All the Beggars Riding

by Lucy Caldwell

  How he actually died was as follows. There’d been an IRA mortar bomb attack on an RUC barracks out in the country. They timed it for a Sunday night, when it wouldn’t be expected, when people would be at ease in their temporary accommodation inside the barrack walls. The weather was terrible that night. It had been pouring down with rain all day, relentless, and when night fell the winds picked up. Branches were falling from trees, the rain was lashing, and any creature that had a home to go to was in it. They struck just after 10 p.m., and killed two men, wounding several others, some critically. My father was paged to the hospital, but the ambulances couldn’t get through – a tree had fallen – and so it was arranged that a helicopter would go to airlift the two most critical cases to hospital. Time had elapsed by this stage, and my father was worried for the men, one of whom had lost a leg, so he went in the helicopter to the barracks. One of the men had died by the time they got there, but in a makeshift operating theatre, my father and the barracks doctor and the paramedic managed to stabilise the other, stanching the flow of blood and binding the wounds, and then they transferred him into the helicopter to take him back to the hospital for the life-saving surgery he’d need. Three minutes after take-off – and nobody’s quite sure how this happened, the storm, the dark, the night, pilot error, equipment failure – the helicopter crashed down, killing instantly the pilot, the paramedic, the patient, and my father.

  It was a tragedy in a time and place of daily tragedies. It was, of course, reported extensively on the news: but our mother hated the news, especially news of Northern Ireland, so we didn’t see it in the papers or hear it on the radio the following day. Alfie and I were at school that day: it was just a normal, boring Monday. Our mother stayed in; cleaned the flat; read her novel; sewed a new dress she was making. If she’d gone out – even just to Mr Patel’s – she might have seen or heard something, but she didn’t. The Harley Street practice must have heard: but they had no idea that the nurse who’d worked there briefly, all those years ago, was still involved with one of their doctors. It wasn’t until the Tuesday, and the evening, that we had the first intimations that something was wrong. These were the days before mobile phones, and so my parents went days without communicating. They’d spoken on Wednesday, when my father said he wouldn’t be coming over; they’d spoken again on Friday evening, briefly. He rarely phoned over the weekend, so our mother thought nothing of it when she didn’t hear from him on Saturday, Sunday, Monday. By Tuesday she started to worry, but it was the low-level, constant worry that maybe he’d been caught in a bomb scare, or maybe Catriona had discovered something, the maybes that she had to battle to suppress. Then on Tuesday night, Alfie left the television on after watching Children’s BBC and a short report on Newsround mentioned a helicopter crash following an attack on a barracks in Northern Ireland’s Co. Fermanagh. None of us were watching it, but my mother, making dinner, heard it in the background – the four passengers, including the pilot and a survivor of the earlier attach, as well as a paramedic and a surgeon, were instantly killed, bringing the total number of fatalities so far this year . . . Something in her, she says, twinged. The news report ended; she called to Alfie to switch off the television, and she finished preparing our dinner. Then she sat us down to eat it and went into her bedroom, where she scrolled through every radio station she could think of, the volume down low, in the hope of hearing more news. When she found none, she came back into the living room and calmly said she was nipping to the shop for a moment. She put on her coat, laced up her shoes, crooked her handbag on her arm and left. Alfie and I looked at each other, shrugged, and continued wolfing our chips and beans or whatever our dinner was that evening. A few minutes later, she came back with an armful of papers. The incident was on none of the front pages and she hadn’t stopped to read any of them at Mr Patel’s. She had the Evening Standard, the Guardian, the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun and two or three others. She didn’t say a word. We began to realise that something was up. Without taking off her coat or outdoor shoes, her bag still hanging from her arm, she sat down and started going through the first paper in the pile – the Times – scanning and discarding each page. We looked at each other; looked at her. Then she stopped. She took a long, shaky breath, and for a moment was completely still. And then she dropped the paper she was holding and started whipping through the others, frantically, ripping the pages, as Alfie and I stood watching. And somehow, we knew.

