Wife in the North

by Judith O'Reilly

  Thursday, 9 August 2007

  One thing and another

  An outing to a city hospital to look into my six-year-old’s nut allergy. Breastfeeding is supposed to reduce the risk of allergies. He was breastfed for thirteen months; I feel like suing my own nipples. A nurse covers his arms with solutions and pricks them through the skin. It turns out he is also allergic to cats, dogs, horses and grasses. I tell my husband if he was allergic to sand and bad coffee, we could all go back to London.

  Children’s Outpatients is busy with intent artists carefully sticking sequins on to cardboard silhouettes of children who run and jump for joy. Next to them, small boys gaze rapt into virtual reality, only their fingers and eyeballs moving as the game plays out. Pretty girls wear golden princess frocks while others storm a grey and plastic castle with battlements and an orange slide for a quick getaway if small barbarians make it through the gates. As my sons played in and around the castle, I noticed an engraved and silver plaque, its shiny brother hung on a different wall, each hardly bigger than a matchbox. They said: ‘With love from The Family and Friends of Katie Grant, Aged 2’. I wondered who she was, this lost child whose parents thought to gift a toy to others. I asked a nurse. Asking, I thought: ‘I hope she is remembered and not just in a plaque.’ She was. As she cleared away the glitter, the nurse said: ‘Ah yes, Katie.’ The nurse said people were so kind – a fire engine, a doll’s house. Each toy to mark a missing child. She said it was a shame: the slide was broken, the castle, it would have to go. But Katie’s silvered name will not lie among plastic and forgotten ruins: the plates will be unscrewed from castle walls and fixed to something else. I thought how right to keep her name; right, too, that a toy should break from hard and eager play. That is what toys should do.

  Monday, 13 August 2007

  Plagues upon houses

  Have been visited by plagues, several and diverse. A plague of boils. Maybe not boils, spots then. It is fair to say I have not had spots like these since I was sixteen when I spent a considerable period of time staring at my nose thinking: ‘How spotty can you get?’ Not only spots: a skin rash has reappeared which I have not seen since I was locked in a job at the BBC which I hated and which hated me back. When I went to a cosmetics counter in the nearest city last week, I explained I needed the magic potion I had once used to get rid of the stress rash – oh yes, and I had spots. The woman found the magic potion, then said: ‘Try a pore-minimizing serum.’ A pore-minimizing serum? That is to say, I have spots, a rash and enormously large pores. Do they train these women to say things like: ‘Well, I think you are beautiful as you are but perhaps you would like to try this shaving foam?’ or ‘I hardly noticed the adult acne because I was so taken by your enormous blue eyes.’ Managers must go on the same courses: ‘On the one hand, you make a lovely cup of tea; on the other, you have cost the company £32 million and you’re fired.’ I want to know whether these women ever look at their sisters and say: ‘Do you know what? I think you are just too ugly for me to help.’

  It is not just the boils, we have so many flies in the cottage, it is difficult to think we are not damned. They drop from nowhere into your tea cup or on to a half-emptied plate. I sprayed and closed doors; stalked with tea towels and newspapers. I bought two plastic fly swatters. Two on the off chance I might get to keep one when the boys discover them and take them out to the garden to hit each other with. I also bought an electronic tennis bat you swing at them; hanging, after all, is too good for them and tying nooses that small can be very time-consuming. Finally, I bought a poison pen to wipe round the windows and doors, which I feel is rather Agatha Christie. I also have my doubts whether they can read. I wrote a note on the window. It said: ‘Dear Flies. Go away or I will kill you.’ I signed it ‘Lady of the Flies’.

