The doctor nodded. ‘I’ve got all the results now. We’ve found nothing.’
‘So what do you think the bleeding meant, means?’
‘It’s hard to know. Your mother has stopped bleeding now. It’s not on-going. It could just be a blip, some matter the body needed to eject. We’ll keep an eye on her through her GP. She seems well apart from this incident. She’s on very strong tranquillizers, though.’
‘She has been for years.’
‘I see. Do you know why?’
My mother would have said they were for her nerves. I used a more acceptable phrase. ‘General anxiety. My mother’s always been very concerned about her health. You’re not thinking of stopping the tranquillizers, are you?’ I’d read that withdrawal for old people was traumatic; as far as I was concerned, my mother was completely hooked and should be allowed to stay that way at the latter end of her life.
Doctor O’Kane shook her head. ‘Most doctors wouldn’t prescribe such drugs now, of course, they’d look at counselling or other therapies but at your mother’s stage in life …’
The doctor came back to the ward with me and told my mother that the tests were clear and she could come home the next day.
‘You’re sure I don’t need an operation?’ she asked, fiddling with the sheet. Her voice was meek, anxious. She was always on her best behaviour in front of doctors, polite to the point of obsequiousness.
‘Quite sure. Just get a bit of rest and stop eating all those lemons, they’ll ruin your digestion.’ Doctor O’Kane laughed. ‘I’m not surprised you’ve had stomach pains.’
‘What lemons?’ I asked when she’d gone.
‘Your mother’s had a bit of a craze on them,’ my father explained. ‘She has them grated and squeezed and sliced in hot water.’
‘I need the sourness. If I don’t have that I get this terrible coating on me tongue. What does that jade know about anything, she’s just fallen out of the cradle.’ Her shoulders had gone back and she was feisty again now that she’d been told nothing serious was happening.
I thought of the morning near my eleventh birthday when she’d kept me off school, convinced that she had heart trouble. Clutching her chest, she made me ring the doctor and ask for a home call. It was in the days before we had a phone and I raced to the phone box, gabbling my message, running back in a fearful sweat to the house, convinced that when I got there she’d be dead. She was propped up in bed saying the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary in a breathless voice. I fretted until the doctor arrived, attempting to clear up so that he wouldn’t see the worst of the jumble we lived in. Her bedroom smelled cheesy but she wouldn’t have a window open, saying that the row the buses made jangled her nerves. When he marched in I hovered near the bedroom door and listened to him clicking his stethoscope. She weakly explained to him that she’d had severe pains in her chest, just here. I heard him tell her snappily that she should lose weight and stop eating the rhubarb that was causing heartburn. For a moment I froze, thinking that heartburn meant a fatal disease but he continued that her heart was as strong as an ox; being so overweight, however, must put strain on it long-term. Fewer calories and more exercise, he threw at her, pushing past me on his way out and giving me a stern look which seemed to accuse me of complicity in this time-wasting. I hung my head and felt a hot blush on my neck. After he’d gone she’d cast her beads aside, bounded out of bed, cooked a huge fry-up and instructed me not to tell my father about his visit or that I’d missed a day’s school. I watched her shovelling down sausages and bacon and swallowed bile, promising myself that she’d never fool me again.
‘Ah, but six lemons a day, Kitty, that’s going it some,’ my father was pointing out.
‘Six! Think of all that acid,’ I said to her.
She put on her obstinate face, the one I imagined she’d worn as a toddler when life tried to thwart her. ‘They’re good for me,’ she insisted, ‘they clean out me system, keep me from being bunged up.’
I shrugged. There was no talking any sense to her, she’d go her own way, she always had.
The Beardy Fella
It was a hot, sticky summer’s day, August 1966.1 was fourteen and I thought I looked pretty far out in my cream cotton flares and orange T-shirt from Bazazz Boutique in the High Street. Despite my trendy clothes, I was dissatisfied. I had no money and nowhere to go. I was at that stage of moody adolescence when home seems like a shuttered prison and your parents are an embarrassment.
I could tolerate being seen with my father who was mildly spoken, tall and slim; with his neatly-trimmed moustache and erect bearing he looked vaguely military. The possibility of being publicly associated with my mother made my skin clammy. She was unacceptable from every view point; grossly fat, loud-voiced, horribly gregarious, unpredictable and toothless. Pyorrhoea had caused the loss of all her teeth in her mid-forties. She had been supplied with a false set but only wore them for photographs or important occasions, maintaining that they were pure torture. When she did insert these brilliant white gnashers her mouth looked over-crowded and horsey. The rest of the time she gummed her food and spoke indistinctly, spraying spittle. I had started to put carefully planned avoidance tactics into practice. I attended a different mass and found reasons not to help her with the shopping. If anyone called at the house I ducked into my bedroom, shot the little bolt I had fixed to the inside and lurked behind a locked door until they’d gone.
She didn’t seem to notice; in fact, during the summer holidays she sought my company, bored by herself. She had few friends and no job, my brother had emigrated and my father was at work. Most mornings, unless it was a day for a jaunt or a visit to the surgery, she would lie in bed late listening to middle-brow radio and singing along with Doris Day, ‘que sera sera’. At about half-ten she would get up and eat a substantial breakfast; two boiled eggs from one of those double-jointed egg cups, half a loaf of bread smothered with marmalade, a couple of pots of tea and to finish with, a grapefruit to deceive herself that she was following a light diet. She would wash down her happy pills with the dregs of her tea and then install herself by the window, still in her loose cotton nightie, to watch the neighbours and see if she could catch anyone spitting into the hedge.
On that baking August morning I was planning to sidle off to the library where I could sit in the shady reference section and read Frank Yerby whose historical novels were sexually titillating. I was dismayed to hear my mother moving around at half-nine and to find that she was fully dressed in a good Marks and Spencer floral skirt matched with one of her white cotton charity shop blouses. This meant that she was off on a jaunt, probably a bargain hunt.
‘Ah, ye’re about,’ she said, ambushing me as I came downstairs. ‘That’s great, we’ll get a march on the day and we can be back for lunch.’
‘What?’ I said, mulish.
‘I’ve found a new dealer, a beardy fella. He does house clearances up at Archway. There’s a picture he has that I want but I’ll need a hand with it.’ The gleam of the chase was in her eye.
‘I’ve got plans. I’m going out,’ I told her, picking at a flake of peeling paint on the door jamb.
‘Where are ye going?’
‘The library.’
‘Sure ye can go there any time. No wonder ye’re short-sighted, with yeer head always stuck in a book.’
‘I’m not interested in going to the beardy fella, those places make me feel funny.’
My mother had graduated from second-hand clothes shops to bric-à-brac emporiums in the mid-sixties; the kinds of places that later on, when old artefacts had become the rage, would call themselves antique centres with names like ‘Granny’s Attic’ and ‘Times Past’. In her shopping heyday they were known as ‘Fred’s’ or ‘Bert’s’ and fairly valuable pieces from early in the century went for knock-down prices. She referred to