Being Alexander

by Diarmuid Ó Conghaile

  ‘You mightn’t get a room,’ Mick snaps.

  ‘I’ll take my chances.’

  ‘You know what I’m just remembering,’ Brigid says reflectively, still holding Maisie’s limp bony hand in hers, caressing the back of it with gentle rotations of her fingers, which attention Alexander finds so irritating that it makes him squirm in the chair if he focuses on it. ‘That time before Christmas, she told me there was money hidden behind the Sacred Heart picture in the house in Ballyryan. At the time I thought she was rambling, and then later I forgot about it. She was telling me to get it. I wonder if there really is money there.’

  ‘We should check it out in the morning,’ says Mick decisively, as if this was an urgent matter of public interest. ‘We’ll have breakfast, we’ll call in here to see her, then we’ll drive over.’

  ‘Hluuu hloor,’ says Maisie, her frail chest heaving.

  In the morning, their plans require modification, since Maisie has died. She expired in the middle of the night. This information is conveyed to Brigid via her mobile phone by the ward sister, just as the three of them are sitting down to breakfast in the hotel restaurant.

  ‘Oh my God, what will we do?’ Brigid asks Mick.

  ‘We’ll have breakfast,’ Mick says. ‘It’s what she would have wanted.’

  Brigid gets up from the table and runs out the door.

  ‘Women are emotional creatures,’ Mick says.

  ‘I suppose it’s always a shock,’ Alexander utters piously without thinking about it.

  ‘It’s not that much of a shock,’ says Mick with a pounce. ‘She was very old, has been dying for quite a while, and was completely incapacitated. In fact, I would say it was one of the least shocking deaths of my experience.’

  They each order the full Irish and for Brigid scrambled eggs on brown bread, which, following her return, she insists she cannot eat.

  ‘She was like a mother to me,’ she says, her eyes red and mascara stained from weeping, her shoulders intermittently heaving with the sobs.

  She holds a ball of scrunched-up pink toilet paper to her nose to capture the assortment of bodily fluids running free.

  ‘What do we do now?’ she asks again, and it seems to Alexander as much an existential question as a practical one.

  ‘We should go to the hospital anyway,’ he suggests tentatively, to fill the advice vacuum occasioned by the fact that Mick’s mouth is busy with bacon and egg.

  ‘I can’t believe she’s gone,’ says Brigid, breaking again into a wail.

  Alexander resists an impulse to laugh. There is something absurd in his mother’s behaviour, he finds. But it’s not only that. He often feels like laughing when he hears that someone has died, and once or twice has indeed tripped into actual laughter, before hastily correcting himself, apologising, declaring that the matter was not funny at all. It is a reaction of embarrassment.

  But he had not felt any embarrassment the previous morning, even when Aoife went into denial.

  ‘There’s something wrong with my baby. Call the doctors. There must be something wrong with my baby.’

  She wrapped it up quickly with another blanket from its basket and ran out of the house to take it to the hospital.

  Alexander ran after her because Danny was naked and unmoving. He caught up with her on the pavement in front of the house, ran around to meet her from the front, like a rugby player bringing himself on-side, enclosed her in a loose two-arm embrace, which she first feebly tried to shrug off, but then accepted, the bundle of her dead infant between them.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, though it was not OK. ‘This happens. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘We should still go out to Ballyryan,’ Mick says. ‘We’ll be back in the city in an hour and a half. They’ll have her laid out in the hospital morgue all day. There’s no hurry there. It’s better to clear our heads now and drive straight out to Ballyryan. We should get in there fast, before the rush starts.’

  ‘What rush?’ Alexander asks.

  ‘The Gradys will ransack the place,’ says Brigid vaingloriously.

  She appears to be sniffing her way to recovery.

  ‘They’ll clean it out like a plague of locusts,’ Mick confirms. ‘Get some breakfast into you, girl. There’s a long day ahead of us.’

  ‘Is this your car?’ Mick asks disbelievingly, admiringly, as they arrive at the space in the half-dark multi storey concrete car park where the BMW is berthed.

