Failing To Hit The Target

Aloysius’s mother was terrified of death, of which I suspect she had seen more than her fair share, and was energetically scrupulous in her efforts to extenuate its impact. She was Hungarian, and spoke hardly any English. As far as I know she never left the house, other than to work in the garden, and once a year, at Christmas, to attend a midnight Mass celebrated in Dutch (which she spoke fluently) at a church in Elizabeth South. She must have felt extremely isolated and vulnerable, with most of her life spent immersed in her housework or gardening, or lived vicariously through her family. Although she was kind-hearted enough in the main, the terror that was lurking just beneath the surface, and that you could sometimes see reflected in her eyes, would on occasion bubble up and issue forth with an uncontrollable potency that was quite alarming to behold.

She must have spent hours each day cleaning her home, which was always spotless, while her back garden was a veritable wonderland of burgeoning fecundity and colour. Once, on a visit there to play with Aloysius, I went to the lavatory, and, without realising it, accidentally overshot my target slightly. When Mrs B found out she reacted with such virulent fury that I genuinely feared for my life. For the only time in my experience she actually left her home as she herded me unceremoniously along the street and around the corner to my house, all the while berating me (I assume) in a mixture of Hungarian and Dutch, with the odd English phrase (“dirty dog-boy!”) thrown in. It was only actually during her faltering attempts to convey the nature of my crime to my mother that it dawned on me what I was alleged to have done. Mum frowned, shook her head ruefully, and tut-tutted with sufficient incredulity to get Mrs B, finally, to calm down, but I still somehow felt that she would only have been properly appeased if granted a front row seat at my public hanging, drawing and quartering.

“It was only a little drop of pee, Mum,” I said, after my accuser had left.

Trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smile, my mum replied, “Yes, I know, but I think it might be sensible to sit down next time to you have to go to the toilet at Aloysius’s. Either that, or hang on if you can until you get home.”

Wise words, which in recent years have assumed a new and hitherto unimagined significance for me, so much so that, almost every time I am forced to answer the call of nature in someone else's home, I find myself thinking of Aloysius's mother, and dutifully, with perhaps a touch of honest trepidation, sitting down.