The Lost Souls' Reunion (10 page)

‘You could butter yer bread with her accent,' she heard Fanny whisper.

‘Where'd she get the hat?' the other one asked. ‘A gardener's wet dream that is.'

‘Lulu!' Fanny hissed.

Noreen drank the tea eventually set in front of her and almost spat it out. The tiredness came over her. Three days tramping around and no signs of what she prayed she would not find – a daughter who looked older than her. She felt her dreams slide away and the hard watchful eyes of the women told her Carmel was one of them, or worse, because what Noreen knew of her daughter was that she had no ability to harden.

Then the door had opened and the tall old woman came through it and stared at Noreen.

‘You've come a long way.'

The old woman's eyes were almost black. She hadn't a line on her face, Noreen envied that and tried to hide her red, chapped hands, but the old woman had already extended a pale, fine one to shake with.

‘You won't want to wait until she comes in, I expect?'

‘Myrna!' Lulu said.

‘A mother doesn't want to meet her daughter with a circus crowd watching, does she?'

‘I wouldn't mind being a fly on their wall, all the same,' Lulu said, when the big woman in the misshapen coat and ridiculous hat had left, after checking herself shyly in the mirror, as if she had no right to.

12 ∼ The Quiet Leaving of Noreen Moriarty

S
EVEN YEARS WE HAD
. Seven years when we lived a life that was as good as anyone else's.

Noreen understood the way it was with her daughter; understood things could not be undone. But for as long as she lived she would not allow another hand to harm her.

Carmel could not go home. Too much and not enough had happened to make the return journey. So Noreen came to us. In fact she never left us from that moment on, so afraid was she that we might disappear on her.

‘We don't want Sive falling into the same life and hands we've had. We must get her away from this.'

She wrote to the solicitors in Ireland, closed up Hoar Rock, sold a few of its fields, but did not sell it.

‘What would it fetch? Pennies. Our nest egg that house is, our just-in-case.'

When a small of amount of money from Joseph's life insurance arrived in the post she set us up in a rented two-bedroom flat away from places that served to remind.

*   *   *

Our goodbyes to Sergio and the café were brief. I let the women who wanted to hug me do so and I let Sergio pick me up and give me an almond pastry with tears in his eyes. I let him tug at my hair and touch my nose with his. When he set me down I went to Myrna and I put my hands on her seated shoulders and looked into her eyes as she had looked into mine. I did not believe for one moment that I would not be back the next day. I was still a child in that way.

Carmel said quiet thank yous and Noreen had one of her own for Myrna.

‘For all you've done.'

‘All I did was tell you where to find them, you did the looking.'

*   *   *

In the new place Carmel and I were not to share a room.

‘Sive needs time away from you,' Noreen decided. ‘Time to be a child.'

When different hands soothed my mother, my dreams overtook me. Greenness opened up to me, I walked in places I could not find during the hours of waking in the hard northern part of a hard city. The place was filled with people who spoke like my mother and grandmother.

‘Our own,' Noreen would call them.

But they were not mine. They had white-blue skin and eyes full of judgement.

I dreamed. Carmel rested. Noreen found work in a shop. It was that work that fed us and kept us. Noreen would dress us in clothes bought by her, which were not splendid, but they were our own.

Noreen tried to get me into school. I proved as keen on that school idea as my mother had before me. I did not take to the rows of faces and the big face looking over them, the lined copybooks and measured learning.

‘All right, Sive,' Noreen conceded, after a fight that left her scratched and panting. ‘You are your mother's child and if the truth be known I was the same about school. You'll learn what I know and that's not much. But you'll never have to set foot in the school again if you give me one thing.'

I looked at her.

‘Your voice, child. You'll have to speak some time.'

I had always known how to speak, and I began by saying, ‘I want to go to the sea.'

We took the train to Brighton the following Saturday. Noreen wore her hat and Carmel had a blue scarf tied around her white face. I had a lemon dress, which made me feel like part of the sun that shone through it. People looked at us.

