Personality

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘There’s no fucking point in making all this food for somebody who’s ungrateful‚’ she’d say. Then she would throw every bit of food into the bin and scrub the plates. Sometimes, in this mood, she would come to bed and grow delirious as she tried to bite into him, and he would take her by the shoulders and shake her and she would grind her teeth in the bedroom in the dark.

  She would make up stories to suit herself. ‘I’ve got an illness like my Auntie Sofia‚’ she said. ‘She’s my mother’s older sister. She died very young from leukaemia and I read something in one of the magazines about leukaemia, it said it’s a family illness.’

  ‘You don’t have leukaemia‚’ Michael said. ‘You have anorexia nervosa and sometimes bulimia.’

  ‘You’re a pig like the others.’

  ‘Stop it, Maria.’

  ‘Get out! You’re a useless pig like the others and you don’t know me.’

  ‘Maria, you need help!’

  She would scream the most terrible scream and run to another room. ‘Who am I? Who am I?’

  Michael lost his temper and smashed a red teapot off the wall one day. ‘Who are you when you’re in bed with me?’ he said. ‘Is that a performance like everything else?’

  ‘When you’re raping me‚’ she said quietly.

  ‘When I’m what?’

  ‘Raping me. You all want to use me. You all want to use me for something.’

  ‘Who’s we, Maria?’

  ‘All of you.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Maria. You’re fucked up. Rape, you say. Rape. When somebody loves you it’s rape? And here you are in your little world, getting skinnier by the day. The place is covered in sick bags and all the suitcases in the cupboard are full of diet pills and there are laxatives under the beds. But it’s all us loving it and causing it and wanting more, that’s what you think, isn’t it, Maria? It’s all just something that’s happening to you. Of course. Yes. We all just stand by and enjoy the show!’

  ‘You and him! You and him!’

  ‘Who’s him?’

  ‘You’re the same person. You want to hurt me and make me fat and put me in a dress and make me go out there looking terrible.’

  ‘Who’s him, Maria? What are you talking about?’

  ‘All you want is to ruin my career.’ She stabbed herself with her finger. ‘Me! I built this – me, and none of you have anything to do with this. I am in charge of this. Me! I’m a singer and you all want me to get so’s everybody hates me. I’m a singer! They love me out there and all of you can’t stand it!’

  Michael looked at her raging eyes.

  ‘I want to love you‚’ he said.

  ‘You don’t know a thing about it. Goodbye you. Goodbye all of you. I can sing you know. I can sing a song.’

  ‘Maria.’

  ‘Goodbye. I have won. You can’t kill me ha ha. You can’t do it. Go and rape somebody else. Goodbye and goodbye and fucking goodbye.’

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it, Maria? Goodbye. All your songs are good- byes. It’s always been goodbye.’

  She let out a long scream in the kitchen that travelled all the way through the house and all the way through his own life and hers too.

  Michael was due to take some of the St Clareites to France the week after that argument with Maria. He phoned Marion Gaskell at her office and he sounded shaky on the phone.

  ‘This has been a long year for you‚’ she said.

  ‘Longer than that‚’ he said. ‘Longer.’

  ‘You’re not to blame‚’ she said. ‘You mustn’t think that, dear.’

  ‘We’re all to blame. Everybody’s to blame.’

  ‘That’s enough of that‚’ she said. ‘You were right to ring me. She won’t answer my messages and it’s a job to keep the press back from her. She’s never out of the women’s magazines. They’re always after new pictures.’

  ‘I love her‚’ he said quietly.

  ‘You can’t do it, dear heart‚’ she said. ‘You can’t protect her any more than you have.’

  Michael didn’t have a key: Maria was always at home when he arrived, and they hadn’t got round to cutting him a key, but he knew a neighbour had one for emergencies.

  He spoke through the letterbox. He knew she was there. He said he would be back for her but she needed better help than he was giving her. Maria just sat on the stairs and cried into the bottom of her skirt; all over the walls and flowing up the stairs and over the carpet there was static and greyness. She could hear Michael’s voice echoing beneath the static somewhere and she thought of kissing his naked shoulder, but she covered her ears and only heard bits of tune and old song-words and she rocked into her knees until long after he was gone.

