All the Beggars Riding

by Lucy Caldwell

  He doesn’t know – or perhaps he does – that two Irish Sunday papers have already asked our mother to tell her story, and she’s told both of them to fuck off: that her life and her children’s lives are not a carcass to be picked over.

  I don’t know, and I have always wondered, what prompted Catriona Connolly to make that decision. She was – is – a devout Catholic, as far as I can tell. Was it conscience? A sudden impulse to do the charitable thing? Or was it the advice of her solicitors that we might have been entitled to a portion of her late husband’s estate: a sort of squatters’ rights in his life, as it were, and this was a pre-emptive gesture? An attempt to avert a long, tangled, drawn-out court case? I’ve subsequently, casually, taken hypothetical advice on this and it seems that we may indeed have been entitled. The Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act suggests that we could have had a course of action: especially if our father’s will did not contain an explicit clause defining ‘children’ as ‘legitimates’. Nobody, so far as I know, ever suggested to our mother that she should take legal advice. I’ve always wondered why she didn’t. Perhaps her shame kept her silent: the thought of our names being dragged through the courts, our business being known to everyone she knew. Except that doesn’t chime: how, now, after everything, could our mother be felled by shame? Unless my father’s death created a vacuum into which all the guilt and shame at bay for years came rushing. Or perhaps it wasn’t shame but shame’s opposite, pride. Perhaps she was too proud to ask for anything, to be seen to be grovelling.

  Back and forth you go, back and forth, trying to reason, trying to know. Always it’s useless. How can you ever begin to enter into another person’s head, thoughts, fears, being?

  Our mother’s face, when she put down the phone, was white. She’d been asleep, snatching two hours between her day shift and a night shift she’d agreed to cover. Her hair was disarrayed, birds’-nested from its slept-in pleat. I noticed, not for the first time, how grey it was becoming. She was only thirty-five: younger than I am, now. The skin-bags beneath her eyes, pools of brown; her face, unarranged by sleep and flaccid with shock, swelling swiftly into a complicated relief. The share of the proceeds, she repeated, as if she was tasting the words for herself, would not be enough to buy another flat, but it could certainly be the mainstay of our rent for some years, if we were careful, and the start of a proper savings account for each of us.

  Alfie nudged towards her. I stayed sitting in the doorway, where we’d come to watch and earwig when we’d realised that this was no ordinary conversation.

  ‘We’re going to be OK,’ she said, and then, her accent slipping back into Yorkshire as she reached for Alfie, ‘No need to be afleyed, love. We’re going to be OK now.’

  ‘The whole flat is ours,’ Alfie said. ‘Not half of it. She’s never even been here.’

  Our mother pulled him tight to her, and looked at me over his head, and I looked away.

  We move house a few weeks later. It’s the start of April, and blustery. The wind whips my long hair across my face and into my mouth and eyes as I stagger down the steps with the final boxes and bin bags of our things. Alfie is guarding them, our pile of possessions, heaped higgledy-piggledy on the pavement by the railings. He looks like a refugee from somewhere, so skinny and pale, his big eyes darting, his chapped bitten lips. He is a refugee from somewhere, I think. We all are. Refugees from our life.

  Another nurse from the Charing Cross has offered to help us: her husband is a minicab driver. He arrives in his battered car to take us and our bin bags and boxes to our new home. He is West African – Nigerian, I think – and his tinny car radio is bleating out Fela Kuti in between bursts of static. We load in as much as possible. He ties our mattresses onto the roof by looping rope through the windows and round, then our mother gets into the front, and we hand her the fragile things – a couple of framed pictures, the pot of spindly honesty – and the car sets off. Alfie and I are to stay on the pavement with the rest of the things and they’ll come back for us. We each sit on a sack of clothes, beanbag-style, not saying a word. The gusty wind cuts easily through my sweatshirt. I am wearing a counterfeit Fruit of the Loom sweatshirt – a last-minute Christmas present bought, I know, at the Saturday street market – and a plaid skirt with leggings and slouch socks and thin-soled plimsolls. The damp chill of the ground seeps through my shoes and into my very bones. I hunch my knees to my chest, tug my skirt down like a tent, tuck my chin under the neck of my sweatshirt. Alfie has picked up a stick and is dipping it in a puddle to draw pictures in the road. I watch him for a while and realise he’s not drawing pictures but writing his initials, over and over, until the square of pavement is dark.

