Last Train from Liguria (2010) (9 page)
Read Last Train from Liguria (2010) Online
Authors: Christine Dwyer Hickey
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For two days and a night, I was his dog. When he went into the flower shop to buy his buttonhole, I was outside having a sniff at the boxes of lavender. When he went into the barber’s, I snoozed in the sun on a bench across the road. I even pissed when he pissed, taking my place at the far end of the men’s latrine on piazza del Pebliscito.
The following evening when he slipped away from the after-theatre crowd, I was behind him. We turned into streets that rose as they narrowed, deserted but for the occasional slither of a cat. Past stair-alleys and side-slits and the windowless
bassi
where people lived like mules behind stable doors, and where in the uphill darkness I could have easily lost him, were it not for the tap of his ridiculous shoes.
I would have liked to have been able to catch him red-handed at some boy or another, the way I had caught him years before in Dublin. Except this time I wouldn’t be threatened into silence. Just as I would have liked to have smashed his face into the tiles earlier on in the public latrine. But I had to think of my future. If he was to be any good to me, then I needed him in one piece, secure and respectable; a man of substance, not of shame.
I can still see him going through that doorway in Naples, me stepping up behind him, tapping him on the shoulder. In the half light, the way he turns and gives me one of his frowns. I can see it dawn on him after a few seconds that it might be me, but…? He is put off by my beard and general appearance. I am far from the fresh-faced boy he last saw in Dublin and almost a year on the run has done my appearance no favours.
In the end I had to help things along by letting him hear my voice. I said something like, ‘What’s the matter, Maestro Barzonni - don’t you recognize your old pupil?’
‘You?’ his voice was hoarse, his eyes alarmed, and I wondered if perhaps word had come through from Dublin that my sister had been murdered and I wondered if perhaps he thought I had come all this way to kill him too. ‘How is it
you
?’
I shrugged good-humouredly and smiled. He took his eyes off mine just long enough to glance over my shoulder to the street outside, then behind him up to the door at the top of the stairs, where a lamp was burning and there was the muffled sound of radio dance music. Then he looked back at me.
‘You’re looking well,’ I said. ‘Prosperous anyway. I see you still wear the sea horse cufflinks my mother bought you.’
‘What are you doing here?’ he whispered.
‘Living like a rat,’ I snarled.
*
That was 1925. Eight years from then to now. How far I’ve come. Naples to Sicily to Bordighera. Much shorter coming back up, I’d have to say, than it had been going all the way down.
I lie on my back in this foreign darkness and remember such scenes so vividly I can actually see them. I see other things too, other people, from further away. Mother on the sofa poised for conversation with a stranger. The oulfella rubbing a cloth into the counter, big ruddy face softly wobbling from exertion. Customers come and go, day into night, but the cloth, like his conversation, rubs the same small area. And I see Louise. Her face a younger version than the oulfella’s. Slightly less red perhaps, less fat, but it’s his face she’s wearing. I see her as she used to be when we were children, the heft of her hammering me to the wall with her massive hip, her face radiant with hate. The two of us scrapping like dogs throughout the house. Even when left to practise duets at the piano we wouldn’t let up, pinching, biting, punching, pulling; disguising our squeals of pain with louder playing. She was always the stronger, the more resourceful fighter. Hard to believe, in the end, I would have got the better of her. Louise alive. Savagely alive. And that’s not how I want to see her.
The day before yesterday. Out in the morning, promenade all to myself, by a whispering sea. The air was for the moment cool and I must have walked a long while because when I came back through Bordighera, the market men had given way to old men and housewives. A few bureaucratic types were headed for the station and children in fascist uniforms quacked around me at the newspaper stand.
I came into Tonino’s cafe, still thinking about the housewives, with their fine big arses and dark damp eyes, their tired little early morning sighs. A stranger at the counter was talking to Tonino. From Albenga, I heard him say. I sat down in my usual corner, cracked open my newspaper and felt the first whack of coffee hit my chest. Tonino was called to the telephone and the stranger started speaking to me. We had a pleasantly impersonal conversation about the headlines mostly: Hitler, and Spain, Roosevelt, people shooting each other on American streets. The world was a terrible place, he said, no law, no respect. Thank God we Italians have il Duce to protect us!
He had taken me for a fellow Ligurian and I realized then that it had been a long, long time since anyone has asked where I’m from. I started to become afraid then. Of what? I don’t know.
