Sometimes, in second-hand clothes shops, I look for objects like these, thinking that if I could hold the hat in my hands, if I could stretch it and smell it, then I would know which was which and who was who out of Kitty, and Liam, and me.
The second time we stayed at Ada’s our father drove us across town on a traffic-free afternoon-it might have been a Sunday-with suitcases in the boot. And the thing that astonished me then was how he knew the way.
This is where the silence happened-as I stood in the back room and looked out at the garage and the lane. It was an overwhelming silence, like the air was made of wood, and the bulbous flowers of the back-room wallpaper both writhed a little and were entirely still, under my eight-year-old eye.
And-I don’t know why this should fit in, but here is my father in the kitchen of Griffith Way, maybe six years later, holding the thickness of the wooden table like it was a bible, and he’s shouting at Liam in a careful voice the lines, ‘I loved your mother from the day I first set eyes on her. I worshipped the ground she walked upon.’
This would be Liam saying something completely insulting, at the age of thirteen or so. My father’s lips thin and purple, his chest working like a bellows, squeezing it out, phrase by windy phrase.
‘I LOVEd your MOTHer from the DAY I first set EYES on her. I WOrshipped the GROUND she WALKED upon.’
While Mossie read the paper, and I got on with my homework, and Midge cried about something else altogether and made a cup of tea.
He certainly meant it. My father, trembling, in that moment before something was flung or broken. Liam calling him a fucking baboon then, probably.
‘You’re a fucking baboon!’
And flying out of the room, before he could be caught and given a thump.
My father was a small man. And his chest always whistled and sang. And I remember nothing like I remember that silence after he closed Ada’s front door and lowered himself into the front seat of the car and drove away.
Ada’s little garden was probably just a yard, but we thought it an exciting place, with crab apple and nettles: the door to the garage was sometimes open and sometimes bolted, and the fact that you never knew if Mr Nugent was in there only added to the interest. Liam used the tools on the workbench or played with the wrecked car in there. I used to sit on the stitched blue leather of the front seat, which was tight in places and ripped in others. I didn’t try to drive; the dash was too strange. I just used to slide up and down the upholstery, or squirm across the nice rows of stitching, and talk in a grand voice to whoever was driving, whether or not he was actually there.
Two double doors led out to the back lane, where there was another car up on blocks, a pastel blue and chrome affair with great American fins. Even now I can not see a derelict car without a pang. Mr Nugent came and left by the doors to the lane, and fiddled about on the workbench, or stuck his head under the bonnet of the American monster if the weather was fine. On a Friday he came round to the front door to knock, and he always had sweets for the children. He wore a hat, which he doffed when Ada opened the door. It was many years before I wondered at the formality of this arrangement, or what was going on.
Ada called him Nolly, though we all knew that what you called him was Mr Nugent, if you called him anything at all, which we didn’t. Sometimes she called him Nolly May, she’d say it after he was gone, ‘Oh, Nolly May,’ pushing the chair he’d sat in back up against the wall. He didn’t do much except sit there getting insulted by the wallpaper, but there was always a slight sweat on him, and he cleared his throat a lot, and you could tell how much he wanted Gran.
She had gorgeous manners, Gran. She liked to put things on a tray. She had opinions about lump sugar and where was the right place to keep your biscuit between bites, all of which made you feel really uncomfortable and very well loved. She made dresses in the boxroom upstairs, and sometimes she worked in the theatre, which is why everything had to be so respectable. It made for a kind of twisting of the air between herself and the actors who sometimes came for a fitting. They seemed to wring something out between, until-oh, go on!-the room was ripe with implication. Though she would put the crockery away after the same guest was gone and tell me that the stage was an interesting life but it made you very bitter. Or she would say something strangely memorable like, ‘Sex gets you nowhere in this world. Remember that, sex will get you precisely No Where.’
Though Charlie was often away, she had us for company, and sometimes one of the actresses slept in the boxroom, if she had a show in town; squeezed in behind the tailor’s dummy and the electric sewing machine. At least I think she slept in there. The dummy worked strangely on my imagination; I can not even get the door open in my head, now, to look inside.
Peggy McEvoy, that’s what she was called. And she was engaged to someone on the telly.
And there was Nolly in the good room, clearing his throat and swallowing, while we ate the VoVos he brought, and the Blackjacks. I knew him by the taste of sweets and by the glint in his glasses, or the heaviness of his pockets, or the peculiar small growth flowering inside his ear. His hands were placed square on each knee, and he always leaned forward slightly, not resting quite on the back of the chair. He sat like someone who wasn’t getting much sex, now that I see him in my mind’s eye-and his glance was too casual, in a way that I also now recognise. Though he had, in his grim way, four children and a wife we never saw, called Kathleen. When Ada was out of the room he would get up out of the chair and walk over to the television and turn it off with a clunk. Then he would sit back down and look at us. After a minute he would manage something out of his pocket.
‘It’s not a toy.’
Though it was always something interesting. One day it was a white mouse-or, it must have been a rat-with red eyes and a pink tail, and he lifted my jumper at the wrist, to let it run up my sleeve and on to my chest: Ada coming in then to scream.
She served up tea on one of those little tables that had two more tables tucked into it, each smaller than the other. ‘Put a cloth on the table nest,’ she’d say to me. And ‘Charlie says’ this and ‘Charlie says’ that, she would say to Nolly May, setting the tray down or handing him over a cup of tea. This was our Granda Charlie she was talking about, who, when Nugent wasn’t sitting there, was, ‘What time did he go? Did you see him take the money from the shelf?’
I don’t think Charlie drank (even his vices were old-fashioned), he just did everything else. Or nothing else. It was hard to say what he did, except absent himself. And sometimes he came back in different clothes.
‘Oh, he treated her like a queen,’ as they would say over the funeral cooked meats. They had a story, Ada and Charlie, that is for sure, in which they each played the most important roles, and when she walked across the room to him, you could tell how fated they felt, as if their love was a great burden to them as well as a joy.
One time I came into the front room and they were sitting on either end of the sofa, and he had her old foot in his lap, and was massaging it through the sheer of her stockings.
I couldn’t tell you what Nugent did, though it has stuck somewhere in my head that he was a bookie, or a bookie’s clerk, that he put on a grey cashmere coat from time to time, and got into a black car, and was driven to the racecourse. All I really know is that he used the garage out the back for his old jalopies and you never knew if he was in there or not. I thought-if I thought anything at the time-that Ada allowed him to use it because she had no car of her own, and by that time, Charlie did not drive.
16