Maudie
by Bill Kirton
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: Maudie reflects on a long life lived to the full.
____________________________________________________________________
Five o’clock. She should have had her tea long ago. She must’ve fallen asleep. And yet she still felt tired. That wasn’t like her. She sat in her chair thinking about it all. The idea of filling the kettle, carrying it to the cooker, heating the teapot, all seemed unbelievably tiresome. Not that she’d have to move very far in her little room. The objects with which she’d lived pressed closer around her now than they ever had before, and the less accessible the world had become to her old legs, the nearer to her the essentials of her life had moved. But just to get up from her chair – that was going to be a struggle with this tiredness, and the whole business would take ages this afternoon. There was no reason why it should, mind you. She felt the usual comfortable warmth of her clothes, her eyes moved just as quickly over the room, her confidence, her self-awareness, her certainty were all intact and very positive within the padding of her drowsiness. And the people’s voices came through the window as they walked on the pavement outside with the same reassurance, the same variety. There! Willie Gordon. And from the sound of him he’d just come ashore. Probably had a good trip. So he’d be rolling off home to the old flats in Woolster Street, shaving his shiny red face, having his tea – which was bound to be fish – and, sure enough, he’d be in the Dolphin at 7:30 when she went along for her Guinness.
She smiled at the thought of him, at his own perpetual grin, at the stories he told hour after hour – and also at the thought that she was one of the few left who knew the truth behind them and remembered the people who were supposed to have done all those unbelievable things. She was already a married woman when Willie had first gone up to St Andrew’s primary school, and she even remembered watching him sidling down Southside Street one day with his back to the wall and scrambling with agonised panic past every opening because his teacher had frightened him so much that he made a mess in his trousers and it showed.
It was hard to see that frightened little boy in her mind and put him alongside the great big man he’d become. They didn’t relate to one another. Like all her other memories, the thought of the schoolboy had become an isolated, self-contained moment. All these things must actually have happened at some time in a wide and spreading past, but now they’d lost their associations, and persisted only as sources of pain or comfort for her in the present. They were more real than the photographs on the mantelpiece from which sons and daughter, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even three great-great-grandchildren looked blankly at her, offering nothing except what she was prepared to believe of them. They were all so many more moments in a life full of them, an old life filled out every day by this long slow procession of thoughts mingling with the voices outside.
A shout in the street made her jump. She’d been dropping off again. It wasn’t like her at all. She must make that cup of tea and perhaps then have a little sleep, if she still felt like it, before going along to the Dolphin. She looked for the kettle. It was on top of the cooker where she always left it. But again the feeling came over her that the cooker seemed a long way to have to go for something she only half wanted.
She’d never really been a tea drinker. She’d made gallons of it in the shop for the trawlermen of course. Now they were tea drinkers if you like. Every morning, except Sundays, dozens of them would be in and out of her cafe from six o’clock onwards for mugs of tea and huge breakfasts they somehow managed to keep inside them as they bucked out and up past Rattray Head and on to where the oil fields would one day take over. And when they’d all gone, the others, the ones who’d just landed their catch and sold it all, would be across from the quay over the road and drinking mug after mug to wash down the enormous platefuls of food they’d been looking forward to for three days.
Maudie had been mother to at least four generations of them. Whatever the trip was like, whether they rolled slowly over a lazy swell or whether their faces couldn’t look up from the threshing nets and a screaming sea, most of them had in their mind a fold of cosy security. Like an Edwardian locket they carried the thought of tying up, bundling the baskets ashore, dragging the boxes onto the carts, and then forgetting everything in Maudie’s cafe as she handed out tea, bread-and-butter, fish, chips, roasts, potted conger. It was a still point of reassurance that they were back on land and that everything was just as they’d left it.
Of course it was a long time since she’d actually served in the cafe. Her daughter, Lizzie, did all that now, and soon it would be Lizzie’s daughter, Kath. But for many distant and ample years, Maudie’s comfort had spread with the wakes of the boats in and out of the harbour.
