Personality

by Andrew O'Hagan

  She lifted the smaller of her two bags and went through to the stairs. She made her way up slowly and stopped to look at the photograph of her grandmother Lucia and her husband Mario on the stairs. She loved this picture of them in their fine clothes; their nice eyes and their young coupledom.

  Maria dropped her bag on the landing. She walked into the living-room and saw it was dark. But her mother was sitting on the sofa looking at the wall, and Maria said ‘Mum’, and when she reached down to the lamp and fumbled for the switch she felt that the bulb was warm. She pressed the switch.

  ‘Come in,’ said Rosa.

  ‘It’s changed,’ said Maria after a moment. ‘You’ve got a new carpet.’

  Her mother paused and picked a thread from the sofa. ‘There’s been stuff in the papers,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve not read the papers,’ said Maria. ‘I can’t stand the stuff they put in the papers. Did it say I was visiting here?’

  ‘It said that, yes.’

  Rosa then spoke for over an hour without a break. There were whole sentences Maria knew by heart, many, many sentences she knew by heart. Eventually she plucked up the courage to say she was tired. ‘I have to go to bed,’ she said.

  ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ said her mother.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Go to bed.’

  When Maria washed her face in the bathroom she inspected her neck and found it disgusting. She felt meat had gathered and puffed up under her chin and she panicked while looking at it and remembered a half-sandwich she had eaten on the train to please Alfredo. She travelled into her own eyes for miles, then began to feel everything might be all right in the morning. She knew she could avenge the sandwich and sort things out.

  She reached for the towel rail and found nothing. Walking into the hall with her face wet she got to the airing cupboard and pulled the handle but it wouldn’t budge. When she looked closer she saw the two handles had been tied together with string. She went back into the living-room and found Rosa sitting in the dark again. ‘I need a towel,’ she said.

  ‘There’s none clean,’ said Rosa.

  ‘But there must be a towel.’

  ‘No. There’s none clean. You think I’ve got nothing better to do than clean all day?’

  Maria went into her old bedroom. Nothing was different. The bedclothes were the same, and the posters; up on the cupboard were her old teddies and sitting there on the windowsill was her Girl’s World. Even pencils and colouring-in books were still piled in the corner under the lamp. Only one thing was new: a Holly Hobby cushion that had been placed on top of her old pillows. She used it to dry her face. Her old duvet felt almost heavy on her legs and chest and she looked out to where the lights of Ardbeg were glowing as they used to do.

  The handles of the airing cupboard were no longer tied together the next morning. When Maria pulled open the doors she saw what she knew she would see: piles of towels in all sorts of colours, filling the shelves to the top, each of them washed, dried, ironed and folded.

  12

  Shopping

  A teenager worked behind the counter most days now, so Rosa had all the time in the world to wander round the shops. Nothing ever occupied her like the shops: the same items would be on display each time she went out, but she never tired of going down Montague Street to see them again. At Bojangles, the knick-knack and gadget shop, her fingerprints would have been traceable on every item, the silver dolphins and novelty telephones, crystal pineapples and ceramic bears, but only now and then would she get out her purse and buy something.

  Rosa had a credit card. Something in its hard plastic shape gave her a feeling of overwhelming force; walking down the street with the card in her coat pocket she would scratch at its edge with a fingernail, and in Woolworths, in the quiet lanes in the afternoon, she picked up bumper pads of writing paper and found box-sets of American country singers. She bought them immediately and quite often she never opened them again. Under her bed were cartons of unopened purchases. She bought toasters and heated rollers, bread-bins – and shoes, almost any kind of shoe, and very few of them tried on first. She often had a daydream of shoes, imagining footprints that stretched away for miles on a long beach. A new hat shop opened in Castle Street and she bought six hats at once. She told the woman she had a wedding to go to, but it wasn’t true. Still in their hat-boxes, the hats were piled on top of the bedroom cupboard.

  She knew every pattern in the carpet shop, every wallpaper sample in the decorators, and she loved the colour cards with the names of paints: Lipstick Pink, Moroccan Blue, Tangerine Orange, Dark Bracken, Telephone Box Red.

