Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  Life was not easy for anyone then, but they had it relatively good. All it would take was for life to keep on going as it was going. Life did not keep on going as it was going.

  It’s a matter of some debate among her children, when, or indeed if, Phyllis ever found out she was dying. It was an argument that carried on for so long that no one could remember its source. There’s a school of thought that it was immediate. Another that it was kept from her to the extent that she never knew, and died aware of her pain and the fact that she was sick, but oblivious to the terminal condition. Imagine dying and not knowing—the wondering you would do, how you would doubt the world and everything in it, how you would question your very body. Imagine dying and not knowing that others knew. Perhaps my grandfather thought it was a kindness that he was gifting her. They certainly never told her nine children, the youngest being only eight months old. They were sent away to other families, away from their mother, evacuated from the city, as if the skies had darkened with bombers once again, which, in a sense, they had. The median seems to be that she found out she was dying of inoperable stomach cancer after her husband did. It was deemed compassionate to tell her. It’s unclear if Anthony was the one who did so or if he left it to someone else.

  Anthony recalled that Phyllis had gone to have her fortune told in Portrush, one of those picturesque Protestant seaside towns that boomed when trains ran throughout the land and the seaside was seen as restorative to health—little England in rain-lashed Ireland. A holiday, then as now, was a kind of ritual cleansing from the grubbiness of work. To the sound of carousels, Phyllis asked for her palm to be read. The astrologer held her hand and examined it intently, then abjectly refused to reveal what she had seen and politely asked Phyllis to leave. She was naturally upset. Anthony always said fortune-tellers, or anyone dabbling in “black magic,” as he put it, were evil after that. His superstitions and his religious beliefs were certainly that, were like a scaffolding on the wreck of a life. The saints and the angels were things not remotely of wonder, but of fear and proscription. A necessary masochism was involved for him. In place of class, back then, there was faith. Anthony did his bit to kiss the altar rails and have the monsignor, ancient even then, over for tea, cowering the kids into obedience behind closed doors, but he was never granted the social ascendancy he sought. When the faithful of the new housing estate began to show up at Thornhill Church for Mass, among the established congregation, they were told by the priest that services would no longer be offered and to walk into Steelstown, several miles away. The following Sunday, at the beginning of their trek, they looked over to see the priest greeting the rich of the congregation as they stepped out of their cars.

  Anthony clung to his faith nonetheless. Its discomforts brought him comfort or at least the semblance of order. He could channel his madness through it. He’d leave a statue of the Child of Prague outside at night in the yard to ensure good weather at sea the next day. As with any ideology, life inconveniently kept interrupting. As Phyllis lay dying, Anthony noted that a hedgehog had come scratching at the back door at night. He lifted it and carted it down the road on a shovel, but it came back the next night. So he drove it away in his van down the road. It took a week to come back. Though it lacked the theatrics of the shrieking banshee or the eerie doppelgänger, he nevertheless took it as an omen of doom. The Romans believed the owl to be a baleful presence, a foreteller of shipwrecks, an emissary of the underworld sent to deliver us terrible messages, indecipherable until they happened. To someone who believed that all was preordained in God’s plan, then portents of what was to come might well appear and be possible to interpret. The murmurations of starlings, a single bird flying into a room, all the stages between the butterfly’s wing and the tornado.

  There’s still some mystery as to how cancer begins. It can be a traumatic event—a rupture, an injury, something that upsets the delicate genetic balance and creates a mutation that begins to replicate. There might be a propensity already; Phyllis’s was a family inheritance passed down in the genes, but not helped by having so many children in so few years. She would be feeding one child, weaning another, with another on the way. Nine children later, she was physically and mentally exhausted. She had once shared a ward with a Gypsy lady who had just given birth and whose stitches were barely in when her husband stopped by. The lady had begged the nurses not to “let him at me,” saying that he insisted on getting her pregnant again immediately, that she couldn’t go through it again, not this soon. But sure enough, in an age when a woman dared not turn a word in any man’s mouth publicly, he silenced them and pulled the screens around. Phyllis, unable to see her own situation clearly, too close and immersed in it, had told of her deep, resounding pity for that woman.

