Bend for Home, The Page 27

  Who is that old woman? asks Mother pointing at Maisie. Who is she? Sitting down again she throws Maisie a caustic stare. So I lift her up till her feet are off the ground and carry her to the door.

  He’s abusing me, shrieks Mother.

  I put her down. Arm in arm we walk out of the living room, along the corridor, past the mirror from the Breifne that now fills the hallway, and stop at the front door. I open the door and we step out into the cold October evening. Her fingers dig into my wrist. She turns her head scrutinizing what is out there.

  You see? I say. There’s no one!

  Flowerpot, she says.

  Yes, that’s the flowerpot!

  Eileen’s light is on, she says.

  It is.

  She studies Eileen’s house for a moment, her head cocked as her eyes vainly try to focus on the familiar. Eileen’s house floats in the gathering dusk. Winnie turns away abruptly. She’s finished with all that. We come back slowly. Tour the rooms. Halt a moment in the kitchen. Return and stand before the mirror. She touches her hair. When we re-enter the sitting room she pauses and studies Maisie who smiles at her. I leave her back in the armchair. She dips into her bag for her beads. Lifts the Virgin’s prayer, puts it away. Rights her glasses and closes her eyes. Who was to collect her has not come. Roddy Doyle wins the Booker Prize on the TV.

  Coca-Cola, says Maisie quietly when the ad comes on. She lies sideways on her right arm on the sofa. Another ad.

  Persil, says Maisie, for a brighter wash.

  And she chuckles when the next programme begins.

  Arthur Daley, she says. I like that thing. He’s always chancing his arm.

  *

  Maisie loved the pictures. Her routine never varied. She went each night, except Saturday, catching every change of programme. It was the Magnet on Sunday night, the Town Hall on Monday, the Magnet on Tuesday, the Town Hall on Wednesday, the Magnet on Thursday, and the Town Hall on Friday. Each of my brothers and sisters, and all my cousins as they visited the Breifne, went with her.

  On the wooden chairs in the Town Hall we sat in a pool of Afton butts tipped with red lipstick and Yorkshire toffee wrappings discarded by Maisie. A latecomer went up the central aisle, and forgetting where she was, genuflected before she entered a row of seats. Aunt Maisie went to pieces. When an actress shrieked in terror Maisie’s hand would slap down on your knee. As Peter Lorre, one of her favourite actors, stumbled round a dark mansion her hand stayed put in the sweet bag. When the good guy got hit she’d crack her heel off the floor and shake her fists into her lap.

  She loved gangster movies, period pieces, courtroom dramas, but prison films above all. Her favourite films were Witness for the Prosecution, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, A Tale of Two Cities and The Birdman of Alcatraz. Her favourite stars were Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

  Some have it, she’d say, and Stan had everything.

  She learnt the patois of the gangsters and used it constantly in the shop. Channel-hoppers were lads who collected butts off the street. Easy Street was where no-gooders lived. Do you want to take a trip up river, she’d say to the house painter Brennan. We’ll soon be in Boothill. Doing time, that’s what we’re at, she’d say to Mrs English, as she handed her her scones.

  In the Magnet cinema the tickets were collected by Catho Morgan while Mr Charlie McGriskin the manager and organist hovered about.

  Good evening, Miss Slacke, Catho would say.

  Good evening, Miss Morgan.

  The Magnet was up market. She would be steered through the dark to her seat by the light of a long torch held by one of the O’Rourke twins. We saw The Robe there and Dracula. Across the road Mr McKiernan ran affairs in the Town Hall. They showed black-and-white thrillers and cowboy films. His man on the tickets was Packie Cullen, who also maintained the Town Hall and kept cattle in the Market yard. He’d lead Maisie to her seat and wait in the aisle till she was seated. We saw The Five Fingers there.

  Between reels the film would stop and the audience clattered the floor with their feet.

  The Gods, Maisie would say, are angry.

