This is a radio piece commissioned by the BBC in 2004 to mark the 100th Bloomsday. It was preformed (beautifully) by Sorcha Cusack, but I can’t find a recording anywhere and to be honest I had forgotten all about it until today, when general Bloomsday chatter on Twitter reminded me. If anyone out there happens to have a recording, do let me know. K
No I Said
I’m off for a walk. I’m out the door and down the drive. I’m out of the kitchen, into my coat, across the hall, shouting I’m off out for a while, I’ll be back in a while, and I’m out the door and I’m into the air, the noise, the world, and I’m not stopping I swear to God I’m never stopping, the way I feel – that’s the way I feel and I can’t disguise it. Why would I want to disguise it? But I do of course, I do disguise it, it’s like I have two different lives, and who’d want that, but that’s what I have. Two different bloody lives, and both of them stopped, halted, stalled, stuck in that house like secret children, like secret bewildered aunts, miserable hidden souls locked in an airless drum. One of them doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind at all – one of them is a good daughter, happy daughter, at ease with it all; the other one has all her fingernails hanging off from scratching the back of the door. I have to force myself, force myself, not to slam. Having to close the front door gently is like a little Calvary all of its own, another one, a tiny one yes, but one of a million other tiny ones, to go with the small ones, and the medium ones, and the big ones, and the massive ones, and the overall one – the overall, over-arching, complete and comprehensive sacrifice I have made of my life for the benefit of another. And where is the kingdom? Which way lies paradise, my peace everlasting, my eternal bliss? Don’t make me laugh. Don’t make me tell you.
Oh alright then. It’s my mother. My mother. She isn’t dead yet.
I stomp down the road looking like an eejit. It’s the middle of the day. There’s no one around now but men in vans out to fix things or deliver them, au-pairs with prams, au pairs with shopping bags, au pairs in the prime of other people’s lives. They all glance at me, stare at me, and I’m so sick of it all that I’m sure it shows. I’m sure they know. Look at you, they’re saying. Running away from your mother. At your age. Good God I could walk to the edge of the world, the mood I’m in, I could stamp my way to the edge of the earth, I’m so disgusted with the centre. But isn’t that the problem? Wherever you are, that’s where you are. You’re always at the centre, never out of the crosshairs, never away from the eye of the storm. We’re always the centre of attention in our rotten little lives. Aren’t we mother? Aren’t we?
What day is it now? She has a thing about dates recently, as if waiting for one to come along unlike the others. It’s Wednesday, isn’t it? Wednesday? The middle of a scrappy June. The middle of a scrappy year.
I’m off into the park. Where else would I go? Out into the pale open spaces with me, with my muddy little feet clicking and clacking over the blankness, over the empty lawns, squelching and sucking at the black mud, dribbling through this tidied up, diminished world, just me, alone. Except for my mother at my back like an undone thing. I turned at the gate and looked back at the house. Just now, as I left it, in my froth. I do it every time. Every single solitary time. I cannot not do it. As if I have forgotten something and I turn back to remember it, but there’s nothing to remember, there’s just the house and its blank, bovine face. Can a house have a face, do you think? A bovine face? Is that possible? The door I haven’t slammed needs painting. As do the window frames. There are some roof slates dislodged. The whole thing looks listless, biding its time. It is in alliance with me, I know. Impatient and grumpy. Perhaps that’s why I look back. Because it calls out to me. Where are you off to? You come back now, do you hear me? Don’t leave me here with her. Don’t dare.
There’s been rain overnight. My shoes are turning dark. The radio is full of nonsense. She, my mother, has her ear glued to it since I arrived. I can get no sense out of her. She’s listening out for something. It may be another request. The last time she had that grotesque man on the mid-morning show play “Son Of A Preacher Man” for Frances – some apparently unspeakable private joke between them – and it was all she could talk about for days afterwards. About the phone call she made, and the girl who took the details, and the waiting, and the panic then, when he was reading out a request from someone called Frank, that the stupid girl had got it all wrong, but he played some opera for that, and the girl couldn’t have got it that wrong, could not surely have mistaken Dusty Springfield for some damn opera fatso, and the relief then, when the very next request was for Frances, from her, from my mother, and how he did it beautifully, got it perfectly right, and about how marvellous it all was, and how accessible the national airwaves are, to all of us, and what a wonderful resource really, one we should treasure. Today though, she seems less enthusiastic. She almost seems nervous. She’s quieter than usual. Oh don’t think she’s quiet, she’s not quiet, she hasn’t been quiet since the day I was born, I don’t mean she’s quiet, I mean she’s quieter than usual, which is still noisier than the rest of humanity gathered together, still nattering on about all sorts and nothing, about next door’s grandchildren and the cuteness of them, which she exclaims is to die for, but it’s just an expression, and the times the postman calls, never predictable, never the same, with his bundle of junk and brochures and the things she sends away for, she can never resist the licking of a stamp, and damn it now I’ve left without the letters she wants posting, and the parcel of God only knows what detritus for the earthquake victims. About whom she held forth for a good solemn fifteen minutes while I peeled the potatoes. Oh she loves a disaster. She loves catastrophe now. She wheels herself up close to the television and shakes her head at the wonderful misfortune of others, at the scale and the depth and the extent of the misery. Oh she moans, oh, who’d be a mother? Not me, mother. Not me. On the list today, the daily list, of things she needs me to retrieve – as well as a shoebox full of letters from the top of her wardrobe, as well as a dusty old novel from father’s bedroom bookcase – there was a photograph of us all taken, en famille as they say, in some kind of caravan, sometime far back in the last century, my father looking like he’s got the camera on a timer – will it or won’t it – my mother looking like he’s annoying her with his technical nonsense, me looking like I’ve had enough of it all already. I’m about three. What does she want that for? What made her remember it? Why was it hidden away behind a pile of crime novels on a top shelf in the spare room? But she doesn’t say. She has it on her lap. With the radio. She’s turning slow circles in the living room. Or was, the last I saw of her.
