Cells: memories for my mother

CELLS

Gavin McCrea is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Mrs Engels (2015) and The Sisters Mao (2021), both published by Scribe. His articles have appeared in The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Irish Times, Catapult, and LitHub.

Scribe Publications

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Published by Scribe 2022

Copyright © Gavin McCrea 2022

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Excerpt from Louise Bourgeois, 29 September 1955. Loose sheet of writing (LB-0126); © The Easton Foundation/LVAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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This book is for my mother, Breda

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: DUBLIN, 2020

CELL I

INTERLUDE: COUNTY MAYO, 1989

CELL II

INTERLUDE: ÎLE D’OLÉRON, 1993

CELL III

INTERLUDE: ROME, 2004

CELL IV

INTERLUDE: PARIS, 2013

CELL V

INTERLUDE: HORTA DE SANT JOAN, 2013

CELL VI

INTERLUDE: LONDON, 2015

CELL VII

EPILOGUE: MADRID, 20—

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE: DUBLIN, 2020

I am spending the quarantine in a small flat in south Dublin with my eighty-year-old mother, who, according to the emergency regulations, is not allowed outside at any time or for any reason, but who at ten o’clock every morning, having breakfasted and hoovered and watered the flowerpots and decided she can’t spend another moment within these walls, insists on packing her coin purse and a bottle of water into her backpack—she leaves her mobile phone on the kitchen counter—and setting off on a route that takes her along the Dodder River, through Rathgar, then Milltown, then Clonskeagh, into Donnybrook, where, in the only place open, a SPAR supermarket, she buys a takeaway coffee and a pastry to be eaten as she makes her way through Herbert Park, Ballsbridge, Ringsend, reaching the River Liffey at Tom Clarke Bridge, in normal circumstances a busy toll link but now empty of traffic, which allows her to stand in the middle of the road as she looks across to the port on the other bank, and the moored boats, and the warehouses, and the cranes that seem to be holding up by thin threads the skeletons of new office blocks, and I wonder what comes to her mind then, at that spot, taking in this scene, which even devoid of people and cars and in this bright spring weather cannot, I imagine, be beautiful, is there something specific that touches her, the sight of a swallow returned from Africa perhaps, before she turns around and returns the way she came—eight kilometres each way, sixteen in total—and comes back through the door and takes off her shoes, and I say to her from the kitchen where I am preparing our lunch—vegetarian salads or soba noodles or pilaf or roasted vegetables and, twice a week, fresh fish, for both of us are skinny and live in terror of weight gain—‘Did you get arrested?’ and she says, ‘Pardon?’ because she is almost deaf, and I say, ‘Did they slap a fine on you at least?’ and if she hears this, which she sometimes chooses to, she lets out a laugh before going into her bedroom to get changed into her indoor jumper and slacks, and, because she doesn’t emerge for a while, I call in to her, ‘This is ready, come in and sit down,’ but she can never sit down immediately, she has to do something first, like put a wash into the machine, so I am always at the table before her, waiting, already irritated, and when finally she does come, she says, ‘This is gorgeous,’ before she has even tasted the food, and then, ‘Are you going into town today?’ which annoys me further because it is something she says all the time, having forgotten she said it before, and I say, ‘Jesus, Mum, not this again,’ and she says, ‘What again?’ and I say, ‘Why would I be going into town? Town is shut down,’ and while she can see I am upset and wants not to upset me like this, she is also wounded by my tone, and I am ashamed then and can only look at my plate, and I decide not to bring up what I intended to bring up, about the past, and about my need for her to apologise for it.

CELL I

Entrance is by a glass-fronted door on the east side of the building. Going through, I am in a vestibule about twice the size of an old telephone box. It is cold here, even on a warm day. Lights flash on an alarm box mounted on the wall, announcing its readiness for use. My mother is against alarms, the idea as much as the noise, and I would switch it off permanently to save the energy, but the required code has long been forgotten. Turning around to close the door behind me, my rucksack of groceries ruffles the leaves of a plant that sits on a low table. Placed in that particular spot, the plant does not get knocked over by the opening door or broken by things coming through the letter box, but it does obstruct access to the narrow flight of stairs, forcing me to mount the first step diagonally rather than straight-on.

