Being Alexander

by Diarmuid Ó Conghaile

  ‘Hiya baby,’ he says naturally, without thought, striding away toward the bushes. ‘It’s great to hear from you. I’ve missed you so.’

  He knows from the silence at the other end that this is not what Julia had in mind, but that’s fine too. There is no expectation in the attitude from which he speaks.

  ‘I’m ringing about Aoife and Danny’s baby.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he agrees gravely, after a few moments of consideration. ‘Maisie died, last night, at four in the morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘It’s been quite a week. . . . I haven’t spoken to Danny since yesterday. The funeral is confirmed for tomorrow afternoon, right? It’s just down the road from here. I’m in Ballyryan now.’

  ‘You’re at Maisie’s place?’

  ‘Yes. We’re standing outside the cottage, contemplating burglary.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Mick, Brigid, myself. I’m always chickenshit at this kind of thing, or else too morally scrupulous, which probably amounts to the same thing.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘The old dear had cash stashed everywhere,’ he explains, speaking slowly, searching for the words, his chest heavy with unexpected emotion, ‘in mattresses, buried in buckets in the fields, hidden behind stones in the barn. . . . She didn’t trust banks. . . . Mind you, it’s highly unlikely that the place hasn’t been raided already, many times, by people with keys.’

  ‘Are you OK, Lexi?’ she asks in a wonderfully gentle, concerned voice. It feels like a new branch of her personality, a new development, or – at least – something he hasn’t experienced in her for a long time. ‘You’re rambling a bit.’

  ‘I’m just saying that it’s been a difficult week. And on Friday

  the Council is launching its broadband report. I really ought to be there. And Helena and I had planned to take part in a show-jumping competition on Friday evening. I suppose we can give that a miss. . . . I wonder when Maisie will be buried?’

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  The following morning, in a dreamy tone, he decides to skip the church service for Merlin; or, rather, it happens that he does not attend.

  After breakfast, he escapes easily from his relatives and goes walking through Galway in January sunshine. His body is freshly washed, but his underpants and socks are sticky, his teeth furry from two nights of no brushing, his face stubbly and dry skinned. After leaving Danny’s place on Tuesday morning, he showered and dressed in Rathmines before setting off for the West, but he didn’t bring a change of clothes or a toilet bag. At the time, he wanted to be spontaneous, unencumbered. He now rues this whim.

  On the surface of things, it would be straightforward to buy new gear. He could duck into a department store somewhere around Eyre Square, pick up what is required, change in the jacks of one of the pubs on Shop Street, throw the old stuff into a bin. He could even shave in a pub toilet, if he is too lazy to return to the hotel. But he has no appetite for such activity. Having strolled around in circles for a few miles, meditatively, he is in the mood now for sitting in a small café, sipping cold Darjeeling, an unlit cigarette in his lips, staring out the window at the passers-by, at the physical fabric of the street, picking out the obscure features where life breaks through: in dirty pavement cracks and uneven kerbstones; in a slowly disintegrating lollipop stick caught in the gutter; in the heavy scarring of the tarred road surface, from multiple digs, filled and refilled, sunken, sinking; in the fact that the pale reflection of the street in the shop window opposite currently blocks his view of whatever it is that’s on show behind the glass.

  Galway has always been closer to his heart than Dublin. He likes the Bohemian thread that runs through it: the colouredy woollen scarves and hats, the German dope smokers, the organic vegetable growers, the buskers with their dreadlocks; the attractive young students with their rollie cigarettes and precious pints of Guinness, their life dramas, the things they laugh at; the busy podgy Gaeltacht mums, up from Connemara for a day’s shopping, speaking rapid Irish with each other, with their sensibly dressed kids, knowing the value of money; the bookshops which seem more Irish than bookshops in Dublin, more Celtic, more literary than smart, more second hand than new, more quirky than comprehensive.

  ‘Do you need a light?’ the thin elegant Asian-American waitress inquires, proffering a little book of matches embossed with the café’s logo.