There was nothing remarkable about the rest of my morning, but each little turn of it seemed somehow significant. I made my way up the slope of the corso d’Italia, returning nods and good-morning smiles as I received them, then bought a few oranges from Marco’s. Next door the barber waved his razor through the window at me, and jokingly threatened my whiskers. I went to his door, pulled the beads aside and lobbed an orange in. He deftly caught it and laughed like a child. At the top of the
corso
an elderly couple sat on a bench. He asked me for the time, and when I stopped to check my watch, they both waylaid me with competitive little tales of their individual ailments. The old man had sweets wrapped in shiny paper in his pocket. As he spoke he opened the wrapper of one and handed the bare sweet to me as if I were a child.
I came back to the house and stood for a while at the window, looking down at the garden. I opened the window and stepped out onto the slight balcony. There was birdsong and butterflies - the usual. The dog down the road with the baritone bark was hard at it. From the kitchen, first rumours of lunch already on the air. I had a full free morning ahead of me.
I stayed there in the main house, read, listened to the radio, stared into space. Then I came down and picked up the lunch tray Elida had left for me on the hall table. I walked through the garden down to the mews, had my lunch, lay on the bed, may have even snoozed. When I got up, I sat at my piano.
My fingers flawlessly moving - there is something to be said for this sober life - anything else faded. I stayed like that until Elida came to my window and called out my name, her voice hacking up to me that it was time to collect Alessandro from tennis.
*
I have this in my head: if I could only see my sister, just once more see her, then I could find peace. Maybe even sleep a whole night. Or accept a morning like the one before last without being afraid it could be pulled out from under my feet. But I’d have to be able to see her, exactly as I last saw her - dead and smothered in blood. It doesn’t really make sense this yearning for a bloody sister-ghost. But that’s what I have in my head.
Anna
April
TODAY I TELL HER Ginger Rogers has died. ‘You remember poor old Ginger?’ I say, as if she were an oulone who used to live down the road. ‘Died last night, heart failure - according to this. Born 1911, that’s a few years younger than you - and you’re still battling away.’
These one-sided conversations. I’d forgotten how much of a strain they can be. Not that there’s really any other kind in a hospital like this one, or that anyone pays a blind bit of attention. But I’ve been told to let her hear my voice, and so like it or not, that’s what I do. They’re big on the voice in here. It always comes back to it. Sometimes I think it’s all that they have.
She’s gone downhill since my last visit six weeks ago, a long time, considering. At least then her eyes would often be open, on a good day even make contact. The odd grunt or nod of the head in response to something I’d say so that there had been times when I’d been able to convince myself that she’d actually been listening to me. Now it seems she just sleeps all the time.
How easy it is to slip back into routine and before I know it I’ve given her the weather report (last night’s rain, today’s sun doing its best to squeeze through) and I’m scanning the ward for something to comment on. The least little shift would do, a vase moved from here to there, say, or a new pair of slippers under a bed. But the passing of six weeks has gone unmarked in here and I find nothing noteworthy or new. Except for Mrs Clarke’s vacant bed and I’m hardly going to comment on that.
The newspaper now, I don’t mind so much - to read a bit out, throw in a comment or two, read another bit again. The wider world and its familiar strangers - it takes the onus off us both somehow. And it keeps her in touch. Or so the little blondy nurse never tires telling me. ‘You never know what’s going in there,’ she’ll often add with a knowing nursey wink.
I turn over the pages, quickly decide there’s no need to go bothering her with Rwanda, Bosnia or OJ’s trial. Then I go back to Ginger, this time reading the obituary aloud.
I’ve always quite liked this time of the day - this hour of adjournment in the ward’s routine; feeding time over, afternoon medication just kicking in. In a moment the junior nurses will start to slip off for a sneaky smoke or a cup of tea. And it will seem like I was never away.
‘You go on,’ I’ll say to them. ‘I’ll give you a shout if there’s any excitement. If anyone jumps up like, and starts doing a jig.’
In fairness to the nurses they’ve never asked me to keep an eye on things, nor would they dream of it. It just sort of happened. I offered one day, then I offered the next. I always have to offer. Unless the staff nurse is on, in which case I’ll keep my mouth shut.
Three nurses. Through the bars in a high-set window, I watch their caps slip into the frame, then wag and nod. Pokes of smoke rise and fritter. Only the tallest one shows the nape of her neck, and her hair which is corseted into a dull-orange bun.
In here, meanwhile, a lull begins to drift over the beds like a mild dust you can almost see, and all those little hidden notes that an hour ago would have been bashed aside now come into their own. The shuffling slippers come and go (that’s Mr Carroll, who can’t stop walking about). Mrs Lyons plays with her rosary, muttering obscenities as if they were prayers. Snores and groans sway and stutter. Under the covers old secrets are whispered. A lengthy fart purrs down the line. And through it all I can hear my voice, wandering up and down the ward, like something lost.