  She was diagnosed at the same hospital where she had given birth to her children. When Anthony heard the news, the checkered floor turned into black holes as he collapsed trying to walk down the corridor, along the walls, the building suddenly tilting, suddenly storm-tossed by the words “too far gone.” Mourning her before she had died, or rather pitying himself. As she deteriorated, and it happened rapidly, the kids were sent away.

  To a child, death is a collapse of gravity; you find yourself falling off the face of the world and grasping to hold on. Nothing that you took for granted is ever quite real again. Trying to find handgrips and footholds in a whirlwind. Ma saw her mother only in excerpts that made no sense, with a quality like waking up into a nightmare. Her mother was emaciated and bedridden. It didn’t matter how much she ate or drank. She was starving to death. Phyllis had what my mother thought was a fireguard wrapped around her. In fact, it was to keep the blankets off her, given that anything touching her skin was unbearable. Her bones protruded from her skin. My mother remembered the antiseptic smell of the bedsore cream and the aroma of lilies, which her mother had once loved and asked for. For three weeks the children were scattered across the country in different houses, kept out of the city as if the Blitz or the plague had suddenly begun again. Some experienced kindness. Others were treated as impostors and impositions. All pined for home. Two years older than Ma, Caroline conspired to escape from her confines and successfully made it back to the house, where she ran in and climbed into bed to hug her mother. She was caught and brought back, where she immediately plotted her next escape. Most of them had no goodbye or explanation.

  The ritual took precedence. Phyllis lay in her coffin at the wake, and Ma stretched to kiss her forehead when one of the old spinster keeners—professional mourners in Ireland at the time—talking about how she had suffered like our Lord and was thus blessed, while stuffing her gullet full of cakes and tea, leered at her, “Don’t touch the body!” Ma was seven. She was gathered up into the hearse and driven through streets lined with people, so slowly that she could hear them talking. “She left nine wee ones.” Ma, then tiny but feisty, said she hated them all, everyone who gave them pity. She hated the exposure. “I felt like a monkey in the zoo.” All summer long her teacher, with parochial sadism, dedicated the class prayers to Ma’s “dead mother.” Ma resolved never to cry in front of any of them—her classmates, the teachers, the morbid baying audience—and fashioned herself an armor of burnished pride. She couldn’t look at pictures of her mother for years. She hated that she looked like her. When she attempted to remember her, contrary to her siblings’ memories of a saint, all she could think about was one occasion when her mother had protectively scolded her for playing with an electrical socket. Caroline would kindly give copies of photos of their mother to Ma, and she’d put them into envelopes and stash them at the bottom of drawers. They almost scared her to look at them.

  A curious consequence of grief is the attempt to put more and more past between you and the lost ones, distancing yourself from what you miss, following the cold comfort that time heals all wounds. Ma felt abandoned by her mother for years, until she had her own children, and it hit her in a flood of emotion that her mother hadn’t wanted to leave them; that as
terrible as it was to them, it was terrible for her too, unimaginably so, to be pulled away, like Eurydice into the dark. As a girl, in the aftermath, unguarded by sleep, she would wake up crying and no one would come. Except her sisters. They became immensely close, joined together in the terrible presence of absence. All who had been children when Ma died went into caring professions in later life, what Jung called the “wounded healers”—nurses, teachers, social workers. “She was our mother and we missed her like the sun.”

  Soon afterward the family received a compulsory purchase order. It ordered them off their land in Bogs Lee. The council finally, partially, beginning to relent to the housing misery, was to build a housing estate there. Those who were left of the family were offered compensation way below the market rate. The decline in their fortunes was already well underway, but the insensitive manner and timing of the vesting order always seemed to Ma to have been a curse placed on them that finally broke everything. Their house, all the rooms in which they had grown up and their mother had lived, was bulldozed. For weeks before it was cleared, the children would return to the empty house, playing in the gardens, looking through the windows and trying unsuccessfully to open the locked doors.

