WATERFORD CRYSTAL

Shortly after my ninth birthday, my grandmother fetched me from school and told me my mother was dead.

I didn’t believe her.  My mother wasn’t old enough to die, like my great-grandmother fading into confusion and death, or my Aunty Fanny, a huge woman who spent the last five years of her life in a wheelchair before falling onto the floor, dead before she landed, the doctor said.  “How can Mummy be dead?”

“What do you want to know for?”

Her question confused me.  I didn’t understand what it had to do with the one I’d asked, but my grandmother often followed a line of reasoning that wasn’t obvious. 

 “I don’t know why it’s left to me to tell you.  She was in a barracks in Belfast. The IRA put a bomb under it.”

I knew about bombs. You couldn’t live in Ireland without knowing about things getting blown up, but no one explained to me what my mother, a Dublin Irish Catholic, was doing in Belfast, let alone a British barracks.  My grandmother muttered something about an English officer but seemed more agitated over the fact that, with her son, my father, godknowswhere, I’d have to live with her in her flat in Palmerston Villa, a cul-de-sac of five-floor townhouses fifteen minutes by bus from the center of Dublin.   

I tried to help out.  “I don’t want to live here.  I want to go to Uncle Sid’s.”  My mother’s brother lived by the sea in Blackrock and I liked my Aunty May and my two cousins, Aiden and Derek. 

“Uncle Sid can’t take you.  I’ve already asked him, believe me.  Their house isn’t big enough and you can’t share a room with the boys.”

So, that was that.  I was the stinging nettle in the simple garden of my grandmother’s life; returning again and again to disturb the orderly pattern of her days, despite all her efforts to get rid of me.

However, I still didn’t believe my mother was dead.  I’d attended no funeral, seen no coffin, observed not a single teardrop fall from my grandmother’s eye, so I followed my own line of reasoning - mummies didn’t get blown up by bombs when they had children waiting for them.    

I decided she’d be back, most likely run off for a while, like my father, although no one ever went so far as to tell me he was dead.  No matter what anyone said, I knew, with absolute certainty, she would one day appear, arms outstretched, turning me from stinging nettle into precious rose with her happy, mother smile.

Meantime, I’d just have to put up with living with my grandmother in her cold, damp flat.  It had a long, dim hallway that ran from the front door all the way back to a tiny kitchen, passing on its way the front bedroom flanked by a large living-room, on the opposite side the dark, back bedroom that shared a wall with a long, cupboard-like bathroom enclosed in stained ceiling and paint-peeling walls.  Large, black spiders crouched, menacingly, in the pitted bathtub, vigorously resisting all efforts to drown them.

The kitchen at the end of the hallway stank of old grease, sour cabbage and gas from the small, black stove on which my grandmother cooked our meals; breakfasts of rashers and eggs, dinners of boiled potatoes and cabbage with fried sausages or liver. 

The kitchen had a coldwater tap that dripped; fat, heavy drops of water that went plunk, plunk, plunk against the metal drain of the gray, stone sink, the sound marching through the flat with the rhythmic tread of a parade of soldiers; along the hallway, into all the rooms, even into the bathroom, with the door closed; plunk, plunk, plunk.  Of all my memories of that miserable flat, I remember that relentless plunk.  No one ever needed to explain the workings of Chinese Water Torture to me.  I lived it.

My grandmother and I shared the large, front bedroom.  She’d been obliged to rent out the living room and back bedroom to students and office girls since my grandfather, two years earlier and after forty years of staggering home drunk every night, escaped to England with a woman he met at a pub and promptly keeled over. 

While my grandmother made no secret of her relief that the years of living with him had ended, his demise left her financially strapped.  Her income consisted of the small rents she received from the students and office girls, and my grandfather's pension from the Four Courts, where he'd worked as an accountant.  Our beds stood side by side in that front bedroom, their stained, wooden headboards rammed against the wall and separated by a small table on which sat a lamp in the shape of a cocker spaniel.  A shiny, red quilt covered my grandmother’s bed, my narrow cot draped in green sateen that often ended in a heap on the floor at night, exposing me to the cold of the room and evading my groping fingers as I sought to drag it back over my scrawny, shivering body.

A large, black fireplace huddled against the adjacent wall, lit only on Sundays, a waste of coal, as far as I was concerned, since all it did was puff swirls of smoke into the room and give off little in the way of heat.

