The consultant is a peppery little man. Likes short answers. ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, preferably. But I’m not finding it easy to distil, out of years of symptoms, a one-word answer for him. He’s irascible, peremptory – yes, peremptory. Exactly that. Little parps and beeps of irritation emerge from him. Does he dislike sick people? “Bend forward,” he says to me. “Bend backwards. Now to the side. And to the other. Go into that cubicle. I shall be back in one moment.”
Or is it just Irish people that get to him? Or only the Northern Irish. Our accent’s not amenable like the Southern brogue, rich as Guinness. It’s uncompromising, so I’m told. Aggressive. Then there’s two of us in it – himself and me. And he’s Welsh. I can tell. I’ve lived here long enough to be able to hear the markers in his accent. His Welshness is well-hidden – years of golfing and aspiration – but we’re non-English, the two of us. Like it or not.
I wait. It’s late July and a window is open. I’m used to waiting. I’ve been all over this hospital. I’m a ‘thick-filer’. I overheard that. Not good. They think you’re a fantasist, inventing symptoms, lying. But I never lie to them. What’d be the point of that? Not in my interests to hide the truth. Still, I’ve been sent to psychiatrists for ‘failure to collaborate’ because if the doctors can’t cure me, clearly it’s my fault. But I always have collaborated, had the injections, gone to the psychotherapy. I’m used to them looking at me, puzzled, irritated that I don’t match their identikit. I look so normal.
Only once have I peeked at my file. ‘This obviously highly intelligent young woman…’ one entry in the opening pages began but someone grabbed it from me before I could read more, and such a glare I got, like I’d been nosing in someone else’s life! What was that complimentary phrase a code for, I wonder. ‘This awkward customer’? I’ve been told I have this or that, then had the diagnosis rescinded. I’ve been told to get a wheelchair, then not to get one. They’ve even told my family that I am choosing to be ill – there’s no other explanation for my pain. And my nearest and dearest nod!
I am certainly used to waiting. Today’s expert I have never seen before. He’s not the first of his specialism to have had the pleasure of examining me but my G.P. doesn’t know anything about him and that is precisely why he’s sent me here. Is the G.P. embarrassed to be linked to me?
This consultant looked at me severely as he questioned me, like I was a criminal who’d dart off with something valuable if he didn’t keep me in his sights. When he lowered his eyes, casually, I knew something was coming and… bam! up he came with a question that broke the mould, a question I’d never been asked before. And I lied. I told him one, single lie. He knew. He half-shut one eye and quizzed me with it but he didn’t ask again. He smirked. He looked me up and down, meaning, “If a patient won’t help herself…?”
Shall I tell him? When he comes back, shall I confess?
Shall I tell him how we had travelled a long way? I was eight. A city child. A hundred miles westwards was an expedition in nineteen-sixty-five and more so since my father could never afford a decent car and went from one banger to the next. We arrived (without breaking down) in a village that was one long, broad street. It reminded me of the cowboy films on tv where ‘town’ was the wide space between rows of shops that looked like houses, and houses fronted right onto the pavement, with a hotel, a bar and a smithy in the mix. Here, just as in the Westerns, lots of windows looked into the street, where the ‘show-down’ would happen, the drama in the empty road. But this place was staid. I couldn’t imagine an act of public violence. “Nothing to see here, stranger.”
The approach to the village had a huge church and an old-fashioned stone schoolhouse on one side; on the other a massive archway with elaborate gates opening onto an avenue which disappeared among trees. Daddy mentioned a double-barrelled name as we passed it. A Duke of Something. “The whole place grew up to serve them.”
“Is that…?” Mammy murmured, pointing discreetly at the church.
Daddy nodded.
I knew it was a Protestant church because it was plainer, older and grander than any of ours. So it was something to do with religion they were keeping from me.
Daddy was excited but anxious. I knew what it was like to be unsure of the welcome you’d get. My friends in our Belfast street sometimes kept me out of certain ‘special’ games, ‘because you’re a Catholic’. They weren’t nasty about it but clearly there was something obvious to them but hidden from me. Some fundamental difference separated me. I had no one to ask because we were the only Catholics in the street. I’d heard my father mention some Protestant cousins but, till this trip, I had never met any. I lived a Catholic life in a Protestant part of the city. I couldn’t link those invisible relatives to my daily experience and since no one around me ever saw them, they counted for nothing, as credentials, where it really mattered, such as getting into those games. Yet, though I never told anyone, for me, even to know of them was a door into some possible belonging at some unimaginable point.
