The Tea House on Mulberry Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

were already.
    The young woman’s name was Brenda Brown. She was a regular customer in the shop, given that she lived right next door, in a one-bedroom flat. Brenda seemed to prefer her own company. She liked to listen to Radiohead, or Placebo, on her personal stereo. And she never seemed to have a boyfriend. She often sat near the counter, for hours on end, writing long letters on red paper with a gold-ink pen, and putting them into red envelopes. The paper and the envelopes were always red, never any other colour. Brenda talked to herself, too – that was another strange thing about her.
    Brenda was an artist, and consequently penniless. Brenda’s mother didn’t understand art but she tried to help her destitute daughter. Mrs Brown was a great fan of car-boot sales and she frequently offered to sell Brenda’s collection of paintings for her at such events. The paintings were a bit weird: full of people with blue faces, their too-big eyes weeping and crying. And angry storms and old-fashioned, cracked windows and big blackbirds hovering above bare trees. But still, some people would buy anything. That was the magic of car-boot sales. They attracted the sort of people who might buy weird things. She might be able to shift a few pieces for Brenda.
    But Brenda didn’t want her great gift to the world to languish on trestle-tables in windy carparks. Her paintings were not just something to hang on the wall, she had explained to her mother, countless times. They were not just pictures, something to match the carpet. They were paintings. They were Art. Fine Art. They must be sold in a proper art gallery, to discerning and sensitive people who lived in houses with plain white walls. Anything else would be an insult to her talent. If Brenda was going to sell out, she would start churning out watercolours of pretty Irish cottages and deserted sunny beaches, and be nice and agreeable to everyone, and be done with it.
    “I’d think about it, if I were you,” said her mother, when she came to visit Brenda in her tiny flat. Brenda’s canvases were stacked against the walls in every corner and passageway. There was hardly room to walk about, never mind get busy with the vacuum-cleaner. And at twenty-four years of age, she thought, wasn’t it time Brenda was earning a decent living? Mrs Brown herself made far more money, buying and selling bits of old junk, than Brenda ever got for her pictures. To Mrs Brown’s knowledge, Brenda hadn’t sold even one painting.
    “Money is money, at the end of the day, and this place could do with a good clear-out,” said Mrs Brown, as she tripped over a small canvas, titled Waiting For My Love .
    Brenda sighed a lot when her mother came to visit, and wondered how her parents, two Elvis fans who had never been anywhere remotely cultural, could have produced a great and talented artist such as herself. And in Belfast, too, of all places. When everyone knew it was Donegal and Dublin that were the cool places to be born. Painfully, unbearably cool. All Celtic wildness and Bord Fáilte landscapes. James Joyce, and all the rest of them, writing poetry in smoky bars that reeked of porter. Would Bono or Enya have done so well, she wondered, if they’d grown up in a small village in County Tyrone that no-one had ever heard of? Or if their names had been something terrible like Maisie Hegarty, or Francis Magroarty?
    Then again, there was Liam Neeson. He was from a town called Ballymena. That wasn’t so far from Belfast – well, Brenda had never been there and wasn’t exactly sure of where it was on the map. Yet Liam Neeson had managed to achieve world-wide fame as an actor, despite his ordinary name and humble beginnings. (Every rule had one exception.) Brenda made a mental note to go to Ballymena some day and see if there was a Liam Neeson exhibition in the town hall, or a plaque on the wall of his childhood home. Maybe, if she went to Ballymena, and walked the streets that he had walked, some of