There are fifteen steps up, covered in an old carpet of beige, mauve, burgundy, and blue stripes. When my mother bought this flat a decade ago, she was adamant that a stairlift be immediately installed in case she suddenly lost her mobility. She was coming from a semi-detached suburban house—with a big sitting room downstairs into which a bed could be put, if it ever came to that—and she wanted to be prepared. She had lived the first years of her life in a single room at the top of a house in the city centre, so she knew what it was like: the breath that was expended ascending and descending, the lugging up of water pails, the dragging down of ash. She also knew that people sometimes gave up and took to staying in, requiring others to do the up-and-down for them. She was frightened of that end for herself. The loss of independence. The shame of having to rely on others.

Really rather irrational, we thought.

‘Not quite at the stairlift stage, Mum. We’ll hold off on that.’

The legs, we were right to believe, would be the last thing to go.

Coming up the stairs, there is about a handspan of distance on either side between my shoulders and the walls. For two people to cross each other here, they would have to put their backs against the wall, and even then their torsos, their busts would rub against each other.

Que leurs torses, leurs bustes se frottent!

(A little command from my ego. A director in search of a cast.)

Through a second door and I am in the main living space. (I am arriving alone, in case there was any ambiguity.) A single room with an open kitchen, a dining table, and a seating area. A large window in the opposite wall, facing west. A smaller window in the kitchen. A glass door giving on to a tiny balcony. Bright enough, overall, not to require lights until late in the evening. And quiet. No flat overhead, and the one downstairs has been empty for some time. No car engines or horns because the main road is at a distance. No television set. No music player. There is a flashy internet radio—the internet itself I had installed only a couple of weeks ago—but it is only rarely turned on these days because, unless she sits right beside it and turns the volume right up, she can no longer make out the voices. For a while she missed them. Then she stopped mentioning them.

To the right, running along the north wall, are her bookshelves. Her collection was thinned out during the move from the family home, but what remains is by any standard impressive; that it belongs to a woman with only a bare-bones primary education, I think is extraordinary. The Irish, of course. But also the Russians. The French. The English. The Americans. A special section dedicated to Richard Ford, with whom she is in a sort of psychogenic relationship. She buys his books in hardback as soon as they come out, and cuts out his interviews, and talks about his professed devotion to his wife as something marvellous, if a bit weird. She met him once at a book signing in Dublin. While waiting for him to finish writing on her copy of Lay of the Land, she took a good look at his shoes.

‘My goodness. They’re exactly the sort I imagine Frank Bascombe to wear.’

Over which they shared a good old laugh.

Of all Ford’s works, she holds a particular fondness for his memoir of his parents, Between Them. Ford’s father had been a travelling salesman, a bit like my own father, and Ford’s mother had been educated by nuns and then taken out of school without explanation, a bit like her.

‘Just ordinary people. No great earthquakes.’

She finished the book, cried, then opened it at the beginning and went again.

Ford says of his relationship with his mother: ‘We could always say I love you to clarify our complicated dealings without pausing. That seems perfect to me now and did then.’

It seems perfect to me, too. I admire it, as I think my mother does, though she would not tolerate much of it in reality. Sometimes, in our moments of intimacy, I do manage an I-love-you, but she does not return it. She is proficient in the other gestures. It is the words that are hard for her.

‘I’m a doer, not a sayer.’

When I point out to her that that is a false division, that in fact saying is a form of doing, she looks put out. She enjoys hearing things that she herself could not say, reading things she could not write. She likes articulate people. But that does not mean she wants them in her kitchen, coming at her.

On the floor, just beyond the threshold, is a folded newspaper on which my hiking boots and her walking sandals are placed side by side. There being space for these two pairs only, I keep my runners on as I head for the big window opposite, which is closed and needs to be opened unless the heating is on, and sometimes even then: the place must be kept aired. After six steps, I am in the seating area, which consists of three ill-matching bits of furniture. One: a moss-green two-seater couch, too uncomfortable to settle into, but fine for perching on to get access to my mother’s good ear. Two: a massive, and I mean massive, coffee table—the weight, I would wager, of one of those new Cinquecentos I see parked everywhere outside—on whose lower shelf she keeps her theatre and concert programmes, her art books, her poetry collections, her saved articles, her things to dip into. Three: an armchair in cream faux leather, pre-ergonomic. This is where my mother reads her novels and does her crosswords. Right now, it is empty, because she is out for her walk. Morning is for exercising, and the hour after lunch is for washing up and drying and organising, but after that, in the late afternoon and evening, her rest earned, she permits herself to sit, and this is her place. A nice part of the day, that. Both of us exercised and fed. Me in my room working. She in her chair reading and scribbling. The place hushed. Peaceful. My favourite time. My most productive. Unless:

‘Do you know what terpsichorean means?’

