If I had three wishes, the thing to do is get three more. "Hello," says the angel, says the fairy, says the devil even, "What do you want? One. Two. Three." And I say, "Well, first off, I'll have three more of those please," and then you have five, you see, to play with, which is two extra, because there's always a trick.
Like you might say, "Well, for my first wish, I'd like to have a beautiful body," and azzakazzam, "There's your beautiful body," says the angel and, when you look down, you're still the same old yoke and the angel says, "Well it is beautiful—the way one bone fits into another, and the blood flows, and the brain works and all that," and maybe, yes—in the scheme of things—but, "No!" you say, "No!" and you blurt out something like, "I want a body like Raquel Welch," and of course she's ancient, these days, so all you get is a heap of silicone and arthritis. Or even worse you ask for a body like Marilyn Monroe, who is actually dead, not to mention rotten, or you ask for the body of "a film star" and the angel gives you Marlon Brando. Or you get the actual body of an actual film star, like say Nicole Kidman's body, and she sues—quite right too—there she is wandering around in your old sack and everyone says it's just prosthetic, like that stupid nose she wore. Serve her right.
So the third wish, then, has to put it all right. You think about it really hard and you say nothing for ages, and then very carefully you say, "I'd like a body like the one Raquel Welch had in One Million Years BC and dah dah!—the full thing down to the furry bikini, except it leaves out your face, and you're some sort of monster oul' wan with a dynamite bosom, like those plastic things men wear on stag nights. Or your face does change—because your face is part of your body, of course it is—and your grandchildren don't recognise you and no one will let you back into your own house and you end up in a state of semi-prostitution just trying to get the bus fare back to the place where the angel disappeared into the clear blue sky.
It's all just semantics, as my son Jimmy would say.
The thing to do, I say, is to ask for the extra three wishes first, then you have enough to put it right. And the way you put it right is to ask for the body you had in the first place, of course, the same heap of old bones that gets you up on to the back step of the bus in the morning, and after that you still have a couple of wishes left. And with the next wish you say, "I would like to have three more wishes please."
You see?
Mad. It's the kind of thing that rolls through your head, in this job, when you're sweeping or wiping—it's very repetitive, cleaning. It's all over and back: over and back again. Your mind starts to run in some terrible groove, and you have to pick the right one or you end up with bombs on the underground and everybody you ever loved lying in the morgue. I can go from a cigarette butt to the great fire of London before I have the ashtray cleaned, so I stay in late and listen to the singing. I stand in the dark at the back of the hall, because you have to watch your head, you have to pick something positive to think about, as my son Jimmy tells me, like winning the lottery, though he doesn't approve of that, either. Because I've had my ups and downs.
It never ends. Cleaning. It never ends. Here we go, back to the start, clean what has been cleaned and then clean it again. I start at the top of the house and work down, parterre, boxes, stalls. I hear the other girls hoovering or calling, and we pass each other on the stairs. I don't smoke. A lot of the girls smoke. But it puts miles on you, trekking up and down to get out to the back door. No. I get an early start—something pleasant—the brasses, or the woodwork, way at the back where no one goes. Sometimes they start rehearsing before we are done, just bits and scraps, but I love the singing. And the odd time, there's something special on, and the audience are in on top of you before you know it. Not that they notice me. People don't. They look but they don't see—which is fine by me. I'm the invisible woman, that's what I say. I could shimmy backwards across that stage on my hands and knees and no one would bother, so long as I had a floorcloth going. Everyone so dressed up, they see nothing, except looking for their own reflection in the fancy togs.
I was down there on the circle steps, one time, trying to get some chewing gum out of the carpet, horrible stuff, when a man walks by, in his full rig, and he says to me, "You're singing!" and I said, "Am I? I didn't even notice," and he says, "Ah! you're Irish. Isn't it marvellous the way the Irish sing while they work?" And I said, "Yes, isn't it?"