  You think he’d lift up a phone.

  On a normal day, a day when Giovanni had done a Giovanni and was out of the picture, God knows where, she would sit in one of the rival cafés with her fingers gathered around a cup of milky tea. She lost track of time, and often, her eyes fixed at nothing in particular, she would sit there stirring the tea until it was stone cold.

  One time she saw an advert in the Glasgow Herald. They wanted a new artistic director at Scottish Opera, and sitting there with her tea on a day when the wind was fierce outside, she imagined the newspaper was sending her a message. She imagined the job was made for her and grew excited at the prospect of what she would do. They need operas of things that have never been done before, she decided. They need to be set in new locations and have different sorts of costume. Out with all that boring stuff, it’s as old as tea. What I’ll do – she said to herself – is bring in fresh blood and mix everything up and get new composers to do modern-day things. She tore out the Situations Vacant pages and hurried along the street in her old shoes.

  ‘I want you to write me a reference,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’ asked Maria.

  ‘For this here,’ she said, and gave Maria the page and pointed to the job.

  ‘But this is for an experienced person, mum.’

  ‘I’m experienced! I have always loved the opera.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘You don’t want me to get on!’

  ‘Of course I do, mum. It’s just that this is a very senior position and the person will need to have directed things and know a lot about music.’

  ‘I know everything about music!’ Rosa’s crimson face was both determined and defeated. Her eyes blazed in the living-room. Lying on the sofa with a blanket around her, Maria straightened up and looked at her mother. ‘Everybody in my family loved opera,’ said Rosa, ‘and I was brought up listening to the great songs and they need somebody for this job that can shake it up a bit.’

  ‘Okay, mum. What can I do?’

  ‘They’ll know who you are.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Aye. They’ll know who you are and if you write a reference I’ll get an interview.’

  ‘Okay. Have you got a piece of paper and a pen?’

  ‘It needs to be on a typewriter!’ said Rosa.

  ‘I don’t have the strength to work a typewriter to be honest,’ said Maria, ‘but I’ll write it out.’

  ‘You don’t want me to get this!’

  ‘Of course I do.’ In the few minutes Rosa had been in the living-room, Maria had undergone a change. Her eyes were bright and her voice was modulated for ease and comfort. Over the last week since she’d come home she realised something – she was performing. It helped her understand much better how to deal with Rosa. She did the very thing she knew they were all good at: she performed.

  ‘I’ll write it out,’ she said, ‘and then you can take it up the library and type it.’

  ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘I’ll sit here and write it carefully, and then it can be typed. That’ll be fine.’

  ‘On you go then,’ said Rosa. ‘Remember to tell them I’ve had a lot of experience of running staff and my father was a great one for songs and even her up the road was knowledgeable on that. Tell them I have secretarial skills and can work overtime.’ Rosa brought a pad in from her bedroom and found a pe
n on the fireplace. ‘Don’t be long, Maria, ‘cause the library shuts half-day.’

  ‘To Whoever It May Concern,’ wrote Maria. ‘I have been in showbusiness since I was quite young and I know that Mrs Rosa Tambini is an excellent organiser. She is very imaginative and knows how to get people involved in her work. If she was to get this position I know she would give it a hundred per cent. Down in London I often see musical directors and suchlike who have less natural rhythm than Mrs Tambini. She would be an asset to any firm she joined. She is familiar with many kinds of office work and has a typing speed of 80 wpm. She is a team-player and would be happy to work any overtime that came her way. Mrs Tambini comes from a family of opera-lovers and grew up knowing a lot of the Italian ones right off. My agent in London Marion Gaskell would be happy to vouch for Mrs Tambini’s abilities and I would be delighted to discuss further her suitability for this post. Sincerely yours, Maria Tambini.’

  *

  I don’t want to eat this it’s so disgusting … biting it … I’m chewing just the end watch yourself and mashing it … in the bowl there’s another ten bananas just keep chewing oh my God it’s sugar inside this banana … I’m not swallowing oh Christ watch it’s not going down watch watch and shush there’s the bowl just spit … okay go for it just spit it down … that’s … spit all at once … that’s so horrible you can’t put that inside … shush and just chew it I can’t feel anything.

