We’ve a boss who’s above us both geographically and mentally. He’s got an office way up at the top of the building with great big windows so he can look down on us all. Which he does. And I’ve been called up to that office once or twice and I see what he sees: hundreds of us working away like little ants, ready to be stomped on at any time.
In case you’re wondering what I do, I work on a production line. The factory makes toys, which is why we’re so busy at this time of the year. I say that it’s the factory that makes toys, not me: this Christmas all I was responsible for was sticking a plastic arm into a hole of the shoulder of some scary-looking doll with eyes so blue and dead I think I’m looking at myself. Happy Holly. That’s what they call her on the box. But I bet the kids wouldn’t touch her with a bargepole if they knew how she started out looking. When she gets to me she’s bald with no legs or arms, just a plastic torso and a head with eyes. This thing ends up singin’ and dancin’ and talkin’ and probably spittin’ if you want her to.
But every day for the past week I’ve been staring at this doll, been staring at those eyes dead and cold and thinking my development has worked in the opposite way to hers. I went from all-singin’ all-dancin’ to being a dead, cold, legless stump like her. It was as if someone had put me on that revolving table and sent me around while one by one people hammered me, pulled at me until I came out the other side feeling and looking like I do now. A conveyor belt surrounded by my ex-wife, kids, mother-in-law, brothers, sisters and whatever friends I had, all armed with their weapons. They’d all taken a jab at me and left me with cold, staring, blue eyes.
I took my place at the conveyor belt, apologized to the guy next to me who was red in the face and sweating from having to put two arms into two holes instead of just his usual one. But I bet he’d done it all while whistling. They all whistled while they worked here, wearing stupid-looking uniforms and working all day without a break. Not me, I don’t make a sound, I had the wind knocked out of me a long time ago.
I could see the boss standing at the window in his office looking at me. Glaring at me with his arms crossed over his fat belly, dressed in an expensive suit ready for his night’s work. We were all working overtime tonight. I hated him. I hated seeing him sitting up there doing nothing while we slaved away down here. I hated that he was the name and face of the company, that he reaped all the rewards, got all the glory and fame and had his picture plastered on every poster all over the world. I wasn’t jealous, no way, that’s not my nature. Not for one second did I want to be in his boots. But I hated him because he wouldn’t let me go.
He wouldn’t give up on me like everyone else had. It was as if we were having some kind of contest. How much could I push it before he sacked me, how much could he take before he would have no choice? I wouldn’t quit; if I was gonna lose everything it had to be taken from me, not given by me. I had a feeling he was just leaving me for the next selfish guy who took his job; I was the mess he didn’t want to have to clean up. He was retiring soon, getting away from all this damn snow and heading to the sun. So in the meantime I got to work later every day and missed a few Happy Holly dolls now and then.
Yesterday they had hundreds of them all packaged nice and pretty, ready to go out, until some guy realized that half of them had only one arm. I told them it would be more realistic to let the kids know that not everyone is born looking like some blonde princess with pretty dresses who did whatever you wanted her to do whenever you wanted. It was sending out the wrong message, I told them. But they didn’t go with my idea, instead they just took them all out of the boxes again and some fool whistled while he fixed the few hundred he wasn’t supposed to fix and wasn’t paid to fix. He didn’t care, just kept on with that happy tune while his dinner grew cold on the table, while his kids went to sleep without a goodnight kiss from their daddy and while his wife, who was getting angrier and angrier by the minute, was getting bored waiting for him and starting to look elsewhere.
And why’s he doin’ it? Because one fat man with a grey beard has given some screwed-up motivational speech about helping people all around the world and he fell for it. Got tied up thinking about kids he didn’t know and forgot about his own. I knew the story all too well.
I watched him hammering away and thought, That’s what I must have looked like before they sent me out on the conveyer belt. All enthusiastic and happy, packaged in bright colours designed to please the eye and heart. Ready and willing to do anything asked of me at the press of a button. Plastic.
