Araby Read online

  COPYRIGHT

  Flamingo

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublisher

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London SE1 9GF

  Published by Flamingo 1999

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 1998

  Copyright © Gretta Mulrooney 1998

  Gretta Mulrooney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  The poem ‘On the Death of His Wife’ by Muireadach O’Dalaigh, translated by Frank O’Connor is reprinted by permission of the Peters, Fraser and Dunlop Group Limited on behalf of the Estate of Frank O’Connor

  Photograph of Gretta Mulrooney by Niall McDiarmid

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Source ISBN 0 00 655101 7

  Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007485291

  Version: 2016-03-16

  Set in Galliard by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that it which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  PRAISE

  From the British and Irish reviews for Araby:

  ‘Wonderful.’

  MAEVE BINCHY The Late, Late Show

  ‘I loved it. Such a sweet story, without being in the least bit sentimental, and very moving without being harrowing. There are moments when the reader is absolutely there so acute is this novelist’s eye and ear.’

  MARGARET FORSTER

  ‘[An] engaging novel … A topic as forbidding as the death of a parent can certainly do with some uplifting warmth and humour, and Mulrooney is good at providing this, making the reader feel like a guest in the family kitchen rather than a voyeur prying on the protagonist’s feelings.’

  Guardian

  ‘Araby is a wonderfully funny view of Irish motherhood, but Mulrooney also evokes powerful emotions as Rory comes to appreciate quite how much his infuriating but irreplaceable mother means to him. Highly recommended.’

  Literary Review

  ‘It’s the cringe-making moments that Rory Keenan cannot forget. His mother created a lot of them. Kitty was bizarre, unpredictable and addicted to imaginary illnesses. Now she’s heading towards the end of life, and as Rory struggles to come to terms with this, he sees his parents – beautifully drawn characters – in a new light. Hysterically funny, desperately sad, always compassionate but painfully touching.’

  Choice

  Further reviews overleaf

  ‘A poignant, warm-hearted (and very funny) London Irish novel … A story about childhood and death and laying to rest the demons of the past.’

  Northern Lights

  ‘Araby is a tour de force of humanity, a recognition of the complexities of filial and parental loves … With Kitty, Mulrooney delivers a remarkable and triumphant character in this, her first novel.’

  RTE Guide

  ‘This poignant novel has the ability to play havoc with your heart strings, making you laugh and cry at the same time.’

  Ulster News Letter

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With thanks to East Midlands Arts, who offered encouragement and financial support at the start of my writing career.

  A special thank you to my agent, David O’Leary, whose friendship, humour and savvy have been magical.

  DEDICATION

  To Peg and her grandson, Darragh and for Kath, Hugh, Jim and Mary; my very own diaspora.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  My plane was late taking off because a hijacked aircraft had been diverted to the airport. The captain of our flight chatted to us about it over the intercom and pointed it out as we finally taxied to our runway. It was the yellow-tailed one, he said, adding that he hoped the poor panic-stricken souls on board wouldn’t have too much longer in there. We were informed that there would be a tail wind so our flight time to Cork would be just fifty minutes.

  I had been panic-stricken myself when I’d turned on the early news and heard that Stansted happened to be the airport designated to receive hijacked planes for London. The report had said that the place was closed off but in the end I’d had no trouble getting there despite the busy late-summer roads, driving in through the TV cameras and tight groups of uniformed men with guns on their hips.

  I was glad now that I hadn’t rung my father, alarming him with fears of a long delay. I thought of how thrilled he and my mother would be that I’d actually seen the hostage jet with its canary yellow markings. They had always relished random misfortune, a good disaster; a motorway pile-up, a plane crash, a sinking ferry. Pulling their chairs around the television they would tut and invoke the blessings of God on the poor victims of chance, crossing themselves when a body-bag appeared. Extra interest would be provided for my father if there was any suggestion of sabotage or treachery. Then he would follow the story for weeks, poring over newspapers and cursing the bifocals he had never mastered. The grassy knoll in Dallas had provided him with years of satisfying theory and counter theory; sometimes he would favour the CIA conspiracy then after reading another book he’d switch to KGB and/or Cubans as the assassins of JFK. My mother’s attention span was shorter; such reports confirmed her view that life was a series of catastrophes waiting to pounce and so she would mark time until the next, uninterested in fine details. After a solemn prayer for the dead and wounded, uttered in a devout voice while fingering her St Christopher medal, she was ready to turn to a quiz show.

  It seemed to me that St Christopher was a disappointment as a patron saint. Travellers who were supposedly under his protection regularly met death and injury. Unlike St Anthony, who in my experience always helped to find lost articles, he wasn’t up to the job. Either he’d been given an appointment beyond his reach or he was a slacker. I once mentioned this facetiously during my late teens, when I was home from university. I used to enjoy baiting my mother and seeing her colour rise. I had secretly abandoned the stranglehold of Catholicism by then and thought myself a bit of a sophisticate. I viewed my mother’s fervent, superstitious belief with distaste bordering on loathing.