My mother, I should explain to you, is in a wheelchair. And I say that in the same way that I might say that I am in a rage, or you are in love, or so-and-so is in a coma. It is a state of being. She’s only been in it for about a year, but she shows such a terrifying level of expertise you’d swear she’d been in it since birth. Do I mean expertise? I mean that corners mean nothing to her. That the wallpaper’s scraped and the skirting boards are blackened with rubber and splintered like kindling, and she couldn’t care less. I mean that tables and chairs are shown none of the respect my father had for them. She clatters her way around like he never existed. She’s put a crack in the central stained pane of the kitchen door. He had that specially made. I mean that steps hold no fear for her – she jumps them, I swear to God, like a side saddle skate boarder. She gets up a bit of speed and goes flying off into mid air as if the worst that could happen has already happened. She is morbidly optimistic. And she has more muscle in her arms than a weight lifter. She can wrestle the machine up steps if she feels she needs to. A remarkable procedure, which I once witnessed, appalled, from the living room window, as she came in from the garden with a bunch of sorry chrysanthemums. She looked like she might burst. I watched. The net curtains tickled my nose. She didn’t.
She has taken all the carpets up and put down linoleum. In every bloody room. From the front door to the attic. It used to be a house that was entirely carpeted, wall to wall, gable to gable, many colours, many patterns, many textures – all my father’s choosing and planning and execution, warm and rich and his. But once she was in the chair she found the carpets heavy going. Had them all ripped up and the linoleum put in. She could get up some speed then, which is what she’s always liked, she can gather some momentum – down the corridor to the kitchen, back up the hall to the front room, spinning that corner like a rally driver, back out to the foot of the stairs, a figure of eight, back to the living room, a ferocious pace, her big arms just a blur at her side, faster than any upright person can manage. Moving through the house with her is like walking with a hyperactive child. She’s all over the place, under your feet, charging towards you, charging away from you, heading straight for a hall table disaster with the two old vases my father bought in Venice perched on top terrified, the poor things, and avoiding it at the last second, oblivious to the chaos in her wake. It gives me heartburn just to look at her.
Everything was always quick with her. She drove the same way. She keeps the car you know – it’s out in the garage, starting to flake with rust at the bottoms of the doors. She gets me to go out and turn it over every now and then. Which involves sitting in it with the engine on for a few minutes, wondering whether she’s encouraging me to kill myself. I can’t drive. I’ve no interest. Walking is better. Slower. She won’t let me sell it. Sure why should she sell it? As soon as she’s out of the chair she’ll be driving again, it’s only a matter of time.
The park is deserted. It’s not as warm as it should be, for this time of year. It never is.
She’ll never be out of the chair. But she won’t be told. She thinks, my mother, that everything is temporary, except life. That one of these days she’ll stand on her own two feet and walk out to her car and speed off to find a man to relay the carpets. Which are rolled up in the spare room like the dead sea scrolls.
She’s benign, my mother, do you know what I mean? Benign like a tumour. She’s not killing me, but I want her removed. Is that terrible? Is it? Is that terrible of me? There she is in the house, my house, by rights my house really, and she’s persevering, clinging on grimly, no actually, not grimly, if she was grim then at least she might be of the same mind as me – waiting for some release – but she isn’t grim, she’s cheerful. Rolling around the linoleum, in my house, talking up her chances of a holiday with Frances and Maud, to the Algarve would you believe, the three of them, a holiday for the girls, can you imagine such a thing? Frances is practically blind, and showing early signs of Alzheimer’s, I’m sure of it. Maud is due her third hip replacement next month and spends most of her days, from what I can make out, chatting to teenage boys on the internet.
Every day I have to come over here. Every single bloody day. When I get to the door I turn and look back down the drive towards the gate, at the world. Every time. As if I’ve forgotten something. I don’t know what that’s about. And then in I go, to a maelstrom of words and news and gossip and ideas, and a list of things in inaccessible places, remembered things that suddenly seem important, I don’t know why, I never know why, and an unquenchable thirst for living, for being bloody well alive, on her steel wheels and her linoleum, like a woman stapled to life, affixed with spokes and levers, propelled by her own strength. Damn her.
I should get back. I’ll have to leave the shoes in the porch. I love her of course. I do love her. But what good is that? She loved my father. My father loved me. What of it?
When I get back she has stopped moving. I think for a moment that she’s finally had the good grace to leave us, but it’s not that. She’s sitting in the middle of the hall, and the radio is gone berserk, with a woman’s voice droning on and on and I can’t understand a word of it, and my mother is clutching that old novel, Ulysses it is, Joyce, that thing, and the photograph of the three of us in the caravan, and there’s a tear on her cheek but she’s smiling broadly. At me. Yes, says the woman on the radio, a few times, and my mother mouths it with her, like it’s a song, and then there’s a long silence, and the announcer comes on and says what it is we’ve just been listening to, and it’s the book in my mother’s lap, the same book, and she’s nodding, my mother is, and the announcer says the date, June 16th, and my mother smiles at me, as if it’s significant, but frankly I’m not getting any of this, and then she asks me, my mother, she asks, with the photograph held up towards me like she’s meeting me at an airport or a train station, and she asks me, do you not know what today is darling? Her eyes sparkling so you’d swear she’s been drinking, or singing, or something good. Do you not know this date?
