Page 240 - Eggs and Ashes pages

Easter Sunday 239

revealed – and proudly, soberly showed me his tattoo of a Celtic cross. His arms
were hard with muscles – cook’s arms – sinewy from the push and pull of hard
work, clean except for a couple recent burn marks from the oven.
It was the last time I saw Brendon.
I think of him sometimes: icing names onto birthday cakes in the brilliant light of
Costco; living in a house with his wife, Jamila, and stepdaughter, Sara.

Neil Paynter

Maggie’s teeth

2 Corinthians 5:1–2

‘Maggie, you’ve got your teeth!’
Maggie stands and smiles, modelling them for us. ‘Madonna, eat your heart out,’
she says, and laughs in her husky, earthy way.
It’s quite a contrast: the false perfection of the new, white-white teeth against the
brown, wrinkled background of her crooked, beaten face.
It only took a year. ‘Wait for your cheque.’ ‘Wait for your teeth.’ Maggie has
learned patience. (Like everybody here in the night shelter, she’s had to.) She knows
it takes a long, long time for anything to trickle down to a shelter in a basement.
Maggie accepts she is decaying, knows parts waste away – genitals, minds.
Having no teeth is a trial, but after so many trials and losses – abusive men, dead-end
jobs, poor housing and rich landlords, psychiatrists and social workers, breast cancer;
a best friend who lost all hope; a good friend who was murdered – you learn to
endure, and to live with little things like having no teeth.
‘You really look great, Mags,’ I say, setting up for bingo.
‘Well, thank you dear, but they’re just a plug in a leak, you know. The body
dies, the soul is eternal, as they say. But at least I can chew now, no more soup and
mush,’ she says, and smiles brightly again.
‘Alleluia,’ I answer, and stop and gaze at her. But it’s not her new white-white
teeth I’m struck by – although I’m very happy she finally has them – it’s her old
laughing eyes – and the light that has never left her. The beautiful, strong light that
no one has been able to blacken, or rob, or put out, or take away – that no force can
kill. The miraculous, amazing light she has, somehow, never lost faith in.
After bingo, Maggie invites us out for fish and chips with the gang – with Bill and
Kate and Dagmar and Doreen – to celebrate Kate’s birthday and her new teeth.
Neil Paynter