A Star Called Henry (2 page)

She walked into my father. Melody Nash met Henry Smart. She walked right into him, and he fell. She was half his weight, half his height, six years younger but he fell straight over like a cut tree. Love at first sight? Felled by her beauty? No. He was maggoty drunk and missing his leg. He was holding himself up with a number seven shovel he’d found inside an open door somewhere back the way he’d come when Melody Nash walked into him and dropped him onto Dorset Street. It was a Sunday. She was coming from half-eight mass, he was struggling out of Saturday. Missing a leg and his sense of direction, he hit the street with his forehead and lay still. Melody dropped the beads she’d made herself and stared down at the man. She couldn’t see his face; it was kissing the street. She saw a huge back, a back as big as a bed, inside a coat as old and crusted as the cobbles around it. Shovel-sized hands at the end of his outstretched arms, and one leg. Just the one. She actually lifted the coat to check.

—Where’s your leg gone, mister? said Melody.

She lifted the coat a bit more.

—Are you dead, mister? she said.

The man groaned. Melody dropped the coat and stepped back. She looked around for help but the street was quiet. The man groaned again. He drew his arms in and braced himself. Then he crawled one-kneed off the road, over the gutter. Melody picked up the shovel. He groaned again and vomited. A day and a half’s drinking poured out of him like black pump water. Melody got out of its way. The stream stopped. He wiped his mouth with the filthiest sleeve that Melody had ever seen. He put his hand out. Melody understood immediately that he wanted the shovel. She held it out to him. She could study his face now. It hadn’t been washed in ages and the specks and lines of blood gave him the look of something freshly slaughtered. But he wasn’t bad looking, she decided. The situation - the coat, the puked porter, the absent leg - wouldn’t let her take the plunge and call him good looking, but he definitely wasn’t bad looking. He clung to the shovel and hauled himself up. Melody stepped back again to get out of his shadow. He stared at her but she wasn’t frightened.

—Sorry, mister, said Melody.

He shook his head.

—Did you see a leg on your travels? he said.

—No.

—A wooden one.

—No.

He seemed disappointed.

—It’s gone, so, he said.—I had it yesterday.

Then Melody said something that started them on the road to marriage and me.

—You’re a grand-looking man without it, she said.

Now he looked at Melody properly. She’d only said it to comfort him but one-legged men will grab at anything.

—What’s your name, girlie? he said.

—Melody Nash, she said.

And Henry Smart fell in love. He fell in love with the name. With a name like that beside him he’d find his leg, a new one would grow out of the stump, he’d stride through open doors for the rest of his life. He’d find money on the street, three-legged chickens. He’d never have to sweat again. Henry Smart, my father, looked at Melody Nash. He saw what he wanted to see.

I know what Henry Smart looked like. She told me, sitting on the step, looking down the street, and up, waiting for him. And later on when he’d gone for ever but she still looked and waited. Her descriptions, her words, stayed the same. She never let her loneliness, hunger, her misery change her story. Her mind wandered and then rotted but she always knew her story, how she walked into Henry Smart. It was fixed. I knew what he looked like. But what about her? What did Melody Nash look like? She was sixteen. That’s all I know. I see her later, only five, six years further on. An eternity. An old woman. Big, lumpy, sad. Melody Smart. I see that woman sitting on the step and I try to bring her back six years, I try to make the age and pain drop off her. I try to make her stand up and walk back, to see her as she had been. I take three stone off her, I lift her mouth, I try to put fun into her eyes. I give her hair some spring, I change her clothes. I can create a good-looking sixteen-year-old. I can make her a stunner. I can make her plainer then, widen her, spoil her complexion. I can play this game for what’s left of my life but I’ll never see Melody Nash, my sixteen-year-old mother.

She worked in the dark and damp all day. She squinted to fight back the light. Her hands were ripped and solid. She was a child of the Dublin slums, no proper child at all. Her parents, grandparents, had never known good food. Bad food, bad drink, bad air. Bad bones, bad eyes, bad skin; thin, stooped, mangled. Henry Smart looked at Melody Nash and saw what he wanted to see.

—What’s your name, girlie?

—Melody Nash, she said.—How did you lose it?

—I haven’t a bull’s clue, said Henry.

He looked down at the ground where his foot should have been, and hopped away out of the porter he’d just thrown up. He wanted nothing to do with it; he was already a new man. He was thinking quickly, planning. She’d seen him falling on his face and then getting sick, one of his legs was missing - he knew he hadn’t been impressing her. But there were other ways to catch fish. He looked at Melody, and back down at the ground.