The walk from the station was long and when we got to the sea it was not just ours, it belonged to the hoards of others swarming on the pebbles with their boxes of food and patches of blanket that squared off the greatness until it was much diminished.

This was not the sea of my dreams, but another sea. Still I went towards it, holding my mother's hand and it welcomed us as an old friend.

We slid into it; I looked at my mother and the shadow of a bird passed over her face.

She smiled a smile that made me so warm I dived into the cool of the waves. I kicked and turned and saw the whites of my mother's legs beside me. I held on to them and they were firm to the touch as if they had taken root in the place where they ought to have been all along. The water made us clear to each other.

‘Let go of me anytime you like, Sive,' she said when I came up for air. ‘You'll swim like a fish.'

And I did, Just like my mother, said Noreen, minder of our belongings and our cares, when I came out of the water, but only after my skin had turned blue and I looked like I had been born in it.

*   *   *

There had been no noise from their bedroom all morning, so I had slept on. I dreamed of Myrna's dark eyes on me, after seven years. It was a long sleep and she had plenty of time to come to me, to stroke my brow and learn the shape of my face and body with her hands. It had filled out from a straight to curved form only in the past few months.

The child was passing and the woman time was coming. This was what I was proud to tell the run of her hands. You have grown into yourself, they told me in return.

She had not come to me in all the times that we had Noreen to protect us. I remembered words that had come to me from her without being spoken, when I had put my hands on her shoulders: ‘You have a grandmother now. A good thing to have. Grandmothers do the job I do, only better, because you share blood.'

Still I did not trust the woman in the sunflower hat, she did not mind her own business, as Myrna did. Myrna, reading me, had tilted my head up so I could see the full blackness: ‘You don't want to leave me now and before you grow another inch you won't remember me.'

Now that Myrna was with me in dreams, I felt none of the guilt at having forgotten her. I felt the child's gladness. An old friend had returned and it was as if she had never left. The air was filled with lemon scent, so I had no wish to wake.

She sat over me and we shared a silence that drove the angry hum of the city, not only from my ears, but also from my heart. I wanted to reach out and touch her skin, to find what made it so pale and fine, but the dark eyes held me. We watched and waited, this old woman and this girl-woman that I now was, until the screaming of my mother carried.

I moved in its direction, still half asleep, the dream-giver fading away. Then, in front of my opened eyes, I saw Carmel, kneeling beside her mother who was already cold to the touch. Seven years she had been with us and provided for us. My mother had grown quieter and I had grown lighter in her care.

‘Who will mind us now, Sive?' my mother wept. ‘Who will mind us now?'

I did not know. But I cried my first open tears.

*   *   *

We put Noreen in a soft grave that promised to care for her as she had cared for us. The man in black watched my mother with a curious concern as she watched the box being lowered into blackness.

‘We should be putting her into her own ground,' she whispered over to herself.

I took her by the arm.

‘Who will mind us now?' she asked of people, who had come to know Noreen enough through her shop work to pay their respects at her last resting place. They looked away. London was where they had learned to look after themselves.

I asked my mother to be quiet, my stomach turning at her beggaring us.

*   *   *

At home, Carmel went to the wardrobe to look for the shoes and satin Noreen had long since thrown away. She talked all the while, to herself, until her lips moved without forming words in that way that tiredness brings.

When we were on our own in the dark kitchen, sitting over food that had grown cold, I made the promise to mind us, if only she would go to bed.

She went, and I sat up with the long dark night and waited for morning.

*   *   *

At the corner shop the owner said with great reluctance he could not have me to fill Noreen's place. He had two more family members coming from India and, besides, at fifteen I was too young.

I knew where to go and what to do.

*   *   *

It was not the same. Sergio was not there. Myrna was not there. Harder, older versions of Fanny and Lulu were at the same table they always sat at. I walked up to them and they told me to push off and mind me own.