‘Virginia Katherine,’ I say. ‘That was her real name. Did you know? Virginia Katherine McMath - at least I think that’s how you pronounce it. Married five times. Can you imagine?
Five
husbands. One’s bad enough,’ I say.
As if either of us would really know.
It all comes full circle. I put the paper down for a moment and that’s what I think. Full circle. We start off in a nursery and we finish up in one. Babies again. If I last long enough I’ll be one too. And what will any of the in-between matter or mean in the end? The way I’ve lived my life so far, the way I’m feeling now, about this woman in the bed, the man who’s recently left me, the meeting in a few minutes’ time with the registrar of this mental hospital and whatever it is he has to say to me. A big fat ugly wrinkly baba, that’ll be me. I’ll open my gummy mouth when I want to be fed or when I want to gibber. I’ll shit in my nappy when the urge takes me, and no other urge will concern me. I’ll finish my days in a place such as this. Sexless and therefore free. Where it makes no difference if the genders are mixed in together, or even mixed into each other, come to think of it (hairy-faced women, men who could do with a bra).
If the shuffler sometimes shows a flop of willy through his pyjama slit; if the ex-reverend mother goes out to the toilet with one plump tit peering like a plucked chicken out the front of her nightie; and if genteel Mrs Lyons wants to mutter her obscenities - well, who’s going to care or even half notice?
‘Eighty-three years of age,’ I say. ‘Imagine? Proud of her pins till the end. You’d leave her in the ha’penny place, so you would. Age-wise and leg-wise. You’d knock her sideways.’ And so I continue for a bit, stretching poor Ginger’s legs this way and that, until they’ve become an exhausted subject. Well - you have to be saying something.
Yes. In the slow passing of hospital time a simple gesture can take on a sense of exaggerated purpose. The refilling of a water jug, say, or finding a vase for the ugly flowers I’ve brought from the garage shop down the road. Folding the newspaper over, taking it across to the table in the middle of the ward in case one of the nurses wants to have a look at it later. Going down the ward and into the visitor’s toilet - now that’s an expedition in itself. When all this is over it’s usual to feel at a bit of a loss.
I stand looking down at the table in the middle of the ward. It’s a kitchen table, red Formica, chipped black around the edges, and has been donated, like most of the furniture in here, by a charitable sort, or, as I’m inclined to think in my more cynical moments, the sort that’s too tight to pay for a skip.
I come back to the bed and force myself to look at my grandmother’s face. It’s a different face to the one I left behind a few weeks ago, no longer scribbled with wrinkles and lines. Fuller since the stroke, you could almost say fat, and pink. I can’t get over this. It makes me want to laugh out loud, to say, ‘Would you look at the big fat pink face of you, Nonna!’
She looks so
well
. Now that she can no longer swallow and it’s the intravenous drip, rather than herself, that’s responsible for feeding her. Here’s something else - without the power of her throat muscles she can no longer cry. At least that’s all over, that constant crying. That awful constant dry-crying. Jesus! At least I’ll never have to listen to that again.
All in all, and absurd as it seems, in some ways the stroke has been good for her.
Between the pink and the fatness and the expression of peace, traces remain of what has come to be known as ‘the incident’. At least that’s how it was described to me on the phone when they finally tracked me down in London: ‘I’m afraid there’s been a bit of an incident.’ And that’s what they’ve been calling it ever since. ‘The stroke was most likely the result of the incident.’ ‘Certain tests had to be carried out on foot of the incident.’ That’s the sort of thing I’ve been hearing. What I haven’t been hearing are the finer details: the whys, wherefores and, most intriguing of all, the how in the name of Christ could such a thing have happened in the first place?
Regarding the incident, this much I do know: it bruised her face and it broke her arm. It left long scratches and cuts all up her legs and across her knees. It fucked up her new hip. Despite all this damage, it has to be admitted that for a while there before the incident, she was a total rip. And since it, apparently, has been a complete ‘sweetie pie’.
I lean towards my grandmother. ‘Nonna,’ I say, ‘I take my eyes off you for a few weeks and look at all the trouble. What are we going to do with you at all?’
I sit back and try to remember the other Nonna, what she was like before all this. But I can barely recall her younger face, which ironically looked older than the face she now has. I can only seem to get back as far as the nursing home where she lived for a year or so before she was sent here. Where we both thought she would end her days. A far cry from this hole, it has to be said.