  If any trace of it remains now, it is under pathways and car parks. There was nowhere left to haunt, or rather nowhere physical. Anthony lost the gas business shortly thereafter, through mismanagement and bad luck and a propensity for extravagant gifts to women he was chasing. In fairness, it was said already to have been on its last legs, due to his father-in-law’s sickness and the fact that he was too kind and wouldn’t chase down the debts that people kept mounting. Anthony, by contrast, was out of his depth and too stubborn to admit it.

  My grandfather moved the family to another area, one called Belmont, downsizing as they went. None of them liked it there. The oldest sister, Anne, had sleep paralysis, waking up thinking that someone was leaning over her. Their car got burned out inexplicably. My uncle Tony, my grandfather’s namesake and nemesis, had bad dreams as a boy and they threatened to turn into bad thoughts, especially when he began to hang around the riots, so the decision was made to move again, far enough out of trouble, to the Woodlands. It felt even more remote then than during my childhood. There were no shops. They could walk to the pub, then called McKeels, and knock on the back door for peanuts or a Fanta—that was the height of it. There were fights every day getting on and off the school bus, when they were lucky enough to be allowed on it, given that one driver, nicknamed Mungo Jerry for his sideburns, wouldn’t let any plebs with a bus pass onto his vehicle. The walk home, when the sun went down early in winter, was pitch-black without streetlights. Tony called it “the ghost run” and was always relieved to see the telegraph wires shining, meaning that a car was coming, to temporarily light the way. They’d tiptoe past Barber’s Corner to evade a dog that delighted in sinking its teeth into their legs.

  The move out of Derry to avoid the escalating Troubles may have been wise, but the violence spread to reach them. Before the checkpoint was constructed, there was a single customs man at Muff, always waiting for his shift to finish. Gradually the family watched the checkpoint erected. Soldiers would drive around the estate in a soft-topped jeep, scouting out the place and the people. The soldiers used to call into the old guy opposite Anthony’s house for tea and buns, as he was ex–Ulster Defence Regiment. He had a dodgy reputation, and the children of the estate, regardless of religion, were warned not to darken his door. Presumably he gave the troops a rundown of who was who on the estate, because shortly afterward Anthony’s family started getting grief. The soldiers weren’t the worst—“you could have a civil chat to them.” The UDR were harsh, however. They’d take your car apart at the checkpoint, literally wrenching off panels, or confiscate things you’d bought, like trays of eggs, and then loudly make it look as if you were collaborating and had gifted it to them. The UDR men were also quick with their fists and boots if you said the wrong thing. Once, they started roughing up my uncle and were stopped from delivering a savage beating only by an MP intervening, telling my uncle to get back in the car and fuck off. They were accidents waiting to happen.

  Farther up the back road, past the border-marking concrete blocks, sprayed with “IRA” and “Long Live the Baader–Meinhof Gang,” was a remote house where two old hermit brothers had lived. They died suddenly, poisoning themselves unintentionally with gas or foraged mushrooms, if the stories are anything to go by. The rumors about that added to the feeling that the Woodlands were cursed. Terrible things kept happening there. Among the reasons for that, however, were its proximity to naturally dangerous sites and machinery; the place being a dumping ground for the city’s ne’er-do-wells; and the people already there who thought they were sane but were just as crazy. If man made the city and God made the country, then the devil made the satellite village.

  Barometer (Cracked at “Stormy”)

  Even before a certain slowing of the mind, Anthony’s storytelling had peculiar quirks. He’d become bullheaded if you didn’t intimately recall a fellow who had died thirty years before you were born. It was safest just to nod and throw in the occasional white lie of confirmation: “Aye, I remember Dinny McCartney from the Isle of Doagh, three generations dead—I remember him well.” I paid attention for as long as could be deemed respectful and then, as he veered into some genealogical conjecture, stood up and began to idle around the room, still half-listening but ever curious at the objects, the little totems with which he’d surrounded himself.

