I looked at her.
‘Your voice, child. You’ll have to speak some time.’
I had always known how to speak, and I began by saying, ‘I want to go to the sea.’
We took the train to Brighton the following Saturday. Noreen wore her hat and Carmel had a blue scarf tied around her white face. I had a lemon dress, which made me feel like part of the sun that shone through it. People looked at us.
The walk from the station was long and when we got to the sea it was not just ours, it belonged to the hoards of others swarming on the pebbles with their boxes of food and patches of blanket that squared off the greatness until it was much diminished.
This was not the sea of my dreams, but another sea. Still I went towards it, holding my mother’s hand and it welcomed us as an old friend.
We slid into it; I looked at my mother and the shadow of a bird passed over her face.
She smiled a smile that made me so warm I dived into the cool of the waves. I kicked and turned and saw the whites of my mother’s legs beside me. I held on to them and they were firm to the touch as if they had taken root in the place where they ought to have been all along. The water made us clear to each other.
‘Let go of me anytime you like, Sive,’ she said when I came up for air. ‘You’ll swim like a fish.’
And I did, Just like my mother, said Noreen, minder of our belongings and our cares, when I came out of the water, but only after my skin had turned blue and I looked like I had been born in it.
* * *
There had been no noise from their bedroom all morning, so I had slept on. I dreamed of Myrna’s dark eyes on me, after seven years. It was a long sleep and she had plenty of time to come to me, to stroke my brow and learn the shape of my face and body with her hands. It had filled out from a straight to curved form only in the past few months.
The child was passing and the woman time was coming. This was what I was proud to tell the run of her hands. You have grown into yourself, they told me in return.
She had not come to me in all the times that we had Noreen to protect us. I remembered words that had come to me from her without being spoken, when I had put my hands on her shoulders: ‘You have a grandmother now. A good thing to have. Grandmothers do the job I do, only better, because you share blood.’
Still I did not trust the woman in the sunflower hat, she did not mind her own business, as Myrna did. Myrna, reading me, had tilted my head up so I could see the full blackness: ‘You don’t want to leave me now and before you grow another inch you won’t remember me.’
Now that Myrna was with me in dreams, I felt none of the guilt at having forgotten her. I felt the child’s gladness. An old friend had returned and it was as if she had never left. The air was filled with lemon scent, so I had no wish to wake.
She sat over me and we shared a silence that drove the angry hum of the city, not only from my ears, but also from my heart. I wanted to reach out and touch her skin, to find what made it so pale and fine, but the dark eyes held me. We watched and waited, this old woman and this girl-woman that I now was, until the screaming of my mother carried.
I moved in its direction, still half asleep, the dream-giver fading away. Then, in front of my opened eyes, I saw Carmel, kneeling beside her mother who was already cold to the touch. Seven years she had been with us and provided for us. My mother had grown quieter and I had grown lighter in her care.
‘Who will mind us now, Sive?’ my mother wept. ‘Who will mind us now?’
I did not know. But I cried my first open tears.
* * *
We put Noreen in a soft grave that promised to care for her as she had cared for us. The man in black watched my mother with a curious concern as she watched the box being lowered into blackness.
‘We should be putting her into her own ground,’ she whispered over to herself.
I took her by the arm.
‘Who will mind us now?’ she asked of people, who had come to know Noreen enough through her shop work to pay their respects at her last resting place. They looked away. London was where they had learned to look after themselves.
I asked my mother to be quiet, my stomach turning at her beggaring us.
* * *
At home, Carmel went to the wardrobe to look for the shoes and satin Noreen had long since thrown away. She talked all the while, to herself, until her lips moved without forming words in that way that tiredness brings.
When we were on our own in the dark kitchen, sitting over food that had grown cold, I made the promise to mind us, if only she would go to bed.
She went, and I sat up with the long dark night and waited for morning.
* * *
At the corner shop the owner said with great reluctance he could not have me to fill Noreen’s place. He had two more family members coming from India and, besides, at fifteen I was too young.
I knew where to go and what to do.
* * *
It was not the same. Sergio was not there. Myrna was not there. Harder, older versions of Fanny and Lulu were at the same table they always sat at. I walked up to them and they told me to push off and mind me own.
Then Lulu looked at my eyes and said, ‘It’s young Sive. You’re not quite filled yet, are you?’ Lulu looked sidelong at me. ‘Still a bit of work to do there, girl.’
I sat down and a young man came to ask me what I wanted. His eyes were cold and I did not hold them. Coffee, strong and black please. For the first time.
‘Myrna’s drink,’ Lulu remembered.
I tasted it, winced and had to put two sugars in it.
‘Where’s Sergio?’ I asked, when the man had gone, though his ears stayed with the table.
‘His own food got him,’ Lulu said simply. ‘Heart attack.’
‘And the fella behind his counter is his nephew. Got the place and came over from Italy and didn’t even go to Serg’s funeral. We went,’ Lulu reminded herself and Fanny. ‘Antonio lets in anybody. No peace in here these days.’
‘We still come in though, nowhere else to go,’ Fanny looked at me, as if I might have another suggestion.
