Waiting for his cup of tea, he forgot what it was he had come for. She was ordinary at the sink, ordinary and sad as she took out the sugar and the milk. When she sat down in her chair at the far side of the room, she was old and looked impatient of the noise his spoon made against the cup.
She asked after his mother, and turned on the radio and said he made a good job of cutting the lawn with the grass still damp. They listened to the tail-end of the news and she took a tin down from the cupboard. ‘I suppose I can trust you,’ she said grimly as she opened it up and a swirl of pound notes was seen, like something naked and soft. There was music on the radio.
He fought for the pictures in his room, of a man with a hat, who casually takes her by the wrist and opens out the flat of her palm, as if he understood it. He thought of the taste of rice-paper melting on his tongue, of the things she might wear under her dress. He struggled for the order of things that might happen if he held his breath. She gave him an indifferent smile. He did not understand.
‘Women,’ said his father, ‘torture us with contradiction, but just because they enjoy it, doesn’t mean that it’s not true.’
There was a soft scratching at the door, and the two of them froze as though caught, with the money trapped in the woman’s hand. When it opened he saw an old, fat crone who would not cross the threshold. Her shape was all one, he couldn’t tell where one bit ended and the next began. There was a used tissue caught in the palm of her hand. She had a shy face. ‘Monica, is the creamery cart come?’ ‘Yes,’ said the woman in a loud voice. ‘It’s a tanker, not a cart.’ ‘Oh no,’ said the old woman, ‘I’m fine, don’t worry about me.’ She closed the door on herself without turning away.
Her name was Monica. She smiled at him, in complicity and shame. ‘Deaf as a post,’ she said, and the room dilated with the possibilities in her voice. She was embarrassed by the money in her hand. She looked at the bob of panic in his throat.
‘There was a woman lived up the way from us, the kind that had all the young fellas in a knot. You could tell she wanted something, though probably not from you. She was ambitious, that was the word. It wasn’t just sex that gave her that look — like she knew more than you ever could. That she might tell you, if she thought you were up to it. She had an old husband in the house with her, and a mother, senile, deaf, who pottered around and got in the way. And one day the old woman died.
‘My father came in from the removal, rubbing his hands. He was a mild kind of man. “Sic transit,” he said. “Sic, sic, sic.” He took off the old coat with a kind of ceremony. I remember him taking the rosary beads out of his pocket and putting them beside the liquidiser, which was their place. I remember how ashamed I was of him, the patches on his coat and the beads and the useless Latin. When he sat down he said “How the mighty,” and I felt like hitting him.
‘When someone died, this woman Maureen would wash the body, which was no big deal. She might take any basin they had in the house and a cloth — maybe the one they used for the dishes. I don’t know if she got paid, maybe it was just her place.
‘“The secrets of the dead,” said Da, “and the house smelling of fresh paint. Oh but that’s not all.” He told me one of those country stories that I never want to hear; stories that take their time, and have a taste to them. Stories that wait for the tea to draw and are held over when he can’t find the biscuits. “Do you know her?” he said, and I said I did. “A fine woman all the same, with a lovely pair of eyes in her head. As I remember.” He remembered the mother too of course and what kind of eyes she had in her head, as opposed to anywhere else.
‘It was the son-in-law broke the news that the old woman had died, and when Maureen came to lay out the corpse, she found the man in the kitchen reading a newspaper and the wife saying nothing, not even crying. She offered her condolences, and got no sign or reply. There was no priest in the house. So Maureen just quietly ducked her head down, filled a basin at the sink, tiptoed her way across the lino with the water threatening to spill. When she got to the door of the old woman’s room the wife suddenly lifted her head and said “You’ll have a cup of tea, Maureen, before you start.”
‘The corpse was on the bed, newly dead, but rotting all the same. The sheets hadn’t been changed for a year so you couldn’t tell what colour they should have been. She had … lost control of her functions but they just left her to it, so her skin was the same shade as the sheets. Maureen cut layers and layers of skirts and tights and muck off her and when she got to the feet, she nearly cried. Her nails had grown so long without cutting, they had curled in under the soles and left scars.
‘“Those Gorman women,” said my father, with relish. “So which of them came first, the chicken or her egg?” and he laughed at me like a dirty old codger on the side of the road.’
After he left the house, the sun was so strong, it seemed to kill all sound. He met her daughter on the road and tackled her for the football, then kicked it slowly into the ditch.
‘When I lost my virginity, everything was the same, and everything was changed. I stopped reading poetry, for one thing. It wasn’t that it was telling lies — it just seemed to be talking to someone else.
‘Now I can’t stop screwing around. What can I say? I hate it, but it still doesn’t seem to matter. I keep my life in order. My dry-cleaning bill is huge. I have money.
‘My father knew one woman all his life. He dressed like a tramp. Seriously. What could he know? He knew about dignity and the weather and words. It was all so easy. I hate him for landing me in it like this — with no proper question and six answers to something else.’
MR SNIP SNIP SNIP
The cinema projectionist in Frank’s home town was often drunk. When he was thrown out by his wife he slept the night in the projection booth and ate the stale Mars Bars and crisps from the counter in the foyer. He threw up once over a roll of film and had to spend the day cleaning and untangling it. Frank’s first experience of ‘The Dam Busters’ was splattered with small, mucky explosions and the sound-track was a mess.
Even so, everyone went to the pictures, and the boys at the front shouted at the couples snogging in the back row. Frank was not enchanted by the plush red seats, nor by their sexual possibilities, though their smell still sometimes hit him unawares. He felt nothing but the dread of the picture to come, the size of it on the screen, the colours, and the way that it jerked from place to place. The projectionist sometimes put the reels on in the wrong order and the beginning of the picture came halfway through. Most exciting of all was the time that the drunken projectionist fell asleep, and the film, passing close to the bulb, had gone on fire. This was the terror that provoked Frank into a job in television.
The air in the editing room had been around the building four times. It seemed to settle there and go cold. Frank sits in a hardback chair in front of the console and a producer sits at his back. What the producer does is his own business. Some of them click their fingers at a cut, or catch their breath or say ‘There!’ Some of them make faces behind his back, field phone-calls, pace up and down the room. Some of them go away. In front of them are three monitors, and Frank sits all day and staples the picture from one monitor onto the picture of another, without any seams showing. He is the magic of television.
Frank doesn’t work on celluloid, he works with tapes that slot in and happen in the machines like they were happening in his head. He can mix or fade, he can freeze the picture at any selected moment, at a laugh, or a fumble. He can make figures move slowly, as if they are pushing their way through honey, or scatter them along the street like Charlie Chaplin. The moment is as long as he likes. Ninety seconds of a finished programme can cover a minute or three years. He is a master of time. No wonder then, that he likes the job.