‘It’s been too quiet without your mother,’ he said, coming in. ‘I’ve been missing my orders. Hard-boiled eggs have been requested for today’s menu. Can you do my top button for me?’
Since smashing his elbow on an icy pavement in the seventies, he had been unable to flex his right arm fully. The joint was fused together with a metal pin. I could remember him walking the floor with pain during the nights before the operation, treading quietly so that he wouldn’t wake us. It had struck me that his genuine illness had to play a bit part while my mother’s trumpeted afflictions strutted centre stage. I reached up and fixed the shirt button, smoothing his collar.
She was in a small ward for six. It was named after St Martin de Porres which would please her because she had prayed hard for his canonization, signing a parish petition to the Pope. For some unfathomable reason she was keen that there should be more black saints. I wondered if it was her own brand of political correctness, trying to ensure that Heaven had its quota of coloured representatives among the higher echelons. I had heard her express regret that Nelson Mandela wasn’t a Catholic as he presented good potential for sainthood, with just a matter of a few miracles to be discovered. Her second favourite holy man was St John Macias who had an olive-tinted skin and was known as the soft-hearted saint because he couldn’t bear to see suffering. He had once intervened with God to effect the rescue of a drowning sheep and was said to have wept blood when he came across a starving old woman. My mother had copied a line from one of his prayers into her mass book; ‘The world is hard and life can be cold and pitiless.’
I could see her as we opened the door of the ward, sitting on her neatly-made bed, her towelling dressing-gown buttoned up and her hair brushed back. She looked like a resentful child who’s been dressed to go out and warned not to get mucky. She waved when she saw us and beckoned us on.
‘I told yeer father not to go bothering ye,’ she said, ‘but he never listens to a word I say.’ She leaned closer, lowering her voice. ‘Pull the curtains round. The ould one in the next bed wants to know everything, she has pointy ears from eavesdropping.’
I arranged the curtains as she wanted them, pulled to overlap so that no one could see us. From habit, I cast an apologetic glance at the woman a few feet away, just in case she’d heard the aspersions on her character but she was absorbed in a magazine and a huge pack of wine gums.
‘Have ye brought grub?’ my mother asked.
‘I’ve got it.’ I took out the pack containing cold chicken, eggs, ham and plain yogurt.
‘Ham,’ she said, ‘I hope they didn’t palm any old fatty bits on to ye.’
‘It’s the best cut,’ my father protested, ‘off the bone. I watched it being sliced.’
She examined it and nodded. Then she despatched my father for orange juice, giving strict instructions not to buy a brand that was full of pulpy bits.
‘Well,’ she said, when he’d gone, ‘what do ye make of this?’ She folded her hands across her stomach and made a steeple with her thumbs; her most confiding gesture. It would be all right to talk to me about what had happened because although I was male, I worked with bodies and had studied fat medical books. To my great mortification she had told several members of the Legion of Mary that she’d always known I’d do some kind of healing work; I had cool hands and a gentle manner. When she had hot flushes in her early fifties she would call me and ask me to put my lovely cool hands on her forehead.
‘Spill the beans,’ I told her. ‘What led up to you coming in?’
She glanced around, even though the curtain was a protective shield. It was her constant worry that other people might get to know her business. It never occurred to her that maybe no one was interested.
She’d woken up one morning to find that she’d been bleeding from ‘down there’, she told me. My father had called the doctor and she’d been admitted to hospital. Some kind of scan had been done and uncomfortable internal things.
‘Have you been having other bleeds?’ I asked her.
She said no but she looked down at her fingernails. ‘I’m having to wear one of them sanitary yokes,’ she said ruefully. ‘I thought them times were over.’
They ought to be, I thought, worried. She hadn’t worn those since the days of belts and thick looped pads that chafed the thighs. Stick-on winged discretion would be unfamiliar territory for her. I had a sense of things being out of kilter.
I knew that unexpected internal bleeding was not a good sign but I wasn’t sure what could cause it. I looked at her carefully. She had shrunk a bit more since I’d last seen her, her shoulders sloping further but at seventy-five that was to be expected and she was still plump. Her colour was good, the eggshell brown of summer days in the garden still evident and her skin, the skin that I had inherited, was clear.
‘Give me your specs,’ I said, noticing her fuggy glasses, ‘I’ll clean them for you.’ They were filthy, as usual, with tiny flecks of potato on the lenses from when she’d last been preparing dinner. Her eyes without them looked crêpey, vulnerable.
‘I expect I’ll need an operation,’ she said fatalistically. ‘I should have had one ten years ago of course, but yeer father wanted to move and I couldn’t leave him to do it on his own. Now I’m paying the price.’
I sighed quietly. She often referred to this operation she should have had but whenever I’d asked her what it was for she was vague, saying that it was to do with her womb. There was no good reason why she shouldn’t have had surgery if she’d needed it – the NHS was still on its feet in London then. I suspected that she was making it up, embellishing something a doctor had once mentioned to her, or that she had ignored medical advice and avoided going into hospital by using my father and the house move as an excuse. It was impossible to make sense of it; the line between imagination and reality where her health was concerned had always been blurred. She had told herself so many stories that even she found it confusing.
My father returned with orange juice which she examined closely before passing approval. It felt awkward with the three of us trapped behind the apricot-coloured curtain. My parents fell silent, oppressed by hospital inertia.
‘Did you hear about that hijacked plane?’ I asked. ‘I saw it at Stansted.’
My mother clapped her hands, energized. ‘I saw it on telly last night. Was anyone killed?’
‘I don’t think so. Some passengers were released early this morning.’ I gave them a full account of what I’d seen.
‘It’s supposed to be refugees that’s hijacked it, trying to get away from Saddam Hussein,’ my father told us. ‘I heard some of them had been tortured.’
My mother crossed herself. Hussein had replaced Khrushchev and Hider before him as the devil in human form for her. ‘Good luck to the poor creatures, may God help them,’ she said. ‘Don’t they deserve a bit of looking after.’
‘Ah, they might not get much sympathy in London these days. They might get sent back to that bastard.’ My father shook his head.
I left them, saying I needed the loo but intending to find a doctor. At the door I glanced back. My father had taken my mother’s hand in his and was showing her pictures of the hijack in the paper. I thought of their response to the story and then of the man in the shuttle bus at Stansted who’d said loudly, to general murmurs of agreement, that the hijackers should be taken away and shot. I was proud of my parents’ humanity, their decency, and glad that it ran through my veins.
A nurse showed me to a small cubicle where a young woman was writing up notes. She was introduced to me as Dr O’Kane and shook my hand, saying that my mother had been telling her about me. I could imagine that several extra degrees and doctorates had been added after my