And you know I have about sixteen things to say to him if he ever stopped by again. Like, "Oh, that's not me, that's just a tape of Maria Callas I've got stuck up my arse." Or, "A cat can look at a king." I might say that, "A cat can look at a king."
I am allowed to like the music. My son Jimmy loves it. He has a voice, he never touched a cigarette. He might come here, even, only he doesn't want to bump into his old mother rooting for the dustpan in the cupboard by the bar.
I might like the opera, you see, but my son Jimmy owns the opera. Jimmy has all the CDs in their box sets. Jimmy was even gay for a while, and then he wasn't gay, and I said to him, I can't keep up. And I think, after all, that he wasn't looking for sex of one kind or another, he was just looking for an education. Which he got. And he has it all now, down to the slice of lime in his gin and tonic, and he never—he very rarely—gives himself away.
Oh be careful what you want.
I never wanted money—wasn't that lucky?? Because if I'd wanted it I might have got it, and wouldn't that be an awful tragedy, an endangerment to my soul? And I never wanted fame. I just wanted stupid things, like knowing the right thing to wear for a christening, or my mother not dying so early, or someone to help out at home.
So, maybe my first wish would be that my mother was still alive—but alive at the age she was before she died, not that age she would be, if she hadn't died in the first place, like a hundred and two. So, with all her faculties and the body of—here we go again—the body of a fifty year old. A healthy fifty year old. A healthy fifty year old woman. As opposed to man. Or horse.
"Oh, be careful what you want." It was my mother who used to say that to me—when I was young, and all I wanted was Seamas Molloy. When all I wanted was the fella in the whitest shirt in the crowd outside the dancehall, on a long summer's evening that was turning into night.
Or if he said, "Fling yourself down there and the angels will catch you, before you hit the ground." Well, what sort of a temptation is that? You go to all the trouble of killing yourself and you don't even die? That's what I call a swizz. Besides, it just sounds like falling in love, to me. Which Jesus never did, when you think about it. Which I did, like a fool—because my mother was right of course: he was an awful messer, Seamas Molloy.
It's a nice view up there—all the lights of London town. I go up, sometimes; the last little flight of steps. No one has to know.
We didn't need the devil, Seamas and me: we thought the town was ours for the taking. Except of course he couldn't take it at all. He couldn't take not knowing who anyone was; he couldn't take the humiliation every time he opened his mouth and the accent came out: it didn't suit him at all. Because Seamas Molloy was a big man, he was the man in the whitest shirt, and I had to throw him out, finally, before the baby came to any harm.
I have a terrible dread of finding him on the street some day, his beautiful eyes all bloodshot, with the memory of me held somewhere behind them, and the kisses we had. Something about me; my hands or my ankles—they're still slim—some giveaway.
But sure drink wipes everything, even your soul.
Come on Old Nick, offer me London town, and free flying lesson and—what was the third thing? Stones into bread. We'll call that getting your breakfast brought in to you on a tray. He was just trying to get Jesus to show his hand. "Go on," he was saying, "Prove it. Prove it!" And Jesus didn't prove it. He wasn't bothered.
I know what he meant, sometimes. Up there on the roof on a summer's night with the city sparkling and you feel you could just close your eyes and blast it all away. One big hot breath. And when you opened your eyes again the place would be reduced to cinders. Every light gone out. Every miserable room I slept in with baby Jimmy after his father left. Every hall and office and sitting room that I swept and hoovered and polished and shone. Whooosh. Gone.
And then you do open your eyes, and it is still there. Gorgeous. Never mind Old Nick.
I stopped going to mass for the religion long ago. I just go for the company. I had my lapse, I gave up God, but I said, I'm not going to give up every sinner I know too. They don't know it, of course—that I don't believe a word the priest says, that I am laughing up my sleeve at him, and at his God—they would find it very sort of blasphemous. But I don't care. There were years when these people were all I had.
Except for Jimmy, of course. I always had him.