  There had been a horrific train crash near Bombay. My mother had been expressing pious sentiments about the lost souls over steak and chips. I felt the food sticking in my throat and wanted to be cruel in the way that young people do who see their parents as stuffy obstacles to progress. I commented coolly on St Christopher’s apparent shortcomings, suggesting that maybe they could do with a good management consultant in Heaven, someone who would look at personal specifications and psychological profiles. It must be hard being stuck with a job for eternity; you’d get stale, bored, itchy to try something else. Maybe there
should be a big shake-up, with roles reorganized; St Christopher might have a talent for music while St Cecilia could prove skilful at protecting travellers. My mother, unsure of my point but understanding the intended mockery, returned her usual riposte; it was a lot of good my ejicayshun had done me if it had turned me into a jeering Judas. She didn’t know now why they’d ever sent me to the Jesuits because all they’d done was made me smart. She’d waved a chip at me before dipping it into ketchup. ‘Smartness won’t cut the mustard with St Peter,’ she’d stated, satisfied that I’d get my comeuppance at a later date.

  As we were lifted into the air I saw a jeep crawl towards the hijacked plane and I could hear myself describing the scene to my parents, beefing it up; the waiting ambulances and fire engines, a glimpse of a famous reporter who was always sent to disasters standing by the verge and smoothing her hair back between takes. They referred to all the major reporters as if they were old friends. ‘There’s Bill,’ my father would say, swishing the teapot and pointing the spout at the screen. ‘Hasn’t he put on a bit of weight?’ my mother would comment, adding that he’d been in Paris last week, probably living it up at the Moolan Rooge and the Folly Berger. ‘Ye’d better watch the waistline,’ she’d admonish Bill, wagging her finger at him.

  Tiny cups of coffee and bite-sized biscuits were delivered by a stewardess. I sipped and crunched at this miniature doll’s house fare, listening to the two women in front of me.

  ‘Of course Ireland’s the place to be right now,’ the blonde was saying.

  ‘Is that so?’ Her brown-haired companion’s scalp was showing through thin hair.

  ‘Oh yes; very much a thriving scene. Films being made, celebrities buying homes; Mick Jagger, Liz Hurley. I think Madonna showed an interest. There’s been lots of articles in the English papers about the quality of life and lack of pollution.’

  ‘Not a second-rate land of bogs and mists any more then.’

  ‘Oh, not at all. The economy’s growing. Youngsters who emigrated are returning. Even the North isn’t putting people off now. And of course there are generous payments to the old, you’re getting retired English people crossing the water.’

  I nodded my agreement. That had been one of the lures that had drawn my parents back to the homeland they’d emigrated from after the war. Letters from my father’s brother crowing about free telephones, fuel and subsidized electricity had been dissected and wondered over. Sums were done and a decision was made, when my father turned sixty-five, to return to ‘God’s own country’. They had sold their modest terraced house in Tottenham for an eighties-inflated profit beyond their dreams, bought a cottage twenty miles from Cork and banked the difference.

  I’d visited as often as I could during the ten years they’d lived there, every spring and autumn and usually at Christmas. They wrote regularly; that is my mother wrote and my father added a line or two at the bottom. My mother’s writing was large, her As formed in Celtic style. Her letters were a challenging stream of consciousness because of her scatter-gun punctuation. She strewed full stops with abandon, confusing the meaning; a question mark or even several question marks lined up together were likely to appear in the middle of a sentence where there was no enquiry and odd thoughts were scribbled in the margins, such as ‘price of butter gone mad altogether’ or ‘didn’t Mother Teresa look terrible sick last week’. My father’s cramped hand always said the same thing; ‘Your mother’s given you the full works. Hope all is well as it is with us here, T.G.’

  The letters spoke of a woman who missed the bustle of London, a woman who’d forgotten that rural silences can freeze you as effectively as any ice. She complained about the price of food, the scarcity of good-quality vegetables, the rain, the lack of a Sainsburys in Fermoy, the battle against the damp along the back wall of the kitchen, the ratty dog from the farm up the road who terrorized their rabbits. There was always a long section dwelling on her major preoccupation, her health; sciatica, rheumatism, water retention, nervous headaches, hot and cold tingles, acid stomach, palpitations and sluggish bowels were listed with the types of agonies they caused. Pain was stabbing, rippling, smarting, shooting, twingeing, griping or throbbing. An exhaustive list of the most recent medicines she had been prescribed was given, with queries about the side effects of the little yellow tablets or the black and red capsules; could they be causing the dizziness or the morning nausea? I could never make my mother understand that as a physiotherapist, I did not have a doctor’s medical knowledge. She knew that I had been to university and sometimes wore a white coat; therefore I should be clued up. The last part of the letter would feed me news of my brother in Hong Kong and I assumed that they did the same to him about me. He and I exchanged birthday and Christmas cards.

