The Herbalist (5 page)

Birdie could afford to be big-hearted – she
owned nearly every house on her terrace and she had stacks of cash. I often wondered why
Mam and Birdie were so pally. We weren’t exactly Birdie’s kind of people.
She had two Protestant ladies up for sherry all the time. Miss Murray and Miss Hawkins
were single and afflicted with flat shoes, thin voices and no men on the horizon as far
as the eye could travel. They played bridge and talked about theatre, the reds and how
great things had been when they’d better use of their legs.
They
were Birdie’s kind of people. She had probably adopted Mam as a charitable
case.

Birdie’s twin sister Veronique had
lived with her until she went and bought an identical shop in a town a few miles away.
Veronique used to drive a motorcar and visit every week. Then they fell out. It was
shortly after Birdie’s fall. Maybe the two were connected. You never knew: old
people could be terrible odd.

Months passed and there was no sign of
Veronique. Birdie fibbed to save her pride – said she was ill and couldn’t visit
often. According to Mam she didn’t visit at all. They must’ve had a bruiser.
Twins shared the one soul, so they’d have to make up if they fancied having a good
time for eternity. I’d often heard Birdie telling Mam that riches in this life
didn’t matter; it was the reward in the next life that counted. The next-life rule
definitely didn’t apply to Birdie; anyone who wore yellow stockings like she did
wasn’t waiting for the next life to have fun.

Anyway, whatever Birdie said, our house
wasn’t a farm house, it was a shambles. We weren’t respectable. Father was
well shook, and nobody knew this, but around January Mam began to drink too. It
wasn’t as simple as that – there were good times as well – but you get the gist:
dinnertime, the spuds boiled dry, the bottom of the pan burning and her holding out her
skirt, singing, ‘Dance with me, daddy, dance with me.’ By tea-time,
she’d be asleep or hunched on the stool crying over some well-aimed insult from my
father’s mouth. Mam called them his fits of eloquence; she could be very
sarcastic. But I think she preferred them to his other fits.

‘Lush.’

‘I’ve never darkened the door of
a public house.’

‘How-how-how I ask you, Maureen, is
that a virtue? Not doing something you can’t do anyway. Now, now, if you
didn’t drink this house dry, you’d have something to boast about. So-so-so
you would.’

‘Brian, how dare you? I don’t
drink.’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘aye, Mrs
Medicinal.’

Until she started drinking on the sly, Mam
used to try to hold things together, used to put on a brave face and take Charlie and me
for long walks with her make-up on, telling us that love was only
a cod, a luxury people like us couldn’t afford. Something that happened before I
was born had left our family unable to hold up their heads in public. Until then
Mam’d had a life, friends even.

Before she gave up pretending, she liked to
act like we were normal and she would be all about my education. She’d smooth down
my hair, look into my eyes and tell me I’d have a future and a good one at that.
Of course, that fell by the wayside, and two years ago I was kept home to help out.

I had liked school but nothing much was
expected of me. No one checked my homework, but I was first in line when there was a nit
scare. Immaculata said I was a daw, like the rest of my lot.

‘Who here’s going to be a
nun?’ an inspector asked once.

‘The four at the front; we’ll
leave the rest to the men,’ old Immaculata had said with a wave of her hand and a
sneer.

So, here I was: spared the convent and the
men. I never dreamt that someone would fall in love with me, not someone normal and good
living. Maybe Aggie was wrong about love coming my way; maybe I was a fool to believe
her.

Mam did love us when she wasn’t
nervous or in a terrible temper. When she was in a good mood, she forgot everything
else. ‘I’ve a great little family,’ she would say, ruffling
Charlie’s hair. We were the best in the world then. Touching our heads, kissing
our necks. The rest of the time we gave her a pain in her eye and would have to get out,
get out, get out, or the brush would be across our backs.

‘Get out or I’ll fetch the
cruelty man,’ she used to shout when we were small.

