Theo and Cara were heading up to his room. Cath would be back soon and although she wouldn’t object to Cara staying, Theo didn’t want any third party bursting the fragile cocoon they had woven around themselves tonight. This evening was for them alone. Their hopes, likes, dislikes and all the atoms that made them up were popping around them like champagne bubbles.
The phone rang and he had to go back into the sitting room to get it, leaving Cara to climb the stairs on her own. By the time her bare foot hit the upper landing, the cocoon had been ripped open, the bubbles had burst and the storm that would lift him away from Cara was already raging around them.
After he hung up, he stood still, staring out the window. The pool of light under the street lamp outside the gate showed a circle of silvered uneven paving stones. It was as though everything else had disappeared behind a curtain of rain. Maybe it had and maybe it should.
Neville’s mother said they’d found the body – she didn’t say his body, or Neville – in the canal at Blanchardstown. She didn’t know how long he’d been there but the Gardaí seemed to think it was a suicide. The words came meshed in tears. She was going to the morgue now. She just managed those bleak details before she started sobbing, deep wordless moans that crackled through the phone into his ear and down into the dark place where Theo hoarded all the other crying. He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. Her grief left no space in the world.
He sank onto the sofa. All the questions he’d wanted to ask her fizzed in his head, pushing the truth back. But Neville was in London? Did they make a mistake? It couldn’t be his friend. Why would he be in Blanchardstown? Neville could swim, couldn’t he? So what? He stepped over the edge and did nothing? Just let himself go, deeper and deeper until he answered the question that Theo couldn’t help him with: can I do this? Can I become nothing?
Cara was calling his name and then he heard footsteps on the stairs and she was beside him, and he was gulping and sobbing and telling her that Neville was dead. As she held his head on her shoulder, his whole body shuddered as this new pain rushed along the dried tracks already worn into his soul. Those trails would always be there, waiting for the next downpour of grief.
“I thought he was in London? Are you sure, Theo? They might’ve got the wrong lad. It can happen,” Cara said. But her eyes were wide and her face was pale and he knew her words were the kind of desperate prayer that never gets answered.
He lifted his head from her shoulder.
“I didn’t see him again after he said he was leaving. I thought he just wanted to be on his own, get us all out of his head for a while. I should’ve checked. I should’ve known he was not alright.”
He looked again at his phone, called up his messages, because you never know and sometimes you could miss one, but there was no new message from Neville. He could feel bits shearing off him like shards of ice. He was shivering. He leant into Cara, breathing deeply from her hair, needing her warmth, her breath on his neck. A tear fell onto his hand. She was crying too. He put his arms around her.
“I should’ve known, Cara. He was acting all weird last time I saw him. We were in Stephen’s Green and he was asking me if I’d been frightened of the moment, like the exact moment when life ends, you know, when those things were happening in Rwanda. I didn’t really understand what he was trying to get at. He said he’d been so scared when Gerrity’s lads took him, so terrified imagining the end of it all, that he’d had some kind of panic attack, and now he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He couldn’t stop thinking about not being here.”
He stopped. A siren squealed outside, its initial blare descending until it was just a hole in the silence. Somebody else’s world was ending.
“I didn’t know what to say to him, Cara. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think about dying back then. I only thought of the pain. I was seven and I didn’t want to be hurt. I saw what they did and that’s what scared me. It was that simple. And I didn’t want to be alone. But Neville, once he knew the fear, he couldn’t shake it off. He wouldn’t have wanted to live with that fear, marking the days off ’til the end. Neville didn’t know how to sugarcoat life for himself. That’s why he did the drugs, why he took risks. He was always looking for the thing that would explain the point of it all and then when he thought he was going to be killed, I guess, he decided there was no point. That was the secret. I think once he knew that, he could never unknow it.”
