Being Alexander

by Diarmuid Ó Conghaile

  Alexander has leapt forward to catch the bundle as it tumbles from Aoife’s arms.

  The baby’s little face is blue and grey. Its eyes are open, but clouded, glassy. There is no breath, nor any prospect of breath.

  Alexander does not react quickly to events like this.

  His father died when he was still at school, and it took him over a decade to begin to consider what this meant, what it continued to mean, if anything.

  The first hours of this morning are surreal to him, and curiously pleasurable, like a strange dance. All the days, he is plodding along, labouring under his own unexceptional burdens, unable to escape himself, unable to emit light because of the heavy pull of his own gravity. And now – as with a flare – the whole thing is lit up. He sees what otherwise goes unnoticed: the fairground ride. Whoosh, here we go; around and around; up and down on the wooden horse. . . . And . . . . wow, isn’t it . . . yes, beautiful?

  But as the flare starts to dim, which it quickly does, as the surreality, the super reality, contracts, he experiences the need to scarper.

  In the early afternoon, after a quick stop in Rathmines for a shower and a change of clothes, he drives to Galway.

  There was nothing further to be done in Danny and Aoife’s except to hang around in the kitchen, keening, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until it was time to start on the whiskey again. When he left, there were plenty of others there. He was beginning to feel superfluous, although not so superfluous as to adequately assuage his unease about leaving.

  ‘My grand-aunt is dying,’ he explained quietly to Aoife’s mother and one or two others as he made his way out. ‘I have to drive down to Galway to see her. She only has a few hours.’

  But even though his excuse this time was genuine, or at least plausible, it is typical of him that he withdraws, that he rations his friendship.

  ‘If you have to go, you have to go,’ Danny said in quiet anger, having initially responded with woundedness, incredulity, ‘but it wouldn’t surprise me if she was still dying in ten years’ time.’

  ‘She’s on the way out. I have to see her.’

  ‘Well, you might as well stay put in Galway. We’ll bury Merlin in Knockboy, on Thursday probably. That’s what my mother says. She’s organising everything. She’s still on her way down in the car, and already she has the whole thing sorted out. It’s great to have people like that around you when you’re in trouble.’

  As he cruises past The Spa Hotel in Lucan, playing back the events of the morning, Alexander discovers an implication in these last comments of Danny’s which he did not notice at the time, namely that he – Alexander – does not belong to the set of people who are great to have around when you’re in trouble.

  The Spa Hotel used to be out in the countryside. When he travelled to Galway as a kid, in the back seat of his father’s car, alongside Helena, with his mother in the front passenger seat dispensing blue Murray Mints and good-humoured conversation, The Spa was a milestone, telling them they were out of the city, well on their way.

  Dublin has now spilled out far beyond the hotel.

  ‘Your grandfather put the central heating into that hotel,’ his mother would say every time they passed it on their way west.

  This was considered fresh news on the outward leg of their journey, but was never repeated on the homeward leg. They would pass The Spa on the way back to Dublin in subdued silence, knowing their holiday was over.

  His grandfather was a builder, in a broad sense of the word. Brigid is disdainful of modern-day tradesmen – as she would call them – because they have such limited expertise.

  ‘Sure, Daddy could turn his hand to anything,’ she would say admiringly, although she hated the man.

  The child imagined his grandfather single-handedly installing the heating in the hotel in question, down on his knees on the carpet, with a cup of tea in one hand, a hammer in the other, and a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, secured only by spittle. This was the boy’s experience of how the man worked, crankily barking orders to anyone within range.

  He drives the car through the ever-extending outskirts of Dublin, repeatedly rerunning his exchange with Danny. This is what he does with life. He attends obsessively to the details of past social interactions, looking for meaning, forming resolutions, flinching at ugliness, reimagining nuances. Occasionally – rarely – there is something pretty to appreciate. Now he is digging out circular patterns. If he’s not great to have around, then it shouldn’t really matter that much if he quits the scene. But is it the act of departing which confirms his status as not being someone who is great to have around? What conclusions can be drawn? People who are great to have around tend to be around. People who are not great to have around tend to absent themselves. Everyone should be happy with this, and no blame or credit should attach.