‘Where’s Myrna?’ I asked.
The two looked at each other. Lulu bit at one of her nails and tucked her latest hairstyle behind her ears. It was too soft and too long for her face and neck, which were hard and taut, fighting slacking skin. There were two small scars above her lip and one bigger one at her hairline. Veins like red stitches poking through too much make-up.
Fanny finally spoke. ‘Gone, Sive. We’re the old girls now!’
‘I’m off.’ Lulu got up abruptly and went out the door, stopping to check in the tarnished mirror that was no longer there. She did not seem to notice.
‘Poor old Lou,’ Fanny sighed. ‘She’s on the sauce big time. Can’t tell her. Still looks well though, don’t she? I got four girls, as you know.’
Sergio’s nephew, I could see out of the corner of my eye, was watching me. Fanny noticed and interrupted herself with a whisper.
‘He’s a git. Pay no mind to him.’
Fanny was working as a maid now.
‘I gave up that business when my first two left home. I haven’t heard from them since. I’m gone down, Sive, and I know it.’ Fanny touched the hair more rust than brown now. ‘But Lulu keeps herself nice. So she’s not gone as far down.’
‘And Myrna?’
‘Myrna got as old-looking as she never was. She was here the day Sergio died. He lay in her arms and he called for his mother so they tell me. A big man like that. After that we never saw Myrna again. We heard she was in hospital – that’s the height of it.’
I felt the empty spaces in the café and the people who should have occupied them. The photos were no longer stuck to the mirror behind the counter. It was as if we had never been. I sat a long while with Fanny until it suddenly occurred to her to ask why I was here.
‘Work.’
‘Right,’ she stood up and brushed off a worn coat. She saw me look at it
. ‘Maids don’t earn as much. Come on, we’ll get you sorted.’
* * *
I took my clothes off carefully the first time, as if my body would disintegrate without them. He had asked to take some photos, the man at the bottom of the stairs in the dark room. The photos were to be put in the glass box so men could decide what they would come to see.
The man agreed with Fanny that this was the best way for a young girl to work, and the cleanest. When Fanny left he said to me I could get extra money doing extra work, but that was up to me.
Our new Soho room was not clean, but I had learned from Noreen to make it so. Carmel had grown wild again and had to be tied to the bed while I went out, as I once had been. But, unlike me, she had no dreams to stop the fear and the fire that had begun to burn in her again.
Myrna did not return to my dreams. I put my head on a pillow each night and listened to my mother’s ragged breath. I turned my back on the fresh green dreams, they brought too much feeling into the grey days I knew lay ahead.
Some nights I would cry for Noreen and some nights for Myrna and often for both.
Days wore on and led to endless nights. The shape of a full woman formed under my skin and I shrank from it as I had from the sunlight on the day of my birth.
I knew the time was coming when I would give more, because I needed more. I remembered Lulu telling me once: ‘It’s like this. It never seems so bad after you’ve done it.’
Carmel took more and more caring for and I was left with less time to make the money we needed. She ate only what I put in her mouth. She burned us out twice and landlords came to know us. The women would keep her in the café while I went to see places and I brought Carmel up at night to the newly rented place when no one could see her. She never left them until she found a way to burn. Then we would both have to leave.
* * *
One night Antonio asked to talk to me.
I gave Fanny a look that made her wait for me.
‘I give you thirty pounds if you let me,’ Antonio offered, annoyed that Fanny had not gone away. ‘Me and my friend, together.’
‘Well, love,’ she said after he had gone. ‘Mine was given away for nothing to a wanker who left me with wet knickers. It’s good money. By the looks of him, by the swagger, I’d say he won’t last more than five minutes.’
13 ∼ The Way Home
I PUT THE thirty pounds in my pocket walking up the stairs. The sulphur smell snaked under the unopened door.
I felt the hard walls close in around me, I moved quickly, expecting to find Carmel passing her fingers over flame or pressing it against her flesh and watching it blacken. I had doubled the knots I tied her with and still she found a way out of them, tearing at them with her teeth until her gums bled, lying in the foulness she could not contain.
I thought my eyes deceived me. Carmel sitting at the table, drawn to a flame held by an old woman. This could not be Myrna. The woman tall as life was bent over and the fine bones turned to gaunt longings for lost flesh and muscle.
The aged shadow of Myrna talked soft and soothing to Carmel, she talked like a river and the flame flowed like a river and my mother was quiet with watching. My mother’s eyes closed and her head rested on her arms. The red marks of bondage on her wrists angry, not a stitch of clothing on her stretched tired body.
I found my voice, ‘She dirties herself – easier to keep clean. I dress her in the day – don’t leave her like this all the time. It’s only me looking after her.’
Myrna held her arms out to me and I knelt and put my head against a jutting collarbone, no soft remained. Myrna spoke and softened the cold grey light of morning.
‘I went in my dream to the place where you were sleeping. Then Noreen came for me every night and shook me awake, wearing that hat. She showed me a place where we can go. A place by the sea and away from people. These bones want to go nowhere quickly. They talk to one another as I walk. They say: “Stop, Myrna, stop walking.” I told them, Sive, I said, “One last time.”’
