Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  His mother had a trick: he had seen it deployed a thousand times. She would reach out and grasp a wrist: she took it and held it, so that the person simply could not get away without being unpardonably rude. Patrick’s eyes were closed – but he knew she was doing it right now, doing it to the nurse. There was a strange breathlessness in the nurse’s voice, and he’d heard this before too. The girl was all at sea.

  ‘Never?’ said his mother, sounding surprised. ‘Well now, there you are. That seems strange, I must say, in this day and age.’

  She was talking about southern Spain: about some Costa or other, the one she visited last year.

  ‘I –’ said the nurse.

  ‘I know,’ his mother said. ‘Each to their own, dear: you’re quite right. Or her own, in this case. But the sunshine. And the Alhambra –’

  His mother spoke of the Alhambra. The nurse did not know about the Alhambra. Patrick lay and listened, with a strange, bitter satisfaction. At least, he thought, at least it isn’t only me. At least she from time to time selects other victims too.

  Well, serve her right, probably. Nurses and medical staff need metal plating themselves, he thought, and they all too frequently display it to me. Since when was a little lady so impossible to handle?

  So he told himself. But of course he could never handle his mother. He never could – so he could hardly bitch about other people not being able to handle her either.

  I could never handle her, he thought. Margaret could never handle her. He, in fact, had been a bit better at it: Margaret was reduced to jelly by their mother, or to gasping, wordless fury, or to supplication – to a range of states, in fact, and none of them in any way constructive or flattering. Bawling at her mother as she stumped from a room, a door slamming in her wake; or incoherent in the face of a patronising expression; or, or, or. ‘Why would you do something like that?’ That being: German at school, or art, geography, history. Brown bread baked from scratch. ‘Sure, I wouldn’t bother, if I was you: you’ll never be any good at it. You’ll have people laughing at you.’

  And later: ‘Those hips: couldn’t you do something about them?’ A fishwife. Who’d have a fishwife around them? And what about that hair?

  Poor Margaret, he thought: that was how it was, for her. No wonder she settled for Robert: done to get away and stay away.

  Armour plating. How odd it sounded: to describe one’s own mother as armoured. And yet it was the image that came always to mind. The tweed suits repelling water, the tough skin repelling love, the words, the language crafted to keep one at a distance.

  The eyes – that had something different to say, though impossible to tell what. Interpreting what the eyes had to say would be a life’s work. Nobody would have the time.

  Margaret might have made the time, had she been given a little encouragement. But none was forthcoming, and that was an end to that.

  She was always clear-headed, his mother, with an iron constitution and an iron turn of phrase. Honed, no doubt, from many years in a girls’ school, where iron turns of phrase came in very useful. And she also could boast of a generally iron will: she spoke her wishes, and they tended to come to pass.

  And perhaps, he thought, perhaps I ought not to slap her down too hard. Not too hard. My mother kept the family together. This is a fact, he thought, of history.

  ‘And I loved the local food. The seafood,’ his mother told the silent nurse. ‘We export most of our fish to Spain. I say we should try keeping some of it.’

  Patrick lay silently, and listed facts as once he had listed capitals of the world. The objective was the same: to create and maintain order, to feel on top of things.

  Margaret, he thought, tried to drown me in the sea off Kinnagoe beach on a summer’s day long ago, when I was six years old and she seven or thereabouts. This is a fact of history: she denies it, but I claim it as an unalterable truth. Then she saved me. That was our relationship. This is a fact.

  My father had a stroke four years after that day on the beach. Another fact. My mother took over the management of the family, of its finances, of everything. Another fact.

  Martin was still young, when it happened: only in his late-thirties. It happened on the night of the 1964 General Election.

  ‘They’ve booted them out, they have, they have!’ Martin said excitedly. ‘They’ve put Labour in again. At last! – well, just about.’

  He was watching the results on what he liked to call ‘our new suburban telly’. ‘Our suburban telly for our suburban house, our suburban dream,’ he would say, waving a hand at the long windows overlooking the patio, the still bare garden. ‘Who’d have thought it, ladies and gentlemen? We’ve made it at last.’