  The house lights would come on. Packie would patrol the space. Courting couples on the balcony withdrew their arms from round each other. Elder citizens looked about them with disdain. People raced to the toilet. Mr McKiernan called for order. The lights went down and numbers raced across the screen till we were back where we left off, at some moment of horror. The Half Acre folk in the front went quiet and grew mesmerized. Maisie, cigarette slanted, suddenly gripped my wrist when the Five Fingers were thrown into a roaring fire. Peter Lorre, eyes rolling, backed off. The hand came out to get him. It got him by the throat.

  Maisie squeezed me tighter.

  When Peter Lorre got free of the hand she relaxed and tapped her Afton politely on the floor. No one moved till the final frame had dissolved. The curtains came across. We left regretfully and walked up Town Hall Street, not in this world at all, through the bristling cold nights of winter. It was like walking home after Benediction on Wednesdays. And the next night there we were again, midway up in the Magnet, her Afton tilted, the Yorkshire toffee bag in her lap.

  *

  Nowadays the Magnet cinema is totally forgotten by the ladies. All those nights in the dark might never have happened. And the strange thing is the Magnet was run for a number of years by Eric Kinane, Nancy’s son, and later by her other son Ernie. Eric had seen his first picture with Maisie. Films entered his blood, and one of his jobs was as a projectionist in London.

  He worked in the Academy in Oxford Street. It was a privately owned cinema that for two years ran Ulysses. By the time it finished Eric knew the dialogue by heart. He worked in the Classic in Chelsea where I got in for nothing to see Repulsion by Polanski. As the demented hairdresser in the film walked down the King’s Road she passed the Classic cinema in which I was sitting. I got an awful land. It was a special effect Polanski would have been proud of. Eric became manager of the Paris Pulman in Drayton Gardens in South Kensington. Here I saw many of the classics – by the Indians, the French, the Russians, the Italians. The three cinemas are now gone, I think.

  By the time Eric came home and set up in the Magnet, Maisie’s days at the cinema were over. She made, I think, one excursion down to see her nephew at work. But it was not the same. She went blind, the cataracts bloomed, while Eric, her protégé, sat in a spill of phosphorescent light on a tall stool by the spinning reels in the high-up projection room, tapping tobacco into a roll-up while voices boomed round him.

  *

  At Midnight Mass at Christmas an epileptic screamed. From the organ loft I saw a man carried out. It terrified me. But the walk home afterwards through the dark expectant town was magical. The happy voices on the street. The cheerful drunks calling out greetings.

  Tiredness exalted you.

  In the Breifne they were all transformed. There were brandies, ports and a big fire. Two trees in the mirror. Maisie was courteous. All the Christmas cakes and boxes of expensive chocolates had been sold. Uncle Seamus began performing. Mother sang. She waltzed with her brother. My father gave me a taste of his Guinness. We were up till all hours.

  *

  Neither Maisie nor Winnie are nostalgic for those times. Cavan is only mentioned in passing. An earlier Milseanacht Breifne, when it was governed by their Great Aunt Jane McGloughlin, one of the founders of Fianna Fail, is more often recalled. It was a time when the two girls served tea to groups of Republicans who sat up with Aunt Jane till late in the café – Paddy Smith, who had faced the death penalty after 1916, Countess Markievich, done up in a veil and quite lah-de-dah, and the chief, De Valera, who was like a turkey, Mother said.

  But little is recalled about the days when the responsibility for the Breifne became theirs. The Milseanacht might as well have never existed. It is as if Cavan was an aberration that occurred after they left Finea in their youth and before they arrived in old age in Cootehill.

  By coincidence, Una married Joe Smith, who w
as from Cootehill, son of Paddy Smith, a frequent minister in De Valera’s government. So after the Breifne finally closed down for good, the pair moved to be beside my sister Una in Cootehill. By then both ladies were approaching eighty. In between, the business had made a cruel bonding between the two.

  My mother was servant to Maisie for all that time. Wherever she went she worried about her sister. When the business was left equally between the pair, Aunt Jane said: Look after Maisie, Winnie, that’s all I ask. And so she did. I cannot remember Maisie ever making dinner for herself. It’s maybe twenty years since she made a cup of tea.

