Aoife Mannix: Pressing Buttons
February 9, 2011
Pressing Buttons
By Aoife Mannix
ROSIE:
I blow past chilled blocks of question marks, their windows icy with the pause of December. The end of the year spinning from the thread of a crane. Blue hoarding boards blank with future graffiti snapshots. A sign pinned to the door of a tower that reads 'Escorts wanted. Earn five hundred quid a night.' Not the kind of 'back to work' policy I had in mind. I check the map again, realise I am stranded in a maze of roundabout construction. The wrong address, the wrong post code, not the tower I'm searching for.
The public path peters out but a man in a low cap calls cheerily 'you look lost' before revealing he knows where I need to go, it's just not so easy to explain how to get there. Still his friendly advice of zig-zagging roads and twisting back across bridges puts the renewed speed of direction into my steps. I wonder if he knows my father then freeze
such crazy thoughts because this is a city of nine million strangers, not some country village.
I spin past bright yellow shutters that dazzle in the sudden stream of sun into a doorway dark as winter. I ring a silent doorbell, unsure if my finger echoes in an empty hallway. I press seven times, my father's lucky number or so Mum told me, but my breath only smokes clouds of zeros. I try another bell and then another and then another, pressing seven with increasing speed, because each steel button could hold the answer to a question I don't know how to ask.
My father left no forwarding address. Mum said that might be a hint he doesn't want to be found. She never even gave me his name till the very end. She claimed he was called trouble by everyone who knew him. Even his own mother forgot him as quickly as Alzheimer's would allow. Mum burnt every memory till the smell of charred photographs turned to ashes inside her. But when she got sick, the smoke rose phoenix like in her lungs. Forty a day for twenty years. She said it was my father's fault but I suspect it was mine.
He left when I was still a cancer in her womb so chances are he doesn't even know of my existence. The last Mum heard from him was a postcard from London a quarter of a century ago saying he lived in a tower called Blashford. That it was a shit hole but the views were nice. And that he'd be home soon. It's not a lot to go on I know but now Mum's gone, what choice do I have but to keep on pressing buttons?
by Aoife Mannix
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