We went to what Daddy remembered as ‘the family shop’. It was a butcher’s now. The butcher was easy-going and waved us through, past the chops and hanging joints of meat and the white tiles, through the tang of blood, to a room behind, where all was shadowy. We stood in a back parlour. There was a high slate mantelpiece over a black range. “I never bothered with all that back there,” the butcher called in after us. Indeed, he hadn’t touched it at all. The lace curtains over the single window were yellow with dust. Ornaments and family bits and pieces and the cushions on the two armchairs sat where they had been left. Two calendars on the wall seemed to me particularly abandoned. No one had been interested enough to turn their pages as the months passed, and then the years. These things left behind; these little things more permanent than the individuals, continuing to exist regardless. “Go on out if you want to,” the butcher shouted. “It’s not locked.”
We went through the scullery. Beyond the back door was a surprisingly big and bright yard, full of sunshine. There was a waist-high ring of brick in the centre; a low, open-fronted building to the right and a high gable wall glinting down at us. A man’s name – my father’s name – was painted high on it. Blacksmith and Saddler. “Your grandfather?” my mother asked him.
“Yes. And my father and uncle worked here too.”
So it was a forge. These men I’d never met became suddenly more real. Their world flared, briefly, in sparks, and clinks, and hooves on the cobbles. That was my surname, up there. I had a connection with this place.
As we passed back through the parlour I was sorry to leave all the dusty things behind with no one to love them.
We went to another house. The woman who lived there frightened me. She was bent in two, like a witch in a fairy tale. Daddy’s cousin, Sarah. Her fingers were bony and twisted. I tried not to show that I didn’t like it when she grabbed my hand and looked eagerly up into my face. She had to look up – her head was bent so far downwards. What had she been looking for? “Oh, she’s like you. She’s like you, James,” she said to him, pleased. “One of us, I’d say.” She had big, beautiful eyes. The eyes of a princess. The body of a crone. I was sent out to the back almost at once, to get me out of the way while the grown-ups talked about something.
There was not much to see there but as an only child I was used to amusing myself. I found an interesting gutter running across the yard. It was made of units of smooth, black, stone-like something. I thought of those varnished wooden building blocks that richer children had – cubes, pyramids – and there were always just a few bridge-shaped pieces. Yes, the units were like those little bridges. I imagined someone building a tower of these black bridge-blocks and wondering what to do with it. Brainwave! Lay the tower on its back and you’ve got a channel. How nicely the pieces all fitted together, with no gaps. I thought of rain flowing off the roof, down a pipe and then along this open route. How clever to have made a single smooth thing from so many separate pieces, the joints laid athwart the flow of water.
But someone was crying in the house. I crept to the door. A man was shouting. I peeped in. A man was standing over the little woman. For a moment, I thought I knew him then I realised it was only that he had his face all twisted up, with his head on one side, pointing at Sarah just like the bully in the playground when he corners someone. Something heavy was in his other hand. “Think you can do what I have to?” he snarled. “Lady Muck! To keep you, rain or shine. Try this for size!” Suddenly he swung a big, bulging canvas bag towards her and dropped the wide leather strap over her bent back. She staggered under its weight and whimpered. “Complaining now!” he mocked.
He pushed her towards the back of the house with one hand and with the other pointed warningly at Daddy who had moved towards her. Sarah’s eyes were wide and full of tears. The man said, slowly and triumphantly, “Man and wife. Man. And. Wife.” From behind him Sarah shook her head at my parents, scared. Daddy stepped back. The man bent to the floor and picked up two letters and a postman’s cap. “Here!” he called to Sarah, “You dropped these.” He tossed them at her. He crushed the cap down on her head. “On your way! Folks are waiting.” The bag was overflowing with letters. He looked at my parents with a smile I recognised: a you-can’t-touch-me smile; a tell-on-me-and-she-gets-it smile.
