Storytime with Houdi – Hairbrush…

I would give everything I own

Just to have you back again

That lyric by David Gates’ Bread was from a song I first heard on Radio Èireann as I watched my mother staring, catatonic, into the fire, after burying my 56 year old father. Not even ten years old I was a sad boy then. My melancholy reinforced by a misunderstanding we had just before his sudden death. Fourteen years later listening to Ken Boothe singing his version on BBC Radio Ulster I was a happy young man. Well into my second year as assistant manager in a huge department store in Republican west Belfast. Despite the violence of the time I was oblivious to the mayhem occurring daily in the city, being immersed in my work. The Holylands area of the city I was living in was  free of violence excepting the Queen’s University students going on a drink binge.

But on a more positive note I had espied the girl of my dreams upstairs in the regional office. Well in truth at our first encounter she rescued me fighting with a Canon photocopier the size of a British Army Saracen. Carole was now the second in command in the directors office. The branch managers called her the tout with the clout as she had the ear of the director, reporting back any misdemeanours like bumping prices on the shop floor to enhance a positive stocktake result. She was also one of themmuns, the only non Catholic on the entire staff of 200.

On the day she rescued me as I was getting agitated, looking like a Welsh coal miner covered in black ink dust. Assuming command, she took the machine apart, her sandglass torso moving in rhythm with the strobe flashes bouncing off the chrome surround. I was salivating like a Mastiff dog watching her move around that machine with the dexterity of a pole dancer, her tanned arms buried inside it like our butcher at a carcass. She pulled out a ream of paper waving it in the air as if a Union Jack, then like Paisley, the previous month, outside Belfast City Hall with a copy of the Anglo Irish Agreement, tore it into shreds, the floor littered with black and white butterflies. The Canon spat out my new booklet which she perforated with a puncher that would have penetrated the scrotum of a rhino. Handing it to me like an award she announced

you Irish boys have no sense have yis?

I didn’t know if it was a statement or a rhetorical question. She left the room smiling, leaving an aroma of scones, cherry I think.

I was on the horns of a dilemma.

Well in actual fact…

… two dilemmas

or dilemmata if you want to be pedantic.

Management in the company was prohibited from having a romantic relationship with any employee. I had watched young trainees in my previous store in Dublin being transferred to the Irish equivalent of Siberia, namely Mullingar, after being discovered at a staff party. Plus, she was one of themmuns. But like robbing an orchard the chase is as rewarding as the apples. I decided to pursue her. I’d see her at break in the canteen, usually ordering scones. Well that explained her smell, but her graceful gait was bordering on presidential. The staff never used crude language in her presence, or engaged in the usual back stabbing when someone left the table, labelling her the holy one from upstairs.

I met her again in the photocopier room the day after the Christmas party where she looked at me as if I was an exhibit in a museum or a Gothic Art gallery. It must have been because of my cheap polyester suit which was the hygiene equivalent of wrapping yourself in cling film, the dry white sweat stains under my arms like a map of Alaska. The black suede shoes needing reheeled, my shirt only ironed at the front.

How were you able to attract such a stunning girl?

She must see something in you that I can’t. 

This was a reference to an old girlfriend from Dublin that I asked to accompany me to the party lest I broke the rules ending up in the Northern Ireland equivalent of Siberia, namely Strabane, or worse, Larne.

Well  Carole, I didn’t think you could pull the prop from the Coleraine Rugby Squad either.

 

Her date was bigger than the Canon Saracen she was leaning on.

 

Oh it’s nothing serious, he’s just a friend.

Why are you called Houdi anyway?

            It’s short for Houdini.

            I have the ability to wangle my way out of anything.

 

Now she was smirking

perhaps tact would prevent you from getting into those situations.

I felt her chestnut eyes staring at me, this time only with more affection than pity.

 

 Are you meeting her tonight?

 No she’s away back to Dublin.

I’m going for my first driving lesson.

Don’t waste your money.

I have a car.

I’ll teach you.

The driving lesson was the embryo of a clandestine romance with our regular trysts in the car park of our company’s branch on Annadale Embankment. During those lessons I learned she was the only daughter of a tour bus operator from Portrush, who not even sixty years old, was forced, due to illness, to sell his business to Ulsterbus. His wife was severely disabled with MS before she was fifty years old. Her brother was in the RUC. Being a devout Christian, not once did I detect any anger towards her creator about her situation.