He fell silent. The tortoiseshell clock in the hallway ticked them into a new reality. Theo closed his eyes; he was sitting in the long grass, watching the golden orb of the sun rise above the waving tips. He was cold then too but instead of a clock ticking, the crickets were clicking out his life, their chirping counting seconds that even his seven-year-old brain recognised were finite, so that he knew he should do something, go somewhere, hide, before the chirping stopped. But there was nowhere to go and nothing to do so instead he sat, picked petals off the wild flowers growing low and safe in the grass’ shadow, and listened and wondered where everyone had gone.
“Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?”
Cara was wriggling out of his arms, lifting him gently back into his own body. He sat up straight. She was right. He had to pull himself together. They couldn’t stay here crying all night. Cath would be back soon.
He nodded, hauled himself off the sofa and followed Cara into the kitchen. The fluorescent light sputtered into life, the initial fizzle freeze-framing the scene so that Cara’s silhouette became a shadow on his retina. She suddenly turned to him, her hands freezing above her head where she was about to open the cupboard to get the cups.
“Has anyone told Grace?”
Theo felt his heart sink. Bad news must travel. You couldn’t stop its rush through the world. In his own grief, he’d forgotten Grace but Cara was right. Grace was in the path of the wave. Neville’s mother probably wouldn’t even think of it, not with the state she was in.
“I’ll go over to her place now. I don’t think I should tell her on the phone?”
He knew it was not really a question. Cara knew too.
“D’ye want me to come?”
In the harsh light of the kitchen, Cara looked pale and tired, like a child who should’ve been put to bed hours ago. Bad enough she had to put up with his grief and her own sadness. She didn’t need any more of this tonight. The days to come would be tough enough.
“No, you stay here. Tell Cath what’s happened and where I’ve gone. I guess I’ll be a couple of hours at least. I dunno… maybe she’ll want company or maybe she’ll just want shot of me. I’m part of it, you see. Part of the whole mess.”
“Okay, but only if ye’re sure. I’d be happy to, well not happy, but ye know. Only I don’t know Grace that well, definitely not well enough for this.”
“Don’t worry. This is not on you, Cara. I’m just sorry I got you mixed up in it all. But I’m not sorry I have you here with me. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t. I think I’d just run and run until there was no ground left under my feet. You’re what’s keeping me here, Cara. You’re the ground I’m standing on.”
She put the cups down and came over to him.
“That’s a big bleedin’ responsibility,” she said, trying to smile. “I’m not sure I can bear the weight of ye, ye big eejit. Ye’ll need to find some surer ground.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist, leaned into his chest and, for a moment, they just stood there, hearts drumming into each other. Finally, Theo pulled away.
“Listen, I’ll be back soon. Cath knows you’re here so just tell her what we know when she gets in. If there’s anything else, I’ll give you a bell later.”
Outside, it was chilly but the rain had finally eased. Theo headed for the bus stop. If there was no bus soon, he’d hop in a taxi, if he saw one. But Sunday night was a bad time to be looking for a cab in this town, especially if you were a black guy, even now. He remembered standing outside a club near Merrion Square with Neville, a few years back. They�
��d both started college, they were both still single and had been on the pull. No luck that night though so they were aching for their beds. It must’ve been after 2 am and the queue was at least twelve-deep ahead of them. Neville was smoking a joint – he always smoked in the street, like he was daring the Gardaí to catch him. For a moment, Theo thought about asking for one for himself. It’d take the edge off of the cold and trim the minutes off the wait they were in for. He’d be able to zone out of this queue with its squabbling, stumbling, half-naked ladies, lads blown up on beer like helium balloons, all big and squeaky, and the young lad in front of them who was just one stomach-churn away from dumping his night on the path. But he’d recently quit the drugs and he didn’t want to go back.
“Jesus, it’ll be daylight before we get home,” he muttered.
“D’you know what, I’m going to chuck in the studies and set up a taxi business,” Neville said. “Clear demand, good earnings, as long as the price of petrol doesn’t skyrocket.”