Daddy muttered, “The child.” and I darted to the farthest end of the yard, knowing I wasn’t supposed to have seen any of this. Mammy waved me towards her, grabbing my hand very tightly as soon as I was within reach. She pulled me through the room and out to the street where, ahead of us, Daddy was striding towards the car. Mammy shoved sixpence into my hand and pushed me towards a sweet shop opposite.
When I’d secured the unexpected treat of an ice cream I lingered in the shop so I could watch them through its window. My daddy thumped the car with his closed fist. My mammy was gnawing her thumb and looking anxiously back at that house. What would they do? How did you rescue a witch? The witch holds people captive; the witch makes the prince carry out terrible tasks to set the princess free. If the witch was the princess…?
Was she really going to have to hump those letters from door to door while the people looked on and did nothing?
I knew better than to ask any questions straight away. After many miles, when they thought I was asleep in the back seat, my parents talked. Daddy remembered her as a lovely young girl. Fond of the fashion. Took over the Post Office when her mother died. Well set up. Centre of everything, the Post Office.
Who is he? my mother asked.
A bye-blow. A chancer. Born the wrong side of the blanket but, bold as you like, flaunted the same name as His Grace, the Duke. Married Sarah for the Post Office – expecting an easy life. Yes, she had been lovely.
So she wasn’t always – like that?
No. It came on after her marriage. Some say she was dropped as a baby….
Mammy snorted at that.
As they went on I thought of her being dropped. It’s what people used to say, isn’t it? Explanation for anything that goes wrong. An accident. Or a wicked fairy. Someone who wished the child ill, who wished someone else could bear the burden of ugliness, know what it’s like to be embarrassment, to not get your due.
Here he is back again, Dr. Pepper. “Stand!” he orders, and he pronounces a diagnosis. I grasp ‘spinal fusion’ and ‘genetic marker’ and ‘incurable’. He thrusts a leaflet at me. “It’s all in there.” He’ll write to my G.P. I am dismissed, with contempt. He knows I lied. He’d asked if anyone in the family was very bent and I said, ‘No.’ Failure to collaborate.
I had to lie. Sarah had suddenly looked up at me, taking my hand. I hadn’t wanted to expose her to that contemptuous man. I didn’t want it to be her fault.
I understood what the consultant was trying to get at – hadn’t I seen it in that yard? – the separate parts jointed together into a whole; the spinal vertebrae fused into a smooth column; no gaps and so no movement. The body bends like a palm tree, the head a heavy fruit on the rigid stalk of the neck. A genetic flaw. Something triggers a disproportionate reaction in the bones – food poisoning; an infection. Bad luck. Bad fairy.
So, Sarah is what’s ahead of me. At this stage I’m still upright but the prognosis is rigidity, pain and a bent back. But I feel relieved – relieved not to be mad. It’s the fault of the genes, those little, persistent things, outlasting the individual lives, busy about their work inside the family.
My long-widowed mother will link me and Sarah as soon as I tell her about the condition, whether or not the science supports that. She’ll be appalled at the thought of the deformity predicted for me but having someone she can think of it as being ‘handed-down from’ will console her. She likes to have a story to fit things into.
And I know the end of Sarah’s story. All those years earlier, my parents had written to the local vicar, asking him to do something about the appalling relationship. He’d replied that he couldn’t interfere. My parents had no further leverage on ‘the other side’.
A couple of years ago my mother asked me to go back. Even after forty years she was uneasy about Sarah. I found a local historian who was glad someone, anyone, from the family was asking about the past. He brought us to the Protestant churchyard. Some sort of maintenance upheaval had seen many grave markers removed, he told us, indignantly. Without him, I’d never have found the grave.
The blacksmith – my father’s uncle – and the post-mistress – my father’s aunt, are in there. They are Sarah’s parents and she’s beside them, with the chancer. He had his good moments, the local man insisted. A cypress, an actual cypress – aristocratic, classical, a gently swaying tongue of bottle-green flame – a cypress grows out of the grave.
As I walk away from the consultant, I think of their bones amongst the roots. I think of my bones. I think of my Protestant grandfather, uncle to Sarah, who left his brother at the forge and married ‘the Catholic’, against all reason; who lived amongst ‘his own’ in defiance of gain-saying and left me an outlier in their midst: exposed, attentive and watchful; interested in bridges; in collaboration – and survival.