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From the river the city seemed like a colossus. The sky was heavy with rain and the wind was sharp. Salt and tar were in our throats, our eyes were stinging. Seabirds were screaming in the sky and the ships’ horns boomed along the estuary; behind us was the emptiness of the sea. The pilot boat went out and came back in, guiding the ships through the invisible channels in the sand and silt. Lashed to them by metal cables, the tugs hauled the leviathans into port. The city bore down on the shore, the dock brought the water into land and closed in on it foursquare. Everything was immense: the warehouses, the harbour board, the shipping lines, the insurance firms, our two cathedrals, all made the skyline and beyond them our magnificent temple of Zion. The city spoke in tongues and when it didn't speak it shouted.
Yet for all we had here, some of us felt a wrench when we looked westwards out to sea towards the Atlantic. We were yearning for something even bigger still. We had inconsolable longings in us for the city across the ocean. We were its blueprint. It was our completion. Some of us went, some of us stayed, but even separated, we were part of the same need to turn away from England. For a hundred years my family has been trying to get to America. In each generation someone tries and fails, or makes it and for one reason or other comes back again. We cannot get over the feeling that England is an interim stage. America! We still have inside us the immigrant, greenhorn fever of our grandparents for the country where the personality expands to fill the emptiness of the continent instead of shrinking into itself, shrivelling for want of air and light. We have an itch. We want to talk big, think big, make it big, be big people without jostling every day for elbow room.

One day, my brother Sam rang me to say that our mother was going to die, perhaps that night. I know of people who hear from a telephone call months later that a parent is dead, and they shrug and say, 'I really hadn’t seen him for years.' Apparently it is possible to pull free of the ropes that tether you to your family; but not for my brother and me. We had a history. My second home, the former agricultural labourer’s cottage in the Perigord with its garden of lilac and lavender, sunflowers and geraniums - where Sam stood with his hands in his jeans’ pockets, flinching as a neighbour’s cat came and rubbed up against his leg and said, 'From shtetl to shtetl in two generations, Alix,' - was off the Rebick map. It was insignificant. What could it mean? It had no meaning. It was all make-believe, like the articles knocked out to sell to French house-wives in a shop we walked past in Bordeaux called The Romantic Englishwoman. ‘I don’t suppose they named that after you.’
I drove to the airport at Bergerac and flew to Paris. It was March, a windy spring day. There is a certain numbness which overtakes you when you hear bad news that you can do nothing about and you settle into a sequence of routine actions, without pausing to think of their moral appropriateness. At Orly I bought a Cartier watch for myself in the departure lounge while I waited for my connection to Manchester. I looked at all the other things I could buy there: Gucci handbags, Bally shoes, Godiva chocolates and I badly wanted these things as I had once had to have a boy doll dressed in the kilt of a Highlander, seen behind the glass of a kiosk in a London hotel when I was a child, and my father had said, 'What's the matter with you? What are you going to do with that rubbish when you get home? Give me an explanation for why you want it and I'll buy it for you.' But I had no explanation. My eyes were bigger than my head. 'Be serious, Alix,' my father warned me. He meant that we should have reasons for what we did and what we desired. 'Make your case.' I know exactly what he would have thought of the Cartier watch, the Gucci handbags, the Bally shoes: 'Good quality products, I'll give them that, but you only want to buy them because they've got you, you're bored. You're climbing onto a death machine and you're certainly not going to think about what you’re doing, so you empty your mind. And when you empty your mind in a place like this, what comes along to fill it? Shoes and handbags and chocolates.'