  Strange, given the detail with which I remember everything else: but those first few hours, those first couple of days, are a blur, a blank. I suppose it must have been shock. I don’t remember crying. I must have done. I remember not going to school, and one of my teachers coming around. One of Alfie’s friends’ mothers came round, too – that’s right – with a baby that dribbled strings of drool over my jumper when I was given it to hold. Those were all our visitors, I think. Our mother didn’t have any friends to rally round – how could she, when so much of her life was so secret? She told acquaintances that her husband worked much of his time in Ireland, but it wasn’t safe for the children, so we lived here. That was her line, and beyond it she kept people at a distance. Any closer and they’d have begun to realise that something was not quite right with our family, our set-up. Did a lady from next door bring around a casserole? It sounds plausible. But I don’t really remember. Everything else is hazy. What I remember most from those days is a moment from that very first night – which for his real family wasn’t, of course, the first night but the third. I remember sitting there in the waste of newspapers while Mum phoned our father’s Belfast number, his home phone number. From the babble of voices in the background as the phone was answered, she knew there hadn’t been a mistake. When she put the phone down she said: They thought I was a reporter, and they asked me to leave the family alone to let them grieve.

  We went to Belfast for the funeral. It was held the following Monday, the second of December: Catholic funeral masses may not take place on Sundays during Advent. We would slip in once the service had started, our mother had decided. It came out later, who we were – that we were – but it hadn’t yet, and as far as our mother knew, the Connollys knew nothing about us.

  So, Alfie’s first time in Belfast; my and our mother’s second. We flew there, first thing in the morning, and our mother booked us return flights for the same evening: she couldn’t face a night in that squalid, hateful city. I remember how grey and wet it was, how raw the air, how clammy. The darkness of the huddled buildings; the darkness of the pavements; the dour faces of the people in the streets. The great blanket of clouds in the sky, and no sign of the sun. We waited in a greasy spoon for the time to pass and the service to begin. Alfie and I were in our school uniforms, his light grey, mine black, the soberest clothes we had. Our mother was in a black skirt and coat and a low-brimmed black hat to hide her face. She made us order full English breakfasts – or rather, Ulster fries – so that we’d have a reason to be in the café. She made us eat them, too: I remember the gagging feeling of chewing on spongy clumps of sausage and sodden fatty bread. The prickle of fizzy orange in the back of my nose; sharp, like tears.

  The streets just off the main road looked familiar from all the news broadcasts we’d seen: small dirty rows of terraced houses, many with bricked-up doorways and windows. Rubble and mesh and women in headscarves, heads down. An Army patrol. A thin-looking dog, missing an eye. The shivery feeling of being watched.

  In the end, my mother’s nerve deserted her and we didn’t go to the funeral, after all. We sat on a wall by a derelict, bombed-out building within sight of the back entrance of the church, and we watched the impassive, soot-stained building, and my mother held Alfie’s hand but I took mine back. The memory of being with her that other time in Belfast, watching a house from outside, waiting, outside of the story, came back to me stronger than ever before. We sat there for perhaps half an hour; it’s hard to tell. Twice a patrolling officer asked us what our business was and our mother said that we w
ere meant to be at the funeral but it had been too much for her little boy and so we were having a breather out here, waiting for the rest of our party. I remember being impressed at how fluidly, how plausibly, the lies came from her tongue. Then again, she’d had our lifetimes of it.

  None of us knew how long a Catholic Mass would be; how long before we’d have to leave. At one point, our mother – agonised, flitting back and forth with her decisions – decided that she wanted to look in, to set foot – literally, just that – in the building. We watched as she jogged across the street and up the steps and round the building; disappeared; returned a moment later, flushed, saying that it was ending and we had to go, and that was that.

