Then she pushed it all aside. It was distressing that a stranger, in another time zone, filtered through a televisual tube, could induce this in her. She returned to it being a mistake, a misunderstanding, messing gone wrong, (boys get up to stuff), which it was. Martin John was young and it was only messing.
If people coming down a televisual tube were going to disturb her it would be a long disturbance.
What about it?
She did not like the idea she had a role in it.
You would not like the idea you had a role in it.
Did she have a role in it?
Have you had a role in it?
Do you have a role in this?
These are some of the questions a mother may ask herself.
Another interview, Tuesday morning radio this time, had her by the ear. An interview with a former drug-addicted mother, who wondered if the fact she was an addict was the reason her son grew up to become a drug dealer and robbed a post office in Kiltimagh. It was a strange place to rob a post office, said a priest who happened to be in there trying to buy a stamp. They wondered if her son did it because he’d been watching too much American television. The mother admitted the son glamourized his violence and boosted his profile with the words that the “feds” were after him. The mother admitted she thought the “feds” was a parcel company. I thought he thought he was being chased by the post office. I see different now. How did he get there, the priest on the panel asked. He took the bus, the radio-mother said. The woman interviewing them all said words like Now I realize this is very difficult for you all.
Except it wasn’t difficult for the priest. He was not at fault. Nor was it difficult for the Minister of Justice who was on the line. The only person it was difficult for was that mother with the veins from which her son had grown and robbed a post office. There was an advert where the radio-mother spoke to tempt the audience to keep listening, I botched up motherhood her voice said. Find out after the break, Did she botch up motherhood? annunciated the presenter. Martin John’s mam turned the radio off.
As Martin John’s mam hears the former drug-addicted mother puzzle it out, she recognizes there are many mothers out there puzzling things out. She will have to be a mother who puzzles. Except she is not the type who puzzles. She prefers to head, bang, to a conclusion. In this case: I was not that mother. I am not that mother. I didn’t raise my son to rob a post office. So what did she raise him to?
She prays hard. She incants for him. Once she prayed to St Jude, a man who fell in his own way, so he’d understand this overwhelming need to keep her son straight. I can’t afford no three-time-cock-crowing with Martin John, one more crowing and it’s prison he’ll be.
Everything I do and have done is to keep him on the outside. Sure if it’s in he goes, they’ll kill him. Plain and simple. They’d eat him alive, they don’t spare the like of him. Someday he’ll come home to me. He’ll come home when he’s failing or an old fella and I’ll be waiting.
She’s probably lying.
She doesn’t want him near her.
Ever again.
Some days she dreams/imagines/fantasizes he might be killed. Shot or run over by a bus.
Like them fellas you read about in the papers.
Sometimes they kill men like him. Others do it. They hunt and they kill them. Sometimes they wait ’til they’re inside. Sometimes they leave a note on them.
Martin John’s not as bad as the ones they kill.
She reminds, comforts herself.
Martin John’s mam hasn’t factored her own aging into it. She’ll never age, only waits on him to come home to her.
Three times a year she summons him. Always by ferry: Sealink not B&I. She doesn’t trust anything with a B in it. B&B never, B&Q — won’t go near it. She even wavers over BBC. B gave me trouble my whole life is all she’ll say. That’s what she’ll say on B.
We can suspect Martin John’s father’s name began with the letter B. Was he Brendan or Brian or just a simple Bob? A simple disappearing Bob.
There will be five refrains. The Index tells us there will be five refrains. We can conclude these five refrains may or may not take us into the circuits.
Martin John has made mistakes.
Check my card.
Rain will fall.
Harm was done.
It put me in the Chair.
There may be subsidiary refrains: I don’t read the fucken Daily Telegraph. We will do as the Index tells us this time. There could be involuntary refrains, about which, alas, not much can be done, unless you take a pencil to them. When will she tell us exactly what they mean? She may not, since the mother may not ever know why he did what he did, or why it was her son and not the woman up the road’s son. There are simply going to be things we won’t know. It’s how it is. As it is in life must it be unto the page. There’s the known and the unknown. In the middle is where we wander and wonder.
Sometimes he said he hadn’t a clue, but he’d think about it. It was the difference between Martin John and the others. He offers to think about it when she asks him. A man who was pure evil wouldn’t make any such offer, would he?
He did hear her. Yes, he understood. He understood whatever it was he did, he would not do it again.
What was it? She wanted to know. What was it? Tell me what it was.
I have no clue, he said honestly, I’ve no clue at all. But he promised he would think about it.
Was that refrain number 1 or 2?
There’s no refrain called I have no clue. This is an interruption. Martin John does not like interruptions.
~ ~ ~
The newspaper will always matter to Martin John.
He won’t be a day without it and it won’t be a day without him.
It mattered before the “difficult time” and it matters today. The stability of it, the regularity, the newspaper women sustain him.
It’s why he calls into Euston on his way to work. Or, first thing every morning, if he’s not working, he’ll cross to the newsagents on Tower Bridge Road. The Irish Times he gathers each day at Euston, except Sunday, and a second British broadsheet, the choice of which he rotates, based on the headlines or the pictures of the columnists. There are a few frumpies he has no time for. There are photos and headlines and certain words that worry Martin John and he will not buy what worries him, because his mother has warned him not to.
Martin John how many times have I told you, give up the papers when they’re worrying you, you cannot be in them if they’re worrying.
He never buys a newspaper if he notices a headline has petrol in it. Or pervert. He’s not keen on P words.
The first page he reads is the letters page to see did any of his letters get through?