Eventually I would fall in love with the epitome of what I recoiled from growing up in the border town of Clones Co. Monaghan.

A Protestant middle class girl with links to the RUC.

It was like a Ronald Dahl Tales of the Unexpected story.

There was rumblings that I was next in line for managing my own branch. When I was suddenly called up to the directors office I expected to be promoted, but instead was told there was a temporary store manager’s position in Billingham, Cleveland, in north England. The manager was out sick. I was the best person to manage the store until he came back. In our company when you went on a temporary assignment it always became permanent. My antenna alarm bells were ringing but when I was promised my own branch on my return I readily agreed.

The store wasn’t trading that well despite the long opening hours. I didn’t mind the extended workload as I didn’t know anyone over there to socialise with. The burden was eased in the fact I  was allowed to stay all expenses paid in a Trusthouse Forte hotel. One week became two, then a month had passed. The store was starting to pick up with no sign of the original manager returning. The whiff of ambition was beginning to bite. I was walking around the busy store on an internal mobile phone as big as a brick. It rang. It was Carole, but I could hardly hear her with static as the signal was out of range.

Mummy’s taken a stroke this morning.

               Oh Carole I’m so sorry to hear that.

                 It must be such a shock for you.

I noted a hesitation her voice as I continued

                 at least she’s in the right place for treatment.

She retorted,  more clearly now

you can get a flight home from Teesside International Airport at 4pm you should make it.

                      But Carole, the store is busy.

                       Is it really necessary to have me there.

Eugene it’s YOUR mother.

It’s your duty to come home.

She could die.

                  MY mother, MY mother.

                   Oh no, I thought it was your mother.

            

I lost my breath dropping the phone in despair, tears staining my puckered white shirt. That evening I was boarding a plane to Belfast anaesthetised with fear.

After disembarking, Carole drove me straight to Our Lady Of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. All my siblings were at my mother’s bedside. The left side of her face had collapsed, both eyes closed, but moving underneath the eyelids, as if trying to escape. It was like a scene from the movie Alien. My sister had found her at home lying beside her bed where she lay for hours unaccompanied. The stroke was likely caused by diabetes. None of the family knew she was diabetic. The medical team advised that the prognosis was not favourable. My mother could end up permanently in a vegetative state. We visited her daily for weeks but there was no change in her condition.

Every day I noticed a woman called Iris, who burdened with a strong Louth accent seemed to visit patients in the ward, a sort of health volunteer. She got familiar with us broadcasting to all the family my mother’s daily progress which was practically zero.  One evening in March I was late getting down to the hospital. Iris met me outside exclaiming

nugene, nugene, your mudder, your mudder!

Ah she’s in great form, your mudder, so she is, so she is.

 She’s moving about in the bed like I’ve never seen her before.

It’s great to see it nugene, so it is.

 

I sprinted down in excitement toward the ward.

To witness what can only be described as…

… gut wrenching cataclysmic horror.

 

My mother on a bed.

Not a soul anywhere near her.

Sucking a hairbrush.

A hairbrush.

Like it was a choc ice.

Loose black hairs hanging off her lips.

As if her collapsed mouth had been violated by a rodent.

 

In despair I pulled it away just as a nurse appeared, her face red with embarrassment. I held my mother’s hand while I prayed into her ear, leaving soon after.

A week later I was carrying her coffin towards her grave. As I was lowering my poor mother into the ground I looked over to witness Iris throwing Holy Water like she was officiating the funeral. Later she embraced me

nugene your mudder, your mudder looked lovely in the coffin didn’t she, so she did, so she did?

I winced. If there was a lasting reminder of that sad occasion I didn’t want it to be Iris.  Carole hugged me tightly before she drove me back to Belfast, reminding me that I had lost someone who loved me, but she loved me just as much.

One life wilts.

Another blooms.

Like her Jesus in John Chapter 11 verse 35.

I wept.

I wept even more later, as on the radio, I got another reminder.

This time from Boy George, singing his current No1 hit

I would give everything I own

Just to have you back again