‘No.’

‘No? And you a doctor of literature.’

A couple of more steps gets me to the window, which is framed by a pair of curtains decorated with horizontal bands of gold and coral. Outside on the grass, two heterosexual families, safely detached, are having picnics. Nearby, a pair of infants, girls, are playing house in a branded and highly gendered tent: pink, princess, turrets, bleugh. I open the window, which lets the voices in, though I am careful not to listen to the message they are carrying. The dwellings in this development are completely ordinary: what, situated in any other part of the city, any other part of Europe, would be working-class homes. Squat, uninspired blocks of red brick. Two and three storeys. Two-bed units, mostly. But the area, the so-called postcode—recently replaced by a more complex Eircode but persisting as a single digit in the national consciousness—has the highest property prices in the country. I am ashamed even to know this. It disgusts me that people get to live here, as I do, on these roads, by this river, with these shops, and town right there. My only reassurance is the certainty that the conversations happening around me are abysmal.

Headline: The Perfect Pandemic Escape in Wicklow for €550,000.

Possibly the picnickers are talking about that. As I am talking about it now. The perfect escape: is that not death? In the meantime, there is no getting way from ourselves. I look down at my neighbours on their blankets, picking from plastic tubs of olives, and it is painful because they could just as well be me.

Moving from the window towards the kitchen, I pass the dining table, another colossal structure. A rectangle long enough for six high-backed chairs in brown-and-beige faux leather. The surface divided into two parts. On one end, two place mats (more beige faux leather) that mark our mealtime positions: mine on the inside facing out, hers on the outside facing in. On the other end, her easel, along with a box of watercolour paints and some mixing trays, all now unused. She used to paint all the time. Well, a couple of times a week in the summer, anyway. At the dining table in the old family home. In the afternoon, after lunch, accompanied by a vinyl of classical music. Jars of water brought in from the kitchen tap. To begin with, her brushes glancing the surface of the water, just to moisten the bristles; then plunging deep and swirling around, turning everything brown. ‘Change that water for me, can you, love?’ The careful squeezing of tubes so as not to release too much paint. The scratch of her blade over a line of masking fluid. And her cry of distress—‘Ah!’—when she made a mistake, one wash too many, requiring a rush to the sink, where the paper was put under running water. Her palette: French ultramarine, cadmium red, indigo, carmine, cerulean, rose, terracotta. Her style, impressionistic. The mood dreamy. A still life of pears whose blue shadows bleed back onto the skin. A cellist with no features on her face. A woman in a chair, her back to the viewer, her hair in a bun. An ancient statue, blue amongst blocks of sandy stone. A copse of bare trunks, a grey-blue sky, rays of purple and yellow light breaking through, and splashes of pink and red all over (achieved by running her thumb along a toothbrush soaked with colour): my favourite. The walls of the flat are decorated with these paintings. Framed in bleached wood. In the bottom right-hand corner of each, her signature painted on a diagonal. The images, which had always been hazy, now faded by time. She will not take up painting again. But nor will she take the easel and the tubes of colour off the dining table. They will stay there as artefacts on display. Objects of historical interest.

In the kitchen, I put my rucksack down on the cream tiled floor and begin to put the shopping away. Vegetables into the dark utility room. Fruit into the bowls on the counter. Pulses and legumes and rice and couscous into the cupboard beside the cooker. But there is no guarantee these items will stay in those places. When my mother comes home, chances are she will make changes. Like, wash the fruit again and put them in different bowls on the table. Or transfer the vegetables to the icebox in the fridge. Or rearrange the cupboard, swapping the pasta and the muesli around. As far as I can tell, she does not have fixed ideas about where specific objects ought to be. Rather, the moving around of things, the placing and the replacing, evokes in her the pleasurable sensation of establishing a new order. Her order.