  Our mother comes back for us sooner than I expected. We load another batch, this time lashing the bed-frames on top, heaving the dismantled dining table-top into the boot. The car drives off, open boot bobbing as if it’s laughing. The third time, we manage to fit most of the remaining things into the car, and the fourth time there’s room for all three of us to squeeze in, with Alfie on my lap. The smell of the car is pungent and stale; Fela is still blaring and the passenger door beside me is tied on with string and masking tape. Alfie’s buttocks are bony in my lap and I jab him with my elbow to get him to shift. He twists back to look at me, bemused. For good measure, I pinch him. He doesn’t so much as whimper.

  It takes less than five minutes to drive to our new home. Right along Lillie Road, past West Brompton station, then right again down North End Road. You could walk it in fifteen – ten – minutes. (Except I never do: I never go back. Even walking Alfie to and from school, I make us take a circuitous route, so that we don’t have to pass the places we used to live, as if those places are also a time, which is over now.)

  ‘It’s almost’, says our mother, ‘as if we’re not moving at all, isn’t it?’

  Neither Alfie nor I reply. I’m not used to feeling sorry for my mother – hating her is much easier – and the emotions swirl uncomfortably in my stomach.

  It had taken her days and days of searching to find us a new home. It needed to be roughly in the same area, for our schools and her hospital – and also, I suppose, to keep some notion of continuity in our lives. She must have walked miles, on the trail of private ads in Loot magazine and the flats advertised in spidery, misspelt writing on cards in newsagents’ and dry-cleaners’ windows, before she found one that would do and we could afford.

  The nurse’s husband double-parks, flicks his hazard lights on.

  ‘Well, this is us,’ our mother says, her voice too bright. She jangles the set of keys hanging from her thumb.

  We crane to look through the steamed-up window. The nurse’s husband gets out and helps our mother unload our things from the good door, so that we’re free to climb out.

  ‘Ah’ll help you take dese last things in,’ he says, his accent good-natured and thick.

  ‘There’s no need,’ our mother says, and I wonder now if she was embarrassed for us, or for him, about to see my and Alfie’s faces.

  He insists. ‘Eh, waht ah you talking about?’ he tuts, and he takes the keys from our mother and smiles a big, gleaming smile at us, then slings a bin bag over each shoulder and walks towards one of the houses.

  I shove Alfie out and clamber after him. We’re standing in front of a dilapidated row of three-storey houses, boxy bay windows and rotting windowsills, peeling paint. The nurse’s husband has gone into one of the houses and we take a few faltering steps in each direction. The doorway is clogged with litter: Coca-Cola and crumpled Special Brew cans, wilted crisp packets, two, three, four used condoms. The window on the first floor is smashed in and covered with a plywood board. I take a step back and realise I’m standing in a spattered starfish of vomit.

  ‘Well go on,’ our mother says, and there is an edge to her voice.

  Inside, the hallway is tobacco-coloured, with rotting hessian carpets and sooty, cracked mirrors. It smells of damp – of cabbage – of urine. We stumble in, pas
t a brown door on the right – the ground-floor flat – and up the stairs. We, our mother tells us, are in the first-floor flat.

  ‘The one with the broken windows?’ Alfie asks, and our mother says she’s sure the landlord will get them fixed in no time. Even in the midst of my shock and confusion I can tell she’s lying. Our flat in Eardley Crescent was shabby around the edges, but it was light, and airy, and elegant. This flat is dim and filthy and smells of what I come to learn is a quiet, insidious sort of despair. Our belongings are piled in the centre of the front room. The nurse’s husband claps his hands together, then shakes mine and Alfie’s, formally, and wishes us good luck. He leaves – we listen to his heavy footsteps going down the stairs, and I think to myself that the noise is like nails being hammered into a coffin. And then we’re alone, the three of us, in our new home, in our new life.

