The North of England Home Service (22 page)

A team of women from the village came in to maintain
Cold-side
Hall. Marzena’s tasks were now confined to the Cornishes’ apartment in the football-stadium complex, which was mainly kept for business use – entertaining business colleagues, clients, and so on – and which his wife always referred to jokingly as Ronnie’s ‘bunny hutch’ or ‘love shack’.

The house facing the Moor where Marzena had lived with Ray for the three years that they had been married was good – it was a pleasant house; comfortable. Many rooms. It was OK. But it was old. The stairs and the old boards at Moor Edge moaned and creaked. The water pipes banged as though somebody was
beating
them with a hammer. Marzena came across evidence of mice
in the kitchen sometimes; mouse droppings on the floor and on the bread board. The doors and windows had shrunk or buckled over the years and let in cold and draught. Wiring was old – big switches that went off with loud click; dusty, fabric-covered flex. All this there was more than plenty of in the old country. Plus Ray was crazy careful about the heating and bills; he liked her to have individual heaters on in whichever room she happened to be, at those times when she was in the house on her own. She would hear him going around feeling the radiators looking for signs that they had been in use, very late at night, after Jackie had dropped him back from the club. Ray wasn’t terrible man. Ray was kind man, thoughtful man, apart from this cratchety Puritan streak.

But the apartment the Cornishes owned! It was Mr and Mrs Cornish’s apartment in the new multi-million-pound
development
at the football ground with the high decorative arch and the marble concourse of fountains and the fashionable wine bars and the health clubs where you could see straight in through the plate-glass windows and the uniformed staff with the discrete little TV monitors at the desk who said ‘good day’ and ‘a bit brighter today’ and sometimes stepped around the desk to touch the button which called the lift although it was no trouble to do this (it was a pleasure to do this – no static shocks from the friction of any treacherous nylon carpets) yourself – it was this place that Marzena, picturing her mother’s incredulity, her constant calling out to Teo, Marzena’s father, pressed close up to the baking oven in the next room, would describe in drooling detail in her letters home.

Turning the key and stepping into the apartment in West Stand Tower she immediately felt like glamorous television lady or model in the fashion magazines. She only had to touch a button and blinds came out of the wall and slowly screened off the room’s wrap-around floor-to-ceiling windows with a mechanical
hum and a jerky motion which (she had to admit) reminded her a little of the crematorium near the city boundary at Tarnow. There were chaises longues and foot-rest armchairs and leather sofas and pony-skin day beds – so many chairs in so many designs and so many finishes she could never decide where to sit. Wafer-thin televisions with surround-sound speakers, and not one but two hi-fi systems that fitted flush against the wall. Designer directional lights and soft indirect lighting. Walls whose colour could be made to change from orange to pale violet to aqua blue at the flick of a switch. The tractional drag of the close carpeting; the deep fleeciness of the towels and robes.

Although she didn’t smoke, sometimes during her break times Marzena would pretend to, feet up, with an unlit cigarette in her raised right hand, a coffee which she could sip as if it was a Long Slow Screw Against the Wall cocktail – she always got good laugh from these dirty English names, the English too embarrassed to say them until they are completely drunk – on the table beside her.

She was doing this one day, stretched out on a chair shaped like a bolt of lightning when, looking down, she noticed for the first time some stunted trees trying to grow out of a few inches of muddy canal bank or unculverted stretch of river. Immediately above them was a sub-level car park for the use of the workers in a concrete office block. As she watched, a piece of feathered
wildlife
waddled out and grubbed around in the muck like a wind-up toy. It was like looking at a piece of petrified, medieval
Northumberland
still clinging to existence at the very edge of the
modern
city, and was many worlds away from international executive space. Rain rushed in flurries and slanted against the window with a pinging sound which she knew meant it was close to hail.

The first time Ray encountered Marzena she was shaving his mother. She was a care assistant in the nursing home where his mother was living, and she was bending over her with a
disposable 
razor and a bowl of water, her back to the door, when he blundered in. He was still living in Devon then, and had come straight to the fearsome smells and polished surfaces and chronic overheating of Teresa Beard House (‘Quality care for the elderly’) from the train.

‘It is important to mirror them‚’ Marzena said that first time when she saw his face. It said her name on a laminated tag on her chest: her Christian name and a Polish surname he couldn’t
pronounce
. ‘Do you not think? It is important to be a mirror, and not turn away and pretend what is there is not there. You can’t live unless you are seen plain by someone. Seeing others plain is not a bad thing, but a good thing. Betty had a beard and also a very fine moustache, and so we had to shave the beard and moustache away because she’s lady not man, didn’t we, sweetheart?’

He had brought with him what he usually brought – some fruit, some weekly women’s magazines bought in the station – and he put these down in the only space he could find on the top of the cabinet by the bed. He sat down and looked for the first time at the tiny, frail figure propped up on pillows in the small white bed. Her head was so light now it made no impression against the pillow. Her hair was thin and there was some unpleasant crusting around her eyes and around her mouth, which Marzena was gently trying to prise open between her thumb and her forefinger in order to get some pills and a sip of water in. ‘Pills to give her a happy head. They give her a happy head‚’ she said to Ray’s mother. ‘Don’t they, poppet?’ And then to Ray: ‘You must be Betty’s son. Look who’s here to see you, Betty. Look who’s come all this way to see you. Can you open your eyes today, precious? Look, Betty. It’s your son.’ And his mother opened her eyes and weakly smiled at Ray, and with her bony, bent fingers (with, for all the nurse’s efforts, Ray couldn’t help noticing, crescents of dark matter still encrusted under the nails), blew him a silent parched kiss.