I missed a few Happy Holly dolls while watching him, decided I couldn’t care less, sat back, lit up a cigarette and watched while those beady eyes rolled on by, seein’ nothin’ and hearin’ nothin’. Existing only in the world to please little beings who’d throw them around, drool on them, kick them, dirty them, leave them out in the rain and make them sit down and drink imaginary tea. Eventually they’d be forgotten about or lost.
The cigarette smoke sent a few whistles out of tune, that’s for sure, caused a few coughs. I looked up at the window at Big Brother and wondered when he was gonna give up. He slowly unfolded his arms, beckoned to me, calling me up. Ah, victory at last. I’d finally won. I’d lost absolutely everything.
I knocked on his door and entered. He was sitting in an expensive leather chair behind an expensive desk looking fat and rich and unhealthy. He looked at me with his twinkling blue eyes, rosy cheeks and a red nose—all the signs of someone who’d drunk far too much all his life.
‘Want me to sit on your knee, Nicholas?’ I asked sarcastically, taking a drag of my cigarette.
He laughed heartily. He wasn’t supposed to and that annoyed me. So I stood before him while he told me a story. A story about a man who worked so hard, cared so much about people he didn’t know, that he lost his family and friends, drank himself to oblivion, ate all the junk in the world and got a belly so big he could rest a cup of cocoa on it, and I stood there fuming because I thought he was talking about me. But it turned out to be his own story and he told me that he looked out that window every day at me and thought he was looking at himself in the mirror. A mirror with a time delay. I didn’t realize it at the time but it seemed that, watching him, I’d been looking in a mirror reflecting the future.
Later, after his retirement, from the windows of that very same office, I kept an eye on the enthusiastic hammerer and watched as he let it all slip away. He would be next. I changed my name, settled into my new job where obesity and unhealthiness was a virtue and where parents smiled and took photos when you put their kids on your knee. Suddenly, I was more welcome in every home around the world than I’d ever been in my own. I had a wonderful assistant, Mary, who made a list of my clients and I checked them twice.
I filled the boots of a great man and in turn became a great man. I may have lost everything I ever owned and loved, but in return I was given the world.
7 Celebrating Mum
A spoon tapping against a champagne glass silences the bubbles of conversations. Voices simmer and then calm.
My eldest son George takes his place at the head of the room, the ringmaster, as always, ready to direct proceedings. My husband, Fred, and I are surrounded by our entire world, cocooned by the generations we had a hand in creating. Fred and I sit beside one another, everybody else stands with a drink in their hand. I eye the quickly disappearing whiskey in the glass in Fred’s hand and vow, again, as I did as a young woman at the top of the altar over fifty years ago, to keep an eye on him tonight. I prepare to be spoken about as though I’m not here, the centre of attention for tonight. Oh, how I hate that, but they all mean well, I know.
‘I was trying to think when was the last time so many of us gathered together and I think it was again for Mum, when we celebrated her seventieth birthday three years ago,’ George begins.
Nods of agreement, memories flashing back, quiet murmuring.
‘She’s always been such an attention seeker, isn’t that right, Mum?’ Edward shouts out and everybo
dy laughs.
‘Do you remember that birthday party, Greg?’ George calls to the baby of the family.
Forty years old this year, my baby Greg. I watch him fondly, at how his face reddens as they taunt him. Ever since the day they’d formed words on their tiny lips, they’d never stopped teasing. How cruel siblings can be. I’d always hated their carry-on as children and teens, each of them so precious to me that one insult flung at them would hit me ten times harder than it ever would them. But siblings are impenetrable, each mock only adds another layer of thickened skin. When should a mother step in? I questioned myself each time, for I’d end up doing more harm than good for the little one I was protecting. Mummy’s pet, they would chant then. No, I tried to stay well out of it and watched them instead with the eyes in the back of my head, hurting for them more than they could ever hurt, feeling tested more than they were testing one another. I still do now. Over forty years old, the lot of them, their tongues sometimes dripping with more venom than ever before. Old enough to know better, the more years they have, the more childish those words from their mouths sound.