—It was my good one too, he said.

—Your good one?

—Me Sunday leg.

—Oh, said Melody.—It’ll turn up, mister, don’t worry. Maybe you left it at home.

Henry thought about this.

—I doubt it, he said.—I lost that as well.

She felt sorry for him. No leg, no home - the only thing holding him up was his vulnerability. She saw honesty. The men Melody knew showed off or snapped at her. Mitchell the rosary beads, her father, all men - they were all angry and mean. This man here was different. She’d knocked the poor cripple onto the street, his face was bleeding, he’d no home to hop home to - and he didn’t blame her. She saw now: he was smiling. A nice smile, he was offering it, half a smile. He didn’t look like a cripple. She liked the space where the leg should have been.

—Will we go for a stroll, so? he said.

—Yes, she said.

—Right.

He wiped the blade of the shovel on his sleeve.

—Let’s get this gleaming for the lady.

He let the spade hop gently on the path. Melody heard music.

—Now we’re right, said Henry Smart.

He held out his arm, offered it to Melody.

—Hang on, said Melody.

She took off her shawl and wiped his face with it. She dabbed and petted, removed the blood and left the dirt - that was his own, none of her business. It didn’t bother her. Dirt and grime were the glues that held Dublin together. She spat politely on a corner of the shawl and washed away the last dried, cranky specks of blood. Then she put the shawl back on.

—Now, she said.

They were already a couple.

He leaned on the shovel and offered her his free arm. She leaned on him and off they went, on the ramble that would still deliver her smile when she recalled it many moons later, when she told us all about it on the steps of all the tenements we were thrown into and out of. A Sunday in June, 1897, when the Famine Queen, Victoria, was still our one and only. A glorious summer’s morning. It took getting used to, the rhythm of their stroll. He’d lean out over the abyss that was his missing leg. She, clinging to his sleeve, would follow him out there. Then he’d haul himself in and forward on the handle of the shovel. She’d be pulled after him, then out again and forward. There wasn’t much room for talking. The cobbles were tricky, corners were impossible. So they went straight ahead, out to Drumcondra and the countryside.

 

 

Who was he and where did he come from? The family trees of the poor don’t grow to any height. I know nothing real about my father; I don’t even know if his name was real. There was never a Granda Smart, or a Grandma, no brothers or cousins. He made his life up as he went along. Where was his leg? South Africa, Glasnevin, under the sea. She heard enough stories to bury ten legs. War, an infection, the fairies, a train. He invented himself, and reinvented. He left a trail of Henry Smarts before he finally disappeared. A soldier, a sailor, a butler - the first one-legged butler to serve the Queen. He’d killed sixteen Zulus with the freshly severed limb.

Was he just a liar? No, I don’t think so. He was a survivor; his stories kept him going. Stories were the only things the poor owned. A poor man, he gave himself a life. He filled the hole with many lives. He was the son of a Sligo peasant who’d been eaten by his neighbours; they’d started on my father before he got away. He hopped down the boreen, the life gushing out of his stump, hurling rocks back at the hungry neighbours, and kept hopping till he reached Dublin. He was a pedlar, a gambler, a hoor’s bully. He sat on the ditch beside my mother and invented himself.

—You didn’t tell me your name yet, she said.

—Henry Smart, he said.—At your service.

Was it a name to compensate for the missing leg, a name to match hers? He fell in love with her name - Melody melody Melody Nash - and she fell in love with his.

They held hands.

 

 

Years later, looking into the night sky, counting her children. Poor ruined mother. She sat in the rain, the hail, the heat. She turned her back on the houses behind us and stared up at the soothing night. Behind her, the damp, scabbed walls, the rotten wood, the wet air, the leaking, bursting ceilings. Decomposing wallpaper, pools of stagnant water, rats on the scent of baby milk. Colonies of flies in the wet, crumbling walls. Typhoid and other death in every breath, on every surface. Banisters that shook when held, floors that creaked and groaned, timber that cried for sparks. There was no rest, nowhere she could lie down and forget. Shouts and fights, rage and coughing, coughing - death creeping nearer. And the rooms behind the steps got smaller and darker and more and more evil. We fell further and further. The walls crumbled and closed in on us. Her children died and joined the stars. Rooms with no windows, floors that bred cockroaches. We cried at the smell of other people’s lousy food. We cried at the pain that burned through our sores. We cried for arms to gather and hold us. We cried for heat and for socks, for milk, and light, for an end to the itches that stopped us from sleeping. We cried at the lice that shone and curled and mocked us. We cried for our mother to come and save us. Poor Mother. Finally, finally, we crept down to our last room, a basement, as low as we could go, a hole that yawned and swallowed us. We lay down and slept in the ground water of the River Liffey, we slept piled together with the sewer slugs and worms. Mother sat on the crumbling steps, she turned her back on the sweating, appalling facts of her life and looked up through the acid smoke at the stars that twinkled over Dublin.