  We are also a house of pestilence and disease. Not only did my six-year-old, my husband and I all fall to vomiting and bile, but the Yorkshire Mother’s seven-year-old and nine-year-old came down with it too. They moved out yesterday into a rented house a couple of miles away. There was a moment of quiet, then last night my baby girl caught it. I moved a mattress into her room, right by her cot. She would say: ‘Feel sick’ and we would play catch into a plastic bowl. Say: ‘Wata’ and I would hold a sippy cup. Vomit and I would say: ‘I’ll be right back, OK?’ and she would lie there, nod and I would go wash an unlucky panda, or fetch another towel or sheet. We lay together on the mattress and she pressed her apple face into the dark place between my cheek and cotton pillow. I said: ‘I love you, darling one.’ I do not think there is a word, nor ever can be one, to catch and paint the all-at-once rush of a mother’s love. It is as if you catch a leaky boat to ride the rapids, tip and swirl around the rocks, gasp to see the rainbowed, unmapped waterfall, then plunge – not downwards into the white and foaming water rush, but up and up and up.

  Sunday, 19 August 2007

  Happy holidays

  The week has been mad; then again, every week is mad. My Clever Cousin came to do complicated things to my computers. He was supposed to come on Wednesday and leave on Thursday at noon. Every time he fixed one program, another unravelled. He ended up leaving on Friday at 6 p.m. He does not have kids. He has fish. I said: ‘What do you think?’ He said: ‘It’s chaos.’ I would have asked him why he thought that, but someone screamed, interrupting my thought process. It might have been me.

  Summer holidays mean that we have neighbours again in the other cottages along our row. Small children play complicated superhero games in the shrubbery. My six-year-old’s part demands he spends every waking moment in a John Deere tractorman boilersuit and his cycle helmet. Even when he eats. When the boys and their friends do things I do not like, I throw them out of the garden. If it is good enough for God. Following a bad experience with a room being trashed, which would not have shamed a Seventies rock band, I also have strict rules about playing inside. On Friday, as I was talking to a builder about the next phase of work in the arches, my six-year-old asked: ‘Can we go upstairs, Mummy?’ I said yes, noticing too late the tribe of children with him. As soon as I had finished talking to the builder, I ran upstairs to bring everyone back down. There was a young boy I had never seen before in the room. I said: ‘Who are you?’ I suppose I should really have said: ‘Whose are you and where are you from?’ I still do not know. Later, when I asked my sons, they shrugged.

  At some point in the morning, my Riding Pal drops by with her friend who has the Exmoor ponies. They are both on large horses. My friend says: ‘I’m really hungover. Can I have some water?’ I go get her some water. I say to my Clever Cousin: ‘Come and meet my friend.’ He stands up, eases past the builder (although we have moved back in, the builders are still with us), steps round a workbench at the door and comes outside to meet her. I say: ‘She is on a horse.’ I probably did not need to say this. We chat awhile about the fact the other rider is on a horse with a glorious, glamorous name. She says: ‘But I think she looks like a Matilda.’ I look at the horse. I think: ‘What would make you think your horse looks like a Matilda? What would make you think your horse looked like anything but a horse?’

  They trot off. A couple of hours later, the Evangelicals arrive with their three children. I say to my cousin: ‘Come and meet my friends.’ I realize I cannot even offer them a biscuit because I am completely out of food. I own an Aga and I am completely out of food. They probably take your Aga away if you do not dedicate at least one day a week to baking cheese scones and fruit cake, let alone if you run out of food.

  My Clever Cousin finally made a successful break for freedom. Then on Saturday morning, we had to get out early to visit a farm shop to buy wooden gates for the access road outside the cottages. The boys pestered me for two small padlocks. I gave in. Within an hour of getting home, my six-year-old had padlocked a friend to a knotted rope tied to a tree, which they were using to let themselves down into a nettled strip of field. As the boy dangled from the rope my son realized, a little late, that he had lost the key to th
e padlock. I had hoped this habit of losing keys would skip a generation. My husband managed to haul the boy up and unlock him with the spare key I had kept (you live and you learn), but not before the struggling had snapped the branch of the rowan tree. I threw them all out of the garden for that one. Pointing to a small tear in his trousers, the boy said: ‘Look! He did that when he padlocked me to the rope.’ I thought: ‘I am so not explaining what happened to your mother.’ I said: ‘Well, next time he offers to padlock you to something, say no.’

