They Never Told Me by Austin Clarke

Author:Austin Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781550963793
Publisher: Exile Editions

OUR LADY OF THE HOURS

When the snow fell like this, when it was night, she was lost in the whiteness. “Why I still in this blasted country? This blasted snow! Me coming home to all this.” She looked at the houses along the street. No light came from the windows, not from her two-storey rooming house. “Now, back home, we make one house different from all the others. Bring out the personality of the house and the dwellers therein. Lord, look at this blasted thing!” thinking, as she descended into a darkened stairwell to the basement rooms, that she must get out soon of her underground living, this confining hole; she did not know at that moment if she was walking on wooden steps, so deep was the snow; and she stopped a moment under the eave, which was not a well-built eave, for it kept out nothing, neither snow nor rain, and she made up her mind: “First thing in the new year. First thing come the new year, I moving from this blasted basement. Basements’re where animals should live.” Yes, she would look for a better place, “And I have to put that man who thief my child, absconded with my child, and Lord, I don’t mean to be mean and anti-motherhood and anti-my-offspring, but with your strength and guidance, I sure as hell am going to have soon, to put that child and father outta my blasted life, and get on with my own life. And I know you won’t hold that against me!”

Thinking of this made her tense and feel unholy, and even though she had sought to cleanse herself of the bad taste of this neglect, this abandoning of her child, she became nervous; nervous as she sometimes felt opening a door and knowing that inside she was going to see that a cat had mistaken her bed all day during her absence, when she was making a living for herself and earning money to buy vittles for the bastard cat, that the cat had shat on her bedspread. This kind of nervousness gripped her, and happily she reminded herself that she did not possess a cat. She had some difficulty getting the key into the hole. She could not see the key and she could not see the hole. Everything was white. Even under the eave, repaired four times for the year, by the landlord. She felt and guessed at the opening.

The smell of the rooms, closed up all day, came at her with a rush of blood to the head. But it was a welcome scent of life. Not like the extreme smell cleanliness gave her when she entered the mansion where she worked in the ravine. And she it was who had cleaned the mansion so thoroughly. And she it was who had made it smell clean; as if people who used the rooms did not live there. But she most decidedly lived here. Incense, which she burned before she left for

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