They got married in a side chapel, in the Jesuits’ church on Gardiner Street. Her father gave her away (and died the year after). The best man was Henry’s colleague, a bouncer called Brannigan. The bridesmaid was a scrawny girl called Faye Cantrell who scratched so much and so loudly that the priest told her to stop it or he wouldn’t let her friend get married. So she put her hands to her sides and concentrated so hard on keeping them there that she wet herself.

Melody was three weeks shy of her seventeenth birthday. She sailed out of the church, lifted by the smells of burning candles, the newly varnished pews and Faye’s piss. There were kids outside, a scabby-headed mob, waiting for the grushie. Henry took a handful of farthings and ha’pences out of his trouser pocket and flicked it so that, for a second, the coins covered the sky. The children watched, enthralled, then woke up, ran and beat and mauled each other to get at the money. The losers turned for more. They stood there, the snot running out of them in ropes and waited for more of Henry’s magic. But there was none.

There was a party in her parents’ room on Bolton Street. Nothing swanky, a few bottles and some music. The neighbour women queued up to hand over the wisdom to Melody.

—Remember now, love, said old Missis Doody from the back parlour.—Give the babby half a bottle of stout every night and that’ll kill the maggots.

—I’m not having a baby, said Melody Smart.

—Of course you’ll be having a babby, said Missis Doody, a woman as old and as dirty as the house.—We all had babbies. I had five or six.

—I’m not having a baby
now
, said Melody.—And I don’t know who told you any different.

—Ah now, said old Missis Doody.—One-legged babbies you’ll be having. One after the other. They’ll out-hop the hoppers.

And Missis Dempsey from the step next door told her all about syphilis.

—It’ll rot the brain out of you, love, she said.—You won’t get it, of course, but he might. And then he’ll pass it on to you, so you’d want to be careful. Rots the brain till you fall over in the street because your legs don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. You die screaming and roaring, there’s no cure at all for it. If you’re lucky they’ll bring you to the Locke Hospital and smother you with a pillow. That’s what they do to the unfortunate girls that catch it off the sailors. Just make sure he comes home every night and you’ll be alright. Or rub a bit of whitewash from the wall of a church on him. When he has his dander up, if you can follow me; you’ll learn, don’t worry, love.

Melody was mystified; she was numb. Woman after woman sat beside her, one on each side, and whispered the deadly secrets into her maiden ears.
Now, if you smell a fancy woman off his coat you should boil it in water with the head of a Malahide mackerel
. She’d gone up the little side aisle in a state of sexual innocence, kissed only by one man and no further. She knew that sex happened, like she knew that God was up there behind the clouds. She knew that women went inside to their houses for a while and came out with babies.
Two good pulls like that now and he’ll leave you alone for the rest of the night
. She’d heard noises under the dark stairs.
He’ll never be off you, you mark my words. With the leg made of wood there the blood needs somewhere else to go
. She was impossibly innocent. Her mother had told her that she’d have to stay in her new home for three whole days after the wedding night. She was ready for the lock-in but she didn’t know why.
A nice leaf of cabbage will do the trick
. She lived bang in the middle of a place that survived on the buying and selling of sex. It was in the air; its stains and howls were everywhere around her, the cries, whoops and gasps, babies and brats crawling over every square foot, brassers and sailors holding up every corner for miles around and, God love her, she’d never noticed. And now, she was being bombarded.
If he makes you do it the way the dogs do you’ll end up with twins or even triplets or more. Unless the straw in your mattress came from under a priest’s horse
. She looked around for her husband, to see if she’d see the monster she was being told about by these calm and bitter women. She couldn’t see him. She couldn’t hear him, his laugh or his leg. She couldn’t breathe.
I got this jar of stuff from a Jewman and that got rid of it before I had the lid back on it
. She thought she was going to die, just a few more whispered words would kill her; her tongue was beginning to swell.