The men still came of course. But not the same ones. Well, Willie Gordon and one or two of the others perhaps, but most of them young men now – men whose fathers she’d seen as children. And although they knew Maudie and had heard all about her in their father’s yarns, for them she was no talisman but just a part of the life they were glad they didn’t have to live. Life at sea was not as harsh as it used to be. They had boats which were almost comfortable to live on, and when they came off them, it was to their scattered homes in council flats overlooking the North Sea where they were instantly absorbed into the cushioned anonymity of living ashore.
Still, they did come in, and she liked to hear the cafe across the passage from her room full of their noise. But although it was their voices she heard, it was their fathers she saw and their grandfathers too. Not the mature young faces of the new men, but hard, almost black faces dragged back against the bones and set in never-changing expressions. Joe Launder, who must’ve been born with half a cigarette sticking to his upper lip. Windy McPhee, who nobody knew was bald until his cap blew off one day to reveal a skull blindingly white above the deep tan of his features. Freddy Osborne, who you could smell as soon as his boat came alongside. Scores of them, each with a story, and each homing in on Maudie in her cafe.
And she was one of them. She’d given them stories to match all their dubious feats, and she was still capable of it. Only six months ago she’d become the first woman in the town to draw a blind pension and own a television set. And then there was that attack she’d had. Lizzie came in and found her lying back, eyes and mouth open, breath rattling from her throat. They all thought she was dying. They called the doctor, he examined her and told Lizzie that she’d soon be gone. They put her to bed, walked sadly about for the rest of the afternoon, started thinking about funeral arrangements, and then nearly died themselves from the shock when she walked to the Dolphin at half past seven and ordered a Guinness. And these were only recent outrages in a life stretching back to the years when square riggers still anchored in the harbour and roads carried people and horses.
In her mind now, the drowsy bass note of the sea collected all her unheard stories and held them in the air outside. The cars and lorries interrupted blatantly but only briefly, and in the early mornings, or now, as the evening settled, there was only that gentle, persistent sound of huge water in the harbour behind the warm voices of the walking people.
She thought again for a moment of making the tea, but the cooker seemed even further away. As the light softened, the shadows of the little room eased forward to take possession of its objects and she preferred to stay with the sound of the sea and all the voices it held. These voices had always been there. Sometimes, as now, spreading gently around her and sometimes dragged ashore on a big wind. On nights like that they’d called out their frightening tales of limbs lost, of boats foundering, of men who would never come back from the white water. They told her of her own son, Billy, on his merchant ship, miles out in the Atlantic, jammed in the engine room as it went down, and always reminded her of how much of her affection had died with him as he slowly choked in salt water and diesel oil. And, as if the sea itself weren’t enough, they’d told of Kath’s husband, Bert, who’d been killed by one of his mates in a fight. So when the winds got up and the seagulls came wheeling back to the quay for shelter she’d tightened herself against the new threat and never been surprised by the night’s news.
But tonight there was no wind and she could hear all the slow quiet murmurs of the good things. Of all her own hard but living days, and all her lovely gentle evenings. And tonight the sound was tender. It brought back Harry’s face, not the face of the old man who’d stopped recognising people and sat bewildered in a hospital bed until his death rescued everyone from his degradation, but the face of the real man, the husband she deserved, the man who’d beaten the sea often enough to insulate her life against the hardships that perpetually threatened. She’d lived for more than 60 years with him in this house by the harbour and in all her vast memories she could find no trace anywhere of having wanted anyone else. Her appetites had been small, and he had satisfied them most of the time – or, at least, as much as she had expected them to be satisfied. As fiancé, lover, husband, father, she saw him now as the solid centre of force on which she and the family had depended and grown through years full of change.