  Songs marched in twos through her mind.

  You Made Me Love You. New York, New York.

  If They Could See Me Now. Rockaby.

  What I Did for Love. Maybe This Time.

  Love Me Tender. Personality.

  The Man I Love. Happy Days Are Here Again.

  The static was all around her, engulfing her, and she grew helpless, baby-like, blurred, tumbling in static, the pupils of her eyes like pinheads, and she curled up on the top stair and looking into the wall sang the same lines over and over.

  She was asleep on the stairs when Michael and Marion used the emergency key to get into the house and take her to the Kennington Clinic. She stood up and let them pack a bag and barely murmured or lifted her head when he carried her out in his arms and they drove her away in the car. The house was silent except for the tick of a clock in the living-room. The white tiles in the bathroom were gleaming; a washing-up cloth was folded in two over the silver taps. A Hoover stood next to the stairs in the hall, and on the carpet, under the letterbox, lay a piece of paper with a single word written in pencil.

  ‘Bitch‚’ it said.

  10

  Alfredo

  Honest to God the things that were in that cupboard. Right at the back I found stuff you could never buy now for love nor money: a record player with the record still sitting on the turntable, dusty, mind you, dusty as all get out, but nothing wrong with it, an heirloom by the looks of it, the very first record player in Scotland or at least Argyll. I got a screwdriver and changed the plug and when I plugged it in the record started playing no bother, I swear to God, as if the singer had just paused for a second in the middle of a verse.

  Dresses from donkey’s years ago, coats with fur collars, nice things: you don’t like to chuck them. All kinds of stuff in a brown suitcase; it must be the one she mentioned to me years ago, the suitcase that came on the boat from Wemyss Bay. Two brilliant bottles of red wine. Mammo was never really one for wine. You can’t just ask her, though. There’s no way to ask her now about a bottle of red wine. Nineteen-forty it says on the label, good God I bet you that’s worth something. It must have been kept over from a big night out or a special occasion years ago. Old-fashioned chocolate, personal stuff, men’s shaving gear. Clearing it all out, I sat on the bed at one point just looking at the things in the open suitcase, gloves, those nice combs you used to get, the Langdale, the Bela, the gloves were good ones too, and I’m telling you I just knew the men’s stuff had never belonged to my father, don’t ask me why, but it seemed obvious that the suitcase and those dresses were part of some other life my mother had lived, a life we didn’t discuss.

  Too late for that now. My mother was just getting more forgetful and it was time, and as for this house, it was always too big for her and houses don’t last for ever. The police found her one night wandering down the pier in her nightdress. When they stopped her she said it was time for her work. She thought it was time to go down and open the café. I hate to bring her down from here, I said to my friends, and so I do: it was always nice to think of mammo up here on the hill looking down on us. She just wasn’t safe any more and that’s that. It comes to us all I suppose. She wasn’t recognising people the same way as before, and you wouldn’t want to leave her, not up here, not on her own
with hot water and fires.

  She’s in Nazareth House. I go and see her every day. She’s one of the better ones up there: she’ll sit and talk some days no bother, and she’ll say, God bless her, ‘I’m fine in here, just nice and warm. Bring down any washing and ironing you need done and I’ll get going on it.’ She still likes a wee joke and that, you see her sitting there happy as Larry, and you don’t need to worry – she’s up there with nice people looking after her, and sometimes everything’s for the best.

  They say some people take a long time to lose themselves with that disease but with other people once they start, it goes quickly after that. My mother has slowed down, the last ten years she’s been slowing down, but maybe we didn’t notice what was happening to her, until suddenly one day she just couldn’t cope up here in the house. Never mind. She’s safe now where she is and that’s the main thing. But it’s quiet here without her. It’s very quiet.

  It was a mercy, really. She didn’t understand what happened. The whole business passed her by and that really was a mercy, you had to thank God. I don’t know: they didn’t always see eye-to-eye but I know it would have broken her heart, the terrible business with Rosa. Poor Rosa. You can’t stop thinking about it. You can’t get over it.

