London Transports

by Maeve Binchy

  “Well, it stands to reason…if they see that I’m not terror-stricken, if they see that if the one who has the bloody disease can accept it, then they will too. It will save so much time, it will cut through all that pretence, we needn’t make all those absurd plans for holidays next year, when everyone knows that I won’t be around next year…”

  She was rather put out by Vera’s refusal to be impressed, her unwillingness to admire such amazing bravery.

  “They’ll prefer to pretend. And they will definitely prefer you to pretend,” Vera said firmly.

  “But that’s nonsense. I’m doing it for them, I’m not going to have them go through what we went through with Mother. Vera, you must remember that, how dreadful it was.” Vera sat very still.

  “How old were you when Clare died…seventeen, eighteen?”

  “I was eighteen, Vera, and I won’t put my family through such an experience. We were constantly going to the church and lighting candles in front of statues so that Mother’s illness should turn out not to be serious. The word cancer was simply not allowed to be mentioned, there was no honesty. All the things I would like to have said to my mother but never did because we were prevented from admitting it was good-bye by some confused code of keeping quiet. If Mother even knew she was dying, which I doubt, none of us had a chance to ask her if she had any last things to discuss.”

  “Oh she knew,” said Vera. “She knew very well.”

  “Did she talk to you about it?” Mona was startled.

  “She began by wanting to talk to everyone, you are so like her it’s uncanny. She wanted to face it…do all the things you want to do.”

  “But why did she not do that?”

  “It caused too much pain. Simply that,” Vera said. “She saw after a couple of days that people couldn’t take it. Your father for one—‘Clare, stop this, there is hope, nothing is definite. I won’t have you speaking as if you are a condemned woman.’”

  “And other people?”

  “Just the same. Me too. I wouldn’t look her in the eye and discuss the fact that her body was rotting, no, even though she wanted to laugh and tell me that it was nothing special, mine would rot too. I wanted to believe there was hope. I wanted not to see her getting thinner and comment that the disease was taking its toll. I wanted to say, ‘Yes you have lost a lot of weight and it does suit you.’ You see, Mona, you’re going to find the same thing. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “But that was nearly thirty years ago,” Mona pleaded. “Things have changed now. They must have.”

  Vera touched her gently. “Go and see if you like, and if they haven’t changed, come back and talk to me.”

  Mona looked at her stonily.

  “I mean it, Mona, my brave young girl. Really I do. I wasn’t able to do it for your mother, and I don’t want to do it for you. But if I couldn’t face one generation being brave, if I let her go to her death with hypocritical exclamations of how well she looked, I won’t do it a second time.”

  Mona smiled at her and stood up to go.

  “I mean it,” Vera said. “Come back anytime. And think before you bare it all to the others. You and your mother are unusual in this world, the rest of us aren’t so strong.”

  Mona kissed her good-bye. The first time she had done that.

  “And I’ll tell you more about Clare, too…you’ll like her,” said Vera.

  “I’ll come back anyway,” Mona said. “You don’t have to bribe me. And, Vera, I’ll try and tell the others, it would be very good if someone made a stand. Wouldn’t it?”

  “Clare wanted me to marry your father,” said Vera.

  “I wish you had,” said Mona.

  “Perhaps I’ll marry Jerry instead,” said Vera with a tinny little laugh.

  And Mona left quickly before she saw the tears that were going to come from it.

  Brixton

  * * *

  The woman in personnel was about fifty and had a silly perm, all grey bubbles like an aging Harpo Marx. Sandy looked at her without much hope.

  “Well, of course, I can try and fix you with hostels or shelters or organization addresses, Miss Ring. But quite frankly I feel sure you would do better just to find accommodation for yourself.”

  “How can I do that?” Sandy asked. It was so very different to the hospital where she had trained. There the rules about where nurses had to live were still strictly enforced. There had been a list of approved lodgings and apartments, and only in these were the nurses permitted to stay.

