Fandango in the Apse! Read online

  ‘You stupid fool,’ she growled. ‘What have you done now?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mummy,’ I whispered, bending to pick up the broken shards.

  ‘Get up, you gormless idiot! You’re getting milk on your dress!’ she shrieked, as she swept past to get the dustpan and brush. ‘Dear Lord, why did you see fit to saddle me with this imbecile?’ she whined into the pantry, as if she fully expected the Lord’s answer to come from behind the tins of baked beans.

  She turned around and the sight of me standing there with milk dripping from the bottom of my Sunday best sent her into overdrive.

  ‘This is just typical of you. Get out of my sight and change your dress, you useless lump!’

  I murmured another apology as I headed for the door. I’d have done better to keep my mouth shut.

  ‘You’re sorry, you’re sorry?’ she sneered in a singsong voice. ‘You will be sorry, you hateful child, make no mistake about that.’

  By this time, I’d had nine years’ experience of my mother’s vindictiveness and had reached the conclusion that she made a conscious effort to dream up the nastiest punishments she could think of. I’d had them all – my mouth washed out with carbolic soap until I vomited, for telling a fib. The time I had to stand outside for ages, barefoot in a bucket of cold water in the middle of winter. I got chilblains from that. It was for running up and down the church pews when she was in confession – I was about five at the time. The irony of it still gets to me.

  The list is endless, so I won’t bore you with it, except to say, the one that affected me most she inflicted not as a punishment – but out of sheer spite. Every year on my birthday and Christmas, a parcel arrived from my father. I knew it was from him for two reasons, the first being nobody else ever sent me anything, the second was the brightly coloured Australian stamps.

  My mother always placed it carefully on the sideboard for me to see; I could look, but not touch. Then in the evening once the fire was blazing up the chimney – well, as much as half a dozen lumps of coal could blaze, she would place the unopened parcel in the flames then poke at it until it was nothing but ash. I ached to know what those parcels contained.

  Clothes changed, I sat in my room and waited for the call from my mother. I dared not go down while she was still cleaning up the mess. Ten minutes later, we were finally on our way to Mass. As usual, I made sure I was a few paces behind her, I loved to watch the odd way she walked, it was all tight arse and stunted steps. She had a way of covering ground that looked like she was trying to hold a red-hot poker up her backside by no means other than her sphincter. Highly amusing.

  I had been given my punishment when I eventually plucked up the courage to show my face in the kitchen. Today, I would not be allowed in the church hall with the other children. Today, I would have to sit beside my mother through the whole, boring service and when the collection plate came around, I was to hand over the money I had been saving for months for a pair of roller skates. I was heartbroken over the skates, especially as I had only been two pounds off buying them. Luckily, she was unaware that the first part of the punishment wasn’t the blow she had intended. Fraternising with the kids, most of whom, went to the same school as me, was difficult enough during the week. Having to do it on Sunday as well, was to say the least, difficult. I’ll explain why.

  It was all to do with frilly socks and plaits. These two things, I can honestly say, blighted my childhood and were the cause of many a traumatic nightmare. Although, to be fair, while I was in the younger years of primary school, neither of them mattered much. Young kids don’t give a damn about what you wear or how you look, you’re just accepted. However, by the time I got to nine or ten, I had begun to stick out in the crowd. Round about that age we were all beginning to be aware of fashion. Suddenly pigtails and plaits disappeared and girls were having their hair cut in actual styles. I wasn’t. No matter how much I begged and pleaded, my mother insisted on doing my hair in exactly the same way as she had done since the day I started school. I was a laughing stock – it still makes me come out in a cold sweat when I think about it. Every morning she would make two plaits just behind my ears, these, she would catch up and tie to the top of my head with a ribbon so the plaits stood out at right angles. Do not dare laugh when I tell you this, but I actually went through my entire primary school years with my head resembling a two handled sugar bowl.