  At the time, his inward reaction to Danny’s comment was hard. He thought: Your mother is a leech. Don’t you see that she’ll turn this into a social whirl, a poignant drama with herself at the centre?

  What he said was: ‘Yeah, she’s great. I’ll ring you later from the car to see how things are going.’

  The car is going beautifully. The driver is pumped up on adrenaline, on the energy of things being different, the routine smashed for a while, and the world seemingly full of possibilities. He is high and agitated on coffee and nicotine. His belly is full of all-day

  breakfast, which he himself cooked for half a dozen people at Danny’s. In ordinary circumstances, his stomach would still have been refusing work, but, given the extremity of the situation, it has deferred all complaints. He is conscious of an underlying wretchedness, but right now he feels good.

  He zooms effortlessly through the roundabout that begins the Kinnegad bypass.

  Through the bypass and on to the narrow winding country road that runs for twenty miles or so, lined with winter-bare hedges and trees, the verge mucky. No overtaking is allowed, and usually it wouldn’t be possible, but in this car, and with the traffic scant, the manoeuvre is accomplished with minimal effort, with none of the usual nervous strain, without thought almost, as easily as one swings out to avoid a cyclist on a quiet road.

  When he hits the Athlone bypass, with the crossing of the Shannon imminent, his sense of pleasure at passing into the West is coloured with regret at how quickly the journey is racing by. It would suit his emotional condition better if the trip was a transcontinental one. This is always how he feels, not just today. He would love always to be driving from New York to some remote coastal corner of Oregon.

  It is a journey in three movements.

  In the first movement, he is up, the day is bright, but not too bright.

  The second movement begins shortly after he crosses the Shannon. As he rolls smoothly through a landscape of thistly fields, flooded in places, the big yellow sun hangs low in the sky in front of him, and starts to blind him. He remembers that he remembered to bring his sunglasses. He remembers that he was clever enough to drop them into the side pocket of the door. His right hand finds them. He puts them on. And instantly everything is groovier, including himself, and he can certainly tolerate a bit of grooving up, since his good mood is faltering, his tiredness beginning to get the upper hand.

  He stretches a little in the cushioned seat, leans his head back against the rest, brings refreshed focus to the external environment, darkened and grainy, freed of the everyday glare of ordinariness. He begins to give attention to the animals in the passing fields: depressed cows at their lazy work of chewing, their udders heavy, industrial; sheep with their narrow stupid skulls; fine slender horses, who even in repose seem frightened. And animals on the road: a squashed rat, pointing to Galway; a full-bodied fox, who survived long enough to make it past the broken yellow line to the hard shoulder, where it lay down to die. From his last trip, more than a year previously, in late summer, he recalls a long plentifulness of dead cro
ws, over many miles, glued to the road’s surface with their own spilt innards and juices, their jagged black wings flapping lifelessly in the wind. No crows today.

  The quick and the dead. The difference between them. The baby was blue, glassy eyed. A particular class of object.

  The third movement opens in busy little Loughrea. He takes off the sunglasses. It will be night soon. The early starters have their lights on already. The narrow streets of the market town are bright and colourful, more appealing, now his glasses are off. For fun, to have a target to aim at, he estimates it will take him another twenty minutes to reach Galway, but he knows that half an hour is more likely.