  “The nurses seem to play musical chairs with each other,” said the Harpo Marx personnel officer disapprovingly. “You’ll be very unlucky not to see about a dozen tattered notices on the board downstairs offering accommodation.”

  “That sounds great,” Sandy said eagerly. “And if I share with someone who works in the hospital, then I’ll learn the ropes a bit more quickly.”

  She got a watery and unenthusiastic smile. The personnel officer obviously found as little satisfaction in her job as she had found success with her hairdresser.

  There were eight notices offering accommodation. Four were too expensive, two specified that the applicant must speak Spanish. That left two. One of them had a phone number, so Sandy dialed it at once. In her hand she had her A to Z so that she could identify where the place was.

  “It’s SW9,” the girl said.

  “Clapham?” asked Sandy, studying her map intently.

  “More east of it,” the girl said.

  “Near the tube?”

  “Yeah, four minutes.”

  “How many of you in the flat?”

  “Just me.”

  “That’s not a bad rent for a flat for two.”

  “You ain’t seen it, lady.”

  “Shall I come over and look, and let you look at me?”

  “Sure. Come now. I’ll make you tea.”

  “That’s very nice, I’m Sandy Ring.”

  “That’s funny. I’m Wilma Ring.”

  “Hey, we might be cousins.”

  “Yeah. Are you black?”

  “Err…um…no. Are you?”

  “Yeah, we most likely ain’t cousins. See you for tea.”

  It was certainly shabby, though nothing that paint and a new hall door could not have cured, Sandy thought to herself, but the street didn’t have too much smart paint and new hall doors. There were three bicycles in the hall and a lot of very loud music came up from the basement.

  What the hell, Sandy thought, I’m not going to be on nights for the first six months, and if I can’t sleep after a day’s hospital work because of a few bars of music I must be in bad shape. Wilma was standing at the door.

  “Come in, cousin,” she called with a laugh. “Have some nice English tea to get you over the culture shock of a walk through the Brixton West Indies.”

  It was agreed in ten minutes. The room, the rent, the life-style.

  “I don’t have friends in, because I’m studying, see,” Wilma said. “But I study in my own bedroom, so you can have people in so long as they don’t shout through the walls. And if your guys don’t eat all the food in the fridge and take all the hot water, they can stay all night.”

  “What are you studying?” Sandy wanted to know. She didn’t feel like telling Wilma yet that there would be no guys for a long time, not after the guy in Wales, the one she was running away from.

  “Open university. I am reading for a university degree,” said Wilma. “When you come back tonight, remember to get yourself a lamp and bulb for your room, there’s only a centre light, it makes it even worse than it need be.”

  “I can come back tonight?” Sandy said.

  “I can’t see why you should pay a hotel and pay me. You’ve got only one body and it can sleep in only one bed.”

  For a few weeks they rarely saw each other. Wilma worked strange hours on the admission shifts, so that she could have appropriate time off for her studying and to watch the programmes on television. Sandy worked a day shift on th
e neurosurgical ward. It was demanding and sometimes depressing. She often wished that Wilma were there to chat to when she got back. Bit by bit she got used to the area; they even joked with her in the corner store as she refused akee and salt fish and other Jamaican treats.

  “I only like the patties,” she said firmly.

  “You wait till you go out to the island and have goat curry,” Nelson, the good-looking man who ran the shop, used to say to her. “Then you never eat anything else.”

  “I can’t imagine going to Jamaica,” she said truthfully. “It must be such a contrast between the rich tourists and the poverty of the people who live there.”

  “What makes you think that?” Nelson wanted to know.

  Sandy was about to say that if so many Jamaicans came to Britain to live in what she considered relative poverty, things must be in a very bad state back home. But she was unsure if that would be offensive, so instead she muttered vaguely about something she had seen on television.

  “You don’t take no notice of that Wilma,” Nelson had said. “Wilma is a no-good communist, she is always finding something wrong with every society.”