  He liked to talk like this in front of Sarah, who was the mover and shaker behind the shift from a Victorian terraced number close to the city centre to this new suburban house, this bare, unformed garden. ‘More room for the children to play,’ she said, and Martin replied, ‘ah yes, in a mud bath, a nice mud bath that I’ll be working for the next thirty years to pay off.’ Sarah tended to leave the room at that point: the children, smiling uncertainly, joined in with his jolliness. Now he was crowing happily as the election results rolled in: ‘That’ll teach them,’ he was saying: and then he had a stroke, just like that. Patrick and Margaret had been allowed to stay up late to watch the telly, and that proved to be a mistake – for they were right there when Martin keeled over on the hearth rug in front of them.

  Nowadays, Patrick thought, we’d be hauled off for trauma counselling. Back then, we were told to – to get on with it, something like that. Which they duly did. They scratched their heads and got on with it.

  And it didn’t kill him. It was a relatively minor stroke, and the doctors were hesitant in the matter of connections with the General Election results. No, probably no connection between the two. And no, it didn’t kill their father – though it didn’t make him stronger, either.

  And the family tended to be a little anxious around politics, after that.

  A minor stroke, so it was classified: but Martin could no longer work; and so Sarah was obliged to pick up the white man’s burden. That was the phrase she herself used. ‘The white man’s burden for me, then,’ she said, standing in the living room of the new house, which would have to be paid for somehow. That, as Patrick reflected frequently, was another of her phrases.

  ‘We could have paid for the old house in about five minutes flat,’ Martin said.

  ‘Ah well,’ Sarah murmured. ‘No use crying over spilt milk now, is there?’

  And she picked up, in fact, the white man’s burden with gusto: Patrick understood this later. She drew on the mathematics degree she had taken in her late twenties. She drew on a facility with numbers in general and a general sense of organisation – and was appointed bursar at the girls’ school down the road. And yes: it soon became clear enough that she quite liked having a good job to go to in the mornings and that these new arrangements were right up her street. And she quite liked having an infirm man to leave in Cassie’s care at home. It appealed to her, in all sorts of ways. Patrick saw this early on.

  He was himself sensitive to memories of his father’s early illness. He was too young to have a father figure transform into someone who seemed not always there. Too young to have a mother transform into a breadwinner. Too young to – wondering at the vagaries of the world – assume something of the burden of being the Man of the House: having to cut the grass and clip the hedges, grumblingly, since his father was no longer up to it.

  ‘Why don’t you do it sometimes?’ he said sourly to Margaret. But these were jobs for a man, she reminded him with relish.

  ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it,’ she said.

  Cassie was still there, of course, to provide the cakes. At that point she was still around: physically strong and able and profoundly domestic, and still had a way with pastry that nobody could better.

  So Cassie did the cooking and the cleaning; and Patrick did the garden;
their mother went out to work and their father sat around, nursing his health. Patrick knotted his tie and went to school, and Margaret clambered into her tunic and gabardine and went to hers; and they both did very well. Robert was not yet on the horizon, and so the world continued to go round and round.

  Martin had taken on Sarah when not many men would have done so. She was an odd one, it was universally agreed in the district; too odd for most, even if that Cassie one was left out of the equation. Certainly Martin’s mother thought so, and told him bluntly what she thought.

  ‘What would you go and do a thing like that for?’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Martin had been a blithe young man, with a socially useful career as a GP mapped out from an early age. He was one of a rare breed in this part of the world: a Catholic family with means enough to put their son through grammar school, and then through medical training, and all without financial distress to themselves. Without noticing, even, was the word around Derry. They lived in one of the fine old Georgian houses close to the city centre, with plaster moulding and ceiling roses and a brass knocker on the glossy front door. They thought well of themselves.