Neville’s face was flushed, from the cold, from the night, from the weed. He was happy in himself at that moment. All the wrinkles had been ironed out and he was in the zone.
“The zone just got too small for you, Nev. You were always pushing too hard at the boundaries,” Theo whispered now, sending the words, too late, into the sky.
Who knows, he thought. Neville could just as well be there as anywhere else. The idea offered a kind of ancient comfort, though Theo had never been very religious. His parents were Christians and he remembered once going to an outdoor mass, somewhere near Kibungo, with his mother and Clément. It must’ve been before Angélique was born. There was a small red brick building that might’ve been a school. He couldn’t remember. Another one of the tiny questions that grew like lichen off the big ones in his head and no one ever able to answer them. The congregation sat on benches on the grass – there were way too many people for the tiny building, whatever it was. The altar was set under a white awning and everyone was singing. He could hear the tune in his head, but the words weren’t there. Just the rise and fall of the music, a meaningless melody echoing through his body. He started humming along and didn’t even notice he was crying again.
The film had finished and Grace had gone up to her room. Deirdre was watching the late news and finishing off the wine. It’d been a while since she and Grace had watched a film together. What with the exams, and Neville, and her job, there just hadn’t been a lot of time. She stretched her feet out on the sofa, flexing her toes. The room was dim, lit only by the lamp in the corner, a wedding present from her father.
In this light, you could almost imagine it was a fancy room, Deirdre thought. You couldn’t see the stains on the carpet and the dark took the sting out of the gilt twirls on the cream wallpaper. She hated that pattern. Fergal had chosen it when they first moved in, giving in to his delusions of grandeur, as usual. She’d been wanting to change it for years. But then one day, she’d realised it didn’t matter. Changing it would mean nothing, except that it would no longer be there. So Deirdre just let it go. It felt like dropping a heavy bag down onto the kitchen floor after struggling home from the supermarket in the rain. The relief.
She did the same with her idea of putting a coat stand in the hall and her plan to put more shelves in the bathroom for the bottles that cluttered up the narrow windowsill. Maybe it was because she’d turned forty in January. She hadn’t thought about it much at the time but now, it was as though some kind of fatigue had set in. Or maybe it was just the realisation that, even looking on the bright side, she was halfway through her life and time was no longer on her side, if it ever had been. Since her birthday, she’d been waking more and more in the night to thoughts so bleak it felt like they might crush her so that the end might be right there, sparing her at least from the rest of this dark night and all the other finite, dark nights that were ahead of her. She tried to remember how she had lived before, when she didn’t ever think of death. She’d forgotten how to do that. It saddened her more than the realisation that she would never now learn the piano, scuba dive on a coral reef, or join the mile-high club.
The presenter was talking now about how Ireland’s Pakistani community was raising money to help their relatives cope with the effects of the recent floods over there. Imagine, 10,000 Pakistanis living in Ireland? It was amazing how little she knew about her own country. Deirdre didn’t know any Pakistanis, though maybe alright there were a few lads going to Mount Temple. It was terrible to see all those little houses being swept away, corrugated iron roofs just lifted off by the water, and then the people standing on the roofs of the few concrete buildings, waving up at the sky. Who was going to rescue them, she wondered? Not the TV crews filming their misery, for sure.
The back door opened with a bang. Shit. She’d been so absorbed she hadn’t heard the van. She lunged for the remote, turned down the volume and waited. She’d planned to be in bed by the time he came in. She wouldn’t get past him now without him seeing her. She should close the door between the kitchen and the hall in future – he often came in the back door now. Why the hell hadn’t she already got into the habit of doing that? She picked up her phone. Just after eleven. Damn. He’d taken off early, no word of explanation, just up and off out the door, and then the crunch of gravel under the wheels. If he’d been in the pub since then, there was no telling what mood he’d be in. She’d have to risk running upstairs. He might have his back to her, he might be at the fridge. She slipped off her trainers. She might be lucky.