  His body feels like wreckage. His spirit is low. He has no home to go to. He rings his mother on her mobile. He doesn’t want to face her and her odious brother this evening. As he listens to the ringing tone, he tries to think of an excuse. He would like to bypass the city and drive out to Barna, book into a B&B on the ocean, have a pint with the good people of Connemara, get to bed early with the remote control, flick through the channels for an hour, sleep. In the morning, if it’s a clear day, he will be able to make out the Aran Islands, three faint rocky shapes on the horizon. Just to glimpse them is a healing experience. If he is brave, if it is not too cold, he might jump into the sea before breakfast, to refresh his soul, to give him appetite.

  He remembers that Maisie is dying.

  ‘She’s drifting in and out of consciousness,’ his mother tells him dramatically. ‘She’s completely confused. Her breathing is very shallow. She could go any minute, or she could last till tomorrow, but it won’t be long now.’

  ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to wait there?’

  ‘It’s just myself and Mick now. We won’t leave her alone, but there are people coming and going. We’ll go back to the hotel for dinner when someone relieves us. The Gradys have been here in force all day.’

  ‘I might stay out in Barna,’ he says abruptly.

  Maisie does not look well. Her eyes are dark, far back in her head. The skin of her face is yellow-grey, flaccid, anciently wrinkled. Thin flesh hangs from her jaws. Her lips are pale and shrunken, desert dry apart from a tiny crescent of dampness that is visible on the inside of the lower lip. Her breathing is erratic, laboured: the emaciated body beneath the sheet shudders and jerks with the effort of inhalation.

  Alexander bends over the bed to kiss her and wants to vomit. He has been vomiting a lot recently. It’s becoming habitual. He searches for the least offensive spot, and is drawn to her forehead. The tepid yellow skin feels synthetic against his lips, and he finds himself far too close to her thin dry hair and the smooth sprouting ground in which it is weakly rooted.

  A low grunt-like sound issues from the dying woman’s throat. She appears to be trying to say something.

  ‘Jimmy,’ translates Brigid, who is sitting in a chair beside the bed clasping Maisie’s hand between her own two hands. ‘Isn’t that marvellous? She recognises you.’

  ‘I’m not Jimmy,’ Alexander points out, sitting down into one of the chairs by the bed, on the opposite side to his mother.

  Brigid shakes her head, dismissing this objection as a mere detail, an inappropriate fussiness.

  ‘You look like him.’

  It is painful for Alexander to hear this. He desires to respond to the accusation, to refute it. He wants to say: I might look like him, but I’m not him. I’m different from him. But his anger would be wasted. Brigid wouldn’t notice it. If she did notice it, she wouldn’t understand.

  ‘Where’s Mick?’ he asks.

  ‘He’s in the smoking room, doing his crossword.’

  Brigid refers to the crossword-doing as though it were a holy rite. Mick is famed in the family for his crossword skill and his obsessive devotion to the Irish Times’ cryptic crossword, as a consequence of which he is unable to focus properly on anything else until the day’s puzzle has been solved.

  Brigid thinks her older brother is a genius, that he could have been President of the Universe if he had just pushed himself a little. He was the only one of all the cousins to go to university. He studied law and became a junior solicitor in a partnership in Loughrea. Later, after a mysterious falling out with the senior partner, ostensibly on a point of professional ethics, though the details remain vague, he left the practice to join the Office of the Chief State Solicitor in Dublin, where he remained for the following thirty-five years until his retirement, without – Alexander understands – ever distinguishing himself. In the latter years of his career, he drifted into complete idleness, devoting himself increasingly to crosswords and gin. Even in this, Brigid found something noble, believing that her revered brother had become too disillusioned to bother.

  Alexander has never been able to deal with Mick. When he was a child, unconsciously imitating his mother, he regarded Mick as a god. They had a love affair, man and nephew. Later, in early adulthood, having not seen his uncle for a few years owing to a family falling-out, Alexander re-experienced the man over a number of family events and was disappointed in him, found himself insulted and angered through what he regarded as the vacuity of Mick’s personality and his unsettling, smart-arse wit. This disappointment was mutual, it seemed. Their interactions now are edgy and unpleasant, characteristic of soured affection. In advance of meeting him, Alexander usually intends to smooth the path between them, or at least to maintain his own internal equanimity, but Mick still has power over him.