She’d picked it herself, after first checking out God knows how many other homes. ‘
Now
this is it,’ she had said. ‘This is the
perfect
place.’ Then she had proceeded to make all the arrangements, financial and otherwise. I couldn’t get over her forking out that type of money or that she had that kind of money to fork out. Not that she’d ever denied me anything, but it had been scrimp and scratch all the way with Nonna, and I had often got the impression that spending money gave her a pain in the stomach. Not this time though. This time she couldn’t whip out the cheque book quick enough.
She had seemed almost happy there, in her perfect nursing home. A veranda in summer where she sat like a memsahib on her bamboo chair, occasionally smiling and nodding at other people’s conversations. The lawn to look at, trees to contemplate, the sound of water. An occasional party in the main drawing room - some eejit in a dickie bow telling corny jokes and banging on an electric keyboard. But still. A bright bedroom all to herself, and her own radio, although she always preferred to sit in silence. She was treated as a pet there, was, I believe, almost loved. They liked her neatness, her soft green eyes, what they saw as her acquiescent disposition. Of course they got over that soon enough.
They tell you to do that in magazines and care advice brochures, they say - try to remember your loved one in happier, more positive times. Try to choose one or two things a day your loved one used to enjoy. It’s interesting I think, the way they always use that expression ‘loved one’ - an undertaker’s expression - like they’re acknowledging that he or she has already died.
The buzzer goes on the door of the ward, and I hear Thelma coming out of the office to answer it. Thelma, a sort of nurse’s aide, is a bit on the simple side. I suspect she may be a former patient, shoved in here a long time ago and for not that much of a reason. The door is unlocked and I can hear Thelma’s loud excited whispers from here. A voice I recognize - that of the bunty little staff nurse - is admitted. The door is then locked again with a touch more ceremony than usual, and I can’t help wondering if this is for my sake.
I get up and stretch my arm to tap on the window. The geometric line of starched caps falters and breaks apart. One startled eye turns towards me, like the eye in a shying horse. I give the nod that says,
The battle-axe has arrived, girls, better get yourselves back inside
.
Bunty’s voice comes into the ward. ‘Oh!’ she goes, when she sees me (as if Thelma hasn’t told her I’m here). ‘Oh, long time no see, indeed.’ She breezes by and it could be a snarl or a smile on her lips but either way I sense disapproval. When she comes back there’s a stack of files in her arms. ‘So’, she says, looking down at the suitcase beside me on the floor, ‘are you moving in - or what?’
‘I was in London,’ I say. ‘I came straight from the airport.’
‘London!’ she goes, as if I’d said the moon. ‘Imagine that now - business or pleasure?’
‘Neither,’ I say and for some reason find myself standing up.
She barrels off up the ward and I feel myself boil up with rage. I long to shout after her, to say something like, ‘Here, you - I have my own problems, you know, I have my own life. And what about all the other weeks, days, hours, when I was the only visitor in this kip? I didn’t hear you asking too many questions then!’
I imagine her stopping in her tracks, turning to look at me, the drop of her fat little mouth, a slow blush pushing north from her chest up her neck. Then just as she’s getting ready to move off again, I hear myself continuing: ‘And another thing - I wasn’t the one who left the door open. I wasn’t the one who let her escape. I’ll be speaking to the registrar shortly by the way, and can’t wait to hear what he has to say about that!’
In my daydream Bunty lowers her eyelids, her already red enough face darkening to a guilty purple. In reality she couldn’t give a fuck, while I stand like a fool watching her move from bed to bed, fussing and fixing, checking on charts, yapping at patients - there she goes. Even those who are sleeping or in other ways beyond listening will be addressed: briskly, loudly, a touch of tolerance bordering, it has to be said, on genuine kindness. As she always does at the start of her shift and again when it comes to an end, the way a primary school teacher might speak to her pupils at the start and finish of the day.
It was never my idea to put her here in the first place. I sit back down and remind myself of this now, as I used to do every time I came up here for the first year or so. This was not my idea. It was that other place wanted rid of her. The so-called ‘perfect place’. A few weeks, they had assured me, a few tests, a rest. That’s how they got around me.
The truth was they just couldn’t put up with her. Couldn’t have her sullying the atmosphere of their veranda with her carry-on and dry-crying. Couldn’t have her pacing the halls and landings, leaving the echo of that one repeated phrase in her wake, ‘I can’t, I can’t. I’m not able. I’m not able.’ On and on, she just wouldn’t stop saying it. Until eventually they had stopped asking, ‘Not able to what, darling? What are you not able to do?’ But most of all they couldn’t have her disillusioning the well-heeled relatives that their money had been wisely spent. She had simply become bad for business, I suppose.