‘Mum, where’s the aubergine I bought? Are you hiding things from me again?’

Perhaps her most unusual habit is that of putting the kitchen utensils, especially the grater and the colander, onto the radiator or the windowsill to dry. Which is to say, after she has dried them with a tea-towel, she puts them out in the sun, or gives a blast of heat, to finish them off. There is a simple point to this, which rationally I am able to fathom: she does not want them going rusty. But there are occasions when I am cooking, with a number of fronts open—something frying and something else steaming and the pasta now ready to be drained—and I am standing in the middle of the kitchen with the pot in my hand and cannot find the fucking colander because it is on the other side of the room, lying upside down on the windowsill, basking in the afternoon sunshine, what may as well be oceans away, another continent, and I feel so angry that my mother is withholding from me what I need that I am minded to tip the boiling water and the—as of thirty seconds ago—al dente rigatoni over her head.

Standing now in front of the open cupboard, a tin of puy lentils in my hand, the memory of the colander brings with it an angry aftershock, one of such power that I feel a terrible constriction in my chest, over which I lay my free hand in order to massage it in slow circles, so that it does not rise up to my throat and my temples, where it could stay all day and turn into an argument.

If a memoir were ever written about her, my mother would prefer it to be like Between Them. In other words, she would prefer to be dead before it is written. I do not blame her. But I think she understands, also, that Ford is writing about his parents as a means to reveal something about himself. He is writing himself through them. And I am doing the same. I cannot see another way. I cannot conceive of a self-portrait that is not painted using my mother’s brushes, that is not a reconstruction by me, of me, from the externals of her life: this flat, that easel, a tin of puy lentils, and, above all else, her.

Off the main living room, down a short corridor, is the bathroom. The bathroom door opens inwards; at its full extension, it reaches halfway into the room, almost as far as the toilet. If I am not careful and come in too quickly, the inside handle meets the glass of the shower door, making an unpleasant bang. To the left is the sink, which is built into a line of cupboards that takes up most of the room, leaving an area of floor about two metres long and half a metre wide. Two paces and I am at the toilet; when sitting down, my knees are about a handspan from the cupboard doors. Above the sink, a mirror is plastered onto the wall flush with the tiles. These wall tiles are a darker beige than the floor ones. Because there are no windows, when the light is turned on, a fan in the ceiling automatically starts up. The noise of this fan is one of four in the flat which my mother can clearly hear and which bother her (the other three: the washing machine, the fridge, the gas boiler). And, in truth, it bothers me, too. As does the quality of the light. So, when using this room, we both of us tend to keep the door open to let the natural light in and the air out. Since only a limited amount of natural light reaches this part of the flat, we have learned to function in semi-darkness. The open door, meanwhile, serves less to clear away smells than to trouble the boundaries between the public and the private.

What I am trying to say is, my mother talks to me while I am on the toilet. She stands in the open doorway, establishes eye contact with me through the gloom, and speaks to me. I return her gaze and respond. We have a conversation. Usually about something unrelated to the bodily act in which I am currently engaged. But on occasion about that act, too. In general, we do not shy from talking about our shit.

‘The system can’t cope with our good diet,’ she says as she heads towards the toilet with a bucket of water to flush away the latest stoppage.

From my bedroom, I can sometimes hear her shit hitting the water, the deep plop of a stone dropped into a well. I make jokes about this, and she laughs, but actually, for the most part, we take our bowels quite seriously. When they are moving well, we are content. When they are not, we are not. (Though, to tell the truth, my mother expresses few problems in this area. Her transit is, by the sounds of it, robust and free-flowing. The anxiety I am expressing here is mine alone. Freud has some things to say about the sort of person who fixates on his anus, but we will get to them—Freud, my anus—later.)

I am less inclined than my mother to begin dialogues across the bathroom threshold, but I do regularly pass by the open door when she is inside and see her both on the toilet and in various states of undress. She sleeps in just a pair of underpants, no bra, no nightdress, and goes to bed hours before me, so our paths sometimes cross when she gets up to piss. When this happens, I do not fix my gaze or allow it to linger, but nor do I look away. I have seen the naked body of my eighty-year-old mother enough to know it fairly well. And it is beautiful.