  Actually, he doesn’t want a light. He is happy to leave the cigarette as it is, long and white, clean – rather than hot, burning, reducing. He is enjoying how his nostrils occasionally pick up the scent of the unblemished fresh tobacco. He is enjoying the absence of smoke.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ he says, to reward her solicitude, out of politeness really, and because she is pretty, with oriental eyes like lateral commas, and a snubbed nose. She is wearing a delicate antique white cotton blouse, which – he finds himself now thinking – must have been washed hundreds of times, lovingly. She is flat chested but with wide generous hips; superior, but slightly curious about him.

  He decides that he would like to live in Galway.

  ‘Could I interest you in another pot of tea?’ she asks with a lovely twinkle.

  ‘You know, there is nothing I would rather do than hang around here for a long time, but I have to find a flower shop. Do you know if there’s one nearby?’

  Bouquet in hand, he passes through the gate into the small Anglican churchyard outside Knockboy.

  It’s a fine bouquet. The florist helped him with it. They made it up together. He didn’t want a wreath. He wanted something live and charismatic, with lots of white lilies. He didn’t care what it cost.

  ‘Would you like to do a card?’ the florist asked him.

  He gave serious thought to this question. Why would he fill out a card? To indicate that the flowers were from him, that he had paid for them, that they arose from his impulse, his sense of duty. It seemed petty.

  ‘No,’ he said. Then instantly regretted the decision.

  He has already spotted the funeral party, up in the cemetery beyond the top end of the church. He is surprised by how few people are there, no more than a couple of dozen. This is problematic, since it makes his late arrival obvious. He finds himself raw and unshaven, a solitary outlaw.

  ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway,’ he whispers, proceeding crunchingly along the gravel path by the side of the church, then onto the silence of the springy grass bank where the graves begin, through the assembly of assorted gravestones from the past two hundred years or more, some black and pristine, newly lettered, freshly flowered, some old and weathered, illegible, lichen stained, lopsided, commemorating dead people now entirely irrelevant, even those who forgot them themselves now long forgotten.

  ‘The Lord is full of compassion and mercy,’ says the prissy young rector to the silent mourners as Alexander comes within hearing. Alexander positions himself in the nearest peripheral slot, apart from the group but nevertheless clearly joined to it, just behind where Paul, Julia and Karina are standing. Paul hears the grass move, turns his head sharply, nervously, nods to Alexander, almost imperceptibly, but in a manner which deliberately conveys disapproval. Fuck you too, Alexander thinks at Paul’s skull once he has turned his back again. He removes from his imagination – borrowed from some Russian friends – a portable petrol chainsaw and tugs on the cord to get it started.

  ‘Ruummm, rummm,’ he growls quietly, but not inaudibly.

  Paul turns his head again, frowning in irritation.

  To disguise his indiscretion, Alexander coughs loudly into his fist. This signals his arrival to the general funeral party. Karina and Julia turn their heads. Karina winks sorrowfully. Julia gives him a tight-lipped smile. Her face is pale, and she is wearing an unusual lilac lipstick, which he finds s
exy. Danny looks across, sees him, but registers no reaction. Closely shaven, gaunt and grey in his apparent anguish, Danny is dressed in a long stylish black coat that Alexander has not seen before. He stands next to the rector, on the far side of the small gaping grave. The interior walls of the grave are dense and mucky, varying gradually in composition as they descend toward the bottom. Usually, in Dublin, the grave is hidden under a wire lattice covered in green baize, with the wreaths piled up on top of it. Here in the country – evidently – they prefer to leave things more explicit.

  Next to Danny, eighteen inches too far from him, Aoife, entranced, stares into the ground. Jasper holds her firmly by her elbow, as though there is a risk she might fall into the hole. Jasper appears unusually mature in this pose. He seems to have achieved a more modulated attitude, of brave defiance rather than unreasoned hostility. The wispy beard sprouting on his pimply face looks surprisingly good. It goes well with his long hair and wire-rimmed glasses, giving him a new Trotsky-ish aspect. At the christening, Alexander recalls, he wore a suit, but now he is in his usual gear: torn jeans, big boots, denim jacket. Maybe they were all too driven out of their heads to give any thought to what Jasper should wear. Or perhaps there was a row about this, which Jasper won, a victory, as he might see it, for authenticity.