Change. Yes, of course, it was time to change. Put on a coat and go for a drink. It must be well past six and she hadn’t got round to making that tea. She couldn’t possibly make it now. Never mind, she’d enjoy her Guinness that much more. The room was much darker anyway and she couldn’t see the cupboards or the table in the corner. Even the bed was just a shape and the cooker had slipped right away into the shadows. The distance which separated her from it seemed enormous and it would need not just a few steps but a real journey to get that far across the room. Through the windows came the last of the evening and, as she looked out at it, the sky held no gulls. The blue was seeping away, and the people had obviously all gone home. All that was left was the water’s noise, slipping down the walls and steps of the harbour as the tide fell.
In the Dolphin Willie Gordon finished a pint and a story simultaneously, and both had been good because that day he’d brought back a boatload of good fish that all the buyers had wanted. He looked at the empty seat next to the fire.
‘Maudie’s a bit late tonight, isn’t she?’ he said.
The landlady looked at the clock.
‘Aye, she’s usually here by now. Perhaps there’s somethin on telly she’s watchin.’
‘I’ll go and have a wee look.’
And he went out to walk the few yards along to Maudie’s cafe. There were no lights on and nobody answered as he knocked. Three boys of the crew of the Simon Ross went by on their way to the pub.
‘Is it no a bit early for breakfast, George?’ they laughed.
Willie laughed with them and went in. He knocked on the door of Maudie’s room. There was no answer. He went in and turned on the light.
He knew at once, without touching her, that she was dead. She lay back in her armchair, her old face smooth and quiet with its skin as free of wrinkles as a young girl’s. Her hands lay softly together in her lap and her head had fallen gently to one side and rested on the edge of the cooker that stood beside the chair. Everything was warm and quiet.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Maudie reflects on a long life lived to the full.
____________________________________________________________________
Five o’clock. She should have had her tea long ago. She must’ve fallen asleep. And yet she still felt tired. That wasn’t like her. She sat in her chair thinking about it all. The idea of filling the kettle, carrying it to the cooker, heating the teapot, all seemed unbelievably tiresome. Not that she’d have to move very far in her little room. The objects with which she’d lived pressed closer around her now than they ever had before, and the less accessible the world had become to her old legs, the nearer to her the essentials of her life had moved. But just to get up from her chair – that was going to be a struggle with this tiredness, and the whole business would take ages this afternoon. There was no reason why it should, mind you. She felt the usual comfortable warmth of her clothes, her eyes moved just as quickly over the room, her confidence, her self-awareness, her certainty were all intact and very positive within the padding of her drowsiness. And the people’s voices came through the window as they walked on the pavement outside with the same reassurance, the same variety. There! Willie Gordon. And from the sound of him he’d just come ashore. Probably had a good trip. So he’d be rolling off home to the old flats in Woolster Street, shaving his shiny red face, having his tea – which was bound to be fish – and, sure enough, he’d be in the Dolphin at 7:30 when she went along for her Guinness.
She smiled at the thought of him, at his own perpetual grin, at the stories he told hour after hour – and also at the thought that she was one of the few left who knew the truth behind them and remembered the people who were supposed to have done all those unbelievable things. She was already a married woman when Willie had first gone up to St Andrew’s primary school, and she even remembered watching him sidling down Southside Street one day with his back to the wall and scrambling with agonised panic past every opening because his teacher had frightened him so much that he made a mess in his trousers and it showed.
It was hard to see that frightened little boy in her mind and put him alongside the great big man he’d become. They didn’t relate to one another. Like all her other memories, the thought of the schoolboy had become an isolated, self-contained moment. All these things must actually have happened at some time in a wide and spreading past, but now they’d lost their associations, and persisted only as sources of pain or comfort for her in the present. They were more real than the photographs on the mantelpiece from which sons and daughter, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even three great-great-grandchildren looked blankly at her, offering nothing except what she was prepared to believe of them. They were all so many more moments in a life full of them, an old life filled out every day by this long slow procession of thoughts mingling with the voices outside.