Across the Channel England was green below and grey above, and I was reminded of those months of low cloud, brown light, light in its old age, pressing down on my head like a roof. This was one of the reasons why I had left and bought the cottage in France. It was the dimness of the light that made me turn against the land of my birth. In my seat I ate a second in-flight snack though I wasn't hungry and drank a second glass of free champagne though my head hurt slightly from the first, but I was travelling business class and it was there, to be taken and being rich is still a novelty to me since the company my grandfather founded and my mother continued - the manufacture of a renowned and expensive face cream, a ‘best-kept-secret’ amongst those who each month studied with diligence the pages of Vogue and Harper’s and Queen - had been bought out for six million dollars four years ago by the American cosmetics conglomerate, Rose Rosen, and my brother and I each took a fifty-fifty share. I tried to read the papers, absorb myself in peace talks and hostage-takings, events that I had come to in the middle of, having rarely seen a newspaper or listened to the radio in France (part of my programme of immersion in the Greek classics) but my mother's face was in my mind, as I had last seen her, eight months before, entirely indifferent to my presence, calm and void. Everything, the clothes she wore, the wedding ring slack on her finger, the bones of those hands, the oval nails, the threepenny bit scar above her thumb knuckle, entirely familiar, all known, yet the substance that animated them was opaque.
'Where is she?' Sam wanted to know. 'Where is she all day? Is she back in Dresden, Alix, what do you think?' But I didn’t know and nor did the doctors.
At the barrier, dressed as always in jeans, white shirt, white leather Nikes, he was waiting, pulled me to him with a strong arm, held me, me stooping a little for his embrace. I smelled his skin, the musky male odour of Pears soap, Chanel after shave and whatever the male hormones were that had been fizzing through the body of my brother since his teens . 'Hi, kiddo,' he said to me.
'Hi.'
He did not age. I aged, not him. He had the same build at fifty-two as he had when he was ten years old, never a geeky kid, not at all, not even at thirteen and fourteen when boys and girls begin to sprout like wet spring lawns. There was meat on his bones his uncles would tell him, yet packed in a small, punchy, heavy-shouldered frame. He smiled at me, that Rebick smile revealing the wolfish yellow teeth, the humour, the tenderness of all the Rebick men who cried in movies, let their tears dry on their faces, unashamed.
Anyone but us would have driven from Manchester to Liverpool in silence, each alone with the thoughts we had had of our mother and the impending death and of our loss and what it would mean to us, but all we know how to do is talk. Our mother had been very silent for a long time. A psychologist might want to make something of this, that she had finally retreated from the barrage of noise that the Rebicks made, the cacophony of words, the pointlessness of it all. But we were realists, we knew the loss of speech was part of her condition.
'How is she?'
They had came to her room that morning. She was lying with her eyes open. Her breathing was hoarse. Nurse O'Dwyer lifted her up against the pillows. The smell of hot urine rose from the sheets.
'Alix, it's pitiful, just awful. She's sitting in her chair. I come in and she's fiddling around with her crotch. I can't believe it, I thought . . .I really believed for a minute she's playing with herself. My own mother sitting there in full view doing . . . and I say to the nurse, 'Hey, what's this?' And she says, 'Oh no, Mr Rebick, it's the incontinence pad, she's not used to it and . . .'
'Stop!' I cried, my foot jammed against the car's floorwell. 'I don't want to hear any more. This indignity, this . . .'
'You have to hear. Then O'Dwyer starts holding my hand, squeezing it and says, 'Mr Rebick, don't question God's mercy' and I turn round and say, 'Why? What's that shyster doing to her now?' And old man Levy comes past and hears and do you know what he says to me? He says, "That's no way to talk about the god of your forefathers who brought us out of the land of Egypt and delivered us from slavery.'' '
I could not smile because I saw my mother as she was once, the young woman of my childhood precise in all her movements, with lustrous copper hair, whose waves coiled around the brush, elegant in Susan Small or Jaeger, who looked with shining eyes at her handsome husband, the doctor, who walked like a god through the city, St Saul, the saviour of sick children, who promised her every day of his life that one day, sooner or later, he would take her away from the dark continent, to America where happiness was written into the constitution and there was a very limited supply of history.
