Read Online Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore - Free Book Online
Authors: Helen Dunmore
Tags: Contemporary
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be wearing embroidered waistcoats, white shirts and leather boots so soft they made you want to bite into them.
But then he’d be an old man. Mr Damiano, like anyone else, would accelerate into age. His power would be gone.
I could not believe it would happen. He appeared immune from death and sickness. You couldn’t see MrDamiano without sensing that this was a man in his prime, at the height of his powers and knowing it. It was a prime that had nothing to do with youth. No, it was a climate which he had created, and in which he lived. By sheer force of what he was, he was borne through a high, sunny air in which things happened faster and more brilliantly than they did on earth.
He had rescued me. He had thought it was only a job interview, the time we first met. How could he know that when I answered his questions my lips creaked open because for weeks I had talked to no one? I had lain in my rented room day after day, watching the money go. I’d unlearned all Joe’s lessons of pleasure, all Adam’s knowledge of love. I’d learned again what I’d known in childhood: the habit of nothing. It was the icy truth on which I holed myself, and sank down.
To eat becomes troublesome.
To choose a T-shirt or a pair of jeans becomes a mountain of weariness.
The phone rang until it stopped, waited ten minutes, rang again. I listened as if I was hearing church bells for services I would never attend.
I did not bath or wash my hair or look in the mirror. If I had done what I wanted I would have torn out my hair and dressed in rags and ashes. Rags and ashes would have comforted me, as the sharp, rank stink of my flesh and my dirty hair comforted me.
I was effaced. For a while, in the years I’d shared with Joe and then with Adam, I’d forgotten what it felt like to be nothing. I’d believed the life I’d lived was really mine, that I possessed it and was safe at last.
With Adam I’d become the woman I’d once glimpsedat the door of lighted houses, and envied. A young woman in an old narrow house with a porch light that spilled yellow on the steps at homecoming. Behind her was the sound of children playing, water running for a bath, footsteps in another part of the house. A young woman who hurried downstairs with a baby on her hip when a delivery man rang on the doorbell. She gave the signature that was needed, took the package, smiled a smile that had nothing to do with the delivery man, and went back inside her house.
I was home, at home, like her.
Those grey streets where we’d walked arm in arm, those grey streets where we had wheeled Ruby in her pushchair and smiled at passers-by who smiled at our smiles. That bed where we’d lost ourselves. Those knotted, tangled, sweat-stained sheets. The key in the door, the phone call when one of us was running late, the reassurance, the details which we shared and which were of no interest to anyone else. The way I would shape the things that happened in my days with Ruby into news for Adam.
Ruby’s heat. The living heat of Ruby that you sensed as you walked into the room where she slept.
I pushed her to the baby clinic feeling an impostor, because my joy was so great. I liked the health visitor, because she never doubted that the dailiness of Ruby was really mine. It was my job to look after her. Ruby’s hearing test, her vaccinations, her difficulty in moving on to solids, her weight-gain. With the other mothers I clucked and deprecated babylife, but I knew that like me they must be masking the joy they felt so that no one would sense it and steal it from them.
*
When Mr Damiano called me into his employment I was like Lazarus, sunk in the grave of myself. I’d learned that story at school and always hated it. Imagine going through the pain and fear of dying, and then being brought back to life, and knowing that you had to go through it all again.
God knows, Mr Damiano wasn’t Jesus. He treated me better than that. He didn’t think that he was resurrecting me,
But then he’d be an old man. Mr Damiano, like anyone else, would accelerate into age. His power would be gone.
I could not believe it would happen. He appeared immune from death and sickness. You couldn’t see MrDamiano without sensing that this was a man in his prime, at the height of his powers and knowing it. It was a prime that had nothing to do with youth. No, it was a climate which he had created, and in which he lived. By sheer force of what he was, he was borne through a high, sunny air in which things happened faster and more brilliantly than they did on earth.
He had rescued me. He had thought it was only a job interview, the time we first met. How could he know that when I answered his questions my lips creaked open because for weeks I had talked to no one? I had lain in my rented room day after day, watching the money go. I’d unlearned all Joe’s lessons of pleasure, all Adam’s knowledge of love. I’d learned again what I’d known in childhood: the habit of nothing. It was the icy truth on which I holed myself, and sank down.
To eat becomes troublesome.
To choose a T-shirt or a pair of jeans becomes a mountain of weariness.
The phone rang until it stopped, waited ten minutes, rang again. I listened as if I was hearing church bells for services I would never attend.
I did not bath or wash my hair or look in the mirror. If I had done what I wanted I would have torn out my hair and dressed in rags and ashes. Rags and ashes would have comforted me, as the sharp, rank stink of my flesh and my dirty hair comforted me.
I was effaced. For a while, in the years I’d shared with Joe and then with Adam, I’d forgotten what it felt like to be nothing. I’d believed the life I’d lived was really mine, that I possessed it and was safe at last.
With Adam I’d become the woman I’d once glimpsedat the door of lighted houses, and envied. A young woman in an old narrow house with a porch light that spilled yellow on the steps at homecoming. Behind her was the sound of children playing, water running for a bath, footsteps in another part of the house. A young woman who hurried downstairs with a baby on her hip when a delivery man rang on the doorbell. She gave the signature that was needed, took the package, smiled a smile that had nothing to do with the delivery man, and went back inside her house.
I was home, at home, like her.
Those grey streets where we’d walked arm in arm, those grey streets where we had wheeled Ruby in her pushchair and smiled at passers-by who smiled at our smiles. That bed where we’d lost ourselves. Those knotted, tangled, sweat-stained sheets. The key in the door, the phone call when one of us was running late, the reassurance, the details which we shared and which were of no interest to anyone else. The way I would shape the things that happened in my days with Ruby into news for Adam.
Ruby’s heat. The living heat of Ruby that you sensed as you walked into the room where she slept.
I pushed her to the baby clinic feeling an impostor, because my joy was so great. I liked the health visitor, because she never doubted that the dailiness of Ruby was really mine. It was my job to look after her. Ruby’s hearing test, her vaccinations, her difficulty in moving on to solids, her weight-gain. With the other mothers I clucked and deprecated babylife, but I knew that like me they must be masking the joy they felt so that no one would sense it and steal it from them.
*
When Mr Damiano called me into his employment I was like Lazarus, sunk in the grave of myself. I’d learned that story at school and always hated it. Imagine going through the pain and fear of dying, and then being brought back to life, and knowing that you had to go through it all again.
God knows, Mr Damiano wasn’t Jesus. He treated me better than that. He didn’t think that he was resurrecting me,
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