  And then, just four days ago, an envelope arrived addressed in my father’s hand. I picked it up, knowing that something must be wrong for long-standing routine to be broken. My mother had had a touch of women’s trouble, the brief note inside said, and she was in the hospital for a couple of days while they did tests. Women’s trouble; what on earth could he mean? My mother was well past the page where that euphemism was usually applied, alluding to gynaecological problems.

  I rang him, always a difficult manoeuvre as he was partially deaf, and he sounded relieved to hear me. Too relieved, I thought, a small bell of alarm sounding. I’d get a locum in and fly over, I told him and he shouted back yes, yes, he understood and I had to hold the phone away so that his thin old man’s voice fussed around the kitchen.

  The Safety Pin Crossing

  I wasn’t frightened of flying but neither did I enjoy it. Not once in the ten years since my parents had moved back to Ireland had I taken the ferry, even though I loved the sea, the humming of the ship and the train journey that would have rattled me there through the Midlands and along grimy Welsh valleys to Swansea.

  Ferry crossings were laden with the history of journeys with my mother, a fretful brew of memories. Those trips across the unpredictable Irish Sea stood out in my childhood as a particular purgatory. We had made one each summer for fifteen years, visiting my grandmother for a month. My brother had been there for some but being twelve years older than me, he had soon vanished away to Canberra and then Hong Kong, leaving me to travel alone with my mother. My father would join us for the last ten days and come back with us, allowing someone else to deliver the Royal Mail in south Tottenham.

  Perhaps my mother simply hated travelling. Any journey that took her beyond the usual confines of her shopping expeditions brought a fixed, recalcitrant look to her face. Certainly, the build-up in the days before we set off to Cork indicated huge anxiety. As a child, I experienced it as part of the ill-tempered fussing that accompanied any major departure from routine and I dreaded it. Bags would be packed and unpacked, tickets double-checked, masses of food prepared. There was always cold roast chicken wrapped in greaseproof paper and if the journey coincided with a dieting phase, plastic boxes filled with grated carrot and shredded lettuce. All of my mother’s movements became razor-sharp. She slammed doors, trod fast and heavily through rooms and became accident prone, nicking fingers and bruising herself.

  Inevitably, a zip or buckle on a bag would break an hour before departure, causing mayhem. My mother would seize and roughly apply brown tape or jab huge stitches with a darning needle, muttering under her breath that somebody – whoever had used it last – must have over-stuffed it, causing it at last to give way. These things were always another person’s fault and it was always her bad luck to be the one who was there when the trap was sprung. As usual, she was the patsy getting the pay-off. While she cursed, the flabby spare flesh on her upper arms wobbling, I would slink away and sit watching the red buses trundle past the window, a sick fluttering in my stomach. I felt hopeless and useless, thinking that there was something I should be doing but knowing that if I tried to help it would go wrong. Then, just as we were about to leave, she would glance at me and find that I was wearing a jacket that made me look like I w
as on an outing from the orphanage or my hair resembled a duck’s ass or the colour of my shirt suggested that I was going to a funeral. Then I would tell myself that I hated her, that never again would I go anywhere with her, that I deserved a mother who wasn’t grossly fat and bad-tempered.

  When I was ten years old there was the journey that I called The Safety Pin Crossing. The sea boiled around the boat. It was crowded with high-season travellers. We couldn’t afford berths and we struggled through the swaying bodies, hampered by carrier bags, trying to find seats for the night. I’ve since heard the ferries to Ireland referred to as cattle ships and it was an accurate description then; the passengers were tightly packed, anxious, breathing each other’s fetid air, fighting their way to taps for water or to toilet bowls to be sick.

  We found one empty seat near the end of a row. On the adjacent seat sat a bulging rucksack, ownership firmly declared. My mother bowled it carelessly onto the floor of the aisle and shoved me down, plonking herself beside me.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ she said, ‘I’m destroyed. Me feet are like burst spuds.’

  She rustled the food bag and extracted a lump of chicken, tearing the goose-flesh skin off with her nails. I refused food, anxiously waiting for the rucksack owner to appear. The ship ploughed and rolled out of the harbour and the sight of glistening chicken flesh made me nauseous. The owner of the displaced bag was young and tall and he turned up after five minutes with a can of beer. He looked at me and gestured with the can.

  ‘Could the young fella move, Mrs?’ he said to my mother. ‘That’s my seat.’

  My mother offered him a blank gaze. ‘Pardon?’ she said in the mock-English accent she employed when she was on her dignity. It was modelled on the Queen Mother’s refined tones, although my mother always referred to her as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, as if they’d been on nodding terms in their youth.

  ‘That’s my seat,’ he repeated. ‘I left my bag on it.’