A shout in the street made her jump. She’d been dropping off again. It wasn’t like her at all. She must make that cup of tea and perhaps then have a little sleep, if she still felt like it, before going along to the Dolphin. She looked for the kettle. It was on top of the cooker where she always left it. But again the feeling came over her that the cooker seemed a long way to have to go for something she only half wanted.
She’d never really been a tea drinker. She’d made gallons of it in the shop for the trawlermen of course. Now they were tea drinkers if you like. Every morning, except Sundays, dozens of them would be in and out of her cafe from six o’clock onwards for mugs of tea and huge breakfasts they somehow managed to keep inside them as they bucked out and up past Rattray Head and on to where the oil fields would one day take over. And when they’d all gone, the others, the ones who’d just landed their catch and sold it all, would be across from the quay over the road and drinking mug after mug to wash down the enormous platefuls of food they’d been looking forward to for three days.
Maudie had been mother to at least four generations of them. Whatever the trip was like, whether they rolled slowly over a lazy swell or whether their faces couldn’t look up from the threshing nets and a screaming sea, most of them had in their mind a fold of cosy security. Like an Edwardian locket they carried the thought of tying up, bundling the baskets ashore, dragging the boxes onto the carts, and then forgetting everything in Maudie’s cafe as she handed out tea, bread-and-butter, fish, chips, roasts, potted conger. It was a still point of reassurance that they were back on land and that everything was just as they’d left it.
Of course it was a long time since she’d actually served in the cafe. Her daughter, Lizzie, did all that now, and soon it would be Lizzie’s daughter, Kath. But for many distant and ample years, Maudie’s comfort had spread with the wakes of the boats in and out of the harbour.
The men still came of course. But not the same ones. Well, Willie Gordon and one or two of the others perhaps, but most of them young men now – men whose fathers she’d seen as children. And although they knew Maudie and had heard all about her in their father’s yarns, for them she was no talisman but just a part of the life they were glad they didn’t have to live. Life at sea was not as harsh as it used to be. They had boats which were almost comfortable to live on, and when they came off them, it was to their scattered homes in council flats overlooking the North Sea where they were instantly absorbed into the cushioned anonymity of living ashore.
Still, they did come in, and she liked to hear the cafe across the passage from her room full of their noise. But although it was their voices she heard, it was their fathers she saw and their grandfathers too. Not the mature young faces of the new men, but hard, almost black faces dragged back against the bones and set in never-changing expressions. Joe Launder, who must’ve been born with half a cigarette sticking to his upper lip. Windy McPhee, who nobody knew was bald until his cap blew off one day to reveal a skull blindingly white above the deep tan of his features. Freddy Osborne, who you could smell as soon as his boat came alongside. Scores of them, each with a story, and each homing in on Maudie in her cafe.
And she was one of them. She’d given them stories to match all their dubious feats, and she was still capable of it. Only six months ago she’d become the first woman in the town to draw a blind pension and own a television set. And then there was that attack she’d had. Lizzie came in and found her lying back, eyes and mouth open, breath rattling from her throat. They all thought she was dying. They called the doctor, he examined her and told Lizzie that she’d soon be gone. They put her to bed, walked sadly about for the rest of the afternoon, started thinking about funeral arrangements, and then nearly died themselves from the shock when she walked to the Dolphin at half past seven and ordered a Guinness. And these were only recent outrages in a life stretching back to the years when square riggers still anchored in the harbour and roads carried people and horses.
In her mind now, the drowsy bass note of the sea collected all her unheard stories and held them in the air outside. The cars and lorries interrupted blatantly but only briefly, and in the early mornings, or now, as the evening settled, there was only that gentle, persistent sound of huge water in the harbour behind the warm voices of the walking people.