  Wednesday, 22 August 2007

  The ghost of Hamlet’s father

  Before I went out last night, the Yorkshire Mother rang to say she had been offered a job cooking in an old people’s home. A house, a job now, piecing her life back together. I was going out to the haunted castle again. The Patient Mother wanted to go on the ghost tour and stay overnight in one of the apartments. The Hunt Ball Lovely was going too. I was willing enough to keep them company on the tour, but I cannot say the idea of another sleepless night appealed. Before the tour we ate dinner in the apartment they were staying in – spaghetti bolognese and After Eight chocolate mints.

  The castle is supposed to have any number of ghosts, as is the way with castles: a miserable lady, a blue boy, a suicide. What struck me was the way we carry our own ghosts with us. The Patient Mother said she had brought her bunny. A floppy brown and greyish-cream rabbit whose worn ears she still strokes and strokes again then feels against her cheek. Ears once cut off by a brother, sewn back on by mother. Whose paw she had to finger-touch before she slept; whose smell was as familiar, if she were to hold it to her nose, wetted by her breath, as her own grown woman scent. Her companion, then, since five, he has never spent a night away from her: not in honeymoon, childbirth, grief, sickness or any kind of joy. Insisting instead that she must take her nightly refuge in the comforts of childhood.

  She sipped a glass of wine and said she would not contemplate a night away from her old friend, would not give the rabbit to her own child. I asked: ‘What does she mean to you, this rabbit comforter?’ She said: ‘My childhood. My father.’ Her father died at fifty-eight, six years in the ground. She will not let him go. Not one whit of him. She said: ‘I like the fact he visits, watches over me. I like the fact we talk.’ And the rabbit, it lies yet on this grown woman’s pillow; blue button eyes, once brown glass, alert to every sigh and turn. I said: ‘What do you think would happen if you did not take the rabbit into your bed?’ She said she did not know, would not find out. When darkness comes, she said she does not, cannot turn her back from her old friend at night, keeping instead her face turned towards the rabbit’s own. I said: ‘And any other toys?’ Two bears, two sheep. A crowded bed, then, hers. A wife, a husband, all the toys of girlhood and her father’s ghost watching over all.

  The Hunt Ball Lovely, too, brought ghosts, or one at least. She said that driving over she had thought of one young true love she had known. A boy she had grown up with, dated, loved, then drifted from. At twenty-one, he had travelled through Australia and died there in an accident when he fell from the cab of a lorry. She said: ‘I thought if anyone would be my spirit guide, it would be him – he loved life so.’

  And me? After supper, I sat alone on a damp bench within the walled courtyard in the cold, torchlit darkness while other ghost hunters toured the rack and spike elsewhere. I thought of my ghosts – the dead and gone and lost. Some I grieve for yet. As I grow older, I find longing pains replace youth’s growing ones. Love and loss; thread twinned tight, twisted, bound, one with the other, impossible to tell apart so close they are in shade, both deep. I easy summoned up my missing; they stood around in pale, grey ranks, admiring stone walls and flags. I said: ‘I’ve called you here to say. I love you all, miss you still and thought you’d like to know.’ I strained to catch a murmur. Failed. A few nodded before fading entirely away; all among them smiled. I think one old lady in grey pin curls and soft wool cap, cradling a babe, raised a hand and waved. It is difficult to tell in the dark with the dead.

