When the contents of Maud’s tiny two up two down spilt first into the garden and then onto the street, the Council served notice and my mother Ellen leapt to her defence.
“Those pen pushers should leave the poor woman alone. Who could blame her for trowing a pan of boiling water over them should they dare to put one foot across her doorstep?”
“There’s no harm in her holding onto things.”
“In Poland, first the Nazis then the Russians denied her even the simplest comforts of life.”
To placate the bureaucrats, Maud rented a shop. An Alladin’s Cave stacked floor to ceiling with an assortment of oddities.
She never refused a donation of anything of little value, clothing, crockery, Bric-à-Brac.
Ellen took great delight in showing visitors our tiny front room crammed with tat and curios. A tea set with odd cups, a picture of the Queen Mother with a pencil moustache, a cutlery set without handles, a horse and cart minus a leg and a wheel, and taking centre stage, a battered plaster statue of a morose Our Lady who had endured the indignity of baby Jesus’ snapping from her arms.
The crying boy was Maud’s best seller.
These oleographs and countless variations on the theme were based on the work of an Italian artist Bruno Amadio who died four years before they sparked a form of mass hysteria, ‘the curse of the crying boy.’
A then popular British tabloid newspaper that I refuse to name out of respect for the Hillsborough dead, published a story under the headline, “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy.”
The article claimed that there were over fifty thousand ‘cursed crying boys,’ in circulation.
A fire officer had apparently recorded over fifty domestic fires where the print was present but undamaged.
Fire Services throughout the UK were called out by people convinced that the print would cause a fire in their homes.
The news desk was inundated with callers attributing everything from deaths, general bad luck, supernatural activity and even a damaged penis to the cursed canvas.
For selling the possessed prints, gossips who believed everything they read in that shameless rag, accused Maud of being ‘a witch.’
The same people who reckoned that Maud and my mother got on so well due to a shared interest in Brandy and Black men, threatened in a series of badly written notes and without a hint of irony, to ‘bun er shop down.’
My mother needed little excuse to fight anyone who so much as struck a match near her friend.
Maud’s Aladdin’s Cave provided a haven for their resilient friendship based on shared obscurity. Neither cared to know each other’s stories in any meaningful detail, save those that were common knowledge.
Nor did they disturb the other’s secret retail assignations with Napolean Brandy, Siebert, Charlie, Clyde, and Grenville.
When probed about Maud’s extramarital activities, Ellen said “Even the Pope is entitled to a personal life.”
Cancer refused to recognise Maud’s Żądza życia, her lust for life and set about agonisingly dissolving her bones.
Ellen held her friend through cold nights and colder days as she melted into the mattress.
Two refugees from love.
Maud’s daughter secured a Right to Buy discount on her council house and opened a nail salon where Aladdin’s Cave once was.
Whilst gutting the shop she wore a t-shirt with the slogan More Irish, More Dogs, More Blacks.
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