  A day or so later, it came out that our father had a second family. I still, to this day, don’t know quite how. Catriona Connolly clearing her husband’s office (do consultants have their own offices?) at the hospital? Or his locker; finding a photograph, some kind of evidence? A well-meaning colleague, who knew or had gathered more than he should, thinking he was doing her – or us – a kindness by taking her aside, a quiet word in her ear, about his suspicions? Had our father ever let anything slip to his mother – our grandmother – or to his sister? Did they know, or guess, or know enough to ask questions? Were there documents there shouldn’t have been, or bills, or statements that didn’t add up? Had Catriona suspected anything before, and put away the hunch, high on a shelf beyond everyday reach? However it happened, it happened: we were discovered, and it was all over the media, at least in Ireland. The Two Faces of the Plastic Surgeon, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the tabloids were gleeful. Somehow, Catriona got or was given our number, and she rang one afternoon to speak to our mother. I don’t know what was said. Our mother took the phone into her bedroom, stretching the cable under the door. We listened, but all we could hear her say was Yes, No, Yes, I’m sorry, Off and on, Thirteen years; our lives, her story, apologetic syllables. Somehow, too, the journalists found out our address. We were photographed leaving the flat in Eardley Crescent: an unflattering one of our mother, her face hard and old-looking; Alfie’s and my eyes blacked out with strips. That was when she said it, and who knows if it was just defiance, but it has always seemed to me that she was telling her truth: I would do it all again, I wouldn’t trade anything, not even the outcome, not even if I knew the outcome right from the start.

  If it had happened earlier – if the truth about us had come out before the funeral, say – there might have been some sort of reconciliation. No: ‘reconciliation’ is too strong a word, but we might at least have been admitted to the funeral, and had a chance or a reason to meet our counterparts, and to meet the grandmother and aunt and cousins we’d never had. As it was, and with my mother’s words in capitals in the tabloids, Catriona Connolly declared she wanted nothing to do with us, ever, and I must say understandably so.

  North End Road

  Three months after my father dies, we’re informed that we have to move house: Catriona is putting Eardley Crescent – which is held in her name, and left to her by the terms of our father’s will – on the market. They talked once – my mother says – about his making provision for us in his will; it would have been shortly after Alfie was born; for whatever reason or reasons, he never got around to doing it. I’ve never been able to understand that. I can’t make myself believe that it was callous, a cruel sort of denial of us. So what was it? Sheer negligence? I can’t believe that, either. Was it practicality – his wife’s signature needed on any changes in the will? Was his solicitor a family friend, someone he couldn’t confess or expose himself to? Was it that when he was back in Belfast we faded slightly, and such matters seemed less pressing? Whatever it was, I can’t understand it, or him, and I can’t forgive him. In our savings accounts were a few hundred pounds each; nothing. He could have made provision for us, somehow. The only hard, cold fact I have is that he didn’t: and in the end that overrides the reasons why.

  It’s February, and bitter. The plane trees are black and slimy-trunked; squalid heaps of semi-putrefied leaves nestle round dustbin enclosures. Pigeons, sodden puffs of tufts and fleas, hop baleful-eyed along dank pavements, looking even more pestilent than usual. Umbrellas broken-boned and abandoned, useless against the driving winds. After school, I sit for hours at our living-room window, watching the birds and the newspapers and the chip-wrappings blown to and fro in the road, hideous under the watery orange light of the street lamps. I watch people swarming home from work, huddled neckless in their long dark coats. The grimy scraps of the day, fag-ends and litter, gusting in their wake.

  A London affiliate of Catriona’s solicitors comes to make a survey of the flat and handle proceedings. Then an estate agent. Alfie, Mum and I sit out each visit in silence, lined up on the sofa: three pairs of eyes watching mutely, stonily, accusing, ashamed. We think they think we’re tenants, but we can’t be sure. The solicitor is a brisk, efficient, apologetic man with a slight astigmatism and thinning hair. The estate agent is a thin, gangly, baby-faced man with the worst case of acne I’ve ever seen. I imagine him scraping his razor over his cheeks each morning, slicing the heads of competing clusters of pustules, liquid seeping. I draw a comic strip for Alfie, with them as the villains. The fourth or fifth potential buyer shown around agrees to take the place, but at a sum far under the asking price: he knows, or guesses, that the vendor wants a quick sale. Done and dusted – I remember the solicitor’s phrase – as soon as possible. Those are his instructions.

