was never as close to her body again until, in the years after Daddy died, when we hadn’t a penny, and the rates man used to call every quarter, and we had to pretend we weren’t in. We’d squash into the cupboard under the stairs as soon as we got the word he was coming along our street. We were used to it, and he was used to it and Reeny next door, leaning against her doorjamb while he knocked and knocked on our door a few feet away, was used to it. I usually brought the hairbrush into the closet and gave my hair a good brushing. I was quite happy in there. He’d peer in the letterbox and we’d have left the door to the kitchen open and he could see there was nobody there. Then he’d go away.
But it was around that time that Min started going to the pub. She ironed all day, to keep us going, because she wasn’t entitled to a widow’s pension – she hadn’t been married to my da – so until I started in the Pillar we had only supplementary welfare to live on. After five or six hours of ironing she went up to the pub. Then she got into the habit of it.
That was the end of wanting to be near her. Nowadays, when I went up to the Inn myself in the hope that she’d come home with me, she sometimes linked my arm or even tried to hold my hand on the way down the street. And I hated that. Her fingers felt like claws. You don’t mean it, I’d think. You’ve been drinking. It’s not love. I’d make her arm drop from mine as soon as I could, not caring if she realised what I was doing.
I looked down on her now where she was deeply asleep on her side with one arm over her face and the other by her side. Before she slept she’d gathered her important things close beside her on the bed. Her battered tin spectacles case. Her wallet of leather worn as thin as paper. No fewer than six miniature salt and pepper pots acquired on the plane. A small snapshot in a perspex cover of Reeny and Monty leaning on the wall between our backyards, with Bell when she was a kitten perched between them. A blue plastic bottle in the shape of the Madonna that was presumably full of water blessed at Lourdes. Her hand lay near these objects, as if to quickly defend them. The flesh at the knuckles was loose and the back of the hand was sprinkled with brown spots.
If you came at her through the modesty of her belongings, it seemed absurd to be as angry with her as I often was. The hand, with its grimy fingernails, was as small as a child’s. Was she not childlike? I knew Min had no idea how to behave like most women – how to dress herself to be attractive, how to chat, how to use the little, insincere words everyone used to be polite. I knew she’d had no instruction in those things. There was no one to instruct her. Her mother died when she was ten and – because of that – her elder sister, my own mother, ran away.
‘She said she was heading out,’ Min once, very reluctantly, told me, ‘and when I asked why she said “I’m not staying in this place without Mammy.” ’
The dead speak through us, Freud said. And then Min’s father had disappeared a few years later, when she was already taking care of me up in Dublin.
Was it possible to see things a little differently from usual, in this wonderfully new place? Take touch, for example. When Min had fumbled for my hand on our way home from the pub, mightn’t that be something she was trying to say, that she could not say unless she unlocked herself with alcohol?
I lifted her limp hand and held it for a moment.
Nothing. No gush of feeling. I didn’t feel a thing. All the same, it was the first time I had voluntarily touched Min in many years.
‘And beer?’ the waiter said. ‘Cobra beer from India?’
Min might have been Markey’s own mother, so tenderly had he seated her in the Shalimar Balti House, making sure she was comfortable enough before calling over the waiter to explain the menu to the visitor from Ireland.
I waited to see what she’d say about the beer. The barmen in this city were hardly going to be like Decco in the Kilbride Inn, letting her sit there all afternoon, and then nominating one of the men who’d come in for a pint on their way home from work to give her a lift to the corner of our street. Look at her now – oh, I hoped she wasn’t going to drink too much! She looked as young now as if she’d been only hiding during the bad years, rather than growing old. Seated bolt upright with shining eyes, and giving Markey a hard time about ordering the Indian dishes that would be most like Irish ones.
Sometimes at home her eyes shone, too, when she came back from the Inn. But that elation had nothing to do with where she was. The exact opposite was the case. The drink at home got her to a place that wasn’t home, to a place where she could be not herself.
‘Fine,’ Markey nodded absently at the waiter. ‘Min – beer? Water? Tea?’
‘Tea will do. With a drop of milk, don’t forget.’ Of course, Min had known Flo Cuffe. There was a Mr Cuffe in London, the father – people said he was a Protestant and the family had run him off – but Markey hardly ever went over there and when he did, all he was interested in was making it to the second-hand bookshops on the Charing Cross Road. But he loved his mother. He handed her up all his wages – he got a civil service librarian job straight after school and went to college at night – even though she would send off nearly the whole amount to some priest she knew who ran an orphanage in Calcutta.
She’d had an influence on my own life, too, Flo had.
Three years after Markey left Ireland I was in my first year at college – thanks to support from Hugh Boody, my boss in the bookshop where I now worked. I was coming home very late one night from some crisis at the student magazine I helped out on, when a form approached through the mist full of refracted light that had settled on the black street. And when we met on the median I saw that the figure was Mrs Cuffe.
‘Who’s that? Is that Min’s Rosie?’ she said, looking up at me from under her hat. ‘I’m late for Mass, Rosie. I think the clock must have stopped.’
She was so distressed that I had to be careful, so I looked elaborately at my watch. ‘I think the clock was maybe fast,’ I offered casually. ‘Because it’s not late you are – you’re actually a bit early for the Eight O’Clock.’
‘I’ll wait in the church,’ she said in a panic-stricken voice. ‘I’d rather wait than maybe be late.’
‘The only thing is, but,’ I said, ‘they won’t be opening the doors for a while yet. And you could catch your death in this oul’ drizzle waiting outside.’
‘You’re right!’ she said, looking up at me helplessly. ‘But if I go home the clock’s broken.’
So I persuaded her to come with me. Min came down from bed when she heard me talking, and I saw her taking in the fact that Flo had a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other. She knocked on the wall and Reeny came in in her dressing-gown and the two of them started to build up the fire and make tea and talk in an everyday, unhurried way to the old lady.
And that was when Flo had influenced me. I suddenly saw myself standing there, useless. The women didn’t need me. I didn’t fit in.
Markey’s mother eventually said, shamefacedly, that she must have forgotten to eat her dinner she was that hungry, and they made her scrambled eggs and toast with the crusts cut off. And when she began to grow sleepy, they put coats on over their nightclothes and took her across the back lane to her own house. They tried to extract Markey’s telephone number in America from her, but she didn’t know where she’d written it down, so they said they’d come back in the morning. Then they took her into her bedroom, and settled her down with her prayer book and a bottle of Coke before they left.
‘She was never the same after that night, so she wasn’t,’ Min had taken up the story for Markey. ‘I remember Reeny telling you on the phone that you didn’t have to come home, that any of us who had houses with back doors onto the lane would bring Flo her dinner and so we did and it worked out great. She loved her grub, your ma did, and she lived in comfort in her own house until a month before she passed on, and by that stage she didn’t know who she was – you know that yourself.’
Min was earnest as I’d seldom seen her.
‘Honest to God, Marcus, she hadn’t a