  The day she heard this new slant on her flat-mate Sandy climbed the stairs and found Wilma at home. She had washed her hair and was sitting in an unaccustomed relaxed mood with her feet on the window box, a towel around her head, and a beer in her hand.

  “Come on, pretend we’re in the sun-soaked Caribbean. There’s a beer for you in the fridge,” she called to Sandy and they sat in the summer evening listening to the sounds from the street below, the planes overhead, the distant traffic, and the general hum of city noises.

  “I hear you’re a communist,” Sandy said lightly.

  “That pretty boy Nelson has a big mouth an’ no brain,” commented Wilma, unperturbed.

  “I think he fancies you. He always mentions you,” probed Sandy.

  “Yeah, he should fancy Margaret, the mother of his three children. She works sixteen hours a day for him. He should discuss her politics and her tits, not mine,” retorted Wilma, this time with more spirit.

  “But are you a communist?” persisted Sandy. In a way she hoped Wilma was. It was quite outrageous enough to share with a Jamaican woman, which had them all whispering back in Wales, but a Jamaican communist would be over the top.

  “Of course not, dope,” said Wilma. “Would I be lying here talking chicken shit to a silly little nurse like you, drinking beer, if I were a communist? No, I would be fighting the good fight somewhere and overturning things. Not planning to become rich and middle class and have a university degree.”

  “I think you are mad to try and do all that studying,” said Sandy, stretching her tired muscles. “It’s bad enough doing what we do. I only want to sleep and look at telly when the day is over. Study! I couldn’t even think of it.”

  “I had always heard they were ambitious in Wales,” Wilma said.

  “They may be. I’m not anymore. Anyway, being a nurse isn’t that far below being a teacher, you know, they rate about the same. And teachers don’t get all that much more money. I don’t know why you’re killing yourself if all you’ll do is teach in the end.”

  “I’ll do both,” said Wilma.

  “How can you do both?” Sandy became suddenly irritated at the calm way this tall girl had everything planned. Even her short burst of leisure was carefully planned, hair shampooed, fresh air by the window, lounging in a robe, instead of sitting there, tired and hot, like Sandy was.

  “I’ll be a teacher during the day, and then some nights a week I’ll do a night shift, and I can work full-time nursing in the long holidays. Teachers have vacations of three to four months, you know, when you add it all up. It is a ridiculous life…they get paid…I don’t know.” She shook her turbanned head from side to side in amazement.

  “My sister married a teacher in Wales. They don’t get well paid I tell you, and he’s knackered come the summer when the exams are over. You’ve got it wrong,” Sandy said. She didn’t like to hear of people doing two jobs. She felt quite proud of herself, having managed to drag herself unwillingly from Wales, from a man who walked out on her, to a big strange city and find a job and a flat. She thought that Wilma was pushing it.

  Wilma got them more beer.

  “Ohh,” she sighed. “Ohh, Sandy girl, if only you knew what my mother had to do for me, and what she and her sisters have had to do for all our family. I’ll never stop getting degrees, every letter I have to my name is a shaft of sunlight for them. It’s a reason to go on scrubbing floors, to go into offices and shops at five A.M. where the air is stale and the baskets are full of yesterday’s sour milk cartons, but the letters after my name will make it worthwhile.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Wilma, you’re far too intelligent to go along with that crap,” cried Sandy, annoyed now and tactful no longer. “If you really wanted to help your mother, then you’d give her money, for God’s sake. I mean, I send my mother money each week, not much, but a little, for her to get herself something nice, maybe a hairdo or a night at the bingo and a fish supper. My dad keeps her very short.”

  “Oh yes?” said Wilma.

  “Yes, bloody yes. And that’s what you should do instead of filling your poor mam’s head up with ideas and nonsense, and degrees and airy-fairy letters after your name. If you can’t bear her being down on her knees then take her off them. You can send her ten quid a week—better, you can go and give it to her. She lives only an hour away. I can’t understand why you don’t go to see her more. My mam lives hundreds of miles away, otherwise I’d go and take her out on a Saturday night for a bit of a laugh. That’s what a daughter is for.”