Broad windows stretched across the wall opposite the beds.  Since the flat was below ground level, bars covered these windows.  I sat for hours on the broad windowsills watching for my mother, observing the blades of grass above grow long, get whisked away by the whirling blades of a hand-pushed lawn mower and grow long again.  I studied the rough, crevassed trunks of trees - and people's feet.  I knew the scuffed, brown shoes of the postman, the flapping soles of the boy who delivered the newspapers my grandmother scanned every morning for the latest obituaries.  I listened for the sharply tapping stiletto-heeled pumps of the lady who lived in the flat upstairs and looked for the hurrying, laced-up blue footwear of her three-year old son, Terence, as he hastened to keep up with those stiletto pumps.Velvet curtains, once green, now faded into stripes of sun bleached yellow, framed the imprisoned glass.  A large spider, this one gray, lived high up in one corner of the velvet curtain, its web thick and clotted from many repairs.  The creature hid during the day, lurking at the top of a long, gray tunnel.  I'd seen its thick, protruding legs.  At night, I knew it emerged to patrol the room for fallen bits of food, or to look for an exposed vein in which to sink its fangs.  I dreaded the spider but said nothing to my grandmother about its predatory presence as I knew she’d make me deal with it and I could not.

A green, flowered carpet covered the floor, enclosed by a foot or so of dusty, brown-painted floorboards.  I knew the carpet's repeating pattern well as I traced it on many rainy afternoons, while my grandmother dozed in her chair by the smoky fire or clucked her tongue at the seemingly endless bad news in the newspaper, her Woolworth glasses hanging precariously on the end of her nose.   

We never had enough of anything; food, heat, hot water, and we seldom left the flat except to take occasional walks to a small park just around the corner where I played on the swings while my grandmother sat on a nearby bench reading yet another newspaper.

She drank, not like my grandfather, but enough.  When I saw her get out the whiskey bottle, I’d hunch down on the window sill and try to make myself invisible, absorbing myself in one of the library books I’d wheedled her into taking out for me with the promise she wouldn’t hear a sound from me for hours if she did. 

I loved the Treasuries of Faerie Stories, big, solid books with full-page pictures of faerie girls with golden hair and rainbow-colored wings flittering about in flower-filled meadows, boy faeries in green or brown, tiny swords buckled on.  I let the world of witches and ogres, wizards and wands, dragons and flying horses take me away from the place where I lived, imagining their stories in my head at night as I lay awake, listening over my grandmother’s snoring, for the sound of my mother ringing the doorbell. 

More than two glasses of whiskey sent my grandmother on a tear about the many wrongs done her by my grandfather, my father, my mother, the bus conductor, the shop lady and prompting her to demand my attention by snatching the book out of my hands and hurling it across the room with threats to throw it on the fire if I went after it.I tried to be patient through the long, empty days upon days, while I waited for my mother, my life seeming to drain away like water from perforated tea kettle.

But there was one source of richness in the dark, scarcity of my life - six glittering pieces of Waterford crystal sitting on top of the long, mahogany sideboard that took up most of the remaining wall of the bedroom, prizes my grandmother had won playing amateur golf when she was young.

They were thick and heavy, and I kept them sparkling by rubbing them every day with lavatory paper, arranging and rearranging the pieces until I had the perfect placement for each one. 

In the back row, I set the two eighteen-inch tall, wide-mouthed vases with the six-inch square pedestals, their angled sides deeply etched in elaborate, geometric patterns.  I made them the king and the queen.  In the next row, I lined up the two nine-inch vases, their rims fluted like the edge of a pastry pie.  These were the children; Prince Valor and Princess Rose.  Off to one side I placed the queen’s lady-in-waiting – a boat-shaped salad bow, patterned in shimmering vines, leaves, and flowers.  On the other side, I put the dowager queen, an eight-sided bowl poised on three small, cat paws and carved from a single lump of quartz, its sides etched in bright clumps of pansies and roses. 

I spoke to these glittering creatures as I polished them, confiding in them the secrets of my heart, my knots of worry over my mother’s continued absence.  What if my grandmother told the truth?  What if my mother really had been blown up?  What if I had to stay with my grandmother, who didn’t want me to?  How would I get on?

I lived for days of clear skies when, in the late morning, the sun shot a beam of light through the barred windows straight at the crystal.  The sunlight fired off the cut facets of the glass, flinging chunks of rainbow across the smooth surface of the sideboard, exploding, like a firework, into a hundred points of light that flashed and darted about the room; tiny faeries with flowing hair and diaphanous wings.  For those few moments, my barred and monotonous life became transformed by my grandmother’s Waterford crystal into a shining, flower-filled meadow in which I, a cut-glass, crystal princess, waited for my mother to come running towards me, arms outstretched, face bright with love.