  Alexander does his best to maintain a demeanour of manly indifference, but his heart beats strongly with excitement. He feels a slight flush at his cheekbones, and is unable at first to speak.

  ‘What did you do? Rob a bank?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Although he feels a tangible – if also hollow – gratification in Mick’s reaction; in the car itself, right now, Alexander takes little pleasure. It seems such a preposterous piece of engineering, an overblown hulk of metal, lustrous, but inanimate, without joy of its own and incapable of reflecting joy.

  ‘I didn’t know they paid economists so well,’ says Mick, the three of them standing by the rear bumper.

  ‘They don’t,’ says Brigid to Mick, then instructs Alexander: ‘Tell Mick what you said to us at Christmas.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, about not being able to buy a house. I thought it was very good.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ recalls Alexander reluctantly, flushing.

  He realises that they are standing around behind the car for no purpose. The other two have been waiting for him to lead the way. He has been waiting for them, or forgot what they were there for.

  He moves around to the driver’s door, but too abruptly, and has the impression of leaving them stranded.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, looking back over his shoulder. ‘Let’s get in.’

  His mother looks at him appraisingly, narrowing her eyes for better insight.

  ‘You’re acting strangely,’ she says. ‘Is there something wrong?’

  He blushes deeply, uncontrollably, and half turns away from her gaze, shaking his head.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ he mutters, opening the driver’s door.

  ‘You sit in the front,’ Brigid says to her brother. ‘You’re the man.’

  Mick has already gravitated to the front passenger door, expecting no less.

  Brigid is happy to observe the sexual hierarchy that prevailed in her youth. She takes a cultish enjoyment in regarding her brother as superior. There is no surprise in this, but it pains Alexander to observe it. His mother sees men in general as essentially superior, except for her own husband and son. He feels in this moment that his mother despises him.

  ‘I thought it was a good attitude,’ she says when they are all in their seats and are belting up. ‘Alexander said that since he couldn’t afford a house, he might as well splash out on a car. It’s a very big car though. It might be too big for you.’

  ‘It’s a better car than my father ever had,’ Alexander says. As it emerges, he recognises this comment to be out of order. It further disimproves the texture of the atmosphere, producing around him a depressing, ashen quality. ‘That was a Freudian slip, if ever I heard one,’ he adds after a silence.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re a better driver,’ Mick says, as Alexander is reversing out of the space. ‘Your father, God rest him, was hopeless. Forgive me for saying it, Brigid. You know I was very fond of him, but sitting beside him in the car was a painful experience. He was as slow and wooden a driver as you’ll meet.’

  ‘He never had an accident in twenty-five years of driving,’ says Brigid.

  ‘That’s not the highest virtue,’ Mick says.

  ‘I disagree,’ says Brigid with plenty of spunk.

  ‘He might never have had an accident, but he might have caused a few.’

  ‘I don’t hold with
that view at all,’ says Brigid, speaking warmly from personal experience. ‘People who drive slowly don’t cause accidents. It’s people who are impatient who cause accidents.’

  Alexander is sweating. He is making an effort to be speedy and nimble, but the descending lane in the car park is ridiculously narrow and tightly wound. He mounts the kerb with one wheel on the inside of a turn. On the way back down, the concrete step catches the underside of the car with a screech and a scratch. He flinches, slows down.

  ‘That was painful,’ he offers meekly.

  ‘Good driving,’ says Mick.

  ‘It takes you a bit of time to get used to a new car,’ Alexander explains.

  ‘It usually takes me about twenty minutes,’ Mick retorts with the practised ease of the habitual boaster.

  Alexander’s driving is ruined now. In the next loop, he under-steers, halts abruptly, curses under his breath as he shifts into reverse to straighten up for the turn.

  ‘You had plenty of room,’ says Mick.

  ‘It felt too tight. I didn’t want to risk it.’

  ‘You drive like a girl.’

