Hanging with the Elephant (21 page)

‘I’ve no one to cook for anymore,’ she said one day, when I opened the fridge and found it cluttered with mouldy sausages. She lived on bowls of porridge from the microwave.

But she’d seemed content in the nursing home, her eyes closed as she dozed in the day room, and I wondered
what she might be dreaming of; a time before telephones or emails perhaps, when lovers wrote their sweet nothings in letters that were transported across the countryside by horse-drawn coaches. A dream with no soundtrack, except perhaps for the clanging hammer of a blacksmith sweating over his fires, making wheels for carts and shoes for horses that pulled heavy loads on the stony highways.

That’s the wondering that rose in me each time I walked in, and saw her dozing, at peace after all the wars that she had waged in Glenasmole when she was alone and angry and the only way to express it was by throwing the walking aid at whoever turned up.

She was reared at a time when the clop of a horse was the only noise on the streets, and traffic was the sight of a thousand horses gathered on a fair green.

One day, I said to an old man in the day room that it must have been pleasant back then, without the noise of televisions.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t pleasant at all. In the 1950s, you could meet three or four grown men in any farmyard, as idle as infants, all gawking out of hay barns or cow byres, or standing against the gable wall of the house like imbeciles.’

‘Why was that?’ I wondered.

‘All on account of the mammy,’ he said. ‘People were very poor, but the mammy would be too proud to let her sons go out and work as labourers. She’d keep them at home until they were destroyed.’

Not that there’s anything wrong with pride. We’re all proud until we grow old and find ourselves holding the wall for support, or foraging in Marks and Spencer for long johns, and trousers with elastic in the waist, like the ones I bought for her every so often.

‘Your mother sleeps well,’ the old woman with the knitting said. And the old man nodded. They knew her, even when she no longer knew herself. They sheltered her there in the day room and the woman with the doll reached out one day and offered it to her, as if Mother might like to play with it. But Mother refused. Her refuge was a handbag, which she clutched in both hands.

‘Our Lady appeared in the trees when I was young,’ a woman told me one day. ‘Two girls were going up for milk to the big house when they saw her along the avenue in the tallest trees. And it went on for a long time and it was a huge sensation. And people would be ferried out from Mullingar on the back of lorries every evening. And there was a young lad who used to climb up into the trees, and he’d be making a joke of it all, shouting, “She’s coming!” But one evening didn’t he fall out of the tree and break his leg. So that put a stop to his gallop. And there was another man who made a business from the apparition. He cut branches off the trees along the avenue and sold them. And he made a fortune out of those twigs, even though they weren’t even from the right tree.’

Mother sighed again.

The other woman said, ‘Your mammy is definitely not in good form today.’

And it was hard to believe that maybe she was finally coming to the end of her road, because I still remembered all those lunches in the Kilmore Hotel, as if they were only yesterday, when my daughter was still in a high chair throwing spaghetti at the walls, and Mother would cast her eye around the dining room as we entered, and clutch her stick, to see if there was anyone there she knew.

‘Hello, Nellie,’ they’d say, and she would light up, and it felt lovely to be out with her for the day.

And I still remembered all those Fridays, as if they were only last week, when I would bring her into town to do the messages because, even in her late eighties, she still wanted to do everything herself. She’d totter around Dunnes Stores holding on to me or her walking stick or leaning against an aisle of biscuits or holding the elbow of any member of staff who was near, and she’d check the sausages, yoghurts, sliced pans and cold hams with a sharp eye. She was so particular. And at the checkout, she’d go through each price with the girl on the till and then erupt.

‘Oh, that’s far too expensive,’ she’d say to me. ‘Put it back on the shelf and get me the yellow one,’ by which she meant a cheaper brand.

And the people in the queue waited. I longed for someone to throw a tantrum or fling a wire basket at her. But they didn’t. They smiled and waited while I went to
fetch a cheaper brand and when I returned feeling ashamed and foolish, she’d speak loudly, saying, ‘What kept you?’

Then she’d turn to the audience and say, ‘Sure, he’s useless.’ A tiny smile on her mouth as she became empowered by disempowering me.

She had a walking stick that she pointed at other people. I remember a particularly devout little lady who never ceased doing works of kindness for other Christians and who came to visit Mother regularly, in case she needed anything, or just to talk and cheer her up beside the electric heater in the front room.

