each single flake was the crust that those departing souls left behind. Then the big snowflakes arrived. Unexpected. Like love letters. And they whispered when they met the grass on the lawn. Each flake singularly. It was almost possible to hear their promises as they met the blades of grass. And then the real snow came in the dark. Whorls like salt that flew around in wind pools. Then came the snow that fell when I was sleeping and covered the roads and ditches, folding them into a silent, crinkled wonderland that, in the morning, bounced so much light onto the ceiling of my bedroom that I woke as happy as if Mammy had returned from town in a big blanket. But it didn’t last. By lunchtime, it had dissolved to slush. The rain fell. I cleaned out the ashes, and drove into town to comfort myself with another hot dinner from the Gala café.

  But Glenasmole wasn’t going to dissolve any time soon. That house was made of bricks and mortar. It existed on paper, in folios, and I hoped that the probate would soon be completed and the titles changed and I would become the new owner and she would fade from it forever.

  That house must have been the crowning glory of her young life. And like many semi-detached houses in suburbia where women pottered about in 1950, it was a lonely little castle, into which she accommodated herself with stoic silence. And she never got tired of it. Although when she was seventy, after a decade of widowhood, s
he began going on foreign trips. Sick of her lonely fireside, she began travelling with Active Age groups to Brussels and Copenhagen and the Aran Islands, where she took photos that nobody ever looked at only herself and that were still in the drawers in the front room when I opened them; moments on piers or in restaurants or standing outside famous churches with widows from all over Europe.

  By her eighties, she had reached a state of equanimity. There was no more travelling and no more pretending. She sold the car and there was no escape from what lay ahead.

  She would look around the front room while I was sitting with her, and Alex Higgins was still alive and potting all the blacks, and she’d say, ‘What will become of this place when I’m gone, this glen of thrushes?’

  And she could still wash her own clothes when she was eighty-five. I remember seeing her in the kitchen on a stool, staring at the clothes tumbling in the machine, as if she was watching television, the unresolved grief for her husband’s death still lingering. And she ate out of a saucepan, the same soup for four days.

  ‘I’ve no one to cook for anymore,’ she said one day, when I opened the fridge and found it cluttered with mouldy sausages. She lived on bowls of porridge from the microwave.

  But she’d seemed content in the nursing home, her eyes closed as she dozed in the day room, and I wondered what she might be dreaming of; a time before telephones or emails perhaps, when lovers wrote their sweet nothings in letters that were transported across the countryside by horse-drawn coaches. A dream with no soundtrack, except perhaps for the clanging hammer of a blacksmith sweating over his fires, making wheels for carts and shoes for horses that pulled heavy loads on the stony highways.

  That’s the wondering that rose in me each time I walked in, and saw her dozing, at peace after all the wars that she had waged in Glenasmole when she was alone and angry and the only way to express it was by throwing the walking aid at whoever turned up.

  She was reared at a time when the clop of a horse was the only noise on the streets, and traffic was the sight of a thousand horses gathered on a fair green.

  One day, I said to an old man in the day room that it must have been pleasant back then, without the noise of televisions.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t pleasant at all. In the 1950s, you could meet three or four grown men in any farmyard, as idle as infants, all gawking out of hay barns or cow byres, or standing against the gable wall of the house like imbeciles.’

  ‘Why was that?’ I wondered.

  ‘All on account of the mammy,’ he said. ‘People were very poor, but the mammy would be too proud to let her sons go out and work as labourers. She’d keep them at home until they were destroyed.’

  Not that there’s anything wrong with pride. We’re all proud until we grow old and find ourselves holding the wall for support, or foraging in Marks and Spencer for long johns, and trousers with elastic in the waist, like the ones I bought for her every so often.

  ‘Your mother sleeps well,’ the old woman with the knitting said. And the old man nodded. They knew her, even when she no longer knew herself. They sheltered her there in the day room and the woman with the doll reached out one day and offered it to her, as if Mother might like to play with it. But Mother refused. Her refuge was a handbag, which she clutched in both hands.

  ‘Our Lady appeared in the trees when I was young,’ a woman told me one day. ‘Two girls were going up for milk to the big house when they saw her along the avenue in the tallest trees. And it went on for a long time and it was a huge sensation. And people would be ferried out from Mullingar on the back of lorries every evening. And there was a young lad who used to climb up into the trees, and he’d be making a joke of it all, shouting, “She’s coming!” But one evening didn’t he fall out of the tree and break his leg. So that put a stop to his gallop. And there was another man who made a business from the apparition. He cut branches off the trees along the avenue and sold them. And he made a fortune out of those twigs, even though they weren’t even from the right tree.’

  Mother sighed again.

  The other woman said, ‘Your mammy is definitely not in good form today.’