Talking to that child—that's been my education. His little face. If you ever want to know what you really think, talk to a four year old. Is there a heaven? Where do we go when we die? Why do people shoot each other? Why does purple not go with green?
And there you are, lying your head off, and trying to tell the truth at the same time. You offer them the world, worse than any devil. You say, "When you grow up, my darling, you can be anything you want, you can earn your own money and buy as many toys and records as you like, and you can fly all the way to Timbuctoo." He comes home crying from school because Shane Fox says he's a nancy boy, or whatever word it was in those days, and I say, "In twenty years' time you won't care a bit what Shane Fox says," because you only have to take one look at that child to know where he will end up. And sure enough, time goes by and Jimmy gets his money and his toys and Shane Fox gets ten years for aggravated assault. There's my amazing son, who changes jobs like men used to change their shirts. He takes a year out to travel, goes to Asia and South America, and he comes back to another job, with even more money. And now he has a wife, who is really quite nice, and they've no plans for babies, he says, even though they can afford it, and she's thirty nine.
I don't know.
Jimmy tells me I'm wasting time on the lottery. He says, anyway, rich people don't spend their money, they invest it. And I say, you might as well not have any in the first place—but I see what he means, he means the only way to keep it is pretend it isn't there. He says that rich people live cheap, they're the meanest lot. They have holidays in other people's summer houses, and dinner on expenses, and some company sends them tickets for the ballet or the opera, and all they have is the hire of the suit. Except they don't hire the suit, they use their grand da's suit. And so on. Jimmy wanted me to cut up my credit card, he said it wasn't plastic money it was plastic debt, and I said he sounded like a socialist, which is the last thing he is, the absolute last thing. His father shouting at the radio, throwing it out into the back yard when Kennedy made that speech over Cuba. But sure I never got into debt.
I never wanted much.
I wanted Jimmy, though, and I had him. Voilà! So I thought he might break the curse of it, somehow. I thought my child could want things, and have them, all at the same time. I thought he could love someone and it would go right for him. And it does go right for him. Though I don't know who he loves, properly speaking. I don't know if Jimmy ever loved anyone at all.
Except, of course, for his dear old Ma.
Then he turns around the night before his wedding day, and he says, "I never had a father" like it was all my fault. "I never had a father," shouting it. "Better off, too," I said—which we both know is true. But still.
Alright, here it is; it's an angel, it's the devil, it's anything you want. It's three wishes. And what you have to watch for, is the trick.
So, pick something small. You want to get rid of the creaks in your knees and the one that is moving into your right hip. You say, "I wish that my body was twenty years younger." Hang on. Careful. Careful does it. "I wish that my body was twenty years younger—not including my brain, which must remain the same age as it is now, with the same experiences to remember." Or. Hang on. "Not including my brain, which must remain the same age as it is now, but with no early Alzheimer's in it, like the Alzheimer's that stops me remembering my own mother's maiden name." Now is that one wish or is it three? It sounds like six.
"Oh be careful what you want," said my mother. Whose maiden name was Mary Kearney, thank you very much.
She would have loved this: the opera. She would have loved the glam.
All right, I tell you what I want. "I want a small win on the lottery, just a small one, just a few thousand, so I could feel, for once, LUCKY. I want my son to call me on the mobile phone he bought me for a present, that never, ever rings. I also want him to have sex with the right people, meaning female people, in particular the female person who is his wife. I want grandchildren. More than anything, I want grandchildren. Because grandchildren are simple. You wish for them and you have them. And I don't care if they are ashamed of me. I want my son who has everything to have something, for once. Something real. To have a heart that isn't withering in his chest. That little smile when he looks at me.
"Hello Mum."
And when the man stops on the circle stairs, I want to look up at him, in his tux. I want to peruse the length of him, and meet him, eye to eye. Old Nick, my friend. I want him to know me, and be very scared of me. And I want to open my mouth, and sing.