  Then, just to add to the trauma, there were also the frilly socks. Oh, Lord, how I was jeered over those bloody socks. My mother always bought me white ankle socks that had a lace trim around the top. OK, this may be pretty when you are four or five…but at ten? I’ve no idea why she did this, it was either a deliberate attempt at humiliation, which succeeded brilliantly, or a throwback to her doily fetish – I’ve just realised I haven’t told you about that have I? My mother loved doilies, the scraps of frilly-edged material adorned every surface in our house, there wasn’t an ornament that didn’t have one underneath it – I detest bloody doilies. Anyway, the socks and plaits alienated me from the children at school and I found myself increasingly alone in the playground.

  After a while, I formulated a plan in an effort to hold onto the few friends I had left. I waited for days for an opportune moment to broach the subject with my mother. Finally it came. She had just come home from her WI meeting and was unusually civil to Mrs Williams, the woman she paid to look after me when she was out in the evenings. Normally, she was quite abrupt and I could only assume Mrs Williams was desperate for the money to put up with my mother’s off-hand treatment.

  I went into the kitchen to make her a cup of tea, and then placed two ginger biscuits on the side just the way she liked them. I took it to her in the lounge, making sure I didn’t spill any tea in the saucer, because she hated that. Personally, I was under the impression that was the purpose of the thing – to catch the drips.

  Because she was a stickler for manners, she thanked me, but her lips remained pursed and she didn’t spare me a glance. I sat on the sofa, making sure I stayed still because “fidgeting” was another of her pet hates. Finally, after a count to ten and just as she picked up her book, I summoned the courage to ask my question.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘What?’ This was said with some annoyance as she opened the book at her marker. I swallowed my nervousness and forged ahead.

  ‘Could I invite, Amy and Josie, for tea on Friday, please?’ I’d picked Friday because it was one of her committee nights

  ‘May I invite… not could… don’t they teach you anything at that school?’

  ‘Um… sorry, so… may I invite them?

  ‘No, you may not.’

  ‘Please Mum, I’ll wash up after, I promise, and we won’t make a mess.’

  I waited a moment or two, and when she didn’t answer, I pressed on even though I recognised my chances now were slim to none.

  ‘Mrs Williams said she didn’t mind looking after all three of us, she even said she’d make fairy cakes, so, can I?’

  ‘May I,’ she ground out. I was getting flustered now.

  ‘Sorry, may I… please? I promise they’ll be gone before you come home.’

  My mother slapped her book shut and turned in her chair to face me. Her eyes bored into mine. ‘I have given you my answer and I do not intend repeating myself, the subject is closed.’

  ‘But why? I…’

  ‘Don’t you dare question me, girl, who do you think you are?’

  ‘Please, Mum, just this once.’ I wouldn’t normally have dared this much, but it was important to me. However, it wasn’t a good move, which I quickly realised when she stood up and pointed at the door.

  ‘Get out of my sight – go to your room, now! How dare you think I would put up with a group of common brats in my home?’

  I went to my room thinking of my dwindling friends. They all seemed to go to each other’s houses and I had hoped that if I invited some to my house, the offer might be reciprocated. I had no choice but to accept that wasn’t going t
o happen now.

  I have to be careful to give you the correct impression here. I don’t want you thinking I was a timid wallflower as a child; in my own way I was a plucky little madam. For obvious reasons I kept it well hidden, I was young after all and in no way a match for my mother’s nastiness, but I gave it a good go. Occasionally an opportunity arose and I would seize it. One of my best – to this day it still makes me smile – was what I like to call, “The false teeth episode”.

  It happened the evening my mother was making an important speech to the Women’s Institute, in her capacity as Chairman of the Church Fund. In preparation, she was taking a leisurely bath. I happened to be passing her bedroom when I noticed her upper set of false teeth in a glass at the side of her bed. I was about eleven at the time, so I really should have known better, but I couldn’t resist.

