Andrew O'Hagan - The Illuminations

Each flat had a ledge by the front door, like a low concrete table, which the resident would crowd with ornaments. Flat 21 had a collection of porcelain dogs with sad eyes, jowly faces and hanging ears. Maureen’s daughter once said it was a black hole of empathy. Flat 20 had a host of fairies hopping about in eternity on gossamer wings. ‘Life is much more interesting if it scarcely exists,’ said their surprised little faces, their slender hands. Alice was heading to Maureen’s place, but passing her mother’s she saw again the photograph on her ledge of a shipyard and a red poppy stuck in the corner of the frame.

‘That photograph,’ Alice said, putting down her teacup, ‘the one outside my mother’s door. It’s one of hers, isn’t it? One of the ones she took years ago?’

‘Yes,’ Maureen said. She was washing the butter knife in the sink. ‘It was one of the pictures from those suitcases she keeps in her bathroom. But she says there’s a lot more of her stuff somewhere.’

‘And why get them out now?’

‘Well, your mum being the way she is, it’s good to get things out and try to remember, you know? The nurse in the Memory Club, she encourages that kind of thing. Get stuff out, she says. Get the old albums out and stir up the memories. So in the evenings your

mum and I have been pulling things out and I’ve been making piles of them. We thought we’d put that one outside the door for people to see.’

The late-night tasks. The letters to Luke. Alice couldn’t be sure she wasn’t envious of Maureen. It’s the sort of thing a daughter should be doing with her mother. And yet she was grateful to the neighbour because she knew that Anne would never have enjoyed doing those things with her. Anne trusted strangers, and so, quite clearly, did Maureen: they liked a new person’s willingness not to jump on the things you said, questioning everything and doubting you. Families did that but strangers didn’t. And so Alice swallowed another insult when she was told about the picture. The photographs were coming out of the suitcases and it was a good thing. And when she thought about it, well, it probably was a good thing if the past could emerge, at last, without her mother’s editing.

‘They’re fantastic pictures,’ Maureen said. ‘And I suppose they show you what Anne was like in her prime, you know, long before this started happening to her.’

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ Alice said. ‘Some people hide away in their prime. You can’t know them.’

‘And you only get to them later?’

‘That’s right. When they need you.’

‘You know I help her with her letters?’ Maureen said.

‘I do, yes,’ said Alice. ‘It’s been very kind. I appreciate it. Especially you helping her keep in touch with my son. We’re an odd family.’

‘I could show you odd. You should see mine. One minute you’re the best mammy in the world and the next minute you could be missing and they wouldn’t notice.’

‘I don’t think this tour’s been easy for Luke,’ Alice said. ‘The Ayrshire boy who died. You know about that? Well, Luke was there. He saw it.’

‘Aye. You and I spoke on the phone, remember? For a terrible moment we all thought …’

‘Yes.’

They sat in silence for a moment. Maureen felt Alice was a bit strange that day, a bit stressed or something, but frankly, it was hard enough trying to keep up with Anne without worrying about her daughter as well. ‘Anyway,’ Maureen said, ‘it’s not only the letters from Luke. Anne’s been getting other letters, too, and there’s one that seems quite important. It’s from Canada.’ Maureen brought it from the cutlery drawer and handed it to Alice. The envelope was marked with crayon and with various stamps and crossings out. The name of the place it came from was across the top of the letter. ‘The Art Gallery of Ontario,’ read Alice. And when her eye dropped to the foot of the page she read out the whole address: ‘317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 1G4.’

‘That’s the address. It’s a woman, I think,’ Maureen said, twisting her head to get a better view of the letter she’d already looked at many times. Alice went on in silence and pressed her own lips with a finger when she noticed they were moving. The curator who wrote the letter said she was writing about ‘Mrs Quirk’s photographs’, and she used the words ‘honoured’ and ‘intrigued’, ‘visionary’ and ‘important’. It said the gallery was planning an exhibition of lost women photographers and that Anne Quirk was an artist with a connection to Ontario. The word ‘marginalised’ appeared in the third paragraph, and, further down, where Alice noticed a teacup stain, it spoke of ‘permission’. Alice felt a

sudden weight of responsibility reading the letter. She wasn’t at all sure what to think so she folded it away immediately and put the envelope in her bag.

‘Isn’t that something?’ Maureen said.

Alice found it hard to say anything. She simply stood looking at the images on the television, staring at them before realising there was no sound on, then she turned with damp eyes to the centre of the room and tried to regain her composure. In some rooms you don’t notice the contents so much as how carefully they’ve been polished.

CENTRAL STATION

They say oil and water don’t mix. But those people never walked out of Cowcaddens and turned at the corner to face the card shops and their helium balloons, the windows displaying teddies and jokes in all weathers. They never walked down Sauchiehall Street in the pouring rain and felt the oil in the rain that waxes your skin and makes you belong to Glasgow. She turned into Renfield Street and immediately thought of the exhaust fumes from the old buses and the neon signs above Central Station that used to glow in the dark with ads for sugar and whisky.

It was 1981 again. The days of Sean and her with bags of chips after nights at the Apollo. If you meet a man who can make you laugh then stay with him for ever. And that was her Sean: he could make a dark night and a poke of chips something you’d want to remember. She could see the two of them walking down Renfield Street with the neon above and Glasgow standing cold in the exact present, their fingers all salt and vinegar. She could

still feel the warm brown chip-paper inside the

Evening Times

with the print coming off on her hands. They could ignore the news then because it wasn’t about them and she saw Sean balling up the paper and chucking it into a bin, pulling her in for a kiss.

She always got nervous walking in the city centre with Sean, the green, white and orange buses and the whole Rangers and Celtic thing and him a soldier beginning his service in Belfast. It was a sectarian time and you could get into trouble, but those nights out with Sean seemed to glow pleasantly in her mind.

Bell’s Scotch Whisky. ‘Afore ye go.’

‘Afore ye go where?’ Sean said. ‘I mean, they’re saying: “Drink whisky, afore ye go.”’

‘Before ye go out.’

‘But if you drink Bell’s whisky before you go out for the evening you’ll be drunk by the time you get there.’

‘True.’

‘So what does it mean, “Afore ye go”? Drink Bell’s whisky, before you die?’

She remembered laughing. Creasing up. The laughter in your youth that comes before everything.

‘Before ye go to bed? What does it mean, Alice? Before ye go into a meeting? Before you go on holiday? I’m asking you: what does it mean, the advertisement for Bell’s Scotch whisky? Afore ye go? But what is

go

? And what is

afore

?’

‘And what is

ye

?’ she said.

‘Exactly!’ Sean said. ‘What is the ye that must have Bell’s Scotch whisky before he — or, okay, she — goes?’