Page 37 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. III #12

At night I lay awake and thought of Heff and
his lists and Mrs. Cassidy and her smile. Then
I thought of my mother. She had always been making lists. She’d had a useless memory, so she used to buy yellow notepads that had a sticky strip on one side. On these notes she would write her lists and then stick them to the fridge door or the kitchen wall, wherever there was space. She wrote lists of little things she had to do. Pay the ESB. Order oil. Pick up a Walsh’s loaf, which my father and I quickly de- voured. One time she forgot to bring home the Walsh’s loaf. She had stopped off at a telephone box to make a call and she had left the loaf behind her. At the time, a notorious member
of the IRA was being held in the town barracks before being sent up north. Release him or there’ll be trouble a message had been phoned in. And when my mother remembered where she had left her Walsh’s loaf and returned to pick it up, the phone box was surrounded by soldiers with guns. Meantime, two members
of the bomb squad were kneeling just outside the phone-box and were prodding the Walsh’s loaf with long metal wands. We often laughed about that.
Mrs. Cassidy’s first name was Maria. She lived next door to Heff. If it was sunny she stripped into a yellow bikini and sunbathed in a full- length deck chair in her back garden. Some- times she wore a white bikini. I liked the white bikini. Heff liked the yellow. We disagreed on some things and bikini colour was one of them. Because we were best friends our disagree- ment didn’t come between us. “Let’s go and look at our favourite woman,” Heff would say if a little tension crept in to our discussions. He always knew how to resolve things.
Her big list was a list of places she wanted to see before she died. The Grand Canyon. The Great Wall of China. Berlin. She wrote it all down, said she was going to cross off each item one by one after she got to see it. I kept her list. I had it in my top drawer. I thought that maybe some day I’d get to one or two of these places. Then I could cross them off.
“I’m going to throw myself into that chair and rub my face all over it,” Heff said as soon as Maria Cassidy got up and went inside. I hadn’t reached that far. I was still with her smile. It had stayed with me after passing her on the street. And I continued to think of it as I passed her house on my way home at night.
Maria Cassidy had brown skin. It was smooth and lovely and watching her from Heff’s bed- room window was both great fun and painful.
I ached when I looked down at Maria Cassidy. She was the most beautiful thing. She wore sunglasses, and made herself a fizzy drink with a straw and set it down on the grass beside her. From time to time, she reached an arm over, grabbed her drink, brought it to her plump
lips and sipped through the straw. She rubbed sun-tan lotion all over her arms and legs. Her legs went on forever. The sunglasses made her mysterious.
It was quiet in our house that summer. My father sat up late. He watched news reports, sometimes a late film. Often he sat by the open fireplace holding his head in his hands. I found it harder and harder to talk to him. It was al- ways late when I came home from Heff’s house and I hoped my father would be in bed by the time I got in. But he was almost always still up.
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