  Clenching my bum cheeks for fear of being caught in the act, I sneaked in and took the teeth. I tipped the glass over to make it look as if the cat had overturned it and rushed back to my own room. Panic-stricken, I found a secure hiding place and rushed downstairs. My mother’s screech twenty minutes later told me my plan had worked.

  ‘Katie, come up here quickly… hurry up, girl!” I rushed up, looking suitably bewildered. ‘Find the cat, find the damned cat!’ she spluttered.

  ‘But why – ’

  ‘Because the bloody thing has knocked over the glass and run off with my teeth.’ I’d never heard her use bad language before, it was a testament to how upset she was.

  ‘Go!’ she bellowed.

  I turned on my heel and rushed around looking for the cat, eventually coming across him in the garden. I made a pretence of searching in the flowerbeds in case she was looking out of the window, before going upstairs again. She was on her hands and knees peering under the bed.

  ‘Um… I found the cat, but he hasn’t got your teeth,’ I said, while looking supremely apologetic.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what am I going to do, what am I going to do?’ By now, she was so close to hysteria, I thought it might be prudent to offer some form of help.

  ‘Shall we pray to the patron saint of lost things?’ I ventured. ‘Saint Anthony, isn’t it?’ My mother’s glassy stare spiked me like a moth on a pin.

  ‘Oh, get out, you stupid idiot. Search the house… look everywhere!’

  There was no way my mother could cancel the speech, the event had been planned for months, there simply wasn’t enough time and as she was the main speaker she had no choice but to attend. I will never forget sitting in the audience trying to hide my glee, as I watched her make the whole speech with her hand strategically placed over her mouth.

  I kept the teeth for three days, before miraculously “finding” them in the herb bed. In gratitude, my mother bought me a cream cake, which I ate with only a minimal degree of remorse.

  You may be thinking what a despicable wretch I was, and to some degree, you’d be right, but I blame it on the guilt. I had it in abundance when I was a child. I mean for goodness sake, if your mother constantly tells you you’re a trial equalled only by the Antichrist sent to test her, it has to have some effect along the line, doesn’t it?

  However, it wasn’t until I was twelve that the seed of guilt I was nurturing was given the full benefit of a self-contained, nutritionally balanced, Fisons Gro – bag. It happened during a jumble sale my mother had forced me to attend at the church hall. I had wanted to go cardboard-sliding down a grassy hill, but she had other ideas.

  I was stuck in the stuffy hall, hiding behind some put-you-up tables the redoubtable women of the WI hadn’t used, when I was privy to a conversation. It was a defining moment in my life, which could have been avoided if I’d done as I was told and manned the tombola stall.

  ‘Margaret’s done well again this year,’ Agnes Firth mentioned to her fellow WI member and friend, Maureen Tibbs. They were both sitting with their backs to me behind the bric-a-brac stall.

  ‘She has that, Agnes. But isn’t it the same every year?’

  ‘Indeed it is, Maureen, everything runs as smooth as butter when she’s at the helm, devoted she is, devoted.’

  From my hiding place, I could see two grey heads nodding together in agreement. Their ample buttocks clad in almost identical print dresses overflowed the fold-up chairs. I was lost in a wonderful vision of sticking two pins in the rotund rear ends when something they said riveted me to the spot.

  ‘She hasn’t had it easy, you know…after what happened…it was such a shame.’

  Maureen, her nose on the scent of a juicy tit-bit, scraped her seat nearer to Agnes. Her questioning, ‘Oh?’ was all the incentive Agnes needed to lower her voice and recount the tale.

  ‘I’m not telling you anything that isn’t common knowledge, Maureen; you know I’ll have no truck with gossip.’

  ‘Everyone knows you’re the soul of discretion Agnes, so go on…what happened?’

  Agnes lowered her voice even further and with my interest well and truly piqued, I strained to hear. ‘I have it straight from Imelda Hewitt as was…you remember Imelda, she married Eugene Barney’s brother; can’t remember his name?’

  ‘Err…’

  ‘Eugene, you know…from the bakery…on Weston Street, it’s knocked down now, the bakery that is – not the whole street.’