  ‘That was terrible what happened with the poor baby,’ Brigid says. ‘They must be destroyed. Do they know what it was at all? Did he suffocate?’

  ‘It’s a cot death: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. They don’t know why.’

  ‘I read somewhere that it might have to do with cigarette smoke, but then Mick said to me that that was nonsense. It’s hard to know what to believe any more.’

  Brother Mick enters the room now, this wise and powerful man, who to anyone else, who didn’t know him, might seem simply small and old. Under his arm he carries a neatly folded Irish Times, the crossword showing, beautifully completed. Mick uses expensive disposable pens with thin soft nibs. In this, his taste is good; and his writing is elegant, if affected. It is a point of honour with him that he makes no marks on the paper, that there are no corrections in his answers.

  ‘You look a bit under the weather,’ he remarks to Alexander as he sits in the chair next to his sister.

  ‘Hello to you,’ Alexander says.

  ‘Did you get it out?’ Brigid asks her brother.

  ‘What?’ he says, pretending not to know what she is talking about.

  ‘The crossword,’ she says impatiently.

  ‘Indeed I did.’

  ‘Hluuu hle hloor,’ says Maisie, her head bobbing feebly from side to side.

  ‘What dear?’ asks Brigid ardently.

  ‘Hluuu hle hloor,’ says Maisie, admirably consistent.

  ‘She’s been very chatty this last while,’ Brigid says, withdrawing her attention from Maisie’s great effort to communicate. ‘I think she might be telling us to close the door. When she had a bad turn before Christmas, she was seeing all these people coming through the door and crowding up the room. And sure the door was closed, and there were only a couple of us there at the time.’ Brigid glances at Maisie and continues emphatically with her voice dropped to a whisper, probably more out of reverence for the subject-matter than out of any fear that Maisie will overhear. ‘She was seeing the cast of characters from her life, all the people she had known, most of them stone dead for decades – may the Lord have mercy on their souls. “My people are here”, she said to me, very lucidly. “They’re coming to collect me, to bring me home, all the people. Look at old McLoughlin there with that hat on him and the same toothless grin.”’

  It is not clear to Alexander whether his mother interprets these events as hallucinations on the part of the dying or as ins
tances of paranormal perception of actual ghostly happenings; that the dead friends and relatives did indeed turn up en masse in spiritual form to usher their loved one to the hereafter, visible to her, who already had one foot in the other world, but not to the other plain mortals gathered around.

  Alexander is not one to rule out the possibility of ghosts, although he would generally be sceptical. He has noticed that people from his mother’s generation often have a ready supply of ghost stories, which seem puzzlingly authentic, if one believes the details described. Brigid even has a particular voice which she employs for these stories and for discussing other weird phenomena, such as UFOs, which she occasionally reads about with passing fascination. How come he has never heard of someone from his own generation encountering a ghost? There are a few possible interpretations here. It might be that there are no ghosts and people now don’t see any because they are more rational about these matters. Or one could assert that people have lost the ability to see ghosts because they are too rational.

  ‘You remember those sessions you guys used to have,’ he says now across the bed, ‘late at night in somebody’s kitchen, telling ghost stories. They used to scare the shit out of us kids. But we loved them as well.’

  Brigid blanks. Mick stares at him with distaste, as though this comment were out of context and inappropriate, then glances sideways at Brigid, frowning, without attempting to disguise his facial expression, which translates as: Is your son really such an idiot?

  Brigid sniffs and jerks her head in embarrassment.

  ‘Alexander is planning to spend the night in Barna,’ she says with veiled accusation.

  ‘That makes sense,’ says Mick with sarcasm.

  Alexander yields immediately without struggle.

  ‘No, no, that was just a whim. I’ll book a room in the same hotel that you guys are in.’