  Tuesday, 28 August 2007

  St Aga-tha

  I am no longer an Aga virgin. I know this for a fact. Firstly, I burnt my chic black and cream Aga oven mits; scorched, singed, crisped at the tip of the right hand. I laid it down on the top to reach over to a pot. I peered into the broccoli and thought: ‘Hmm, that doesn’t smell good.’ Only to realize the oven glove was smoking. On the upside, I did not have to eat it and the burn does make it look as if I occasionally cook. The Aga, I have discovered, is a tattle-tale. My husband was the one who wanted it. I did not. The expense made me feel bad. More than bad. The expense made me feel sick. I gave in and I was warming to it up to the moment I put the kettle on to make a cup of tea. The Evangelicals came round for supper; I had fed six children, then four grown-ups. I had cooked sausages and baked potatoes and beans alongside a vegetarian option. We had eaten in the garden, which entailed a fair amount of scurrying backwards and forwards carrying things. The pink kitchen table was on the grass since we do not have any garden furniture. This meant I had one surface too few in the kitchen. Things got moved about. My guests left. I thought: ‘Before I put the kids to bed, I really want a cup of tea.’ As I say, I put the kettle on.

  Now, this was not my fault. I told my husband when the Aga arrived that we would have to use it for warmth (tick), for cooking (tick), for drying clothes (tick), for ironing (tick-ish), for making toast (slices of bread pinned in a mesh bat contraption then pressed to death (much as a Catholic martyr might have been) between the hot plate and the chrome lid: tick) and for boiling the kettle. Well, that is what I do. He, however, got the electric kettle out of a packing case and put it on the side. I put it away again. I said: We have an Aga. Use the Aga kettle. Fill it up and put it on the hot plate. We are wasting enough power as it is, without plugging in a kettle.’ He got it out again. On Saturday, I put it on the Aga. What can I say? It had been a long day. The Aga kettle was not where it normally was. I wanted tea badly. I looked at the electric kettle as the black plastic started to wrinkle as it sat on the hot plate. I looked at the red switch you use to turn it on. I thought: ‘That is so not supposed to be there and it is so not supposed to be melting.’ I wrenched the kettle off a little late for the black toffee bottom and my hot plate, which now has the face of a clown imprinted on it. Unless, of course, it is the face of a Catholic martyr.

  Tuesday, 28 August 2007

  Foot and mouth

  Glendale. Some people wait all year for the right agricultural show to come around. OK, they may flirt a little with another agricultural show, but when you know you have found the agricultural show for you, a strange peace steals over you, that hard, coiled part of you relaxes, thinks: ‘Perhaps this is how life is, should be, will be for ever.’

  Alternatively, we have lived here too long. We arrived early, and as we settled by the main ring to eat bacon sandwiches and watch the horse jumping, I thought: ‘Oh good, horses to watch.’ Events here are a little like wallpaper: you glance up and there is a horse. I have never looked that closely; maybe it is wallpaper. But it moves; maybe that is because I have been drinking the water. Anyway, they had the moving wallpaper trick going while we ate the bacon sandwiches, and I gasped when a stray hoof knocked off a pole. My husband said: ‘I think you are going native.’ I said: ‘I don’t think so. Make sure we are back in time for the hounds. They’re on at three.’ He muttered something. I did not ask him to repeat it.

  Courtesy of foot and mouth, there were no cattle, sheep or goats. Sign of the times, there was a ‘chief livestock and biosecurity steward’. Presumably he has links with the United Nations. Without beasts, I had to find comfort in the horticultural and industrial tent. In the vast marquee were baked products, flowers, and the fruit and veg of entrants striving for unnatural glory. Onions the size of a three-year-old’s head; cabbages the size of a ten-year-old’s. Leeks as long as an arm, spilling over the table and reaching for the floor. I am not sure I could eat anything that reminded
me of a body part. When I was a trainee reporter, I covered a leek show. A man who was languishing in a coma won first prize. He was in the local hospital after being knocked down by a car late one night. As he lay ill and all unknowing, never likely to recover, his twin brother carefully tended his leeks, watered, fed, talked to them. The mother was old and frail. She visited her lost son every day, sat by him, held his hand. She was there when they announced he had won first place with his leeks. Tribute to a brother’s tender love. I remember she cried.