  It was obvious from Agnes’ tone, that she was getting frustrated with Maureen, but not nearly as frustrated as me. Why do old women take an age to tell a tale?

  ‘Ah yes…I know who you mean now,’ Maureen replied after what seemed like an age.

  ‘Right, well she used to go to school with Margaret.’

  ‘Who did?’

  IMMELDA BLOODY HEWITT! I wanted to yell, but Agnes did the honours more quietly.

  ‘Well, if you told it properly, Agnes, I might be able to keep up,’ Maureen huffed.

  ‘I-m-e-l-d-a went to school with Margaret, they’ve known each other donkey’s years – that’s how I know what she says is right.’

  ‘Righto, I’ve got it now, so go on…what did she say?’

  ‘Imelda told me, Margaret and Jack – Jack was her husband – didn’t want children. Adamant she was…hated them, and he wasn’t much better, by all accounts.’

  ‘But she has…’

  ‘Yes, she has…and the word is, that’s what caused the trouble.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Apparently – and don’t repeat this, Maureen, apparently, she was so determined not to get in the family way she refused to come up with the goods, so to speak.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Honestly – that’s what Margaret told Imelda.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t have been admitting that, would you?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t, not many had sympathy for her after that got out let me tell you. Even though it was common knowledge he was a bit of a philanderer.’

  ‘So how come she had…’

  ‘Ah well,’ Agnes butted in, ‘that was down to Annie Renton’s wedding.’

  By this time, Maureen was agog and I wasn’t far behind her.

  ‘What happened at Annie Renton’s wedding?’

  ‘The tale goes that Margaret went on the fruit punch thinking it was non-alcoholic – got pissed as a fart and did the dirty deed later that night.’

  ‘You jest!’ Maureen’s ample bosom heaved with laughter.

  ‘I kid you not; it’s as true as I sit here, the child was born nine months to the day.’

  Both women dissolved into a fit of giggles and I removed myself outside to digest what I’d heard. Sitting under a large sycamore at the back of the hall, I ran through their conversation in my head. For the most part, I hadn’t heard anything new. My mother had never made a secret of her aversion to motherhood, but listening to the two women had brought it home with more force. I suppose I had always thought that my mother was the way she was because Dad had left her, and it was the bitterness she felt towards him, that manifested itself in her treatment of me.

  Now it all seeme
d different. The one new piece of information I had was that my father hadn’t wanted children either. This was a shock. I had been under the impression he left because of my mother – not because of me. I was devastated. My parents had broken up because I had been born. I had infected their world like a nasty germ and destroyed it.

  I felt angry, I wanted to disappear, I wished I’d never been born, but hidden deep in my heart was a conviction that it really wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t asked to be born, but the daily diet of guilt I had been swallowing forever was hard to forget. I had to remember, my birth had ruined two lives.

  Chapter Three

  The one thing that kept me going during the last couple of years of junior school was the thought that it wasn’t long until I started secondary school. I was looking forward to it. For one thing, at St Mary’s Convent School the girls wore grey knee socks and I would defy even my mother being able to find grey socks with frills. The other was that during the school holidays, she began to allow me to do my own hair. So long as I tied it back, she left me to it. I was fervently hoping this would continue once school started. If it didn’t, I had already made the decision that I would take a pair of scissors to the damn plaits and lob them off. Maybe I would still look like an idiot, but at least I would be an idiot without plaits.

  However, my enthusiasm for the start of the new term dulled significantly after we had been shopping for school shoes. My heart sank as my mother picked out a pair of dark brown, flat, lace-ups. There we were in a shop full of gloriously, fashionable shoes, and she picks out the worst pair available. I should have known it would happen, but I always lived in hope that one day she would let me choose for myself. To make matters worse, as I was walking up and down the shop so my mother could check the fit, I had to pass the Smith twins trying on their gorgeous, patent leather shoes, complete with little bows on the top. I could still hear their sniggers as I walked out of the shop.