All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  Late at night years ago, in some sudden need, the old woman had taken Collette’s braided head in her ropy arms and Collette had looked up and seen the loose grey folds of flesh drooping from the old woman’s neck, her head high, just like a bird, her old woman’s bones sharp and shining in the loose flesh. Except for silent times like that, the old woman had carped at Collette and Simon, whom she had always coddled and then ignored with a kind of contempt, just like their father – so droop-shouldered, morose, and always dressed in muddy browns, warming his bare feet before the electric fireplace in the living room during the winter – had ignored them, regarding them all with aloof suspicion.

  Once, Collette had heard her father telling the old woman, as if he were cheering her up, that there was some unseen meaning in his wife dying in childbirth, that a death cannot mean nothing, and maybe the whole trick was in discovering what a death told you to do with your life, and, anyway, he wanted the old woman to know his wife was his wife forever. The irony was, Collette thought, that he seemed always preoccupied with sniffing around, a cabinetmaker who had loved the wet feel of stripped wood, the fleshy shine, and had ended up making dozens of little inlaid jewel boxes, stacking them around the house, empty, calling them as a joke his little coffins. When Collette had asked, Why, why this sniffing around, as if some corner held a clue to where her mother had gone, he had glared at her and said, Someday maybe you’ll learn something about losing love, and she had said, I don’t intend to lose anything, leaving him alone as he kept busy doing little more than brood. If anyone in the house asked him a question, any question, he got up with the newspaper and paraded through the house, reading aloud until his anger cooled down. Then he sulked, sorry for them, for himself, burrowing inside himself, and went away. An awful thing to do, she thought, so irresponsible that she wanted to kill someone herself, so she took to dancing and drinking all night, detached from the men she let make love to her, only afraid when she realized that she wanted a baby and didn’t care who the father was. All her disheartened gaiety died, like the breeze in the curtains, the curtains suddenly limp. She looked up at the ceiling that was so white, so empty, with a little spider trekking slowly from the corner. She was going to get up and kill it, but she just lay there, tired and calm, closed her eyes, and went to sleep.

  Simon came into her room in the morning where she was lying on her bed and sat by her feet. He laid his left hand on her ankle. He tried to hide that he was watching her in her nightgown, watching her breasts. She let the silence hang between them. He took his hand off her ankle and said, What do you think would happen if I were to leave, if I took a room or something somewhere else in the city? There had always been a dulled sensuality about him, some sly cunning to no effect, and she said, I don’t know. Simon leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and said, What I don’t understand, and he was licking his thin, almost white lips, is why you haven’t gone for good, why you came back and why you’re hanging in for a fight with anyone. She felt suddenly saddened and moved by him, sulking around on the edge of his own life, unable to leave because there had been so much neglect in the family, and so there he was on the end of her bed, slumped forward. A postman, she thought, with a bag full of dead letters, his sallow face staring, and she said to him, I’ve been alone with aloneness, and I just headed home because home’s a point where you can see where you don’t want to go again and being somewhere else would be just thirty minutes closer to nothing.

  She got up and went to the old maple dresser with the oval mirror, and in the rim of the mirror there were yellow curling photographs from just a few years ago, a boy with long hair, Harry something-or-other whose father had owned a pasta store, one smirking face in a row of faces hardly remembered, and she brushed her hair, watching herself and Simon in the old smoky glass. Simon said, You dream about your men, I bet. He was crouched forward and his shirt was loose at the throat. She turned and put her hands on his neck, saying, And I bet you’ve got your naked women in your own mind, and he said, What do you think about? She rubbed his neck, moving her thumbs up his brown burned skin and into his hair, and leaned close so that he could smell her, almost feel her. Knowing that he wanted her hands on him warmed her so much that she was suddenly aware of the dryness in the room – dry wood all through the house, the stairs worn grey and bevelled by so many years of boots up and down except where there were knots standing up like carbuncles – saying softly to Simon, I sometimes see a man standing straight and his body wet and I run my fingers slowly across his chest, through the hair on his chest. With a little laugh she kissed him on the neck and pulled him against her. That’s all, he whispered, so she pulled away knowing she had been unfair, but she stood there, shaping her hair with her hands and when he turned, his eyes on her breasts, she hated him for being her brother, and also because he didn’t look ashamed at all, and without shame, she thought, we’re nothing, and so she went out of the room and opened the porch door and found the old woman asleep, snoring, a rattling whine through the yard. The string leash had slipped from her hand and the guinea cock was strutting about in the dust. Collette went down into the garden among the lilies and poppies and the headless stems.