  Maria’s weight dropped below four stone so she had to go to the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow. It was an old place down beside the shipyards, white shiny bricks around the walls of the wards, and full of patients who were unhappy with their treatment and swore at the nurses. Maria said she had never seen a place like it: lying in the bed with a saline drip in her arm (how many calories, she wondered) she began to feel she was far away from London. She missed the freedom of Primrose Hill and her room where nobody ever bothered her. She missed Mrs Gaskell’s wooden chairs and her lovely cushions spread across the living-room and the look of the Post Office Tower from the top of the hill.

  ‘What you in for, hen?’ asked an old lady who had wheeled herself up to the door of a fire escape where people could smoke. ‘You’re only a wee slip of a thing. You must be young.’

  ‘It’s colitis,’ said Maria.

  ‘Is that to do with the stomach?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Aye, there’s a lot of them’s in here for that. You get that thin.’

  Maria smiled at the lady and went back to bed. On the first day they brought her in she felt depressed but also superior. She had lain on top of the bed feeling in charge, but today, with the greyness of the ward and people looking at her, she had begun to lose confidence. ‘I want to get back to London,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m looking good.’

  Dr Jagannadham had made the trip to the hospital. ‘Seeing as you keep avoiding me in Rothesay, I thought I’d track you down,’ he said, putting his coat and briefcase on a chair by the bed.

  ‘Dr Jag,’ said Maria. ‘Are you working here?’

  ‘I had a word with one of the consultants,’ he said, ‘and now I’m here to see this showbusiness person everybody’s been talking about.’ Maria slightly flushed and then fidgeted and coughed. In a strange and sudden moment she wanted to take the tips of Dr Jagannahdam’s lovely brown fingers and kiss them.

  ‘You sit there like a bird in a cage,’ he said.

  ‘Like a scarecrow in a cage,’ she said. ‘None of my clothes fit me, they are meant for a fat person.’

  ‘Not so, Maria. They are meant for someone who isn’t starving,’ said the doctor. ‘I was speaking to Kalpana on the telephone. She was asking after you.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She studies at the University of Stirling. Or rather, she has a good time at the University of Stirling and I do her studying for her.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘She is the news editor at the student newspaper. Maybe you’ll see each other if you are in Rothesay for a while.’

  ‘I have to get back to London,’ Maria said.

  He reached forward and touched her bottom lip and asked her to open her mouth. He saw that her gums were bleeding. ‘Is your mother not patient with you?’ he asked.

  ‘Giovanni came back to Rothesay last week,’ she said, ‘and at first she wouldn’t speak to him but later on I heard them laughing and I think she hasn’t laughed very much this year.’

  ‘Let me ask you, Maria. Do you think you will be able to go anywhere if you don’t gain a little weight?’

  ‘Why does everybody want me to be a different size? I feel nearly the right size.’

  ‘Maria. You are dying.’

  Maria started to cry. ‘I am not really here,’ she said.

  ‘You are here,’ said Dr Jagannadham, ‘and you are very ill. Maria, I have known you most of your life. This is a very serious problem you have. You will die if you do not eat.’

  ‘But I do eat. I eat all the time.’

  ‘You have stopped menstruating.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ she said. ‘I can have babies.’

  ‘I am here to talk to you as a doctor and as an old friend. I want to listen to you. But we must start by understanding that you are not well.’

  She cried more into the raised blanket. ‘How many times do I have to say I am not hungry?’ she said. ‘I do eat. I do. People just want me to be fatter and they don’t know me.’

  ‘Let’s take our time, Maria,’ said Dr Jagannadham. ‘We have all the time in the world.’

  Maria pulled herself together. After a while she sat in a wheelchair and the doctor took her down in the lift and along the walkway to the little green at the back of the hospital. She almost forgot herself listening to his talk of Glasgow and funny stories about inventors and people in history. For two hours in the afternoon she grew distant from the sound of herself: on the motorway over the hill, they saw cars passing, and laughing together they counted the red ones until the grass underneath them started to ruffle and the breeze grew cold.