  Wilma sat up and looked at her.

  “No, Sandy my little sister, that is not what a daughter is for. A daughter must never be for that. That means the system never ends. A daughter must be something better, something stronger, she must give hope and reason for what is being done. She must make some sense out of all the scrubbing, bring some logic to all that lavatory cleaning. Otherwise a daughter is just yourself again, on and on forever.”

  Sandy saw why Nelson thought that Wilma wanted to overturn society.

  And because she thought of Nelson she mentioned him.

  “But the other Jamaicans don’t feel that way, Nelson and those girls in the store for example, they have a laugh and they go to parties and they sing songs, and they say it’s not too bad. Isn’t that better for a mother, to see she has happy children?”

  Wilma stood up and rested her hands on the window box. She looked as if she were about to make a speech to a crowd below but instead she spoke in a very gentle voice.

  “My mother told me that before she came here she never knew that white women were poor, too, when she saw poor white women in Britain she thought they had done something bad and were being punished. She came from a family where the women were strong.

  “Her mother remembered being a mammy and remembered having to lie down and let a white boss screw her. But that had all gone by my mother’s time, she had five jobs, five different jobs to get her fare to England, and when she came here she had six jobs to make the money for us to come, but she didn’t mind having six jobs because she lived in luxury. She had electricity, not kerosene, she had water in a tap, down the corridor but in a tap. She had a house where the food didn’t melt, or rot, or go bad, she didn’t have to buy expensive ice to keep food fresh for twenty-four hours. And one by one she sent for us. One by one we came.”

  Her voice began to sound a little like a preacher’s. Sandy could imagine her putting a few “Yea, verilys” into her conversation.

  “You see, what was so wonderful was that we knew she would send for us. I was only nine when she went, only a child of nine when she got on the bus to Kingston that day, and I knew she would send for us one by one. That when I came first, part of her sending for Sadie and sending for Margaret and the others was that I should work hard at school. It was team work, it was solidarity like you’ve n
ever known. If we had the homework done and our mother’s supper ready when she came in from one job, that gave her strength to go out to another. If she didn’t have to worry about us, if we cleaned the house, then she could stay healthy, in her jobs, and not fret. You have to scrub a lot of floors and get a lot of bonus and overtime to pay five airfares from Jamaica and for a home for them to live in.”

  Wilma smiled seraphically.

  “But we were a lucky family because it was the woman who came. No danger of the woman finding a fancy man and forgetting us like happened to some of the men who came. A woman with five children will not forget them. That Nelson you admire so much in the corner store, he has a wife and two children in Ocho Rios, as well as Margaret and the three children here. Nice for Nelson to be chatty and to have a laugh and a drink and a song. Very nice. My mother would spit on him. A disgrace to Jamaica, every song and every bit of a laugh which you said I should be having is a mockery.”

  “But, Wilma, surely you can have both. I mean the pride in your doing well and a bit of a laugh, that’s all I was suggesting. That’s all I was saying, your mam has to have some relaxation, some happiness.”

  “I write to her and I tell her what I am studying, sometimes she looks at the television when the open university programmes are on. She can’t understand them, but that’s her happiness.”

  “What does she do on her time off?”

  “She sleeps. And when she wakes to work again she remembers that her mother couldn’t read but she can read and write, and she knows that even though she can read and write she will never have qualifications but I will have a university degree, and that sends a big surge of happiness right through her and she is glad that she didn’t just sit and laugh with her mother while the chickens ran around the dusty yard, and that I did not sit and laugh with her while we both went out to play bingo.”

  “I see,” said Sandy, who didn’t see at all.

  “You don’t see, because for you it has always been a possibility, a good life. You don’t have to prove anything to your mother nor she to hers.”