  She took a pair of hedge clippers and began cutting the stems back, and the old woman, with the blackthorn lying between her legs, threw back her head and settled into a steady snore, like a giant insect, Collette thought. Then the old woman came half-awake and groped for the leash. Where’s my cock? she cried, and the bird, hearing her, jabbed a leg toward the stairs, and Collette went toward the stairs with the clippers in her hands and the old woman bawled out, Bring me my cock, bring me my cock. Collette just stood there, uncertain, watching the bird step toward the porch, its head high, and she hooked her foot under its belly and hoisted it into the air, laughing, and the cock squawked and flapped and fell head first. The old woman leapt to her feet and screamed, Who’s hurting my cock? while the bird whirled with its legs beating the dust. The old woman edged down the stairs, and Simon came banging through the screen door, yelling at Collette but she paid no attention. She and the cock eyed each other, its beak swinging slowly back and forth, the red comb flopping from side to side, its eyes never off her, the old woman yelling behind her as she levelled the clippers and took a step, expecting the bird to cut and run but the cock didn’t move. There was only the throbbing in the loose flesh of his throat, and when she stood above the bird her hands shook and she could feel her own blood beating in repulsive time with the bird’s stringy neck. The cock lifted its leg and took one contemptuous step and it was done, a slicing rasp of the hedge clippers. Blood swooshed out of the severed neck and she leapt out of the way, scared. The cock’s body tottered, the blood in bursts, the headless body jagging crazily across the yard. The old woman, frozen in her blindness, let out a screech as if chanting to the bird in his dance, My cock, my cock, who’s hurting my poor cock? and her whole face had collapsed, lips drawn back, baring her yellow teeth, tears down her cheeks, and the cock fell down among the lilies.

  Every day afterwards Collette saw the old woman at the upstairs window and sometimes Simon stood beside her. She was in her bedclothes wearing her bedcap, and she put her long finger to her lips as Simon took her from the window.

  It rained for several days and became so cold that some of the maple leaves turned yellow and red. When Simon came home from work Collette fed him, and then he took a tray to the old woman, sitting opposite her while she ate. The old woman did not come downstairs again. Collette told Simon to tell the old woman that she had taken the black queens from the deck, that the little game was over, but the old woman had said nothing, as if, Simon said, she didn’t know what Collette was talking about.

  Collette began going out alone in the evenings, sometimes taking the old blackthorn cane, which she thought made her appear interesting and elegant because she had read once that a young woman wanting to look mysterious should try to be a little sinister. She also found a wonderful black cape in mothballs in a bottom d
rawer, which she thought might have been her mother’s. She wrapped herself in the cape in the evenings. Once, she wore it out to a big dance hall, though she didn’t bother to go in but only stood outside listening to the music as if she were waiting for someone. One evening while she sat out on the porch entertaining a boring young man who lived four gardens down the lane, the old woman began rocking above, and he looked up at the noise from the rocking and Collette began to beat out the rhythm of the old woman’s rocking with the cane, leaning forward and beating faster on the porch boards as the old woman rocked faster, trying to lose Collette. But Collette got ahead of her so that the old woman was trying to keep up with her, and it gave Collette glee, her face glistening, which frightened the young man, and she began to laugh. Then all of a sudden the old woman stopped. Tired out I bet, Collette said and lay back in the chair with the blackthorn between her legs, feeling fine. A few minutes later Simon came down to the porch saying, You should see her, she’s as white as a sheet, and Collette said, She should see me. Turning to her young man she said, But of course she can’t because she’s blind, and Simon said, You oughta be ashamed of yourself, and he stomped off. Because he was looking bewildered and ill at ease. Collette said to her friend that he should give her a kiss on the cheek. He did, and then sat back with his hands folded around his knees while she sat looking out over the garden as the sun went down behind the two-storey houses.

  THE COHEN IN COWAN

  Cowan’s my name, and in case you don’t know, Cowan’s cut down from Cohen ’cause Cohen meant you were a king but I’m a Cowan, which lets you know right away where I stand, which is on my own two feet, and where else, ’cause I used to be Jewish but now I’m very successful. Otherwise, would I have a black car like a regular mayor or a mortician if I wasn’t successful? Mostly I know I’m okay ’cause I get no secret sweats in the night though I got a lot on my mind and sometimes the pressure is a cooker like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t owe no one in this whole world for what I got, which is to say my company from day one was a moneymaker I thought up in the shower room at the Y and where the idea came from is one night I’m watching the Oscar awards and this song You Light Up My Life, which I always thought was a Flick-Your-Bic commercial, wins ’cause it turns out it’s a song about God. What I’m looking for’s got nothing to do with God, it’s got only to do with this company I put together as a dodge for tax purposes, out near the old cemetery and it has got to look legit. So in the shower after playing basketball I think to myself I’ll get into the T-shirt business with T-shirts from Taiwan, to which if you send me a photo I’ll put your face dead centre between your tits for all the world to see, which is better than all these Day-Glo slogans ’cause it’s you yourself, which is when I get the company name when I hear myself saying U-yourself and that’s where we all live ’cause nothing counts like old Number One, which doesn’t mean I don’t have a Number Two, namely my wife who loves me a lot, but the fact is, I’m at my best alone in the Y and so standing the next day in the shower room I think, Why not lampshades with your face on your own lampshade, which my wife says is a little weird for a Jew but I say forget the Jewish problem and let the light that lights up your room light up your face. That’s what we all want, to look good in a good light, and pretty soon there’s so many orders I know I’m on a lucky streak, and sure enough one afternoon I’m out walking past one of these religious stores with prayer books and those beads and I stop dead in my tracks. I can feel for sure somebody’s got their eye on me and pretty soon I figure it out, it’s this 3-D holy picture of Jesus with the big heart bleeding, and my wife she says she’s worried about lampshades being in bad taste, and there I am looking at this dripping heart with a red light bulb in it, which to me is really sick, but bleeding hearts are not my business except the world’s full of bleeding hearts. But those big mooning eyes, no matter where I move, they follow me ’cause of the way they’re printed in this pebbly plastic and BAM, like a light, it hits me. Put U-Yourself In The Picture With A Frame Of Simulated Walnut. I tell you this is terrific like you can’t believe ’cause there’s nothing people like better than the look of themselves on the wall keeping an eye on everything, and you think T-shirts are big. I’m getting photographs from the ends of the earth and I’m putting them through the same process so that their own eyes inside the frame follow them around the room wherever they go. I’m making big bucks, which suits me fine except suddenly I’m a businessman tied to an accountant instead of a tax dodge, and I don’t want to be a businessman like that ’cause actually though I’m very respectable, you see, I’m a bookie.