I know it’s true, she was a difficult woman, Lotte Rebick, my Mamma. She was undoubtedly damaged by her wartime experience, by being thrust onto a train at Dresden station at the age of fourteen, never to have a proper home again with her parents. She was angry and sad. She was sometimes demented by sorrow and regret but let me tell you, I was born into love. I hear that this is not as common an experience as one might suppose. Held in my mother’s arms wrapped in a bathtime towel, the smell of talcum powder rising warm from my skin, the pages of a picture book open before her on the table: from this tight swaddling grew the story of Jack, of the cow and the beans and the plant that rose up from it with green and curling leaves and the giant that lived in the clouds with his wife. Words. New or familiar. What is bean? Like in soup. Where is the cow? Here. Bad giant. Yes. Smack him. Yes, he has a broken head. Kiss it better? No, we don’t kiss bad giants better. The walnut radiogram played waltzes and polkas and Mamma hummed and sang. In my barred cot my rabbit guarded me. No giants came near. The nightlight hummed. Mamma told me a little lullaby and my eyes closed. She walked to the door but it did not shut. My eyes opened. Mamma standing darkened, back lit by the hall light, a velvet shape with her hands clasped together. ‘Nothing terrible will ever happen to you, baby. Your Daddy will see to that. All safe. All safe now. Shhh. Einschlafen, mein liebling.’

South past the cast iron shore, inland a mile or two, my mother was in the old people’s home, a red sandstone monstrosity knocked up with fake turrets and crenellations, built, according to a plaque in the entrance hall, by a cotton merchant around the time that the city was engorged with wealth, when the river was full of masted schooners and the first steam liners, the raw cotton stowed in ships sailing up the Manchester Ship Canal to where the Lancashire mills were going at full production, and little mill girls in clogs span and span until their fingers bled.
A picture of the house in its heyday shows the entire cast of characters assembled on the lawn for the photographer: paterfamilias, face buried in his beard, unreadable; washed-out mother half-dead from child-bearing; doe-eyed daughters in pinafores and hair reaching their shoulders like Alice in my childhood story book; jaunty young sons, dipping a hand into the pocket of a Norfolk jacket, unaware of what life had in store for boys born in the 1890s - dead at the Somme or Passchendale; and ‘tween maids and parlour maids and butlers and all sorts. It was the self-confidence of them that struck you: they knew who they were and by what God-given right they were there, on the shores of the River Mersey. They knew their place, members of the rapidly rising bourgeoisie propelled upwards on a blast of boiling white steam from the chimneys of the industrial revolution. They were powering their way into the future, into the twentieth century, rolling in on a tide of sugar and cotton and (until recently) slaves. Dressed in their stiff suits and impossible dresses, hardly able to believe their grandparents once tilled the Lancashire earth, these grandchildren of an almost forgotten rural English ancestry were thrusting modernists, playing with their new toys: steam engines, horseless carriages, flying machines. They were the forerunners of an American state of mind
And all gone, totally swept away, and in their place, the house was full of old Jews.
Little girls who had skipped rope on the cobblestones of Brownlow Hill; their older sisters, the first Jewish flappers, who went to the pictures to see Mary Pickford and Clara Bow and defied their parents with lipstick and rouge 'my own daughter leaving the house like a prostitute'; the barefoot kids whose parents sat at home mumbling into a prayerbook or pushed hand carts up and down the hill and spoke only as much English as they needed to know to tell the authorities what they wanted to hear – they were old, old people now, the same age as the grandparents of those young pogrom immigrants who left Russia and Poland and the Ukraine at the turn of the century in the years after the Kishniev massacre..