But Mother didn’t like her. She had resigned herself to solitude and she was content in the privacy of her own sour space. That’s the fearful thing about depression. It’s an isolating experience. It’s a merciless solitude, like a glass wall surrounding the victim, leaving them alone, even in a noisy street, drenched with their own delusions and tormented by their own personal demons.

One day, she announced to me over the phone that the pious little lady had stolen the bed linen out of the hot press. So the next time she called, Mother demanded the linen back, and then slammed the door in her face. And she never spoke to her again after that. She even went to the guards to tell them of the crime. They smiled to themselves and said that there was nothing they could do and that was an end to it. Except occasionally when I was helping her from the jeep across the underground car park to the lift
in Dunnes, she would recognise the woman in the distance and sometimes she would raise her stick and say, ‘Look! That’s the faggot who stole the linen.’

The time I spent in Glenasmole after she died was a necessary ritual of cleansing and dismantling her world, of taking her identity apart, of disposing of her wardrobe, so that the painters and decorators and carpenters could move in and construct something new. I longed for a time when I would no longer hear her voice whispering at the turn of the stairs, her muffled cough in the dead of night or her hand on a door as she slipped from room to room. I even wanted to replace all the doors in the house so that in the opening and closing of them, I would no longer hear her hand fall. That’s why I went to stay at Farnham Road that November. She was four months dead and a job was waiting to be done. The nettle had to be grasped.

And then one evening in late November, I went to Mullingar to visit friends. He is Irish and she is from China. She cooked dumplings and stir-fried some vegetables and sliced up some raw carrots and we all tucked in. I called her Little Lotus for fun. She was a young woman who had been reared as an only child by elderly parents in the hills of a remote region in China. In the mornings, her father would do tai chi on the wooden balcony outside the house while his wife pottered about inside making tea and trying to remember where she left her knitting or trying to find her glasses. She could never remember where her glasses
were, and she needed them to find the chickens, though the strange thing was that she didn’t need them to knit. And she needed them to see her husband, who was much bigger than a chicken, but she didn’t need them to thread a needle.

How the family ended up in a small wooden house with a balcony on the slopes of the hill beside a deep river is something their daughter never asked, in all the years that she went to the school in the local village or even when she went away to secondary school in a far-off town. Home was always home. Until she finished school and realised she must go to the city to find work.

When she was a child, her father, who even then was old and as slender as a single bone, would often take the horse and cart down the dusty lane to the village, where he drank more tea and talked to other old men, and then the horse would take him home.

In the warm afternoons, he liked to doze in the cart as it trundled up the stony laneway that reminded him of his childhood, and the horse was a reliable navigator because there was always oats at home.

It was the same nag that brought his daughter to the local bus station when she was leaving for Europe. Her father was waiting in the cart and she was standing on the balcony, in a bright flower-patterned dress and bare shoulders, and he said, ‘Young girls are not fond of drapery at the best of times but you must wear a cardigan when you get on the
bus, because it is six hours to the city and you will get cold when the sun goes down.’

So she went back into the house and lifted a navy blue cardigan from the chair and her mother looked up from her book wondering for a moment had the universe conspired to stop her daughter from emigrating.

‘I thought you were gone,’ her mother said, full of sudden hope.

‘I just came back for this,’ the daughter replied, picking up the blue cardigan, and in that moment her mother spoke her name and gave her a final hug.

There is a hug that happens after all the hugs, which is more valuable than gold. It is the extra hug. It is the hug that happens when someone is leaving, when the goodbyes have been said, and the fussing over luggage has been done twice over, and when the tears have been avoided and the manly coherent hugs have all been delivered and the emigrant is about to step away and become a ghost for ever. And then something is remembered. The keys. A passport. Or a cardigan. And at that last moment, the one who is about to leave turns again and says, ‘I forgot something,’ and suddenly there is time for one last, enormous hug; that extra hug that a child can carry with them across the mountains and over the ocean.

It’s what I longed for from my mother. But which she could not offer. She burned with love for her children, but she failed us. And the pity is that I failed her too. I could
have hugged her. I could have made myself a father to her child and made her warm and safe in her old age but in that I failed terribly. So we circled one another. And like the oyster in pain who wraps time around the sand and grows a pearl, so she weaved her widowhood in solitude around small regrets until she had become aloof and dignified in her sorrow.

