The Lonely Saints

The dollhouse wallpaper I grew up in: soft blue, gold stems, French rococo.  That abides.  The stains that would never come off have pleasingly still not come off.  I called those enduring blotches the lonely saints of my alcove because of their resemblance to the halo-topped heads you’d see on novena prayer books.  They now have company, new stains that look less like saints and more like captured villains screeching to be released from my childhood walls, toasted brown patches like dried blood, mercifully not fecal.  Bachelors in transit.  I give the new stains a pat with a tissue but they are also congealed and not eager to shift.  You’d think having lodgers she would have given these rooms equal that attention she gave the downstairs dust but I suppose mottled walls have always been more challenging than those assignments involving powdery surfaces.  Glad she’s at least changed the sheets.  She is not helpless, oh no.  She holds up better than myself at the minute, by the look of it.   But isn’t it nice to have someone around to go out and do your messages for you?

I return to Clooney’s the next day, a small hope the crown forces have withdrawn.  They have.  Off to annoy someone else.  Until everyone settles into being annoyed with them, and must live with that annoyance, and them, forever.  The snow too has pulled out and left behind lone icebergs to die in those deep puddles at the side of the road. 

I was told those maniacs had a go at you yesterday, says the man in the shop.  Yes, yes.  It wasn’t the welcome home I was looking forward to.  We get them rolling through once a week, he says.  Some of them come across mere cocky scamps but be careful around them.  They caused an awful commotion down Tobercurry way a few weeks back.  Burned half the place down.  God almighty.  Indeed, indeed.  There was a man yesterday squared up to them, I say.  He did, he did.  That would be Cosmo Tarpey.  He was in here earlier telling me all about it.  You know, I say, he was rolling a pale dice with the way he talked to them.  I thought both of us would end up mincemeat with his carry-on.  He’s a bit of a header alright, no lie.  Just the milk today?  Just the milk.

Keep thinking someone from the past will notice me on the streets and say hello.  But nobody does.  Or if they know me choose not to.  What would draw eyes to my person?  I’ve been a hundred and one other people since the one I was back then.    

My cold improves over the following week.  Tea, soup, pies, stirabout, bit of salmon.  This is the regime I will remember for next time.  I even smoked a little tobacco from her clay pipe once or twice but both times it definitely did not agree with me.

A few days before the Yeatses arrive and I help Mam clean the bigger room for them.  There are immovable markings on the walls here also, but nothing as curious as my lonely saints.  Little signs of Desmond everywhere.  The dent on top of the ottoman from when he landed arse-first in it and all of us puzzled about what he’d been doing in the room to end up in the box like that – he said he just slipped but nobody believed him and it stayed a mystery.  The windowsill has marks from when we shared the place.  The scrawls and scrapings of nonage.  Etched nicknames and hard-achieved doodles.  Enny.  Des.  Rabbit-heads and broad swords.  I wonder what the great poet will make of it.  Will he end up in the box too?  Is that the destiny of man in this room?

I sense my self-assurance increasing in my time at home with her.  True, the petty aggravations of close acquaintance persist but they are immaterial when measured against the tumbling world outside us.  Though I find myself crying some nights in the bed before sleep, it is a good cry, the constructive kind, I’d say.  Afterwards, my head feels freshly bathed, and I find it then easier to fall asleep.  Bad dreams cannot be helped.  But when I wake it is in my home.

George is first one at the door when finally the day comes for us to welcome in the refined pair.  I’m the one who answers for her.  She is very elegant and well-to-do as you’d expect.  She wears a long gingham dress and tartan hat.  She looks much older than she is.  Mam tells me she’s not even thirty yet.  I’ve about ten years on her but I look and feel like an unscrubbed urchin in her presence.  It is awfully nice to meet you, she says.  She sounds English.  But it’s not unusual.  You can tell apart the lower middle classes from the upper by how British they sound, especially when you’re in Dublin.   When you’re here, it’s obvious who’s purse is going to be fatter.