The Places You’re Not

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by Patience Mackarness

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People think they know where you are. One neighbour tells me not to be sad, you’re in the arms of Jesus. Another, a weddings-and-funerals type Christian, says you’re with Ken.

I can’t picture you with Jesus, you who talked about fuckin’ priests and all that Catholic bollocks.  I don’t see you in Ken’s arms either, though you recalled your ‘Saturday Matinées’ together with lusty fondness, and kept his photo in a diamanté frame above the sofa. You two met in the Cavern Club in the early Sixties, you and your mates wore make-up and blagged your way in, convinced you looked at least seventeen, hoping to cop off with Paul or George, but instead there was this big piratey type with a droopy moustache and a grin, you shared a ciggy and he told you his name and you said, Well, I’m not fuckin’ Barbie.  You married him twice, like Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, only without the diamonds.

The Cavern Club cellar was filled in with rubble in 1973, so you’re not there either.

After Ken died you waited tables at a Greek restaurant in Liverpool centre. All sorts came in there, actors and musicians, foreign tourists and gangsters. Sometimes you’d tell me a story and add, Don’t tell me kids!

You’re not sitting out on the pavement where the For Sale notice is now, outside your door, like you did on summer evenings, a glass of wine in one hand, a ciggy in the other, keeping an eye on everything that went on in the street. The local kids called you Auntie Maureen or Mo, some of the snottier neighbours said you were too big for your boots, Who does she think she is, the bloody queen?

You’re not by the mural in the back alley, our muriel you called it, but there’s a flower in one corner that’s yours. The mural was almost finished, just a patch of sky left to fill in, the kids said Go on Auntie Mo, paint something!” so you took a brush and some leftover paint and it’s still there under the rainbow, a purple and blue flower like nothing in nature.

You’re not in my yard where we sat out with more wine among the plants we’d grown, planning to make the whole street green, hanging baskets for everyone, even the scallies who couldn’t be arsed gardening, and your thoughts went wider and wilder until you said, “Let’s knock down that shitty street behind, give everyone a garden!”

You’re not in your front room in the hospital-issue bed any more, and I’m glad.

Neighbours still talk to me, the half-foreigner, the Scouser-in-training you befriended. Mainly, they talk about you. You, stitched into their memories of the docks and  tenements, of a city that’s proud and dirty, ancient and football-mad, that always has the last word.

I want them to go on talking because I’m making a picture, and the bits of you that I knew are only one corner, astonishing and brilliant, like nothing in nature.

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