When I first walked into the home four years ago I was impressed by the scale of its public rooms and I didn't immediately make the connection with a hotel which puts its best furniture in the lobby and only when you have signed the visitors' book and taken your key do they show you the meaner cubicles, the stained bedspreads, the chipped formica headboard, the desolate view from the window where you will lie awake at night, sleepless, listening to the knocking pipes, the timbers shifting. A grandfather clock with spidery hands and a walnut case ticks abruptly in the entrance hall. Gold-framed mirrors adorn the walls, as well as tame, inoffensive pictures by Impressionists of blameless, soothing water-lilies. Various plaques announce donations and endowments and a whole breeze-block extension (built by eight years of fund-raising banquets, tombolas, raffles, charity golf tournaments and jumble sales) leads off to the right where up-to-the-minute en suite rooms offer the ultimate in luxury for these old people who are hoisted into bed at night by thin Irish girls, their scaly feet eased out of slippers, night-gowns slipped on over their bent heads. In the upper atmosphere competing brands of air-freshener wage war with their different chemical odours. Beyond the entrance hall, another grand, high-ceilinged room. A mahogany sideboard holds numerous silver menorahs and Friday night candlesticks, some brought over on the boat from the Old Country by the mothers of the inmates, and wrapped in a linen tablecloth, rolled up in the bottom of a cardboard suitcase and preserved right through to the far end of the century where the silver has been polished down to the brass.
But now, in March, freezing winds blow across the estuary. Afternoon has drawn in. The long day ends, the lamps are lit, the tv turned on, the visitors depart and a new life takes over, the private night world of the home. Tonight someone may die, because on any night death is always possible. The company is not static, it changes all the time. It is an illusion that these are the same old people sitting in the same chairs with the same chapped legs and swollen feet. I see them in motion, a line are waiting to depart and another line of are waiting to enter, and the line stretches back well beyond the doors and I see myself there, and see you there. The home is not asleep, it is not motionless at all, it is a place where dramatic events happen . . . the most violent thing of all happens here: death comes by, once or twice a week and wrenches someone from their chair.
If I could, I would reverse time. I would poke the old people on the shoulder and make them stand up, throw down their sticks, push away their zimmer frames, tear off their old people's clothes, see the colour return to their faces and to their hair, give them rosy cheeks and brown hair, the bosoms and chests rise up, their spines elongate - watch them grow again, inch by inch until they regain their full height as the vigorous adults they once were in the Fifties and Sixties, the prime of their lives, and watch them leave, just walk out the door and get on a bus home. I'd crank the clock back, turning the hands with all my force so they would become young married wives, their hands clotted with dough, sweat shining on their faces as they kneaded and sifted and baked biscuits and cakes for their children They fatten those pink cheeks so that they never resemble the starved, rickety street kids, whose mothers don't know how to feed a growing child and gave them 'tea' of bread and dripping instead of a meal with soup and chicken and potatoes and vegetables and strudel, which all day throughout the rest of their lives will form fatty plaques around their hearts, until death calls out 'Next.' We are obliterated now, their children, we are not born, but are eggs clutched in adolescent ovaries like tiny pearls, unspent sperm in boyish testicles, just dropped, and they are almost children themselves, Thirties kids trying to make a living in the Great Depression and making one, because they stuck together, were hard workers, gave each other a hand. Wherever they colonised a new neighbourhood, moving outwards from Brownlow Hill, inching into the suburbs, they built themselves a synagogue with money they raised from whatever was spare in their wages Everything was organisation, committees, plans, surging into the future. Not bound by any class system, for when the workers told them that they knew their place, they thought, 'but I have no place.' They were immigrants. Things could go either way. But always they were propelled forward by the sheer energy of the immigrant, for whom there is no safety net to catch them when they fell.
Further back, further back I would go, the hand turns in only one direction and I make them vomit over the side of the boat, the first time any of them has ever set foot on the uncertain, unstable, treacherous sea. And then the curtain comes down, darkness falls because before Liverpool, before the century that has just ended, there's nothing. Only the tiniest scrap of memory handed on and torn, so that the ink of the writing fades and the creases in the paper wipe out whatever was once there and we must fill in the blanks with our own imaginations and what we know from the historians who went to eastern Europe after the collapse of communism and resurrected towns and villages from the ashes of history.