Deirdre was not lucky.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going? Running away from your own husband, are ye?”
She froze and turned. He was standing in the kitchen doorway and, even from here, she could tell he was drunk. It was in his stance: arms too carefully by his sides, feet planted on the ground like they would never move again, torso swaying, and head pushed into his neck like it was too heavy.
“I didn’t hear you come in. I’m away off to bed. It’s late,” she said.
She tried to stand tall, she tried to keep her voice low, to stop the fear and panic from squeaking out from under the words.
“Why don’t ye stay and talk to me? Why don’t ye ask me where I’ve been? Sneaking off like that. Too good for me, are ye?”
Jesus, she was tired of this. Tired of creeping around like a mouse. As drunk as he was, he was right. She was a mouse in her own home but she wouldn’t stand here and talk to him tonight. They’d done this too many times before and there was nothing new in the world to say.
“Don’t be stupid, Fergal. It’s a long time since I bothered to ask about your day. You probably have good reasons not to tell me. Who knows what you’re up to, right? That’s how you want to keep it and that’s fine by me. Why would I ask you? If you get pissed off, maybe you’ll take a hammer to me too. So yeah, I am too bloody good for you and I’m going to bed. Alright?”
Deirdre didn’t know why she’d mentioned the hammer but it was too late now. Maybe he was too far gone to notice? She turned and put her foot on the stairs but, for a drunk, he was fast. She didn’t so much hear him as feel the weight of him pushing through the air between them and then his hand was in her hair, dragging her back into the sitting room, where he slammed on the light so that all that dim perfection was blasted to hell.
He flung her from him and she stumbled on the rug in front of the fire, falling and scraping her hands on the hearth. Not again. She straightened up. So this was it. This was how it was going to happen.
“What do you mean take a hammer to ye, ye hoor? What do you mean?”
He was whispering though. He knew the kids were upstairs. Whatever he might think about her, he wouldn’t want them to know this, she thought. She could have her say tonight but it’d cost her.
“You know damn well what I mean. I mean Neville. I mean your own daughter’s boyfriend. What the hell happened to you, Fergal? What happened to you that you sank that low? Gerrity, for fuck’s sake.”
&nbs
p; He stood there, mouth gawping like a gormless baby bird.
“You think I’m stupid, you think that you can pull the wool over my eyes day in day out. But I know what you’re up to, I know who you’re running around with. Now, let me go the hell to bed.”
She tried to get past him but he pushed her back.
“Oh yeah, ye know so much do ye, smart arse? How d’ye think we’d put food on the table? The clothes on yer back, the booze ye drink, schoolbooks for the kids? The fucking mortgage, right? Where d’ye think all that comes from?”
His face was twisted into a sneer.
“You’re a right Miss High-And-Mighty, aren’t ye? You can stand there on your mountain top, but ye haven’t a clue what’s going on. Ye think I wanted to do this? There was nothing else on offer, Dee. Nothing else on offer, and then, just when ye think ye might be alright, as long as you don’t get nabbed, there’s something else to do. And now ye can’t say no. Now, you’re in.”
He fell silent and turned away but this wasn’t enough for her. His excuses would never be enough for her again. There was no going back. She could feel the pity drain out of her. It was as though time stopped as she looked at him – she saw him now and as he had been. Those memories she couldn’t find before, of him laughing with the kids, walking with her in the park, dancing in some dive, they all rushed through her mind, the only things moving in this frozen bubble but still they weren’t enough. It was like the wallpaper all over again. She had to let this go. There was no time left for this.
“I can’t do this, Fergal. I can’t be with you now.”
He didn’t turn around.
“You’ve done too much. That’s all. You’ve changed or you’ve dropped the mask you used to wear, whatever. I don’t know. All I do know is that I don’t want to be with you the way you are now. And I don’t believe any more that you can change for the better. We’re done.”
Rain Falls on Everyone Page 22
