Gretta Mulrooney - Marble Heart

Resolutely she put her mistake behind her, saved regular amounts and eventually had enough for the deposit on her flat in Leyton. It was on the first floor of a three-storey fifties block, one-bedroomed with no garden but she’d loved it the moment she had set eyes on it. There was a Grace Ashley verse that said:

Give me a room

And I will paint it with love’s loving colours,

Cushion it with heart’s ease

And it will be our cherished home.

Joan had worked those lines into a tapestry when she moved to her flat. It hung in its frame on the living-room wall. She went and read it over to herself on that night when Nina had appeared depressed about her marriage. It meant even more now that she was preparing a home for herself and Rich. The paint for the living room was standing ready inside the front door. They had selected white with a hint of buttercup for the walls and deep yellow gloss for the skirting board and radiator. Joan had spent the previous weekend stripping off the old wallpaper and putting up lining paper. When she told Alice what she was doing, her friend had offered to come and give her a hand with the painting. She was lonely herself, that was why she spent so much time at work. Joan understood that her business had replaced her family, who had abandoned her. Her one son had become a drug user, then joined a road protest group and was living up a tree somewhere. Her husband had taken off with his optician years ago, clearing out their joint bank account the day he left. According to Alice, all that had remained of fifteen years of marriage were his golf clubs and a stack of pornographic magazines stashed in the back of the wardrobe. It was generous of her to root so strongly for Joan and Rich, advising that they should grab whatever happiness came their way. Some people’s scars made them resentful of their friends’ good fortune.

Alice arrived promptly at eight that evening, dressed in overalls. She had brought her own roller and tray so that they could do two walls each.

‘How are you getting on with that new woman, Nina Rawle?’ she asked as they worked.

‘Okay. I thought she was a bit stand-offish to start with but it’s just her manner. She’s very weak physically. It must be terrible to be able to do so little when you’re comparatively young.’

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘Something wrong with her tissues, that’s all she’s said so far. She moves like an old woman. I think she’s quite depressed.’

‘You’ll be good for her then, Joan, you’ll chivvy her along. We’re survivors, you and me, aren’t we? Get on and make the best of things.’

‘You have to, don’t you?’

‘Suppose so. Any vermouth going?’

Joan poured two glasses and they took a quick breather while they sipped.

‘It’s a lovely colour,’ Alice said. ‘Warm. I hope Rich appreciates all this. I’ll be having words with him if he doesn’t.’

‘I don’t think you need worry about that. He’s a smashing man, Alice, he really is. Will you be a witness when we get married? His brother’s agreed to be the other one.’

Alice raised her glass. ‘’Course I will. It will be a pleasure, as long as you promise me you won’t want to do anything daft like give up your job.’

‘No chance. I love the job. Anyway, we’ll need the money.’

They carried on painting, finishing by ten-thirty. Alice washed out the rollers while Joan wiped splashes off the skirting board.

‘That Nina Rawle,’ Alice said, ‘did she tell you who recommended you?’

‘No. It was probably Jenny Crisp, the young woman with the baby in Crouch End.’

Alice shook her head. ‘That’s what I’d assumed, but it wasn’t her. I know because she rang today and she said she hadn’t mentioned us to anyone. I’m sure we haven’t any other customers from Crouch End.’

‘I don’t know then. I must be more famous than I thought!’

Alice was sniffing the air. ‘There’s a very scented smell in this kitchen, sort of musky. What is it, some kind of air freshener?’

Joan pointed to the cantaloupe sitting on top of the fridge. ‘It’s that melon. Strong, isn’t it? They were on a special offer, I thought I’d try one.’

They had another vermouth as a nightcap and Alice left. Joan knew she wouldn’t be going straight home, though; she’d be calling at the office to check the answer-phone. She couldn’t wait to introduce Alice to Rich; she knew that they’d like each other. Her life felt good. For the first time in many years, everything was coming together. She raised her glass to Rich’s photo in the kitchen and said goodnight, sleep tight to him, as she always did.

3

NINA

‘C ara Majella,

‘I wonder if you are asleep now in your dormitory, breathing in dry Ethiopian air? I have no idea of time-zone differences between our respective continents. You’re probably toiling in the daylight, helping with irrigation or holding a health class. You used to refer to sleep as “John O’ Dreams”. It was a name you’d got from your mother, one of those comforting childhood sayings that adults cleave to. “I’m ready for John O’Dreams,” you would yawn at the end of a long evening in the students’ union bar, shaking your hair out. When I was bleary-eyed after listening to one of Finn’s lengthy position papers on Irish capitalism you would say that John O’Dreams was after me. He would steal gently into a room, unnoticed, relaxing tired muscles, softly closing the eyes. My mother used to warn me that the Sandman was on his way. When I was reluctant to settle down, she would say that she could hear his footsteps on the stairs. He was as bold as John O’Dreams was self-effacing, a threatening figure in my childhood imagination who threw stinging dust under the eyelids.

‘“Sleep offers us escape from grinding reality. It says, ‘that was then, this is now”. A balance evolves through sleep, an acknowledgement of the need for order. People say “sleep on it” when they mean that you need time to consider something, put a shape to it. That’s the kind of truism my new acquaintance Joan Douglas would utter: “sleep on it, things always seem different in the morning”. I’m sure that for most people, those with everyday anxieties, it does happen; they wake and smile, realising that in the light of day, things aren’t so bad after all.

‘Depriving someone of sleep is a form of punishment or torture; apart from the physical effects, it disorders their world and makes them crazy. But then we both knew that back in 1970; do you recall that we demonstrated outside an RUC barracks, protesting about the harsh treatment of political prisoners? We sprayed the reinforced concrete wall with yellow paint to signify police cowardice and ran before they could catch us.

‘I woke at two o’clock this morning and I immediately thought, some of us punish ourselves and some of us punish others. My father punished himself for losing his job by drinking his way to an early death. My mother punished him for never being the husband she aspired to by criticising every move he made. You punished yourself for what we did by becoming an exiled voluntary worker. I have delivered punishment on two fronts, pursuing retribution against myself for what I did with you and against Martin for loving me when I didn’t deserve to be loved.

‘One form of my punishment has been to wake at two every morning since the day I got married fifteen years ago. As my eyes open I look at the clock face and there it is, exactly two, as surely as if I had set the alarm. John O’Dreams and the Sandman linked arms and vanished from my life without warning on my wedding night. It is as if I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have the comfort and pleasure that Martin wanted to give me. The memory that lies always just beneath the surface was rising up in the silence of the night. Why should you sleep, it asked, why should you know warmth and companionship? So instead of the sanctuary I had hoped for, my marriage delivered me to bleak stretches of the night when I would lie and watch Martin sleeping. Contemplating another person sleep while you ache with tiredness becomes a kind of torture. There he was sailing a balmy sea of dreams while I stood shivering on a desolate shore. I knew all the little noises Martin made, the snuffles and sighs; I counted the number of times he turned in an hour and the pattern of his movements on the mattress. I tried copying his breathing, wondering if I could catch on to the shirt tails of his sleep and join it.