  Alexander brakes angrily. The car lurches to a stop, the passengers bouncing forward, rebounding off their belts. He turns and faces Mick.

  ‘Why don’t you shut the fuck up,’ he half shouts at the hunched old man beside him.

  ‘There is no need to get offensive,’ Mick responds, but he looks away, out through the front windscreen, rather than face Alexander’s intensity.

  ‘There is need,’ Alexander insists.

  ‘Cool it, both of you,’ Brigid commands in a clear, authoritative voice from the back. ‘Let’s remember that Maisie has just passed away.’

  A further retort to Mick forms itself in Alexander’s head: If you’re so smart, how come your son is a smackhead? But the words are deep down. It would require too long and too deliberate an effort to dig them up and shoot them off.

  The kitchen was the pumping heart of Maisie’s farm. To the visiting kids, it was more like a HQ than a room. It was a big dark flagstone-floored space, sparsely furnished. Just inside the door, under the front window, was a small kitchen table that was the focal point for the visits. The adults would sit around in rickety wooden chairs. The children, running, would converge into this space on returning from their adventures, hang around for a while, then set off again. At some point they would be fed: soft-boiled eggs; home-made brown soda bread; a bowl of new potatoes with butter and salt. The butter was unusually soft and yellow, unrefrigerated. There were no modern appliances in the house, apart from an old valve radio with a taped-together cord linking it to a dangerous-looking electric socket. Maisie was saving for her old age. She never bought anything.

  The kids sat at the table, their thin legs dangling loosely, chewing the home-produced food which they appreciated much less than their mother did, watching the hens pecking at the floor. Sometimes, one of the birds would jump onto the table and go for the crumbs. Maisie would mutter angrily and take a surprisingly brutal swipe at it, but make no contact. The hens were talented in avoiding her blows. They skipped out of the danger without giving the appearance of having noticed it.

  Alexander looked for milk and was given a cupful from the bucket that Uncle Johnny had just filled.

  ‘Can I have milk from a bottle?’

  This was a source of amusement for the grown-ups.

  ‘Sure, you can’t get better than that – full cream milk, straight from the tit, still warm.’

  But he found it vulgar and disgusting, undrinkable: thick and frothy and smelling of animal.

  Helena looked to go to the toilet, occasioning further mirth.

  ‘Outside, turn left and it’s the second bush on the right,’ Johnny said, surprisingly fluent for once – pink in the face, sniggering slightly.

  In time, the children became accustomed to these features of the Ballyryan homestead, and accepted most of them as part of the fun. The joy that Brigid took in the simplicity of the couple’s life prodded them along in this direction. She, for example, would always point excitedly at the iron hook protruding from the upper stonework of the large open hearth, which – decades earlier – had been used for hanging pots and kettles over the fire. Now they had a stout black iron range, which was novel enough for the children, but which represented modernity to Brigid, relative to the farmhouse she had known in her childhood.

  These then were the main features: the table and chairs, the range, the unused fireplace; at the centre of the opposite wall, a large dark dresser holding a dozen miserable paperbacks, deeply yellowed newsprint magazines, the radio; beside the dresser a rocking chair with some squashed cushions in it that looked as if they

  hadn’t been moved for years; on the far wall, facing the entrance, a ghoulish wooden-framed picture of Jesus of the Sacred Heart, shrouded in cheap glass, his visage repugnantly meek and glowing, the organ in question red and sore looking, wrapped in poetic thorns, with a miniature crucifix emerging from the top where an artery might be expected, as though it had grown there through some truly bizarre mutation.

  The kitchen was not the only room in the house, but they rarely even peeked into the others: a long narrow parlour, over filled with ugly stuffy furniture and ancient kitsch; two small bedrooms; a stony scullery with a deep ceramic trough in it for washing things (but with no indoor taps) and an old bleached-out wooden churn in the corner, which was no longer used. More exciting than these odd annexes was the small door in the kitchen that was halfway up the wall, above the top of the dresser, seemingly unreachable. This, they were told, was the loft, where the boys in the family used to sleep, accessed by way of a ladder.