  Those first few minutes in the flat in North End Road are as clear to me as if they happened this afternoon. Alfie grabbed my hand and I let him, squeezing his sticky little paw in mine. We looked, saucer-eyed, around. It must, once upon a time, have been a respectable house. The first-floor window, like the ground-floor window directly below, was a square bay. The ceiling was reasonably high, though drooping, and there was a crumbling cluster of decorative mouldings in the centre and around the edges. One strip of the room had been cut off with a thrown-up plywood partition, to create a galley kitchen with grimy walls and peeling lino, crusted with grease. The bathroom – a toilet and slimy plastic shower cubicle – was at the end of a narrow hallway. Nothing happened when you pulled the cord for light, but even in the watery light that came from the small dirty window we could see black speckled mould growing on the walls and in between the shower’s tiles. And then the bedrooms. The bedrooms were through the living room – the whole ‘flat’ was in reality two reception rooms, which had been sectioned off into separate spaces with cheap, flimsy walls. Only one of them – the one our mother quickly said could be ours – had a window, overlooking an alleyway and some bins. Each room was barely big enough for a double bed: our wardrobes would have to go along a wall of the living room.

  ‘If you think, yeah, that I’m going to share with Alfie, then you’re wrong. You share with Alfie. I don’t know any almost-thirteen-year-old that has to share with her piss-pants little brother.’

  As I said before, I’d got lippy – our mother’s word – since the summer. But I didn’t say those words, and for that I am grateful: I think our mother might have broken, there and then on the scuzzy floor, and never got herself up again.

  Instead, with Alfie still attached, like some sort of mute, drifting sea creature, I trailed back out, did another tour, as if we might have missed something; as if our mother might suddenly realise we were in the wrong place. There might have been, please God, please please God, or Jesus or angels or anyone, a mix-up with the keys, or something, anything . . .

  ‘We’ll make it nice,’ our mother said, and I realised to my horror that she was pleading with me over Alfie’s head. ‘Of course it needs a bit of a clean, and with our stuff all bundled like this . . . but we’ll make it nice, Lara, won’t we? Won’t we, Alfie?’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Alfie said.

  ‘Shut up,’ I said.

  ‘But I am. I’m starving.’

  ‘Well,’ our mother said, ‘do you fancy fried chicken, pizza, Chinese, or Indian?’ She swept her arm in the direction of the road outside. The opposite side was a row of fast-food places, pawnshops, credit unions, massage parlours. She started to laugh. Her laugh was too high-pitched to be a real laugh.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Mum.’

  She stopped as suddenly as she’d started.

  ‘When are we going to start?’ I said.

  The frames of our bunk bed and our mother’s bed were jumbled up in a heap in the living room. She squatted down; picked up a leg and a couple of slats, looked at them. It had taken her and Mr Jarvis from the basement flat in Eardley Crescent the whole morning to disassemble them. So we hauled the mattresses into the bedrooms and for the first few nights, until she begged the sleazy Turkish landlord – who insisted on kissing her and me in greeting, missing my cheek and sliming his rubbery mouth on the side of my lips – to help us build the beds again, we slept like that, in sleeping bags, like campers. As if the situation was only temporary.

  I knew, and I tried fiercely to tell myself that night, lying there listening to the dull roar of traffic, and the incessant sirens, and the thumps and thuds and yells of fights outside the takeaways, and the blaring music from cars with their windows down, and the scratching in the skirting board beside my head that was mice, not rats, mice, not rats (I will not cry, I will not cry), that many people in the world – many people in London, in the North End Road, even – lived in worse conditions: in far worse, and far more humbling conditions. Of course we got it cleaned up, and painted, the window got fixed. A few months later, my mother bought a fold-out sofa bed for the living room and she slept there, so that Alfie and I could have a bedroom each. So writing this now, I’m reminded of that Monty Python sketch: well, we lived in a paper bag in a septic tank for three months. The North End Road was a fine place to live: it was close to parks, it had – still has – a vibrant street market every day but Sunday; bakeries, pound shops. I’d gladly live there now. So I’m going to stop now. Suffice to say, that first April night felt as if life as we knew it was truly over.