  I hadn’t seen her for weeks. I knew Giovanni had fucked off altogether; first it was the oil rigs then some woman in Aberdeen and he was out of it by then and it was good riddance to bad rubbish as far as I was concerned. But Rosa wasn’t well. We’re always trying to speak for one another but you can’t always speak for people: she was devastated that he wasn’t coming back, she just couldn’t cope and that’s that. You know, years ago I always thought it would be him; I thought he’d be the one to be left on his arse, nothing to show for all the work, all the love that was spent on him. But he had the charm. He had the gift to be able to reconcile himself to any sort of life, and it was poor Rosa, the home-maker, the ambitious one, our Rosa who gets left without a leg to stand on. ‘That’s the old style‚’ she said to me one afternoon in the café. ‘They’re all away now.’

  ‘Women don’t put up with that nowadays‚’ I said.

  ‘Don’t they?’ she said.

  People make out the world is all what happens tomorrow and the day after that. But I remember my sister. I remember us sitting at the window when we were young counting the bumps on the Cowal Hills and making lists of the colours from here to the lochs. Rosa always found more colours than I did and she would always laugh and write them down or store them up in her head.

  My sister chose a clear day to die on. It was Hogmanay, and it should have been cold: usually you can’t see two feet in front of you at that time of year. In the afternoon I took mammo a walk down the seafront and people were out buying carry-outs for the Bells. Mammo took my arm and we walked slowly beside the railing and even the water was calm. I saw as we passed on the other side that the café was closed, so we stopped at the telephone box and I rang. ‘Hello Rosa,’ I said to the answering machine, ‘just wanted to see what you’re doing for the Bells. I’m going up to Nazareth House to sit and bring them in with mammo and Maria is singing on the Hogmanay Show. Give me a ring.’ That’s all I said.

  They had a poster up outside the Esplanade Hotel for Lesley Presley, Scotland’s Greatest Elvis Impersonator. Mammo and I were just walking and a man came along in a kilt. Mammo chuckled to herself and yawned like a lion. ‘The Fyfe and Fyfe entertainers,’ she said, ‘and a man on the pier selling canaries.’ She stopped next to the sea wall and looked up at me. ‘The man selling canaries was just selling sparrows painted yellow so don’t be fooled‚’ she said, then we walked to the tea-room at the old pier at Craigmore and had our tea and strawberry tarts.

  The television room was full at 11.45. The nurses at Nazareth House had put the tired ones to bed, and there was steak pie and peas being dished out, mainly to the families of the residents, you know, all of them around their mother or father or whoever in the chairs. I brought mammo over a glass of sherry and she took it no problem. The room had streamers and balloons and that, and some of the families had brought their weans and they were quite happy playing on the carpet. So all the families just watched the TV. Scottish country dancers whirling about as usual to the Alexander Brothers.

  Mammo sipped her drink and told me I should mind and say my prayers. I’d never noticed it before in Nazareth House, but every family speaks on behalf of the old ones in their chairs. The old ones sit there staring at the telly or into space, and their family says what the old person might say if she or he wasn’t ill. Every family does it, and they put questions to the old ones but answer the questions themselves.

  THE O’NEILLS: Oh there’s Moira Anderson, mother. You always loved Moira Anderson didn’t you? She loved Moira Anderson. Of all the singers it was always Moira Anderson you loved the best, sure it was? Aye it was.

  THE MCDAIDS: You’re the same, aren’t you faither? Aye. Look at all the people enjoying themselves. He’s happy wi’ his drink. You enjoying your wee drink faither? Aye, he’s happy. Sharon what time is it? How long have we got to the Bells? Oh fine. You don’t like to miss the Bells. He always liked Hogmanay in his ain hoose. Eh, faither, in yer ain hoose? Aye, he says, nae bother. Nae bother at a’. He wouldny step outside the door on Hogmanay. Never in his life. He’s that happy sitting there.

  THE O’NEILLS: He looks that happy right enough, his nice shirt and tie. Mother, she’s been looking forward to the night, haven’t you mother? Oh, aye, she’s brand new sitting here. You’re glad we’re a’ the gither. Oor party’s as good as anybody’s, intit mother? Aye, she says – this is the place to be.

  THE BOYCES: Drink up your drink. She likes a wee lager.