  Martin was already qualified, in fact, when they met, after the war. Sarah wasn’t qualified: she was qualified to do nothing: she was becalmed. ‘What will she do?’ said Martin’s mother, who was a great believer in female emancipation. ‘She’ll marry me,’ said Martin; and his mother pursed her lips and turned away. ‘The breed and the seed of her,’ she said. Martin left the room. He slammed the door. Sarah’s life took its decisive turn that night: she was persuaded out of her digs one night by an old school friend. ‘We’ll go to Borderland,’ said Isobel. ‘Come on: we’ll paint the town red.’

  ‘So this is what you meant about painting the town red,’ Sarah said when they arrived. She looked around: the walls of Borderland were red: a strange, dark red that soaked up the light. The band was playing and the atmosphere lively; the place was packed. People were having a good time, but Sarah herself was not likely to join them in this. She’d made her mind up about that. She was a sore thumb.

  ‘Come on,’ said Isobel. ‘Aren’t we here to have a good time?’ She did not herself seem to be having a good time: Sarah’s mood was infectious; no man was coming near them. Isobel’s foot tapped the floor – not in time to the music, but nervously, a nervous bounce on the sticky timbers. It had been kind of her: she hadn’t seen Sarah for months. Isobel thought she ought to show willing, to be kind.

  Maybe now she was regretting her kindness.

  ‘You need to dump me.’

  Isobel turned, frowned. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘That’s what I need to do. I need to just dump you.’

  ‘I’m giving you smallpox,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Shut up, will you.’

  ‘Typhoid,’ said Sarah. ‘Bubonic plague. Infantile paralysis.’

  Isobel turned away. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ she said over her shoulder, bluntly. ‘It’s very unattractive.’ Sarah stared, said nothing, blinked. ‘Clear?’

  ‘Clear,’ Sarah said at last. ‘Clear.’ They laughed, the two of them, for the first time in the course of the evening and at that moment, the two young men who had been observing them from the far side of the room, made their approach. They were well spoken, well dressed; around the room, other girls stared with displeasure; they knew a catch when they saw one.

  *

  Martin could not account for it. He leaned with his friend Danny against the red walls of Borderland and observed her through the haze of cigarette smoke. Martin could imagine – or rather, he could not imagine – what his mother would say if presented with such a girl. Such a girl! A country girl, out to grab any man. Was Martin mad?

  He was. Danny, leaning beside him, cigarette in hand, seemed to understand – later, he reflected that if Danny hadn’t been there, if Danny hadn’t supported him, then he would never have plucked up the courage to step across the floor, with so many beady eyes tracking his step, and ask this girl to dance. His life would have turned into another channel. Though, Danny had his eye on her friend and had a stake himself in this adventure.

  ‘We’ll ask them to dance, come on,’ said Danny. He drew on his cigarette. ‘Come on,’ he said again, ‘before someone else does.’ Which was a foolish thing to say. Nobody was going near these girls – but Martin too felt an urgency just the same, a prompt to get in there just as fast as possible. Danny stubbed out his cigarette, clicked his tongue in irritation. ‘Come on, Marty,’ – and now the deed was underway: his feet were on the move and the eyes of the room swivelling and focusing; the girl looked truly, genuinely, frankly dumbfounded as he presented himself in front of her and asked her to dance. She flushed, nodded; beside her, her pal was already being whisked away.

  *

  Behind his closed eyelids, Patrick saw the daylight begin to fade, heard the texture of the background hospital sounds move up a gear; dinner was on the way. He heard his mother wrapping up, heard the nurse gather herself to go, to get the hell out of there.

  ‘Patrick?’ Sarah said. ‘I’m going to go now.’

  She gathered herself up; she left without fuss. In the blessed, relative silence which followed, he continued to dredge up his now worn mental maps. Even in this place, on this ward, in this bed – dusted off with ease. Recalling various events of childhood, events like that trip to Kinnagoe, visits to other beaches, assorted picnics with Thermos flasks and battered Tupperware containers filled with ham baps – picnics to be consumed in the car, more often than not, with the rain bouncing off the roof, and condensation fogging the windscreen. A family unit intact, after a fashion.