Except,
It’s
not
me
she’s
seeing,
he wanted to tell the Polish nurse Marzena, who was looking gratified and delighted in her
green-and
-white striped tabard uniform.
Not
Raymond
Cruddas
the
son
she
brought
up
and
worked
hard
for
years
to
feed
and
clothe
and
take
care
of
after
her
bastard
husband
my
swine
of
a
banjolele-playing
father
turned
his
back
on
the
both
of
us
and
walked
away.
That’s
not
who
she’s
seeing
sitting
here.
She’s
seeing
the
other
Ray.
The
one
off
the
telly.
The
one
with
his
face
in
the
papers.
Well,
maybe
not
in
the
papers
so
much
any
more.
But
the
one
who
never
used
to
be
off
the
telly
and
splashed
all
over
the
fishwrap
papers,
in
their
time.
My
mother’s
seeing
the
Ray
most
of
the
other
sad
old
desperate
cases
in
here
think
they
see.
I’m
not
joking,
old
girls
who
don’t
recognize
their
husbands,
who
can’t
tell
their
sons
from
Burt
Reynolds
and
answer
‘1901’
when
you
ask
them
what
year
they’re
in,
they
all
beam
when
they
see
me
come
in
the
door,
like
I’m
their
private
friend.
You’ve
got
to
see
them.
Smiling
like
Christmas
and
laughing
uproariously
before
I’ve
even
opened
my
mouth.
Giving
their
cheek
to
be
kissed;
squeezing
my
hand;
calling
me
‘Ray’.
People
who
don’t
know
up
from
down
think
I’ve
been
in
their
home,
met
their
family,
have
good
feelings
about
them
and
root
for
their
being.
They
don’t
know
me
from
a
bar
of
soap,
but
the
point
is
they
think
they
know
me
.
Because
I
came
into
their
houses
with
a
smart
wig
on
and
a
bright
smile
and
a
song
and
made
them
laugh
–
they
chuck
me
under
the
chin
and
coo
and
gurgle
and
really
think
I
give
a
shit.

He wanted to tell her all this. But he didn’t. Not yet. Not that time. He decided to save it, because he was comfortable with the fact than she knew no more about what had happened in the sixty-five years of his existence before he walked through that door than he did about the kind of experience that the just over forty years (he was guessing) of her first life in Poland had taken in.

In fact in her present circumstances Marzena struck him as much more ‘naturalized’ and far less of an outsider than himself. She spoke English with a quirky, pronounced Geordie twang that
connected
her to the area in a basic way that he could no longer claim.

It was a voice that Ray was reassured to hear when he called the home. He started to ask for Marzena by name when he phoned to check on his mother’s condition, and on his trips back to the North East to visit his mother they began meeting up for a drink, a walk by the river, a brief unromantic Indian or Italian meal. She told him what had made her want to escape from Poland. He told her why he had chosen to leave the city where history or chance had located her and which she had come now to regard as her home. On one of the first occasions they saw each other on neutral ground, away from Teresa Beard House and its dark promises of ‘end-of-life care’ and ‘planned pain
management
’, he felt compelled to tell her that the weightless husk of a person sprouting hairs on her face and incapable of raising a spoon to her mouth and sometimes gibbering and drooling and smelling sometimes, his mother who she had to bathe and
baby-talk
and care for every day hadn’t always been that way. He told her that she had once been a hard-working, lively woman,
saddened
by the turn her life had taken, but with a kindly nature and a genuine love of people and a communicable appetite for the world. He told her that she used to have nice hair and nice clothes which she knitted and made herself on an old-fashioned treadle machine. He told her that she hadn’t always had to have help in the toilet or be constantly reminded of her name or have holes cut with a razor-blade in her ugly shapeless old lady’s shoes.

She just said, ‘I know‚’ and poured wine into his glass and into her own glass, and they went on eating.

Betty had been forty-three when Ray finally made his name with
The
Big
Show
on the television. The following year, with a showcase season in the West End in the offing, he had decided to make his life in London. Ray bought his mother a bungalow in a quiet suburb before his departure from the North East. There was everything in it Betty had never had before. But she found many of the modern conveniences burdensome and a challenge rather
than bringing any lightening or improvement to her life. The first time he paid his mother a visit in her new house, Ray found the fridge empty and switched off. ‘Mam‚’ he called to her, ‘there’s nothing in this fridge.’ ‘That’s right, pet‚’ she said. ‘I don’t eat a lot and, anyway, it’s winter, so it’s a waste of electricity.’

Betty hadn’t really been suited to the quieter rhythms of
suburban
life. Although it was an easy bus ride back to the streets where she grew up whose every scarred stone and dog-marked corner was familiar to her, she had grown to feel isolated and unnecessary – ‘a pointless article’. Very few people passed her window on Linden Avenue, and there were rarely any children out in the street. There was no pub and no shop on the corner that she could slip out to if she found herself short of bread or low on sugar or suddenly fancied a slice of ham for her tea. ‘I’m neither use nor ornament‚’ she’d tell Ray when he phoned at the appointed hour, because she was afraid to pick up the heavy ebonite phone squatting reproachfully in the corner unless she was sure who it was. Like many of her pleasant, strait-laced neighbours, she
suspected
, she had come to feel like a footnote to her own life.