She thought again for a moment of making the tea, but the cooker seemed even further away. As the light softened, the shadows of the little room eased forward to take possession of its objects and she preferred to stay with the sound of the sea and all the voices it held. These voices had always been there. Sometimes, as now, spreading gently around her and sometimes dragged ashore on a big wind. On nights like that they’d called out their frightening tales of limbs lost, of boats foundering, of men who would never come back from the white water. They told her of her own son, Billy, on his merchant ship, miles out in the Atlantic, jammed in the engine room as it went down, and always reminded her of how much of her affection had died with him as he slowly choked in salt water and diesel oil. And, as if the sea itself weren’t enough, they’d told of Kath’s husband, Bert, who’d been killed by one of his mates in a fight. So when the winds got up and the seagulls came wheeling back to the quay for shelter she’d tightened herself against the new threat and never been surprised by the night’s news.
But tonight there was no wind and she could hear all the slow quiet murmurs of the good things. Of all her own hard but living days, and all her lovely gentle evenings. And tonight the sound was tender. It brought back Harry’s face, not the face of the old man who’d stopped recognising people and sat bewildered in a hospital bed until his death rescued everyone from his degradation, but the face of the real man, the husband she deserved, the man who’d beaten the sea often enough to insulate her life against the hardships that perpetually threatened. She’d lived for more than 60 years with him in this house by the harbour and in all her vast memories she could find no trace anywhere of having wanted anyone else. Her appetites had been small, and he had satisfied them most of the time – or, at least, as much as she had expected them to be satisfied. As fiancé, lover, husband, father, she saw him now as the solid centre of force on which she and the family had depended and grown through years full of change.
Change. Yes, of course, it was time to change. Put on a coat and go for a drink. It must be well past six and she hadn’t got round to making that tea. She couldn’t possibly make it now. Never mind, she’d enjoy her Guinness that much more. The room was much darker anyway and she couldn’t see the cupboards or the table in the corner. Even the bed was just a shape and the cooker had slipped right away into the shadows. The distance which separated her from it seemed enormous and it would need not just a few steps but a real journey to get that far across the room. Through the windows came the last of the evening and, as she looked out at it, the sky held no gulls. The blue was seeping away, and the people had obviously all gone home. All that was left was the water’s noise, slipping down the walls and steps of the harbour as the tide fell.
In the Dolphin Willie Gordon finished a pint and a story simultaneously, and both had been good because that day he’d brought back a boatload of good fish that all the buyers had wanted. He looked at the empty seat next to the fire.
‘Maudie’s a bit late tonight, isn’t she?’ he said.
The landlady looked at the clock.
‘Aye, she’s usually here by now. Perhaps there’s somethin on telly she’s watchin.’
‘I’ll go and have a wee look.’
And he went out to walk the few yards along to Maudie’s cafe. There were no lights on and nobody answered as he knocked. Three boys of the crew of the Simon Ross went by on their way to the pub.
‘Is it no a bit early for breakfast, George?’ they laughed.
Willie laughed with them and went in. He knocked on the door of Maudie’s room. There was no answer. He went in and turned on the light.
He knew at once, without touching her, that she was dead. She lay back in her armchair, her old face smooth and quiet with its skin as free of wrinkles as a young girl’s. Her hands lay softly together in her lap and her head had fallen gently to one side and rested on the edge of the cooker that stood beside the chair. Everything was warm and quiet.
About the Author
Bill Kirton was born in Plymouth, but has lived in Aberdeen for most of his life. He’s been a university lecturer, presented TV programmes, written and performed songs and sketches at the Edinburgh Festival, and had radio plays broadcast by the BBC. He’s written four books in Pearson’s ‘Brilliant’ series and his crime novels, Material Evidence, Rough Justice, The Darkness, Shadow Selves and the historical novel The Figurehead, set in Aberdeen in 1840, have been published in the UK and USA. His other novel, The Sparrow Conundrum, is a crime spoof set in Aberdeen and Inverness. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and Love Hurts was chosen for the Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 2010.
His website and blog can be found at http://www.bill-kirton.co.uk.
His website and blog can be found at http://www.bill-kirton.co.uk.