  THE MCDAIDS: Everybody likes a wee dram at ne’erday. Faither. So you do, don’t you? He liked a wee lager at ne’erday.

  THE DUFFS: Maw. Wake up noo. Wake up. She wants to be awake for the Bells. You don’t want to sleep through the Bells. Here’s a wee bit shortbread, you love your shortbread maw. Aye, she loves her shortbread. There’s Andy Stewart. She always said Andy Stewart was that handsome. Andy Stewart’s on the telly maw. There maw. Aye. She loves him. She says I wouldny mind taking the pin oot ma knickers for that Andy Stewart.

  THE MCDAIDS: He’s steamin’.

  THE O’NEILLS: Blootered.

  THE DUFFS: Sozzled.

  THE O’NEILLS: Oot his tree. I bet he’s put a few drams away. Eh, maw? He’s put a few drams away the night that Andy Stewart. Aye. Maw says he’s probably got a half-bottle in his sporran.

  Ha!

  THE BOYCES: She’s sitting there in a wee world of her own. Eh, mother? Aye. You’re wondering how long it is to the Bells. She’s wonderin’. Drink your lager. There’s a few songs to come up.

  Mrs Tambini’s granddaughter is coming on. You remember her? Mother. You remember Maria Tambini? She always loved Maria singing on the telly. Didn’t you mother? That’s right. She loves Maria Tambini. Mother. That’s Mrs Tambini’s granddaughter.

  She’s coming on to sing.

  THE MCDAIDS: Nobody like her. That’s what you always said, eh faither? Scotland’s greatest export. He loves her. Look at the telly, faither, Maria Tambini’s coming on. What a singer. You always said that didn’t you faither. Aye. He loves her.

  THE DUFFS: Oh, she’ll no be wanting anything to eat. Do you maw? No, nothing to eat. She’s just happy sitting there and looking about. Tap your wee feet to the music, that’s right maw, oh she’s enjoying herself.

  THE O’NEILLS: Fill your glasses. That’s Hinge and Bracket. Look up. Aye, you like them, she likes them. It cannae be long noo tae the Bells. Is your glasses full?

  THE MCDAIDS: Hard to believe that’s two men. They’re that funny the two of them. You would never know that was two men. You cannae be bothered wi’ them can you faither? No. He hates all that don’t you? He hates a’ that. Men dressing up as women. No his style is it, no your style is it faither? No. Oh, you’re sitting there laughing a’ the same, aye you
are so, you are, and widyecallit, the two o’ them on the telly … look at him, he’s wondering when that Hinge and Bracket are gonnae finish. You waiting for one of their wigs to slip, is that it faither? Aye. Aye. He’s waiting for one of their wigs to slip off on the telly.

  THE O’NEILLS: The clock. That’s the clock now. Sit up straight mother. Okay. Sit up straight that’s the clock. Nine …

  THE DUFFS: Seven. Six … There y’are maw.

  THE BOYCES: Five. Four.

  THE MCDAIDS: You’re laughing away faither. Three. Two. One.

  Happy New Year. The Bells rang out as usual. All the families cuddled the old ones in the chairs and went round kissing each other, kissing us, and the old ones just sat there bewildered, spilling drink, and the families were quiet at long last and having a wee greet. I leaned over and kissed mammo on the cheek and she smiled and kept her eyes on the TV. Big Ben faded out a bit and there was Maria sitting in an old wicker chair. Her hair was permed. She looked that thin and right away, seeing her, a sob caught in the middle of my throat.

  ‘There she is,’ said the McDaids, shaking the arm of the old one and pointing at the screen.

  Maria sat with a glass of champagne on a side-table and her eyes were bright and she just sat there and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘Oh, she’s that lovely. That’s your wee niece,’ said the Duffs.

  ‘Mammo,’ I said, ‘it’s Maria.’ And my mother just smiled at the television and her foot was tapping the carpet just like that.

  *

  Rosa never called me back that day. I rang and rang her number. Then I thought, maybe, with one thing and another, she just didn’t fancy going through a Hogmanay party. On the way back down from Nazareth House I looked up at her windows and the lights were out so I went home to bed.