  Closely around the central trio stands the next layer of relations, grim and steadfast: Danny’s mother, his tall angry red-faced father, Aoife’s mother, Danny’s sister Cordelia, her impeccably turned-out husband, a couple of aged aunts, an uncle who has just had a stroke, or is just about to have one, or is having one at this very moment, his head twitching strangely, his complexion a little more purple than would be wished for.

  ‘For He himself knows of what we are made,’ continues the rector pompously, but also lovingly. ‘He remembers that we are but dust. Our days are like the grass. We flourish like a flower of the field.’

  ‘Goodbye, my little flower,’ says Danny, an almost dandyish affectation, which nevertheless nudges his red-nosed sister into sudden, convulsive sobs.

  Her husband slips his arm around her shoulders, remaining otherwise aloof, and she ends her sobs, as though they are errant, requiring correction. She dabs her nose and eyes with a small silk handkerchief. Alexander has always liked Danny’s snobbish elder sister. As a student, on one particular weekend visit, he fantasised about asking her to show him her fruit-perfect breasts, imagining as he jerked off before sleeping that she would unexpectedly comply with this request, surprised by his candour, or out of charity perhaps.

  The labourers have come forward, in their well-worn, dusty jackets and caps, in their dark creaseless trousers, heads dropped respectfully, shielding their eyes. They lower the tiny white coffin into the grave, using ropes, working them through their thick, mud-stained hands, though not particularly expertly: the descent of the coffin is uneven, halting.

  There are no screams, no gasps, no further weeping. Just the rector’s voice and the creak-thud progress into the earth of an ornate white box with gold trimmings, almost like a chocolate box, in the upholstered innards of which – it must be supposed – lies a dead little baby boy, absurdly named.

  ‘The Lamb who is at the throne will be their shepherd, and will lead them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away all tears from their eyes.’

  Alexander considers how Paul’s skull might be split open with his portable chainsaw, splashing everyone around with blood, bone, brains, bits of hairy scalp. It occurs to him that it might be difficult for the blade to get good purchase on the curved surface of the skull, which of course would be moving away. The blade might slip down onto the shoulder and take that off instead. But that would be OK. It couldn’t be a clean killing anyway, not with a chainsaw.

  While he is thinking these pleasing thoughts, Paul’s right hand – directly in Alexander’s field of vision – emerges from his coat pocket and travels down to Julia’s ass, reaching up under her tailored thigh-length black leather jacket, searching out her left buttock through the tweedy fabric of her skirt. As the hand squeezes with familiar intimacy, she offers herself, moves in slightly to accommodate his touch.

  They sit at the oak table in the big kitchen of Knockboy House, eating smoked salmon on fresh brown soda bread, with a squeeze of lemon for tang. Alexander is already on his third or fourth portion. Danny’s mother, Ursula, is expertly – generously – cutting off slices from the side of salmon, with an outward scraping motion at the bottom of each cut so that none of the precious flesh sticks to the ivory inside of the scaly silver skin. She cuts rapidly, as though in a hurry to get rid of the fish, pauses to cut off more slices of bread from one of the quarter loaves, liberally butters them with thick strokes from a pound of Kerrygold, crowning each with one or two pieces of the remarkably tender and flavourful dark-pink salmon.

  ‘Have another,’ she says to Alexander, pushing the serving plate across the table in his direction. ‘Pass it along.’

  Karina and Paul are next to him, also enthusiastically feasting after a hard morning of funeral. Cordelia’s husband Philippe is at the far end of the table, engrossed in the day’s edition of the Financial Times, which is a lighter shade of salmon than the salmon itself. Julia sits around from him, at the other side of the table, down from busy Ursula, who is standing.

