Handbags in the bedroom
MOLLY combs her hair and gets fully dressed in her bedroom before descending the short flight of stairs to the back kitchen. She had moved their bedroom from the second floor down to the neither-floor a few years back.
Her husband protested vehemently, ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with the bedroom the way we have it, I mean to say, surely at the age of 60 we could stop moving’.
Changing things for the better was Molly’s job, this room had a sink in it, and hot water, they could have body washes before going down the stairs in the morning, and she could wash her make-up off before going to bed. He could protest all he liked; they would still be living up in the fireman’s bungalow on Davitt Road if it weren’t for her foresight.
The bedroom is directly over the back kitchen. It’s a proper extension with its own gable roof, it would seem like a small house at the rear of the three story main house, if you could get far enough away from it to see. But there is no latitude; this is the Quay, the commercial district of Wexford Town in the South East of Ireland. The houses here have spread themselves into every available space. The yard has barely enough room for the rubbish bin, and a hook for the washing line that runs from there up to the wall of the main house where the receiving hook is hammered into the main wall.
The Ryans run the Corner House next door, a busy bed and breakfast with a popular sweet and victualler shop at the front. Their kitchen, which has consumed their whole yard, runs parallel to ours, and their discussions above the soft cupping of plates becomes a pleasant background, to my mother Molly’s singing along with her transistor radio.
Behind both houses, Mary Gold lives with her elderly father and John the lodger, they don’t have a shop, perhaps that is why they were able to leave their yard alone, shops have a way of taking up the whole ground floor. It’s easily the biggest yard around, but their house is small, my mother says that they have no bathroom, and you have to walk sideways to get up the stairs. On warm summer days, Mary can be heard talking to her chairbound daddy from the washing line, her voice getting deeper and deeper from successive cigarettes.
Eventually she and John the lodger will marry, but not before her father’s demise. Molly will offer our bathroom for their pre-marriage bath, they shyly scurry through our house with bare legs beneath overcoats. John giggles, he’s red and heavy, he has a Guinness baby in his belly, decades old, and fully grown, and it precedes him at a fair advance. After the hot bath, he looxks boiled.
Molly has the alarm clock in one hand and her handbag hooked to the other. The handbag goes to bed too. She has heard stories about handbags being left down stairs. Mrs. Culleton who lives just down the Quay near the Crescent, locked the house up one night and went to bed. When she woke up in the morning her handbag was gone, she had left it downstairs, my mother said.
‘I couldn’t tell you how they got in, but the bloody bag was gone in the morning,’ she said.
I found myself wondering what was kept in the handbag. It was an absolute rule, whatever you do, don’t leave the handbag downstairs, even when the front door is locked, and there is no one other than yourself in the house. They can get in!
Molly will offer our bathroom for their pre-marriage bath, they shyly scurry through our house with bare legs beneath overcoats