Then Lulu looked at my eyes and said, ‘It's young Sive. You're not quite filled yet, are you?' Lulu looked sidelong at me. ‘Still a bit of work to do there, girl.'

I sat down and a young man came to ask me what I wanted. His eyes were cold and I did not hold them. Coffee, strong and black please. For the first time.

‘Myrna's drink,' Lulu remembered.

I tasted it, winced and had to put two sugars in it.

‘Where's Sergio?' I asked, when the man had gone, though his ears stayed with the table.

‘His own food got him,' Lulu said simply. ‘Heart attack.'

‘And the fella behind his counter is his nephew. Got the place and came over from Italy and didn't even go to Serg's funeral. We went,' Lulu reminded herself and Fanny. ‘Antonio lets in anybody. No peace in here these days.'

‘We still come in though, nowhere else to go,' Fanny looked at me, as if I might have another suggestion.

‘Where's Myrna?' I asked.

The two looked at each other. Lulu bit at one of her nails and tucked her latest hairstyle behind her ears. It was too soft and too long for her face and neck, which were hard and taut, fighting slacking skin. There were two small scars above her lip and one bigger one at her hairline. Veins like red stitches poking through too much make-up.

Fanny finally spoke. ‘Gone, Sive. We're the old girls now!'

‘I'm off.' Lulu got up abruptly and went out the door, stopping to check in the tarnished mirror that was no longer there. She did not seem to notice.

‘Poor old Lou,' Fanny sighed. ‘She's on the sauce big time. Can't tell her. Still looks well though, don't she? I got four girls, as you know.'

Sergio's nephew, I could see out of the corner of my eye, was watching me. Fanny noticed and interrupted herself with a whisper.

‘He's a git. Pay no mind to him.'

Fanny was working as a maid now.

‘I gave up that business when my first two left home. I haven't heard from them since. I'm gone down, Sive, and I know it.' Fanny touched the hair more rust than brown now. ‘But Lulu keeps herself nice. So she's not gone as far down.'

‘And Myrna?'

‘Myrna got as old-looking as she never was. She was here the day Sergio died. He lay in her arms and he called for his mother so they tell me. A big man like that. After that we never saw Myrna again. We heard she was in hospital – that's the height of it.'

I felt the empty spaces in the café and the people who should have occupied them. The photos were no longer stuck to the mirror behind the counter. It was as if we had never been. I sat a long while with Fanny until it suddenly occurred to her to ask why I was here.

‘Work.'

‘Right,' she stood up and brushed off a worn coat. She saw me look at it. ‘Maids don't earn as much. Come on, we'll get you sorted.'

*   *   *

I took my clothes off carefully the first time, as if my body would disintegrate without them. He had asked to take some photos, the man at the bottom of the stairs in the dark room. The photos were to be put in the glass box so men could decide what they would come to see.

The man agreed with Fanny that this was the best way for a young girl to work, and the cleanest. When Fanny left he said to me I could get extra money doing extra work, but that was up to me.

Our new Soho room was not clean, but I had learned from Noreen to make it so. Carmel had grown wild again and had to be tied to the bed while I went out, as I once had been. But, unlike me, she had no dreams to stop the fear and the fire that had begun to burn in her again.

Myrna did not return to my dreams. I put my head on a pillow each night and listened to my mother's ragged breath. I turned my back on the fresh green dreams, they brought too much feeling into the grey days I knew lay ahead.

Some nights I would cry for Noreen and some nights for Myrna and often for both.

Days wore on and led to endless nights. The shape of a full woman formed under my skin and I shrank from it as I had from the sunlight on the day of my birth.

I knew the time was coming when I would give more, because I needed more. I remembered Lulu telling me once: ‘It's like this. It never seems so bad after you've done it.'

Carmel took more and more caring for and I was left with less time to make the money we needed. She ate only what I put in her mouth. She burned us out twice and landlords came to know us. The women would keep her in the café while I went to see places and I brought Carmel up at night to the newly rented place when no one could see her. She never left them until she found a way to burn. Then we would both have to leave.