  Intact, Patrick thought: intact in this case meaning a righteous mother, a humiliated father, a marriage far from simple or mutually satisfying. People tell themselves that children notice little or nothing, he thought: when the truth is that they notice everything, every last thing. They are sponges, soaking up the ether. Certainly he and Margaret soaked it up: but they were also aware that their affairs were being managed well enough, that their needs were being met. That they had three adults in their family and not simply two: that one of them was in the kitchen from sunrise to sunset, and that they were as a result better off than most of their friends.

  That the lid was on, though it rattled from time to time ominously, and that all was well.

  That the map of their lives was laid out on the table, or spread on the floor: clean and clear and unarguable in its portrayal of past and present and future.

  But as they grew, it began to dawn on them that this map of their lives, past and present and future, was perhaps deceptive. That its clarity was false: that the myths which helped to structure all of their lives – myths of sanctity, of togetherness and security – had in their case little bearing on reality.

  A devastating idea – even if, in their case, it dawned slowly, in fits and starts. Because they needed the myths – more than this, they needed the myths to connect in some way with reality. Patrick began to imagine another map – a palimpsest, he thought later – laid over that map: a palimpsest, with marks in dark indelible ink. These marks soak through the pure fabric of the map: they stain and mark; and all the while the edges of the map grow grubby and soiled with handling, with use, with life.

  And of course he was well able to listen and watch and absorb all the while – well able to observe as hand grenades were aimed and flung from one room, to explode in the next. A man’s body lies splayed across a footpath, to be sidestepped, to be stepped over. Who knows what a child remembers and absorbs? And who cares?

  Sometimes, nobody cares.

  *

  ‘Don’t say another word,’ Sarah said. She stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Martin. His newspaper flung away, its leaves scattered; his reading glasses on the table, as if flung too; his cane on the floor; the air crackling with anger. Cassie had vanished, as if into thin air; along the hall, her bedroom door closed quietly.

  Cassie go
ne, Patrick gone, Margaret gone. They had the place to themselves. Plenty of words thrown back and forth already, exploding like so many mines in the landscape of this house. And now more words hovered, momentous, almost spoken, ready to detonate.

  She regretted her language already. Sickness and incapacity; overwork and a house to run: slick phrases, spoken easily, spoken to goad and injure – and Martin had flung the newspaper across the tiled floor; had taken off his glasses and thrown them onto the table. And now he took aim in his turn.

  ‘Who would have taken you on?’ he said. ‘Nobody, that’s who. You were too much of a handful. But I took you on,’ and he lowered his voice and gestured along the corridor, ‘and her,’ and now he raised his voice again, recklessly, ‘and is it any wonder, is it, that I got a stroke out of all that?’

  She stared at him.

  ‘You’ll always have making up to do,’ and now, though he had lowered his voice again, the force of his words were, if anything, greater still. ‘You’ll always have,’ he said, throwing her trust, her confiding words long ago, back in her face, ‘and you know it.’ He reached for his glasses, bent for his scattered newspaper. ‘So get on with it,’ he said, winding up now. ‘This is your lot.’

  Sarah looked for another second, and then turned and left the room.

  *

  The pampas grass rustled and swayed. The sun was warm and the ground dry, hard; and the bristles on the pampas snagged his sleeve, snagged Margaret’s sleeve. They were crouched, the two of them, behind the pampas; its leaves covered them like a scratchy blanket.

  ‘We shouldn’t listen,’ she said piously, with the tact, the law-abiding attitude of age. The kitchen windows were wide open: they could hear every word. They stayed where they were, they listened until the conversation ended, until the silence that fell was worse than the shouting had been. The kitchen was silent: no rattling of dishes, no clatter of pans. Cassie was simply not there; and when they peeped through the rasping pampas fronds, they saw their father’s black, glossy cane lying across the floor, their father’s stockinged feet at the table.