Before the Jews came, before even that bearded patriarch the Liverpool ship-owner or insurance merchant or sugar magnate who built this absurd, over-wheening house, even before the Irish came, Liverpool was a few streets and a semi-derelict castle put up in the time of King John. Where my father would one day grow up, on Brownlow Hill, there is a hill but no Brownlow for it to be named after. Windmills stand, their vanes turning, their stones grinding; corn grows on the farmlands which will one day house the teeming tens of thousands living in the worst squalor in Europe, and the corn makes flour and the flour makes the daily bread of the people of the emerging port. To the north, where the first wet docks are beginning to reclaim the sand-dunes, horses race on Whitsun Sunday, their manes tearing the sea wind. Salt is in your mouth and your hair and you can taste it on the back of your hand with the tip of your tongue. Behind you is the village of Everton, whose beacon looks out over the Mersey on which the wooden ships will sail to America with cargoes of slaves and back again with cargoes of raw sugar. And before that? A fishing village on a tidal inlet of the river Mersey flowing quite fast through shining silver beaches and beyond them, a wooded ridge of red sandstone, because in Liverpool even the rock comes from the sea.

Within my mother's body, the doctor observed, time was also being reversed. Unable to walk or speak or control her bladder or bowels, she cried when she was pain and slept when she was not. God walked about her turning off the lights. Around lunchtime, while I had shopped for Cartier watches at Orly, my mother, Lotte Rebick, had had a strange period of animation. She lay in her chair and her hands made fluttering gestures as if she was beckoning or addressing invisible friends. Her mouth moved without sound in a continuous monologue. She was taking up again her end of a conversation that had fallen silent three years ago when she put an end to speech. Every morning in the home she spent a long time dressing, a long time creaming her face and applying her lipstick, straightening the seams of stockings which were visible to her alone, in her mind’s eye. She wore a little chiffon scarf around her neck to conceal the ruins of a throat which my father wanted to kiss and kiss when they were first courting, just after the war when he was a young ex-serviceman smashing Mosley's fascists with his bare hands. For four years my mother had descended like a queen to the first meal of the day, would eat sparingly, still following the regime she had begun as a young bride. Then, resisting every attempt at conversation or therapeutic interaction by the staff ('How are YOU today?') she would sit bolt upright in her chair staring into the middle distance. Nothing moved her, not the reminiscence work, not the singalongs.
Sally, Sally, pride of our alley
You mean the whole world to me.
Sally, Sally, don’t ever wander
Away from the alley and me.
There were many wanderers in the home. They wandered up and down the corridors but not our mother. Her brain is very, very damaged the doctor said to us. It was hard to know what remained. Mary O'Dwyer injected her with antibiotics and the bacteria died for a few hours or went to set up house somewhere else. But then it came back, always it came back and the urine that seeped from her body stank and with each breath her lungs banged against her ribs like iron hammers. Mamma was dying in full view of the others and of their relatives, their sons and daughters and noisy grandchildren. Care assistants walked past with sponges and cups of tea and boxes of tissues. Her nose stood out like a sharpened beak in her sunken face and her eyes were grey and filmed. Her lips were slack and askew. A smell came off her, an odour of disinfectant masking waste materials. She was half way through the door into the other world. The biochemical processes that would render her body back to the earth were already beginning. Horror. Disgust. My mother rotting before my eyes, her hand rotting in mine.
'Sam, my God, what . . .'
She was hot, she was burning up with feverish infections.
'It's terrible, just awful.' We cannot bear too much reality, not even Sam who deals with nothing else.
'When did you see her last?'
'Sunday. She was nothing like this, nothing. She was just like when you last saw her. Exactly the same for three years, identical, the same every day, now this.'
'What's happened?'
'I don't know. I'm fucked if I know.'
'What did the doctor say?'
'A stroke, he thinks, strokes happening every half hour. Felling her.'
'How long?'
'He can't say. Could be any minute, could be weeks.'
Levy came over. He squinted at me, his eyes red and watering. 'Is it Alix Rebick?'
'Yes.'
'You come home to see your mother?'
'Yes.'
'I remember when your father first brought her back to Liverpool after the war,' he said, feeling in his pocket for the cigarettes that weren’t there because the doctor had made him stop smoking after last year’s coronary. Still his fingers twitched in the lining, closing on emptiness. 'She was a picture, a doll. A little girl, I can see her now.'