I used to have nightmares about him, the
cruelty man in his shitty brown suit coming to get me, whipping me off in his car. He
pulled up into our yard once. Big dusty car, short clean man. He was looking for the
Carvers’ place. I wish my father hadn’t told him how to find the house. My
father said he took Kay Carver’s baby because she hadn’t any sense. Mam said
it was because she hadn’t any husband. Kay used to jump out from the hedge and
shout ‘boo’ at us when we were walking the road. She still followed us but
she didn’t jump out any more.

Charlie used to laugh when Mam threatened us
with the cruelty man. I just ran like hell. Charlie and I were pals. I fished with him.
I loved fishing and loved fried trout. Didn’t even mind gutting and cleaning, not
when I knew we’d be in for a treat. I didn’t have a weak stomach like my
mother. We’d have cold spuds and tomatoes with it.

Charlie was in great form of late, getting
letters that made him smile. You should’ve seen him, running to meet the postman
like a child, twirling into the barn to lie down and read them. Mooning around,
daydreaming. About what, that’s what I’d like to know? Sweethearts, I
supposed.

Me, I dreamt of staying on in school,
imagined years of correct-marks and ‘Good work, Emily’ written all over my
copybook and someone saying, ‘We’ll make a teacher of you yet.’ Birdie
said I’d make a fine teacher or dressmaker, that I’d be great at whatever I
put my hand to. As if teachers left school at fourteen.

When we got to the town, the market was
packed. The chicken and dog man near deafened me as we passed, roaring his prices, half
his red hens dead and the other half pecking the ground, and black pups in a barrow, all
small and shivering. I leant down and rubbed one: he was the size of my hand.

‘Don’t ask, Emily – you’re
not getting a pup and that’s that.’

We were at a standstill then; a crowd
blocked our path. Mrs Greaney turned and smiled at us, fag limp and brown in the corner
of her mouth.

‘Keeping well, Mrs Madden?’ Her
eyes travelled slowly over my mam.

‘The best. What is it, Mrs Greaney?
What’s everyone looking at?’

‘The Indian lad – he’s put a
spell on them. Don something-or-other he calls himself.’ She coughed and moved
aside. ‘Go on, you’d love him, Mrs Madden. Go on, have a gander at The
Don.’

‘Thanks but I won’t, we have an
appointment.’ Mam yanked me back by the collar. She made me follow her around the
edge of the crowd and across the road. A few dicey-looking characters were leaning
against the wall of the courthouse. Mam didn’t like being
near
them either, so she turned on her heel. ‘Home,’ she ordered. I could have
cried. We had gotten so close. Was I ever going to see this herbalist, this magician?
Why did Mam always have to go the opposite way to everyone else?

‘Are you not curious to see the
herbalist?’

‘A rogue. They’re all
rogues.’

She was talking about my father again;
everything came back to him being a shyster. You’d be sick listening to it.

As we left the square Birdie waved from her
doorway.

‘Maureen Madden, you look exhausted –
come in and rest those feet.’

In we went, out of the sunshine and into the
dark dusty shop with not a sinner in it and no craic. My mam sat on the low bench beside
the vegetable boxes. I leant on the counter. Birdie pushed a magazine towards me. Greta
Garbo was on the cover. Where did Garbo get those eyebrows? I held her up to the light
to check if they were pencilled in. The women started to murmur:
mmm
and
haw
and
I know, I know
and
tut, tut, tut
. Then, sobs. I
turned. Birdie had her arm around my mother; their heads were close together. Mam was
crying and talking real low.
A few weeks, maybe months
. I spotted my chance,
tiptoed out of the shop and ran like billy-o towards the market.

The women were still crowded around his
stall. His voice was hoarse from all his proclamations about the power of his potions,
the strength of his medicine. I stood on tiptoe, glimpsed his hand waving over the sea
of headscarves: it held a brown bottle, sported golden rings.
I could love that
hand
, I thought then – my first thought as a woman. I pushed forward between
the shoulders in front of me; they were hard to part, but I persisted, imagined that
they were the tide and I was a magnificent swimmer. Then came a poke, followed by a
familiar tug at my collar. ‘Got you,’ Mam crowed, ‘and not a minute
too soon.’ That’s what she thought, but she was wrong. Me, I wasn’t
thinking. I was in love.