  All Anthony’s relics, unsurprisingly, were nautical: flotsam from a life finally run aground as the tide slowly retreated across the fields, leaving him landlocked, close to the river, but out of sight and reach. He kept a large pink conch, a fossilized extraterrestrial life-form the color of damask and fuchsia, as a doorstop. It had chambers in it that resembled rooms, and, when I was a child, that made me think of Jonah wandering inside the whale. Banded flints sat on his shelf, with markings that looked like tidal bore lines. There was a broken barometer, fixed just shy of “Stormy.” Sea charts with rocks, islands, rivers, tides, fluctuating depths, magnetic directions, and latitude lines, with bearings, corrections, and hazardous areas scrawled in red ink by hand. Different knots in rope framed in wooden boxes—Palomar, Surgeon’s, Trilene, Hangman’s—intricate as medieval script, knots that men’s lives had relied on at times. Flies, of dazzling color and weights, like tiny sculptures. A ship in a bottle, its rigging delicate as a moth’s wing. I could never work out how it was assembled as a child. The glass had somehow grown around the boat, a genie’s vessel.

  Something in the way Anthony was speaking made me pause. A certain doubt. Almost a stutter. The bluster of old that had seemed, at times, an elemental force was gone and in its place was a forgery of what he’d once unconsciously been. Something in him had changed. His legs had packed up several years earlier. He’d put it down to the lasting effects of a motorcycle accident years ago, but it struck me as more incremental. Off his feet, inactivity began to erode him. Time worked on him like frost to stone.

  Anthony’s empire shrank to a few landlocked rooms. The cyclone that whirled around his home had turned in on itself. To the unfamiliar, he’d have remained formidable, still Old Testament, but I knew him well enough. He lacked the telltale signs of the coming end that he’d seen in folks of his age, or younger even; the weight loss that left grown men looking like they were children wearing their parents’ clothes, a hunted, hounded look in their eyes as the skin retracted and they had to maintain intense focus so as not to fade completely. These obvious features were absent. Bar the circuitry of purple veins in his hands and the speckled egg of his brow under wispy blond hair, he could have passed for a decade younger than he was.

  The mortality lay in his voice. It was no longer an exerted bellow. It no longer crowded out all responses. It had a hesitancy that seemed utterly alien. As if something had profoundly shaken him. Anthony never disclosed what it was. This was something worse t
han the deaths of his wives or parents or his brother; this was something private. Age was a war waged on him, and this was collapse, disordered retreat, when all comes crashing down, but the motions are still gone through as some attempt at denial or comfort. He went through his old stories like an actor who had lost faith in the play, or his ability to know the impending lines. My grandfather’s newfound weakness was mistaken by some of his grown-up children as a sign of mellowing, a hoping that he’d found inner calm and forgiveness. This was wishful thinking and understandable, given his dominance for so long. He had not, it seemed to me, found inner peace at all. He simply could not be physically as he once was and still wished to be. Gods have power only for as long as they are believed in. They become myth after that.

  I asked him about the river and he obliged, talking me through a journey from the old docks out along the lough to the sea. “We’d follow the shoals. Head out at night.”

  “Did it ever get rough?”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Did it get rough? Did it get rough? Have you been up at Malin Head?”

  “I have. I camped up there many’s the time. It’s on the shipping fore—”

  “Aye, well, we went out for a few days up round Banba’s Crown, right at the tip of Ireland, where you go north until you run out of land. It gets rough up round there. We knew the weather was taking a turn for the worse, but we thought we’d make the most of it and pick up what we could before heading back for Greencastle. The storm came on quick. I can still see the clouds racing over us. After an hour the waves were so rough that you couldn’t tell one direction from the other. The whole world seemed to be rising and falling.”