  Even more than being a bookie I like playing basketball, mostly by myself ’cause it’s not that I can’t keep up with the boys, being only thirty-six and I got what my wife calls a little pleasure-pillow paunch, but I don’t like to complicate my life with too many other people who want only to make demands and one demand leads to another. So I like being alone, bouncing a ball on Sunday mornings at the Y when there’s nobody on the floor, and usually there’s only one old guy out that early jogging around the upstairs track like he’s chasing his own shadow. He don’t pay attention to me and I don’t pay attention to him but we quit around the same time ’cause other guys are now on the floor and B-ball is really only terrific when you’re by yourself ’cause when you’re alone you can get this feather touch in the fingers, your whole body light like weightless, and you take off and float with the ball, looping it up off the backboard and BAM it goes swish. That’s as close to perfect perfection as you’re gonna get, knowing you’re totally in tune between yourself and the ball, and before you even take a look you see it happen before it happens – which my wife tells me is almost mystical or musical, I forget the way she says I talk about it, but it’s true. The only time I felt close to totally happy is the one or two times I got that feather touch in my fingers, like the little flutter I feel sometimes from my wife except my wife and me, who everybody says we were made for each other in heaven, one week we nearly come apart at the seams and, for Christsake, can you believe it, all over a lousy Christmas tree.

  Which was not because I’m Jewish but the way I remember being Jewish, which in some ways is worse than being Jewish because it’s always in the back of your mind and by and large what you remember is what you are, which is why I figure that what a person wants to forget should take care of itself, except there are some things you can’t do nothing about and for me it’s the smells I smell. Come Christmastime and I see Christmas trees what I think of is shiksas and what I thought about shiksas when I was a boy was pork, and when I think of pork I get queasy ’cause unclean’s unclean, which don’t make much sense ’cause actually I like eating great big goyish hams with pineapple rings. But what can I do about what I smell in my head whether it smells that way or not, so when my wife says she wants a Christmas tree so my two little daughters can open up their presents like regular kids, and I say they’re not regular kids, she says why not, and I say ’cause they’re nothing the way everyone else is something, and she says that don’t make sense ’cause nobody’s anything these days so what’s the difference and what do I care, and I tell her I care and she says not about them and then I’m suddenly screaming pork and she looks at me for the first time in our lives like I’m crazy, which I suddenly feel I am, standing there in the kitchen going pork, pork, but there’s no way I’m gonna be the first person who’s Jewish or not in my family who has a Christmas tree in his house. For all I know what she wants is a star up on top like I’m supposed to be one of the three wise men wishing I knew which way to turn, which is the trouble with wise guys who got all the answers for everybody but themselves, ’cause they got stars in their eyes, which I don’t.

  Anyway, now I’m in the dark with my wife who is a looker and she’s cut me off with absolutely no nookie no way and let’s face it, I’m a very sexy person who doesn’t like lying awake in the dark. So I’m sitting up downstairs half the night trying to figure out what’s going on, staring at the tu
rned-off TV tube staring back at me like I’m nuts, and there’s my own face on the lampshade over the piano, all lit up. So I turn on the matching lamp on the mantelpiece and there’s my wife all dolled up like Snow White staring at me smiling on the lampshade, and between us on the wall my little girls are hanging in their plastic pictures looking at me no matter where I move, like the world’s coming to an end over this lousy tree. I can’t stand it ’cause my wife says why should people who’re nothing sit around with nothing to do, especially when we don’t care what’s what with anyone, except I know we care ’cause we’re screaming at each other the whole time, and I tell her we’re making something outta nothing ’cause already I’m sleeping on the sofa and what’s even worse everything’s out of whack with me being a bookie ’cause now I’m losing.