I say this without sentimentality. I am not trying to convince myself, or others, that I am one of those (fictional) people enlightened enough to see beauty in absolutely everything. I am acknowledging, merely, that I am glad to possess this picture of my mother’s naked body, which she herself has given to me, and which I can now conjure whenever I want, as a memory but also as a certain kind of knowledge (about bodies and sexuality and time and mind and history and women and sons and me).

There were no locks in the house I grew up in. My parents had keys to the front door, but we children did not. We came and went through the back door, which was left unlocked. Neither were there locks on the inside doors of the house. On the bathroom door, not even one of those little bars that slide across. Nada. A lack that was not counterbalanced by a system of rules designed to keep six bodies a modest distance from one another. No, it was a free-for-all. It was not uncommon that I, at age ten or twelve or fifteen or twenty, would be in the shower, soaping my balls behind the thin white curtain, when my mother would walk straight in, no knock, and begin to brush her teeth.

‘I won’t be a minute.’

A number of habits from my upbringing I have rebelled against or tried to rid myself of, with varying degrees of failure. Communal bathrooming is not one of them, despite my former protestations against it:

‘I can’t handle this any more!’

In my relationships, it turns out, I do not respond well to being locked out. I was fucking you in the arse a minute ago, now I’m not allowed to see you taking a dump? Or, to put it more constructively, I seek out and thrive in the sort of closeness in which the bathroom door is left open. In which communication continues uninterrupted from the bedroom to the bathroom, and between the sink and the toilet and the shower. I have known profound dialogues to take place while I sit on the edge of a bath and my lover opens his bowels beside me. The end of at least one relationship was postponed by a hand passing through my hair while I washed my hole at the bidet. What I am describing is not an imagined ideal state of intimacy, for I know it exists, yet today I find my heart aching as if for something unattainable.

In the final months of her life, my maternal grandmother moved in to our house. On her first morning with us, I (fourteen years old) came out of my bedroom to be greeted with the sight, through the open bathroom door, of her naked figure, or almost naked, on the toilet. My mother was standing beside her, supporting her by keeping hold of her extended arm. The scene, which moves me when I think about it now, embarrassed me then, and I made to slip away. But my mother stopped me:

‘Come and say hello to Nana.’

I paused in front of the open door. ‘Hi Nana.’ And then (that horrible Irish tic): ‘How are you?’

My grandmother passed her gnarled hand—curled back on itself by arthritis—across her forehead and, speaking over the sound of water falling into water, said: ‘I am old.’

Serious question: will my past experience of toilet intimacy with lovers prepare me, train me, make me ready for intimacy with my elderly mother? My wanting to be close to a man when he shits, and my wanting a man to be close to me when I shit: will this desire stand to me if and when I am called upon to wipe her arse?

Recently, for the first time, I had a conversation with my siblings about long-term care for her, in the course of which I heard myself say that, when the time came, I would look after her. I would do for my mother what she had done for her own mother. I would sit her on the toilet and hold her arm.

Come and say hello to—

I have lived abroad for most of the past twenty years. During the last couple of these, when speaking to my mother on the phone, I noticed a change in her ability to engage with me and to retain the information I gave her, but I put this down to her hearing loss and to her lifelong dislike of communicating over a wire. Then last summer she got lost while walking home on a route she knew well, which alarmed my siblings because it suggested the onset of a more serious decline. In November of the same year, I came back to Ireland to take up a one-year residency. My mother offered me her spare room for the duration. As soon as I moved in, I noticed a marked change in her behaviour. She was getting confused about time and date and place. She was initiating the same conversation over and over. When I relayed information to her, about where I was going or what I was doing, she retained little of it. She was obsessing about appointments: about where they were and with whom. Was it right what she had written in the calendar?

Since quarantine, the situation has got worse. Or perhaps I just get to observe it for longer periods and from closer range. Whereas before I was spending my days at the library or teaching at the university, seeing her only at mealtimes and as I came and went, now I am in the flat with her for most of the day. Outside of my work, she has become my entire focus. And what I see is a woman whose mind is slipping.

I report this to the others.

‘This is only going in one direction,’ my eldest brother responds.

So we talk about the future. And I say I will look after her because I am the best placed to do so. It is what I want.

‘Are you sure about that?’ my sister says.