  *

  By the end of that summer, Maria was six and a half stone and the gauntness had gone from her face. She befriended Flora, the dog belonging to Mrs Bone next door, and she would walk Flora up and down the seafront in the hours when she felt disgusting, which was often, but still the hours would pass and sometimes the feeling did too. Down by the pier people would stop her to say how much they loved her singing on the television. They told her she was looking great, but she didn’t believe them.

  On Alfredo and her mother’s birthday, Maria decided to have a dinner party like the ones they had in London, and she set about planning it days in advance. Before she bought what she needed, she wandered around Tesco’s to see if they had all the things, and she made notes of new stuff she could include. Rosa had been playing country music all morning as she went about her housework; people standing on the putting green could hear Dolly Parton over their heads and making for the sea.

  When Rosa saw Maria’s shopping list, she took it, went up the street to photocopy it, and came back smiling. ‘You know something, Maria?’ she said. ‘I’m going to tape this into the Book of Stuff!’ She took down the crumpled book of recipes from the shelf on the kitchen, cuttings falling out, and placed the folded shopping list in with everything else. ‘These are good old recipes,’ said Rosa. ‘They have stood us in good stead so they have. It’s good to look back on.’

  Maria leaned into one of the large fridges in Tesco’s. The supermarket was empty – so empty, in fact, she thought she could hear the hum of the strip-lights overhead, and leaning into the fridge she paused to let the cold air enclose her. Breathing it was like having mint in your bloodstream. She delayed coming up, and then, with the sound of squeaking wheels behind her, she lifted four tubs of ice cream and took them to her trolley. She needed both hands to accept the parcel she’d ordered at the meat counter, and at the delicatessen she asked for blocks of pâté, packets of smoked salmon, herring roe, olives
of several kinds, and a great many cheeses. ‘I am in charge of this trolley and I have my own money,’ she said to herself.

  She bought a brand-new food processor from the electrics aisle and more cutlery. She found a party bag of red napkins and straws and dropped everything into the trolley, after-dinner mints, family-size bags of crisps. She felt more and more elated: the horrible abundance in the shop steadily joined with a great compulsion that drove her forward, but by the time she reached the drinks aisle she was sweating and short of breath. She went to find better soap for the kitchen and paused at the toiletries; she took three boxes of Tampax from the shelf and threw them into the trolley. She found a new tube of toothpaste and two new toothbrushes and bought a packet of plasters for corns and bunions. She felt so nice when she got to the checkout, then very quietly removed the Tampax from her trolley and dropped them in a dumpbin of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum.

  *

  When Maria got home there was a letter from London sitting unopened on the phone table. It was from Marion, written on paper from the Denmark Street office.

  Dear Maria,

  Hello darling. It was so lovely to speak to you on the phone the other day – you sound quite marvellous, and I know from speaking to Dr Forbes in Kennington that he’s spoken to the people in Glasgow and you are firmly on the mend. Bravo! We’ve been missing you here in NW1! A certain pair of dogs have spent the summer moping around the utility room door waiting for treats and I can tell from the look of them there’ll be all sorts of bother if you don’t hurry along.

  You asked what work has come in. I can’t tell you everything – there’s been tons – but Butlins in Skegness are extremely keen to have you for two nights in September and Wogan wants you. Des O’Connor Tonight is very keen, as are many of the kiddies’ things, Runaround, Ask Aspel, and there’s a ton of work coming in from Blackpool. Good old Little & Large want you, and Ken Dodd’s doing a new variety show at Worthing. I think darling you should do quite a few of these before we think about new recordings. There’s also Songs of Praise, who want you to come on and sing – Christiany stuff, but that’s all right isn’t it? They want to film it down in Brighton or thereabouts with a charity called St Clare’s (they look after the men blinded in the wars) and the BBC’s idea is that you would talk to some of them and sing down there.