  He doesn’t look us in the eye. He doesn’t believe we’re tenants, after all. He must have seen the newspapers from Belfast, the photo of our mother and her defiant words. She should have been repentant and apologetic, begging forgiveness, but she wasn’t, wouldn’t.

  Our mother is working all hours at the moment, to try to keep us afloat. Her main job is as an auxiliary nurse at the Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith. She’s started walking the forty minutes there and back to save on the bus fare. Only if she’s on a late shift and we beg her will she agree to take a night bus up Lillie Road past Normand Park, where the junkies and drug-dealers hang out after dark. Alfie begs her, and I beg her, too. I have a weird, unshakeable feeling that I somehow killed my father – as if I willed it, caused it – and I’m suddenly, irrationally, terrified for our mother now because I’ve hated her as well these last few months. She says she takes the bus. We hope we believe her. Auxiliary nursing – bed-making, bedpan-slopping, washing and dressing and cleaning sick and wiping arses – doesn’t pay, even when you’re working back-to-back shifts and emergency cover. So for the past few weeks our mother’s been trying to find extra work cleaning houses. We hate this. There are cards up on the windows of the local newsagent, the Indian takeaway and the library, the café opposite West Brompton Tube station, and we are mortified: for ourselves, and for her. She hasn’t had many takers, though, and for this we are grateful beyond belief. People don’t like a middle-aged white woman, so obviously fallen on hard times, mopping their floors and scrubbing at their spattered loos. It makes them uneasy: it’s too close to home.

  She doesn’t know how we are going to manage, now. Her face is tight and thin and lined these days. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: she looks easily ten years older. Perhaps her mother could help, or her sister Helen: but she’s too proud to tell them how bad things are. Besides, it’s not as if any of them could be any immediate, practical solace. Our grandmother lives in Beverley now, on a modest pension in a small two-bedroom house, and Helen has married a Canadian and moved to Toronto. While Mum’s on lates I creep into her room and read Aunt Helen’s occasional, slapdash letters, bold sloping writing on flimsy airmail paper, and I wonder if our mother thinks of going there. You guys should come! she writes, and The kids would love it! and she’s only talking about a holiday, but I think: what if? A new start: a whole new beginning, a whole half-world away. These days I wonder what we might have been like had we slipped our skins and become Canadians. I think of our other-selves, living other-lives, and
the thought makes me oddly sad. Mourning the loss of something you’ve never had: how absurd. How do you know, I tell myself, that things would have been any better? They might have been worse; we might have ended up doubly, triply exiled from ourselves and our previous life. But yet: even now, I can’t help it, help wondering if that was a turning we missed, and these days, after Jeremy, it descends on me with a new intensity.

  Perhaps, it occurs to me with a sudden and nasty stab, that’s ageing. I see it all the time with the elderly people I look after. All of them, almost without exception, mourning their other selves. Haunted by their ghost-lives, the people they could or should have been. I feel too young to feel like this. But the truth is I’m almost forty, childless and alone, with little hope of writing myself out of the script and the story I’m trapped in.

  All I can do is keep going.

  We didn’t go to Canada, and perhaps it was only my imagination that we ever might have. One day, the squinting solicitor phones and says that his client Mrs Connolly has informed him that we will be receiving half the proceeds of the sale, once tax and duties have been cleared, in a lump sum. It’s on condition, he stresses, that my mother does not contact or attempt to contact Mrs Connolly again, ever. That my mother does not speak to any member of the media about our personal circumstances, should there at some future time be approaches made or offers effected. These criteria, he finishes, apply from the tendering of the offer, and any communications whatsoever should be made through the official channel, i.e. him.