Yes, I am sure. I do not want her going into a nursing home. I see it as my duty to provide her final care. After all she has done for me, it is the least I could do in return. I will hold her while she goes for a shit. I will reach down behind her and wipe her dirty arse. I will take a wet rag to her breasts, her bottom, her vagina. I will do all of that. Yes, I have thought about it. I have visualised it. I have put myself in her place, standing next to Nana, and I am comfortable there. I am okay with her body.

But no body exists without the mind, and it is that—the mental part—that I am (and my siblings are) more worried about. Will I have the tolerance to answer her questions all day, to repeat myself over and over, and to know that tomorrow will be the same or worse? How long before my own sanity begins to fray? Will I bully her? Will she bully me? Will I be willing to give up work to be available for her around the clock? Will I neglect friendships and turn down relationships because they interfere with my ability to care for her? Will I resent her for that?

‘Are you sure?’ my sister says.

‘Yes,’ I say.

But, in the concrete, I am not.

Adjacent to the bathroom is my mother’s bedroom. About three by four metres. A single bed. A wardrobe. A chair. A chest of drawers. The walls bare apart from a couple of her watercolours: a Japanese geisha and a female nude reclining on the floor reading a book. My bedroom, a little smaller, is next door. A single bed. A wardrobe. A chair. A bookshelf that I have converted into a standing desk (my laptop on the highest shelf, an external keyboard in the middle, my notebooks and reference texts on the bottom). A spare mattress that sits on its side against the wall in case my sister, who lives outside Dublin, ever wants to stay the night (in which case the giant coffee table in the living room is pushed against the bookshelves, and the mattress put in its place).

The bedrooms, divided as they are by a thin non-supporting wall, form two compartments of a single cell. From my compartment—I am the bug, the rat, the stool pigeon, the snitch—I can hear my mother sleep. At first, in the stage of light sleep, she tends to snore. After that, in deep sleep, she goes completely silent.

(Once, with the aim of getting clean sheets from the drawers under her bed, I entered her room while she was in this silent state. She was lying face-up with her head tilted to the right side of the pillow. In the bar of light coming in from the corridor, her skin looked pale. Her limbs were petrified. Her chest did not appear to be rising or falling; there did not seem to be any air entering or leaving her lungs. I approached her, came right up to her face, and for an instant, before I heard a quiet gurgle in her throat, I beheld a picture of her death. Or perhaps ‘death’ was merely the name I lazily gave to what would have been, if I had looked more carefully, a picture of undistorted life?)

Later, when she transitions into REM, she sighs and moans and sometimes even calls out. That is when I know she is having her dreams.

‘I had a bad dream last night.’

‘Yes, I heard you.’

‘It was my youngest granddaughter. She needed my help and I couldn’t reach her.’

‘What was happening to her?’

‘She was sick. Or in danger. I can’t remember. But I couldn’t get there. It was terrible.’

My mother sleeps well. She goes to bed early, around nine o’clock, rarely after ten. Between sleep cycles, she gets up to go the toilet; afterwards, despite the nightmares that often await her, she does not struggle to drop off again. At around seven, she gets up and has a cup of herbal tea and a small bite, then returns to bed to read and snooze until around nine. In all, she can clock up ten or eleven hours. My father was the opposite. He would come home from work at around eight or nine in the evening, have his supper, then fall asleep on the couch. When he woke up, at eleven or so, he would go to bed, where he would toss and turn, plagued by anxiety, until five o’clock—an hour of the morning that has always been loaded with signification for me—when he would get up and go back to work. To his mind, getting out of bed and returning to work was an escape route from the anxieties of the night, yet in reality his work was a principal source of those anxieties. It was a closed loop he was trapped in, going around and around, getting ever more exhausted and maddened, until it eventually finished him off.

Since coming to live with my mother, and especially since quarantine, I have been sleeping longer and more profoundly, while the quality of my dreams has improved. The pictures are richer and more finely detailed than usual. The sequences of images, though they shift and slide as normal, are less interrupted and last longer. I am also remembering my dreams more than I typically do; I am recalling specific aspects, sometimes apparently tiny details, about the characters, the objects, the attire, the environments that I see, all without losing any receptivity to the larger narratives and emotional landscapes that determine the form and the direction of the action.

As a literary experiment—so as to collect these unusually vivid dreams and submit them to interpretation—I have started to keep a journal. As soon as I wake up,