This is the story of Maria’s son, but it is a story with two endings.
Maria lived in a small neglected suburb on the edge of the city and at the foot of the mountains. She had one son, and he was her world. His life was her life, and her thoughts were directed only to him. Eighteen years before, she met his father on the one holiday she had ever had, in Spain. Herself and the girls in the biscuit factory had clubbed together and booked two weeks in Benidorm. Her first glimpse of the turquoise sea as the plane droned down into the Spanish dawn made her eyes prickle with astonishment and joy at such postcard beauty. The world was full of marvels, she thought then, and life was beginning.
Most of the girls met men on that holiday. Some had a quick fling, or even several one-night stands. But on the second night Maria met Jorge. As far as she was concerned that was it. He was the man of her dreams, with golden brown eyes, dark skin that felt like satin when he touched her arm and a sweet bucket of a mouth that she wanted to suck all the kisses out of forever and ever. Jorge was a printer. He wooed her and stuck to her like a clam throughout the holiday. He brought gifts of specially printed notelets and cards, with her name on them, and clever drawings of two hearts entwined. He told her he loved her and she believed him, because she loved him. It did not seem possible that the love she felt could not equally be returned. It was also the first time she had fallen in love, and as it was her nature to be giving, she gave herself to him, heart, soul and body.
Things had moved swiftly. In retrospect, she believed she became pregnant on the third night of the holiday, which was the second night with Jorge. She saw no reason to withhold herself from this man, who was good, charming and whipped her senses to a delirium. At the end of the holiday, she had a vague sensation of unwellness. She noticed, as she lay roasting on the beach one afternoon, waiting until Jorge would come from the printers to join her for the last hour or so by the water’s edge, that she felt not quite herself. It was not exactly a sickness, but an odd sensation of having been slightly pushed out of her own body.
Around her, voices of other holiday-makers rose on the air. People played in the water like children. They dipped their overheated bodies into the Mediterranean, and swam around for a few minutes, whooping with pleasure, occasionally splashing someone else as they went.
On the final evening, Jorge arrived with a generous heft of pink, scented writing-paper, on which her address in Ireland was printed in delicate slanting writing, fresh from the printing press. So that you do not forget to write to me, he murmured close to her ear in his delicious accent, making her forget her earlier feelings of physical displacement. She felt weak with love for him, and that night they fell again insatiably into one another’s arms.
Back in Ireland, she did not forget to write. But after three letters, and once she relayed the news of her situation to him, Jorge’s correspondence suddenly ceased. At first, she did not want to believe that such a thing could have happened to her. Her mother, who in her way was sympathetic, told her not to be a fuckin eejit and did she think she was the first girl to get knocked up and then dropped like a hot potato?
‘But Ma,’ Maria wailed, ‘he told me he loved me!’
Maria’s mother threw her eyes to the ceiling and folded her arms. ‘Daughter dear, you weren’t the first he said that to. Now the best thing you can do is forget the louser. You’ll manage. Trust me, you will!’
Over the years, Maria placed her trust in her mother’s advice. She managed very well indeed, all things considered, with a small, adored son whom she christened George. Eventually, she moved away from her mother’s house and into the suburbs. She mostly forgot about Jorge and concentrated instead on George, determined to raise him to be a good man, a reliable man, although he had no father to show him how to be a man.
For George’s sake she took two jobs, one of them with a domestic cleaning firm, the other as a waitress on Saturdays and Sundays, when she cycled to a restaurant perched on a thickly wooded hill half-way up the mountains. She scrimped and she saved so that George would have the right clothes for school, the right trainers, the right pencil-case and ruler, a proper boy’s lunch-box and, after school, some decent computer games. Because she did not trust banks, she saved money in two ways: at the Credit Union and in a narrow tin box kept beneath the crimson layered skirt of an ornamental Spanish doll, bought at the airport by Jorge as the lovers said their tearful goodbyes. The doll stood in a perspex on the landing window. She congratulated herself on her cleverness in secreting money in such a way. As time went on and George grew older, she knew that she had almost equal amounts of money stashed in both locations. It was a comfort on the rare occasions when she awoke at night, to know that there were, literally, some thousands right there in her home, to be put towards George’s education.
He was showing signs of being exceptionally good at maths, and her heart ached with pride in him. Although she would never admit it to her neighbours, like many mothers she dreamt of him joining the professional classes. Someday, she thought, he might become a doctor. He would heal people. She hoped he would never go for law, however. In her opinion, solicitors had big mouths, necks as thick as a jockey’s bollocks, and it was universally acknowledged that they overcharged. Medicine, please, she prayed, not law.
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