They’re teasing Greg now about his behaviour at my seventieth-birthday party. He was up dancing on that floor all night, mostly on his own, inhaling helium from the heart-shaped balloons they’d arranged for me, and singing the Bee Gees. More was that performance a ‘Tragedy’ than the song, for his enjoyment will be a source of embarrassment for the rest of his life.
A surprise seventieth. Now there’s an oxymoron: never was there a day I knew was on the horizon more than that one. It’s not a number that creeps up and shouts boo! Life does slip by, it’s true, but I’m not so unobservant as not to notice or so numb as not to feel seventy years in this life. But a surprise seventieth-birthday party— now that was a shock. Have you ever heard anything like it? That was a great big boo! in my ear. Had my hearing aid been switched off I’d still have heard it. Lucky my seventy-year-old heart didn’t fail me when I was besieged as I entered the room. A few drinks with Betty and Frank, my you-know-what. Betty had barely been out of her bed for a month. Oh, but it was the best excuse Fred could think of to get me down to that pub. If it wasn’t for the state of his prostate, I’d have thought he had a little someone on the side. On the phone for an entire month before that party, he’d leave the room every time I walked in. Late at night I’d hear him whispering down the phone, and there’s me thinking he was organizing the new patio furniture from the magazine I’d left open on the table. But no, when they all jumped out at me from the dark, throwing streamers in my face and shouting, the surprise was on me. A moment I’ll never forget, and nor will they, for they’re still talking about it as my mind wanders.
‘I seem to recall not being alone on that dance floor, thank you very much,’ Greg defended himself. ‘Mum joined me for the moonwalk and we have the video footage to prove it.’
Ah, yes, we did. We’d had fun watching that at Christmas and every single Christmas since. They don’t drop a joke, my boys. Fred looks at me and smiles, remembering it all.
‘Hear what they’re saying about you, Mum?’ my daughter Louise calls out, and there are laughs all around.
I hear you, I hear you, I chuckle. Fred looks at me adoringly. Never stopped loving me for a moment. A second or two maybe, but never more than that.
‘Well you didn’t acquire your dance skills from Mum,’ Brendan shouts. Ah, Brendan. Always defending me. Even when I know I’m wrong.
‘A wonder on the dance floor,’ Fred says softly and takes my hand in his.
Oh, a wonder we were, from the bunny-hop to ballroom, the chicken dance to the cha-cha, the jig to the jive, we did them all. I dragged him to a dance class in the local community school one night forty years ago and since then he’d been dragging me around the dance floor every chance he got.
‘Never did get the handle on the tango,’ Fred says. No, we never did. Though we tried, and that’s what counts. Failed at a few things, me and him, but got through it all together, stronger at the end of it all.
‘They really were Fred and Ginger,’ George adds, and there are murmurs of agreement.
‘Why ginger?’ Sarah, my seven-year-old granddaughter, asks.
I laugh. All I am to her now is her grey-haired granny but to everyone else … I look around for someone else to answer the question for me.
‘Oh, your grandmother had bright-red fire-engine hair.’ Brendan speaks up on my behalf and I’m not surprised it’s him. ‘And when all the others on the dance floor saw her spinning their way they scattered right out of her way.’
Edward makes the sound of an ambulance and we all laugh. And then off they go discussing me again as though I’m not in the room. I’m sure I blush; I always have done. George may have got my red hair but Greg was cursed with my red cheeks. Louise? My only girl. I look to her and find she’s watching me, sadness in her eyes. I see the child in her again.
‘Well the things that stand out in my mind about you, Mum,’ George continues, ‘are your dancing, your graceful waltzes across the floor. You and Dad moving so fast no one could tell whose feet were whose.’
Murmurs of agreement.
‘And all those beautiful dresses you wore, too, and you’re wearing one of my favourites tonight.’