  ‘Can we go up there?’

  ‘Another time maybe.’

  ‘Where is the ladder? Is it outside in the barn? Can we see it?’

  Maisie and Johnny hardly ever addressed the children directly, perhaps partly because the Dublin children sometimes didn’t understand their heavy country accent. They spoke to them through the parents. And the parents themselves were by this cause moved back into a more distant perspective, seeing their children through the eyes of the old childless couple.

  ‘I want to be a farmer when I grow up,’ Alexander one day declared.

  This was amusing for the adults, but charming also.

  ‘It’s hard work,’ Uncle Johnny told him. ‘You’ve to be up very early to milk the cows, in all weathers, and you can’t be going off on your holidays.’

  ‘That’s fine. And I want to grow things, and have horses.’

  The house is almost derelict now, the thatched roof still in one piece but sunken in the middle. The straw is dying, losing its golden colour, going grey, with open wounds in two or three places where it is rotting, congealing. The whitewash on the front wall is dirty, stained with black specks and blotches, particularly under the small front windows, the panes of which are coated in a greenish grime. And the paint on the front door is blistered and peeling, the exposed wood sodden from the rain, splintering.

  The site is overgrown. The garden, in the time Alexander knew it, was always unkempt, but the front yard was relatively neat. Now it is teeming with tall, aggressive weeds. Enormous bushes crowd in from the perimeter. Only the windowless barn stands in good condition, dirty but uninjured, its corrugated-iron roofing dark and corroded, brittle looking, curled a bit in the corners, a few holes here and there, but essentially intact.

  Wordlessly, the three split up, moving slowly and quietly, as though in meditation, each performing his or her own individual snoop. After a few minutes, as though by arrangement, Alexander and Brigid’s paths intersect at one of the front windows and they pause together, waiting for Mick.

  ‘I’m horrified,’ says Brigid in a hushed voice, her head shaking, tears spilling lightly from the corners of her eyes. ‘I can’t believe it’s been allowed to go to ruin like this. Why is nobod
y taking care of the place? It’s a disgrace.’

  ‘You can’t really see too far into the kitchen,’ Alexander says, his face right up against the glass. ‘The window’s so dirty, and it’s dark inside.’

  ‘You’d think at least that the neighbours would have trimmed the bushes.’

  ‘But I can definitely see a bottle of Heinz ketchup on the table, underneath the window. She never used anything like that.’

  ‘I’m surprised Michael Phaddy wouldn’t have taken a hand to the place, after all Maisie did for him.’

  ‘What did she do for him?’

  ‘Didn’t he come down to her for his dinner every day for a good ten years when his own wife went mad and took to her bed?’

  ‘But he’s an old man now, isn’t he?’ It shocks Brigid momentarily to hear this undeniable truth. ‘I think I can even make out the tablecloth,’ Alexander continues. ‘Do you remember it? It had a blue flowery pattern.’

  ‘That wasn’t a tablecloth.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘It was a plastic thing,’ Brigid explains. She seems irritated. ‘You peeled off a skin at the back and ironed it on.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember the bubbles under the surface. And the way it was scrubbed white in the places that saw the most action.’

  ‘Those are peculiar things to remember,’ says Brigid, frowning.

  Mick’s hunched form appears from around the corner of the house. He is sucking purposefully on a cigarette, which reminds Alexander that he could take out one of his own, although he does not do so. For some reason he has not smoked so far today. Now that he remembers, he notices the presence of the usual physical longing for nicotine in his throat, in his blood, but is happy for the moment to accept these sensations, to enjoy them even.

  ‘We can get in around the back,’ says Mick, ‘through the scullery window. We can smash it with a rock.’

  Alexander’s phone vibrates in the back pocket of his trousers. He slips it out and spins around to consider the call in privacy. On the grey monochrome screen, the little black bell is swinging. Underneath is the letter J. It’s a long time since he has seen that. He presses the green receiver button to take the call just as the phone would switch from vibration to ring.