The morning after I heard Little Lotus speak of her mother’s hug, I walked into town, past lawns that in summer time had been drenched with flowering hydrangea, fuchsia, variegated ivies and big juicy red rose bushes. Now they were all dead. Bare branches and wrinkled rosehips stood in the winter fog. The laurel and the box hedges had been clipped back to smooth and severe lines. Clearly the middle classes had not been idle during the autumn. The cut lawns of Farnham Road glistened in a film of dew and the air was crisp.

In Dunnes Stores, I went around the familiar aisles and filled my shopping basket with all her favourite groceries, which I knew by heart. I bought a packet of Barry’s tea, and six Activia yoghurts, and two slices of Brady’s ham, and a half-loaf of bread. I bought cheese slices and half a dozen sausages. And for myself, I bought a Danish pastry and a bar of soap and three bottles of bath salts and oils, and at the checkout there was yet one more old lady ahead of me in the queue, counting her change. She had a wine-red beret on her white head, and was suspicious that the
checkout girl might have cheated her. Everyone waited patiently. There was no telling how great were the things she had lost in a lifetime, or what was in her heart, but she got no satisfaction from the checkout girl before she walked away muttering something about life not being fair.

I walked home again, past the bus and the train stations and past McCarron’s bacon factory where Nellie Finlay’s father had sold his pigs. He would buy the pigs in Belfast, and convey them by train to Cavan. Mr Dolan, the old man at my mother’s funeral, told me about him and how a crowd of young boys would gather at the station wall as the train pulled in, everyone hoping big John Finlay was on board, and that they might earn a few pennies by driving the pigs from the station down the hill to the factory.

In my own childhood, the factory owner, Tom McCarron, a remote patriarch with watchful eyes, had a Jaguar car that floated silently down Farnham Road and bounced up on the pavement outside the factory like a big boat coming to rest on a beach. I would finger the chrome cat on the bonnet as I walked home from school and listen to the squeal of pigs inside the factory, as they were shuttled along cables upside down to their awful death. I could not imagine what was in their hearts, but I certainly deduced that for some unfortunate creatures life was never fair.

That evening I cleaned out the bath. There was a seat in it for an invalid, whereby the care worker could wash my mother in the years when she was still able to climb
upstairs. And all around the floor, there was dust and old wallpaper and flecks of peeling paint from the ceiling where the pipe had burst in 1996. I cleaned the bath and took musty towels from under the sink and threw them in the washing machine. I turned on the immersion heater downstairs and after a few hours, I poured half a bottle of bath salts into the steam. I lit incense sticks on the corridor and on the window ledge and in the bedroom. And then I undressed and got into the bath. I was ten years old again, a time when my body was small and fragile, and I longed to be a grown up. I soaked for half an hour and got out and dried and lay on the bed and fell asleep.

The next night, I did it again. I used more bath salts and soaked again, this time with night lights burning in the bathroom and on the ledges of the windows, and more incense sticks burning throughout the house. I set them on every window sill, and in jam pots on the corridor and on the mantelpiece in the back bedroom. Everywhere, except the front bedroom. I didn’t go in there at night.

Only in daylight did I open that door and go through her stuff systematically. I put away the linen, the clothes, the suits, the frocks, all in different bags. Some went to the waste disposal and some to charity shops. And one day, I was packing away a drawer of lingerie and night clothes and I found presents from long ago Christmases, unopened gifts she had received and purchases she had made, still in cellophane wrappers with the price tags on the side in
old pounds and shillings and Christmas cards still in their envelopes. I found a blue nightdress in a dusty presentation box, unopened since the 1960s, and I took it from the box and shook it free from the cellophane wrapping. It was a coy thing that some young girl might have worn back then with a lot of lace trimming on the hem. A present perhaps from someone who hadn’t noticed the passing years; hadn’t realised that Mother was by then almost fifty. And perhaps that’s why it remained unopened. She may have felt herself too old for it. A light-blue, knee-length garment with short sleeves, lace ruffles on the shoulders and ribbons tightening the bodice and tiny roses in dark purple woven into the hemline. I brought it upstairs and left it lying on the duvet in the bedroom and stared at it for a long while.