Oh, it’s my favourite, too, and Fred’s. He’s looking me up and down, still approvingly after fifty years. I swallow hard. There is plenty of discussion all around me now about which dress is whose favourite. An entire wardrobe of ball gowns, I made many of them myself but not the one I wear now. It’s gold-sequined and floor-length; worn the first time Fred and I got first place in the dance competition. I wear a pair of shoes to match. I can’t walk in them, not to mention dance in them, but I wear them all the same. I wear a gold slide in my silver hair with an emerald stone. Brings my eyes out, makes them sparkle, people always complimented. It’s not the slide that does it, I’d always say, it’s the man that gave it to me. He liked that.
‘A fondness for blueberry muffins also features strongly when I think of you, Mum,’ Greg carries on.
I laugh, and so does everybody else.
‘It’s not so much the blueberry muffins that stand out in my mind, it’s the twenty minutes spent taking the blueberries out before eating them that’s particularly memorable.’
‘The same with scones,’ Louise pipes up.
‘Is that so? I didn’t know,’ George laughs.
Fred looks at me and laughs. ‘Oh, you and your muffins and scones, love.’
‘What about her ironing Dad’s handkerchiefs?’ Edward calls out, and I have to chuckle again.
‘Every time I walk into that bloody house, she’s ironing Dad’s dirty handkerchiefs. For what? To end up scrunched in a ball in his pockets anyway!’
Fred takes a white crumpled handkerchief out of his pocket and waves it around the room.
‘He surrenders!’ Brendan shouts, and they all laugh again.
‘Her knock-knock jokes!’ Louise shouts out.
‘Awful!’ Edward calls.
‘Oh, they’re not so bad.’ Brendan brings it back down again. Typical Brendan.
‘Your homemade brown bread,’ Louise says softly, and I hear mmmmm’s of delight.
‘Your driving,’ Edward says, and there’s laughter. ‘Every day a new bump or scratch on that car.’
Fred and I laugh, knowing that a good driver I am not.
‘Always blaming somebody else,’ Louise laughs.
The room erupts, and I cringe. A good liar I am not.
Fred finishes his whiskey, Edward tops him with more. Louise eyes Edward angrily. I smile in the quiet that follows. Bubbles of tension simmer, then calm.
‘There is so much for us to celebrate you for, Mum. We each have our individual stories, personal ones that we’ll never forget, but collectively we thank you and celebrate you for the love and care you’ve given us all throughout our lives. During all our ups and downs and in-between moments, your love for us has never wavered, has never
lessened. We have always felt you’ve given us your all, dedicated yourself completely and utterly to this family, and we have selfishly but gladly taken it all from you. Thank you.’
There are murmurs and nods of heads in agreement. My eyes fill.
‘We all love you very, very much, Mum.’ George’s voice cracks, and his wife Judith reaches out to hold his hand. He composes himself, my eldest boy who never cried in front of anybody, not even when he fell and hurt himself, wasn’t picked for the football team or fell in and out of love in the past. Only with me he’d shed those tears. He cried with me last week, let all those tears fall down those once-again pudgy cheeks, and I, with older hands, wiped them away for him again.
‘So let us all raise our glasses in a toast. To Mum, we all love you and … we will miss you beyond words.’
‘To Mum,’ voices repeat and eyes moisten.
There is a silence now. A sad one. They will be fine, they will all, always be fine.
I am beside Fred, but he looks before him to where I lie. He squeezes my hand, kisses me gently on the forehead and finally, slowly, lets go.
I drift away but don’t go far. Will never, ever be far.
8 Mallard and May
‘Ah, this is the life, isn’t it, May?’ Mallard sighs with satisfaction as he makes himself comfortable along the lakeshore.
The crystal-blue water shimmers beneath the light of the sunrise, its ripples appearing like goose pimples as morning warmth touches cold. The water moves up and down as though, like Mallard, it takes a giant sigh of relaxation, breathing in and then releasing. The sun slowly rises, by far the largest buoy in the large lake. The more it peeps above the horizon, the further the orange glow seeps from the sun and spills its way, like ink, towards Mallard on the shore. His personal pathway to the sun. He knows things can’t possibly get any better than this. Him and May, back in Ireland at last, after a winter spent at their holiday home in South Africa.