  And it was hard to believe that maybe she was finally coming to the end of her road, because I still remembered all those lunches in the Kilmore Hotel, as if they were only yesterday, when my daughter was still in a high chair throwing spaghetti at the walls, and Mother would cast her eye around the dining room as we entered, and clutch her stick, to see if there was anyone there she knew.

  ‘Hello, Nellie,’ they’d say, and she would light up, and it felt lovely to be out with her for the day.

  And I still remembered all those Fridays, as if they were only last week, when I would bring her into town to do the messages because, even in her late eighties, she still wanted to do everything herself. She’d totter around Dunnes Stores holding on to me or her walking stick or leaning against an aisle of biscuits or holding the elbow of any member of staff who was near, and she’d check the sausages, yoghurts, sliced pans and cold hams with a sharp eye. She was so particular. And at the checkout, she’d go through each price with the girl on the till and then erupt.

  ‘Oh, that’s far too expensive,’ she’d say to me. ‘Put it back on the shelf and get me the yellow one,’ by which she meant a cheaper brand.

  And the people in the queue waited. I longed for someone to throw a tantrum or fling a wire basket at her. But they didn’t. They smiled and waited while I went to fetch a cheaper brand and when I returned feeling ashamed and foolish, she’d speak loudly, saying, ‘What kept you?’

  Then she’d turn to the audience and say, ‘Sure, he’s useless.’ A tiny smile on her mouth as she became empowered by disempowering me.

  She had a walking stick that she pointed at other people. I remember a particularly devout little lady who never ceased doing works of kindness for other Christians and who came to visit Mother regularly, in case she needed anything, or just to talk and cheer her up beside the electric heater in the front room.

  But Mother didn’t like her. She had resigned herself to solitude and she was content in the privacy of her own sour space. That’s the fearful thing about depression. It’s an isolating experience. It’s a merciless solitude, like a glass wall surrounding the victim, leaving them alone, even in a noisy street, drenched with their own delusions and tormented by their own personal demons.

  One day, she announced to me over the phone that the pious little lady had stolen the bed linen out of the hot press. So the next time she called, Mother demanded the linen back, and then slammed the door in her face. And she never spoke to her again after that. She even went to the guards to tell them of the crime. They smiled to themselves and said that there was nothing they could do and that was an end to it. Except occasionally when I was helping her from the jeep across the underground car park to the lift in Dunnes, she would recognise the woman in the distance and sometimes she would raise her stick and say, ‘Look! That’s the faggot who stole the linen.’

  The time I spent in Glenasmole after she died was a necessary ritual of cleansing and dismantling her world, of taking her identity apart, of disposing of her wardrobe, so that the painters and decorators and carpenters could move in and construct something new. I longed for a time when I would no longer hear her voice whispering at the turn of the stairs, her muffled cough in the dead of night or her hand on a door as she slipped from room to room. I even wanted to replace all the doors in the house so that in the opening and closing of them, I would no longer hear her hand fall. That’s why I went to stay at Farnham Road that November. She was four months dead and a job was waiting to be done. The nettle had to be grasped.

  And then one evening in late November, I went to Mullingar to visit friends. He is Irish and she is from China. She cooked dumplings and stir-fried some vegetables and sliced up some raw carrots and we all tucked in. I called her Little Lotus for fun. She was a young woman who had been reared as an only child by elderly parents in the hills
of a remote region in China. In the mornings, her father would do tai chi on the wooden balcony outside the house while his wife pottered about inside making tea and trying to remember where she left her knitting or trying to find her glasses. She could never remember where her glasses were, and she needed them to find the chickens, though the strange thing was that she didn’t need them to knit. And she needed them to see her husband, who was much bigger than a chicken, but she didn’t need them to thread a needle.

  How the family ended up in a small wooden house with a balcony on the slopes of the hill beside a deep river is something their daughter never asked, in all the years that she went to the school in the local village or even when she went away to secondary school in a far-off town. Home was always home. Until she finished school and realised she must go to the city to find work.

  When she was a child, her father, who even then was old and as slender as a single bone, would often take the horse and cart down the dusty lane to the village, where he drank more tea and talked to other old men, and then the horse would take him home.

  In the warm afternoons, he liked to doze in the cart as it trundled up the stony laneway that reminded him of his childhood, and the horse was a reliable navigator because there was always oats at home.

  It was the same nag that brought his daughter to the local bus station when she was leaving for Europe. Her father was waiting in the cart and she was standing on the balcony, in a bright flower-patterned dress and bare shoulders, and he said, ‘Young girls are not fond of drapery at the best of times but you must wear a cardigan when you get on the bus, because it is six hours to the city and you will get cold when the sun goes down.’

  So she went back into the house and lifted a navy blue cardigan from the chair and her mother looked up from her book wondering for a moment had the universe conspired to stop her daughter from emigrating.

  ‘I thought you were gone,’ her mother said, full of sudden hope.

  ‘I just came back for this,’ the daughter replied, picking up the blue cardigan, and in that moment her mother spoke her name and gave her a final hug.