* * *
In Sergio’s Café Lulu just nodded when we made our final goodbyes. Fanny stood on ceremony more, asking for our address and putting it in a special compartment of her purse.
The bus to the station took us up the long stretch of road, past theatres, offices, flats and homes all within walking distance of my life but I had never entered this world. Past the people who lived in this other world we were carried, who did not know the contents of mine, or those like me. I was nineteen and it was as if my whole life had been lived.
So I felt no regret or loss when our train pulled out of the station and heaved its way out of the grey vastness into greener times.
Nor did my mother who had her eyes trained on home. The way home cost thirty pounds. I paid for it.
* * *
The ship’s blast took my throat. We marched up the gangway with hundreds of excited voices, ours silent among them. Myrna and I sat Carmel by a window and not once did she move from it, not once did she take her eyes off the harbour or the rolling sea which followed.
The movement of the ship took my stomach by surprise and I felt it would not settle unless I went above to the deck.
‘On you go, Sive, I’ll mind her,’ Myrna said.
So I left my mother, I had to have the wind on my face.
The day was cold and bright and the wind sharp with it. I had no jumper and was all goosebumped flesh. My heart stayed warm. I saw the first island off the new shore and I was filled with the sense of knowing it. Voices raised, the ship’s blast said: ‘I am bringing them all home!’
Shouts and cries as people on deck recognized waiting faces on the pier, a rushed clearing of the deck that left me standing alone and waiting for someone I would recognize.
There was no one, but the town spires and the faraway hills said, ‘We welcome you back.’
The seagulls added their cries of homecoming.
Below, I found a different mother with the same old woman. Carmel’s face had come alive and flushed. She was in her place and knew it.
Myrna smiled at us both and our feverish talk of what way we could make for home.
‘The train to town, Sive,’ Carmel was saying. ‘Then the bus. Then home.’
* * *
We arrive in the town of Scarna at dead of night, with nothing but emptiness to greet us. The old tired woman and the young lost one look to the one between them, the middle one knows the way.
Carmel left Scarna from the same spot to which she has now returned. She comes off the bus on to ghost footprints, which are her own. Her steps are strong and sure. We leave the town quickly, out into the blackness, and I am afraid. All is familiar about this night to only one of us. All is the same as it was before the path broke up around her. The night greets her like a purring cat, wrapping itself around her.
Carmel bends to unstrap the shoes that have bound her. Her feet released, they carry us over ground known to them. Myrna cannot keep up and I am afraid to be led. Afraid of choking silence and the stray pairs of eyes belonging to the night creatures and spirits who line the way, belonging to the hedgerows and high trees which line the way. All the eyes have come to mark the return.
Myrna and I trail further behind, hold hands and strain to retain sight of the pale legs slicing through the night way. And for us the walk is a forever walk, to us it will not be kind, because we are strangers to the place and the pitch black of the unlit night. We have the smell of city and its disregard on us, we are not open to the ways of the country. Not like Carmel. This is her own. None can take it away. Her pale legs ahead disappear from view and we have to follow up an overgrown laneway with brambles which screech and throw misshapes into the sky and scrape at bare skin. I am afraid of these and Myrna sighs and takes my arm. ‘They will know you, too.’
Where is the way leading?
Upwards and upwards and the shape of a stone house appears when the full moon changes mood, casts off her cloud shrouds and chooses finally to shine and
her white light bathes the path and the prospect for us.
Myrna reaches for my hand and says, ‘The house that Noreen brought me to. This is the shape of coming things.’
Where is the way leading?
Up to that stone house surrounded by ghostly trees.
There is an open door and Carmel is there, before it, breathing fast and remembering the last time she walked through it and she says, ‘I cannot go in. I cannot go in.’
And her sweat-glistened face is cased silver in the moonlight and out of the shadows the ghost of Noreen appears and beckons her. She follows then and we follow Carmel and that is how we find the place called home.
A place with no lock on the door, but our presence is marked as an intrusion by the creatures that have made it theirs in our absence. They do not flee when Myrna whispers, ‘Stay.’
The ghost of Noreen leaves us.
Carmel knows the way things are to be done. Myrna and I sit while my mother makes light in the darkness with that which she has always sought to make. By the fireplace the crib is waiting. She runs her fingers along it, removing the dust of years with fresh tears.
‘Were you kept in it?’ I ask. She shakes her head. Myrna tells her it is beautiful and Carmel knows that it is.
A fire of welcome is lit for us.
Home.
* * *
The new place crept up on us and gave us its heart. Though in the first few days of being there I did not want it.
Noreen had sold all but a few acres. The sold land was farmed still, so curious neighbours did not surround us. The house was whitewashed once and grey patches invited by the salt-laden winds peered through the white. Because the building is on a slight incline, though trees conceal it, the gales laugh at all attempts to shelter the house.
We learned, when a north-easterly blew, to stuff the windows at the front of the house with newspaper and still they rattled and the wind let out shrill whistles of derision. When the weather brought rain to visit the newspaper would soak and drip and the puddles needed mopping up every half hour.
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 8