  In many ways, it was. This has been a memoir of my childhood, and that first day in North End Road, my father dead, exiled from our family home, exiled from the notion that we ever were a real family, I regard as when my childhood definitively ended.

  At Mr Rawalpindi’s

  I haven’t managed it, I know. I wanted to tell my story in the hope that I’d understand something – understand my parents, understand us – and in the hope that things would be put in order, put right, laid to rest. But I haven’t managed to write even one single episode without it breaking down midway into hypothetical questions and holes, things I don’t know and have no way of knowing. Pathetic, isn’t it? Even our own stories, we’re unequipped and essentially unable to tell.

  The writing course ended last night and I realise now, belatedly, how much I’ll miss it. Without my noticing, my week has come to be centred around those Monday nights in that dingy, strip-lit room in the Irish Cultural Centre, even when I told myself I was only there for Mr Rawalpindi. The teacher met up with each of us, for a quarter of an hour, to discuss our work. She was kind enough to call it that, to take seriously the sheaves of paper we’d so self-consciously, excruciatingly, slid onto her desk last week.

  ‘I know mine doesn’t work,’ I said as soon as I went in, to spare her having to say it.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ she said.

  ‘Well – it just doesn’t, does it? There are too many gaps and contradictions. Too many holes. Too much I don’t and never can know.’

  She tilted her head to one side and looked at me and I didn’t know where to look. ‘You have this thing against fiction, don’t you, Lara? You think that because you’re telling a true story, only the exact and utter truth will do. It’s like a moral imperative for you. But, actually, everything we write is a kind of story. We shape it, structure it, decide where it begins and ends. You say that you’re stumbling into blanks and gaps and holes – well, what fiction can do is spin a net across them. It won’t catch everything – it can’t – but what it can do is make you feel what it might have been like, what it would have been like, to live in that situation, to make that decision. Fiction is the most humane and magical of acts – it’s healing, restorative, exactly because it shows us a way across those chasms. We can never know what it’s like to be someone else, ever, except through fiction. People always talk of fiction as if it’s an escape from the world, but it’s not that, or not just that. It’s an escape out of ourselves and into the world, too.’

  There was a lot more, but that was the gist of it. I was hot with embarrassmen
t by then, my head whirling at the thought that she’d actually read my story – parts of it, anyhow – and aching to get out of there.

  After I took Mr Rawalpindi home we sat out in his overgrown tangle of a patio garden, all jutting paving stones, rotting leaf mulch and rusting wrought-iron chairs, and smoked some of his weed. It’s years since I’ve smoked, and I remembered why. All it did was make me nauseous, and my head throbbed. Mr R. had dug out some more mouldering boxes, and he showed me the damp soft photographs, brown with spreading water marks and stains. He had his lover’s diary, too, an expensive leather journal with gilt-edged pages and tight lines of elegant fountain pen on thick mottling paper. I was there, he said, and he showed me the last few pages where the handwriting faltered, and the entries shortened to indecipherable abbreviations. It was probably more to do with the weed than anything else, and the anticlimactic feeling of finishing the course, but I felt my eyes well up and once they started the waterworks wouldn’t stop. I found myself rambling on about how I destroyed our photo albums, and how I didn’t ask my mother the right questions in time, and how now all I have of her is her shoeboxes with their useless scraps. Before she died, I’d had the sudden idea of recording our conversations, and I’d bought a stupidly expensive voice-activated digital recorder to leave by her hospital bed, so that if she started talking – and people sometimes do, in their last days and hours – I’d have it saved. But all I got, in the end, was about eleven minutes of my panicked promptings, and her bemusement, and irritability. I’ve played them again and again, those recordings. I even transcribed them, in case the files were damaged, or lost, or accidentally erased. They tell me nothing, and they’re all I have. My mother, stubborn to the end, refused to unburden herself, and my wild hopes that we’d discover a letter, or a diary, something that would explain things or give her version of events, came to nothing.