  Now, because of my mother’s state of mind, that bond has been severed, and both parties are unsure what relationship remains. It’s Maisie now that worries about mother. She tries to remember for her a past which is quickly escaping. She gives off to me if I’m angry – That’s your mother you’re talking to, she says. That’s your mother! She slaps the table. The impatience I sometimes feel at Mother’s sighs, her stubbornness, her complaints fills me with shame. The faults she has are exaggerated by the disease while her goodness is being daily eroded.

  She is no longer the sedate lady people speak of. But it remains somewhat in the delicate way she folds a towel, toys with a bracelet, pulls a comb through her hair or hangs her Sunday suit. They say that if someone you love is mentally available, then your self-image is enhanced. If they are not, then your identity is belittled. You’d be surprised how much you once did was, in fact, a charade to meet with the bestowal of her favours. Now praise is not forthcoming. Looking after Mother is like watching language losing its meaning.

  Then sometimes out of the blue she unearths a newspaper clipping from an old Anglo-Celt, brings it into the sitting room and deposits it in my lap.

  Read that, she says.

  And there is Una dancing at various feiseanna, or Miriam performing in pantomimes, Tony sitting in the sun in Aden, or myself claiming to have written a play for ITV. Out come photographs of herself and Aunt Bridgie at the Niagara Falls. She points at a photograph and smiles.

  Bridgie, she says, fondly.

  Then looks at me. Straighten your back, you bugger you, she says, and starts laughing.

  *

  Once when I lived in Pimlico in London an astrologist on a grant from some esoteric group in America moved into a room on the third floor. He had an aggressive mind. He was seeking the mathematics of mystery. I met him on the stairs at various times and soon we became vaguely acquainted. He was interested, he said, in the Irish psyche because of its waywardness and femininity and confusion.

  So I sent him off to a Beckett play in the Royal Court.

  He left disturbed at half-time because he kept seeing me on stage. That’s why you sent me, he said. No, it wasn’t, I told him. How was I to know you’d start seeing things? You knew, he said. Then bit by bit I began meeting him everywhere. I worked as an underwriter at Sun Alliance Insurance in Soho, and when I’d leave the office in my pinstripe suit, he’d step out of a shop doorway on Piccadilly to greet me. I met him outside the police barracks in Rochester Row. He fell out of the crowds in Victoria Station. Then, one evening, I found him waiting for me on the landing outside his door.

  He said we should all go round the following evening to see this woman in the House of the Mediums in Eaton Square. She – as a medium for various dead composers, Beethoven among others – was able to play compositions the composers might have written or left unfinished. So we agreed to meet him there some time before seven. The next evening John McCaffrey, Becky and myself found ourselves entering this white Victorian five-storeyed house which was perched among various embassies. We arrived at a minute past seven. We told the receptionist where we wanted to go.

  You’re late, she said, I’m afraid.

  Only a minute or so, I said.

  But you see, she explained, Mrs — has already begun.

  Oh.

  And you can’t go in once she’s started.

  That’s a pity.

  I’m dreadfully sorry.

  We were about to go when she added: But you could see Mrs — at seven-thirty.

  We could?

  Why, yes.

  And who is she?

  She’s a medium.

  Can we walk just right in?

  Of course you can. We are delighted to see new people.

  We entered a pink room with an ornate ceiling. Incongruous wooden chairs, six each side, formed about nine rows. People arrived singly and sat at respectable distances from each other. Two couples, outsiders like ourselves, quickly sat down and waited. We, of course, took chairs in the back row, in the far corner, at the furthest remove.

  There was no whispering. A woman I took to be one of the audience entered. She was wearing a tweed skirt, quite fashionable blouse and pert shoes. She sat down in front of us and began unexpectedly talking in a matter-of-fact way.

  I’m just going to say a small prayer, she said, there is nothing to be afraid of. And for those newcomers among us let me explain that when I speak to you, and you realize that I have met someone you’ve known who has passed over, please say yes, say yes when they speak to you, for if you say no well then I will lose them.