  Julia is not eating. She sips on a mug of black coffee, maintaining that she is not hungry, though Alexander is fairly sure that she is ravenous but dieting. She was never fat, but was always half watching her weight, complaining about it. When he saw her before Christmas, she was a good stone lighter than she had been at the point of her departure, and looked fabulous. Now, she seems undernourished.

  ‘This is the best thing I have ever eaten,’ Alexander says, truthfully, as he takes another slice and brusquely passes the plate along to Paul. ‘I can’t stop myself. This is genuinely food for the gods. I’m getting a philosophical buzz from it.’

  Philippe glances up briefly from his paper to observe the speaker so effusive. In his scummy clothes, in his peasant genes, Alexander feels common and insubstantial by comparison with the dense, mani­cured presence of this man, who is thus far uncommunicative, a half-eaten bread-with-salmon lying neglected at his elbow.

  ‘You’re talking nonsense again, Alex,’ Paul says pleasantly, as he passes the plate to Karina. ‘You’ll have to watch that. It’s becoming a habit.’

  In another context, Alexander might have scraped together some sort of a response to this. Or – more likely – would have said nothing, stunned, smarting. In the present moment, he is out of reach of anything Paul can throw. The salmon is genuinely affecting him, transmuting his pain into something at the sweet end of melancholy. Or perhaps he was simply very hungry after his wanderings through the city in the morning.

  ‘I think Alex has a point,’ Karina intercedes defensively as she too takes another slice. ‘The salmon is fantastic.’

  Alexander remembers Fionn MacCumhail and the Salmon of Knowledge. Perhaps the very flesh that they are eating now is imbued with wisdom, which passes then to the eater, however transiently, if the receptivity is there for it. Perhaps the fish’s spirit has lived many lives, inhabited higher planes, and even at this moment might be coming into form again as a Tibetan llama.

  ‘I get it from a woman down in Clare,’ Ursula explains. ‘It’s the real thing: fresh wild salmon, wood smoked. You can’t beat it really.’

  ‘It’s a bit pricey though, isn’t it, Mum?’ Cordelia says from across the kitchen floor, in another country almost, where she has many tumblers lined up on the wooden counter, half filled with black coffee, whiskey, brown sugar, waiting for the cream which she is now whisking in a big thick-lipped ceramic bowl.

  ‘Well, it is. But she knows me, so I get a bit of bit of a deal. When she has it, that is. She often has nothing, the stocks are so depleted. Sure, they’ve fished them to death and are still coming back for more.’


  ‘How is your aunt?’ Karina asks Alexander.

  ‘My grand-aunt? She’s . . . still very ill,’ he says with a glance to Julia not to betray him. He doesn’t want to get into it now, doesn’t want to put everybody, including himself, through another death. ‘She won’t last long, but then she’s very old. . . . There’s a danger she might leave me some land, so I’m told.’

  Philippe looks up again. Perhaps this is a subject that spikes his interest.

  ‘That would be nice,’ says Ursula warmly. ‘Where is it?’

  This is a question which requires some reflection on Alexander’s part. He is tempted to respond – Just down the road. But Danny and his father now simultaneously enter the kitchen, by different doors, Danny through the outside door to the backyard, his father through one of the two inside doors that link the kitchen with the remainder of the house. These arrivals alter the political environment into which any utterance would land, but also obviate the requirement for any immediate response to Ursula’s question.

  ‘How are the Irish coffees coming along?’ Billy Carter asks his daughter. ‘The natives are getting restless up there. I’ll have to take out my elephant gun for protection if we don’t get some alcohol into them soon.’

  Ha ha ha, he laughs in staccato bass, his face flushing a deeper shade of red, which is stark against the lifeless grey of his hair and sideburns.

  ‘I think I’ll open a bottle of white wine,’ he continues, as though this were a major policy decision. ‘What do you think, Ursula?’

  ‘Since when do you consult me about your alcohol consumption?’ she answers charmingly, poisonously.

  ‘Since the tragedy knocked me for six,’ he says slowly, individually eyeing the people at the table, then resting his arrogant gaze on Paul.