'She was twenty-two,' I said. To hell with these second-hand memories of my mother, I wanted to be alone with my own, of watching her sit in front of her dressing table mirror on the satin stool, massaging her face with the special cleansing cream that came with her from Dresden, and me saying, 'Mamma, am I old enough yet to use the special cream?' Because I knew she had something to teach me, that there was a lesson I was waiting to learn, eager for it, rushing ahead precociously towards womanhood. And always the answer, 'On your sixteenth birthday. Not a day before, not a day later.'
'All the boys were in love with her but she was a married woman, already. A shame. Anyone would have had her.'
And walked off, shaking his head, his newspaper clamped under a stiff arm, an eighty-five-year-old man with a dowager's hump and tartan carpet slippers who used to sell ladies dresses in three shops in Walton, West Derby and Fazackerley. Schmatte shops, outfits that came apart at the seams after one wearing , 'because there's no quality, no workmanship, you only pay for what you get, Alix, but I'm not selling them a garment like your mother would wear because for that they would have no appreciation.’
Sam turned to me, the face of sorrow, and said, 'Shall we sing to her?' For she always sang to us, we were a family who sang. We gathered round the gramophone, a hefty, leather-covered box, and listened to our parents' records, show tunes, from Judy Garland all the way to Barbara Streisand, American of course because it was America, my father said, who had given the world the popular song. We sang, 'Somewhere over the rainbow' and 'Some enchanted evening' and 'I've grown accustomed to her face' and 'Surrey with the fringe on top.' My father's baritone, my mother's wavering soprano, my own, firmer, louder contralto and Sam, who said he was tone deaf but only because he loved to hear us sing, a chorus of voices filling the house, attempting rudimentary harmonies, the Rebick choir of loudmouths sweetly singing together. So to our mother we now sang this:
She may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing that same shabby dress
But while she is weary try a little tenderness.
Mamma is weary, weary of this hard life in which so much has been lost. Sam and I sit, each holding a hand in one of hers, and I am crying until I think my heart will break at this thing that lies in its chair, this scabby rag that is supposed to be my mother.
We sit until close to midnight. The nurse comes over and tells us to go home, get some rest, and this is the end of my first day back in the city. We drive downtown to my brother's flat in the Albert Dock, I get undressed, in the bathroom cleanse my face with the special cream holding the flannel against my skin just as Mamma taught me on my sixteenth birthday so long ago, climb between the white sheets in the spare room, while outside the Mersey flows past me from the granite hills of the Pennines, down to the turbid sea.
When I was a child I heard the loud echoing horns of the ocean-going liners pulling out on a midnight tide and their lights turned the river gold and the funnels sang the song of our city. For the Mersey ran out to Liverpool Bay, and our bay led to the Irish Sea, and our sea opened up to the Atlantic Ocean and our ocean touched the shores of Mexico and all the way down to the bottom of the world. All the old Jews, every one, like their nurses and helpers ('angels! Florence Nightingales' 'bog Irish bitches, more like') had come from over the water. In our city everything comes from the sea. The Irish girls wheel the old Jews out along the promenade at Otterspool, and the old Jews look at the river and hear the ships’ sirens and the foghorns and the motor of the tugs and the pilot boats. 'In your dreams,' the care assistants say, for there are no more ships on the Mersey, or at least not very many and they only go as far as the container port at Seaforth.
The old Jews knew they wouldn't be there much longer, watching the river. They were bound for the other side, the unknown peninsula. That they were still there at all was a miracle. It was the same with the city, it was hanging around long after anyone had any further use for it. My mother was dying on the banks of the Mersey, in a derelict town, the worst place in the country, the very worst. Yes, it's depressing. But it's not the story, only the beginning of the story. When I came back to see my dying mother I fell in love. Me - the arrogant, angry, wilful, sarcastic daughter of Liverpool and of Saul and Lotte Rebick.
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