  She smiled, said a short prayer, and turned immediately to a woman halfway down the room.

  James sends his regards, she said.

  The woman nodded. Yes, she said.

  He believes you should go to Canada.

  Oh yes, the woman agreed enthusiastically.

  And forget about the piano.

  I will.

  Then she turned to a man with ginger sideburns wearing an off-white suit, who was seated in the front row.

  Madeline is here, she said.

  Yes, he said.

  She is trying very hard.

  Yes.

  I see sadness.

  Yes.

  But she wants you to know that that is all over. You can forget about it now, she desperately wants you to know that.

  Yes.

  She’s happy.

  The medium moved so fast at the beginning from one person to another that I did not know the mediumship had begun. I thought these were people she knew. That she was calling out greetings to old companions. But then she began to call out to people, You in the red hat, yes you, or, You in the raincoat, and suddenly it struck me she was talking to strangers. Her features would twitch. Some spirit would possess her ever so slightly, she’d give a small grimace or smile, and without hesitating pass on to another lost soul. Without stopping, she ran through the available dead, offering advice, encouragement, intimacies, to which the people in the room said yes, and nodded, and I was wondering was all this real when suddenly I heard her saying, You, you down there at the back.

  We held our silence.

  She bowed her head a moment then stared at me.

  You in the blue shirt.

  John and Becky looked at me.

  Yes, I said.

  I have a man here.

  Yes.

  He appears to be in a uniform.

  Yes.

  And he’s saying Straighten your back!

  Yes, I said, for that was something my father always said to me.

  Is he a soldier, I wonder?

  He’s a policeman, I replied.

  Ah, she said, for he holds himself very, very correct. Yes. And he’s saying not to worry about the writing.

  I could feel John look at me in wonder.

  Yes, I said.

  He’s saying that you’ll never come in the front door, you’ll always come in the back.

  Yes.

  Are we in a village?

  Yes, I said.

  And there’s water.

  Yes.

  And you’re on a horse.

  I was never on a horse.

  Yes, it’s a big horse. And the policeman, who is your father, is holding the reins.

  No, I said.

  But I see it, she said crossly.

  I’m sorry, I said, I was never on
a horse.

  But I can see it.

  No, I persisted.

  This was the first time since the mediumship began that such a negative hiatus had occurred. I was ashamed of myself. Everything had come to a stop. Some of those who had already spoken turned to look at me with curious disdain or to urge me on to say Yes, yes. I wanted badly to say yes, but knew I had never been on a horse. There was silence a while as she contemplated me. She was not going to give up.

  Have you ever had a pet monkey?

  No, I said with great certainty.

  Then a young lad who had come in last and was sitting next to me slowly put up his hand.

  I had a pet monkey, he said.

  Strange, she said, I could see it sitting on his shoulder. Oh well.

  Then the conversation passed on from me to him, and from him to others, as I sat there light-headed after a visit from my dead father which ended with a question about a horse. Becky was visited by her grandmother in Texas, others spoke to dead husbands and wives, and then, just as she had arrived, the woman got up purposefully and thanked us, strode off and went away into the night and a few moments later we followed her.

  *

  The astrologist was peeved that we’d missed Mrs — but delighted to find that I’d been unnerved by contact with my father.

  And the monkey, he said excitedly.

  What about the monkey? I asked.

  Don’t you know what having a monkey on your shoulder means?

  No.

  It means having an addiction, he said with a great deal of satisfaction.

  *

  Years later I told the story to Anne-Marie after we got married. One night she came racing into our bedroom in the Breifne with an old Healy family photograph album she’d been looking at. She placed it in front of me and pointed. There was a photograph of my father standing, with just the side of his head in view, by a horse in great wonderful winkers, Tom Keogh’s horse in Finea, while I, about four years of age, sat astride it happily.

  Chapter 34

  Today Mother is quiet. The nurse came and said Mother looked wonderful so both myself and Eileen were pleased and proud and she ate a brave breakfast.