The Day I Discovered My Mother Was A Lunatic
On the 157 bus
Children are inherently conservative. They wish to be ‘normal’ like other children. They wish their lives to reflect those of other children. To be different is a burden.
I was twelve, on the cusp of my teenage years, those years when you are allowed, expected even, to challenge and rail against the strictures of your parents.
My mother and I had gone to town for a spot of window shopping. We visited the perfume counter at a department store. My mother was in her Opium period and sprayed a tester bottle over her body, including her hair and her feet and under her arms.
It was quite a show and the shop assistant was most put out because my mother could not afford the perfume, and the assistant knew this — she must have had radar for such things — and snatched the bottle from my mother and gave her a look.
I was used to people giving my mother looks, and I accepted it just as I accepted that we never went to restaurants, that I had to wear my sister’s hand-me-downs and that I wasn’t going to get a pair of high-heeled shoes anytime soon.
My mother glowered as we passed Marks and Spencer.
‘Buy nothing from that shop unless you want to look like every other woman in England.’
She needn’t have worried. With her apple green dress and her long red hair, there was no one like her.
We caught the 157 bus home and sat on the top deck. It was summer and hot, the type of weather that stokes madness. The slits of windows did nothing to cool the bus. It was full of women with Marks and Spencer bags on their laps and Marks and Spencer cardigans over the bags. The bus left with a jolt, and the low chatter of women murmured like bees.
My mother sat next to the window, and I was at the aisle. I was already unsettled because behind us sat a man with a bush of matted hair and a face the colour of salmon. He clutched a half bottle of whiskey and his clothes were oily and the sweet smell of long-unwashed body and alcohol mingled with the Opium steaming from my mother.
She rested her arm on the seat back and made eye contact with the man. She was drawn to anyone who looked like they rejected convention. Winos, hobos, tramps, she flocked to them.
She said, ‘Alright there?’
The two words marked her. This was the 1970s, and the IRA was busy bombing London. Her Belfast accent was shorthand for: IRA, UDA, UVF, paramilitary, terrorist, bomb-maker, bomb-planter, Semtex carrier, gun runner and person-to-be-avoided if you wanted your limbs to remain attached to your body.
The man woke like a monster from a stupor and gave a low mumble that sounded like, ‘Not bad, yourself?’
‘Oh aye, up for a bit of the shopping.’
‘Shopping, is it?’
He was a Scot. Had he been Cockney, there was a small chance she might have turned away. But her forebears were Scots, before they were Irish, so she felt an affinity with any Celt, especially if he looked like he had stumbled out of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.
He was not only drunk, but deranged and now that my mother had disturbed him, he launched a litany about unemployment and inflation, punctuated with bits of Keynes and Lenin. He must have been a university lecturer at a happier stage of his life. My mother joined him in government bashing, which made me uneasy because the Marks and Spencer women didn’t look sympathetic to Marxists.
I studied my shoes. They were black school shoes. We could not afford shoes for weekends. They were black and flat, with a strap across each foot and small punched holes in the top section of the black plastic. The scuffs at the toes were white where the scuffing was at its worse.
The bus laboured and rumbled, and the top deck got hotter. We stopped frequently at bus stops and traffic lights.
My mother’s Belfast voice was as forceful as the Opium.
‘And how long have you been down with the Sassenachs?’
She didn’t wait for a reply. She always monologued when she spoke of the English.
‘Sure, the English, they’re nothing but a pack of crooks, with their low-slung faces, no cheekbones at all.’
She tutted and shook her head.
People of my mother’s generation, the women on the bus, had grown up during World War Two. It was a touchstone in the 1970s, its victory a point of pride amongst a country that had lost its empire and could only watch as the German economy boomed, so what she said next was unlikely to soothe our fellow travellers.
‘They went down the tube stations in 1939 and never came up again till 1945. Yellow-bellied cowards.’
The word coward in England has two syllables, but in Belfast it has one and sounds like card. I hoped the Marks and Spencer women thought they and their forebears were nothing worse than a pack of playing cards.
But all around me, lips thinned, and chins bristled, and whispers hissed. Behind my head the half bottle of whiskey glugged and there came a sigh and a smack of lips, followed by a putrid belch.
At the edge of my eye, came the whiskey bottle. My mother wiped the top of the bottle with her dress, and the liquid gurgled as she threw back her head. She nudged me and thrust the bottle under my nose.
The whispers changed to gasps. I shook my head. It was one thing to have a slug of whiskey in my tea at breakfast, but not on a bus, from a tramp. That was one of my strictures. But I could not get my mother to obey it.
The straps across my shoes were wide, and the edges frayed. I thought again of the high heeled blue-as-a-plum shoes with the neat little straps in the window of Ravel. If I had those shoes and their two-inch heels, if my mother had the money to buy them for me, I shouldn’t have minded quite so much about the man and his smell and his whiskey. That’s the thing about material goods, they are a great distraction from the woes of life.
‘As for that old bitch, the Queen Mother. Dear old woman!’ My mother almost spat.
Like all mad people, the man was unpredictable. I think it was the sight of my mother with his whiskey bottle. He must have got confused and thought she had stolen it from him. He burst into a torrent of abuse and spewed a litany of accusations and denouncements, which I could not follow or understand. Only the phrase, ‘Your breasts are deformed,’ emerged clearly. From it, I never recovered.
But my mother was unfazed. She restored his whiskey bottle and then calmly turned her back to him. But she had made the madman mad. He began to chant in that rapid way mad people do, as if they are intoning.
The bus rumbled and chugged and the sun wouldn’t leave us alone. I squeezed the metal pole that anchored the seat in front. The buckles on my shoes were the nicest parts. The only nice parts of the shoes.
The chanting stopped. Its absence crackled like electricity, invisible and ominous.
I turned. The man held a tobacco tin. He stood, swayed, opened the tin, and with one thrust of his arm he hurled the contents.
It didn’t contain tobacco. It contained maggots.
The Marks and Spencer women screamed. I screamed and shook my head, feeling a thousand weighty maggots on my skull. My mother didn’t scream; she pulled in her chin and with cat-like insouciance stared out the window.
The bus stopped. The screams of the Marks and Spencer women summoned the bus driver. The police arrived. Two blue and silver uniforms came up the stairs. They grabbed the man, who was still chanting and denouncing, and led him away.
I had recently read Jane Eyre, and I realized with sudden clarity that the proper place for my mother was an attic under lock and key. And surely there had been a mistake, a mix-up in the maternity ward. Except I looked like her, the same blue eyes, the same cheekbones, the Irish skin. She was indubitably mine and I was responsible for her upbringing.
I yearned to tug one of the uniforms and say, ‘Take her away. I want a Marks and Spencer mother.’
Eventually, we reached our stop. Nothing was said about the madman and we drifted home in a haze of Opium.
My teenage years stretched before me. I would have to set curfews, give homilies and chastise. I would be that most dull of creatures: a conservative teenager, struggling to rein in her lunatic mother.
It was weeks before my hair felt free of maggots.