Carmel’s back ached. In between
serving customers she’d taken down all the tins and spent the afternoon dusting
and rearranging them, and then she’d cleaned both of the outside windows. Everyone
that passed was on about that man. The herbalist this, the herbalist that. Or The Don,
as some were calling him. A charlatan, a magician, a fraudster, a saviour, who had
appeared in the market to con them or heal them – take your pick – and there
wasn’t a one that didn’t have an opinion and every second opinion was
contradictory.

Emily had stopped and offered to help.
Carmel wasn’t in the mood to listen to her nonsense, the way she repeated other
people’s news as if she’d seen it first hand, as if she had actually been
there. Carmel told the girl she was expecting, not an invalid. She was sorry for her
sharpness afterwards. The child hardly got the time of day from anyone; there was no
need for Carmel to join in. Emily was only gone when Birdie hobbled across the road,
carrying a kitten, and informing Carmel that she must be ‘nesting’. What
would poor Birdie know of nesting? That woman had never known a man let alone reared a
child.

‘Would you like a kitten?’ she
had asked. ‘It’s a lovely grey one, very unusual.’

‘A kitten is the last thing I’d
want, Birdie.’

When the shop had finally shut, Dan went out
to the pub; he had to ‘talk to someone important about something important’.
That usually just meant a chin-wag with Mick Murphy. Sometimes she listened to
Dan’s long explanations of why he had to go out; sometimes she didn’t, and
let her mind drift, thought of her baby’s fingers, his toes, and how she would
soon hold him and never let him go. She had known it was a boy before Mick’s
mother divined it. The face on Dan when he saw Carmel stretched on the sofa, with Lizzie
crouched over her wielding a pin on a string, and it swinging back
and
forth madly over her belly. His reaction later had surprised Carmel. He’d called
it witchcraft, said he didn’t want ‘that filthy crone’ in his
house.

‘But she’s the mother of your
pal?’

‘Doesn’t mean I have to like
her.’

‘I don’t like her much
either,’ Carmel said, putting her arms around her husband. ‘It was only the
once – calm down. Lizzie does smell a bit, but you’re a bit salty
yourself.’

He smiled then, and gave her one of his bear
hugs.

‘I just didn’t like
it.’

‘I know, I know.’

Carmel went up to the baby’s bedroom
and opened the window on to the street. She lifted the monkey off the mantelpiece: the
cymbals’ edges were rusty and sharp. Sorry, Monkey, she whispered, as she tugged.
The cymbals came off easily; she moved the screen and threw them into the fireplace.

As she sat on the rocking chair, she
realized the stairs must’ve made her breathless. She leant back and relaxed. There
was a nice breeze. The yellow check curtains flew up, fell down and flew up, over and
over. It reminded her of being a girl, of playing rope. She didn’t even run
nowadays, let alone jump. Or use the bicycle. Being careful had paid off; she’d
made it past the dangerous stage this time. Dan called it God’s will. He was never
keen on giving any credit to Carmel, but she didn’t mind, not now. She ran her
hand over her stomach: it was smooth and firm. Babies didn’t move much in the last
few weeks. Doctor B said there just wasn’t the space. It was a sign the baby was
getting ready to be born.

It was lovely and bright in here, no matter
what Finbar said. Completely different to how it was years ago. The walls were papered
in pastel stripes and the ceiling was painted ivory. Dan had done a great job, and
he’d been thrilled to do it. This baby coming had given him a great lift. Carmel
knew Dan had been the subject of jokes for not fathering a child sooner in their
marriage, especially as he was such a tall, strong man.

A child a year was no bother to some women,
but that hadn’t
been the way for Carmel. At least now she could
serve them their powdered milk and syrup of figs without feeling an envy that nearly
floored her. Something had finally worked – be it prayers, devotions, miraculous medals,
feet-up, milk puddings, tonics or blessed ribbons, she didn’t care. This time,
things had gone as they should have. She went to touch the medal at her throat,
forgetting it was missing. A small thing like that, if it wasn’t found at once,
was usually lost for ever. She felt guilty – it had been her mother’s – and she
had near worried it away in the early days. Now she hadn’t even searched for it,
distracted by Finbar’s visiting after so long.