Forensic Songs

by Mike McCormack

  ‘The things you find yourself doing,’ he began. The anxious note in his voice snagged Mark’s attention. ‘I got a call from him around nine o’clock yesterday. Call over, he said, I need to go into town. What do you want to go into town for, I said, I’ll bring you the paper. It’s not the paper, I’ve a bit of business. So I call over and he gets in the car and we drive into town and pull up outside the chemist. He does nothing but reaches down into his pocket and pulls up a ball of notes that would choke a horse, all fifties. What are you doing with that, I said, going round with that amount of money on you. He looks at me and tells me that he’s going to buy his coffin – just like that, he’s going to buy his coffin.’ Here he paused, giving Mark a moment so that he might credit the incident with some expression of disbelief. Mark shrugged and swung his legs off the bed.

  ‘So he bought a coffin.’

  ‘He did but not before we had a big row in the car.’ He lowered his voice and looked towards the door. ‘I don’t know what put it into my head but I got this idea that he was going to go into Sweeny’s and buy a cardboard coffin. For some reason I thought it would be just the sort of thing he’d do to spite us, and it was out of my mouth before I could stop myself. You’ll get a right fucking coffin, I said, and not go shaming the whole family in the church. You mightn’t have lived right but you’ll be buried right. It was out of my mouth before I realized it and of course I regretted it straight away. But that started it – a full half-hour there in the car, the two of us arguing like tinkers. And he gave as good as he got, the fucker, I’ll give him that, but he was as pale as a ghost after it and I thought he was going to die there in the seat beside me; he starts coughing and spluttering and then he takes out this bottle of pills and starts wrestling with this child-proof cap, and him still coughing and spluttering … I thought he was going to die there beside me … and he wouldn’t give me the bottle but he couldn’t open it and the two of us …’ His words tailed away in anguish and shame. Mark kept his voice low.

  ‘You should know better than to start arguing with him. You know how much it takes out of him.’

  ‘Oh that’s easy said, you’re gone all day. You don’t know what he’s like, you don’t know the half of it. How did he look last night?’

  ‘The man was out buying his coffin, how do you think he looked?’

  Mark stood up and flexed his arm behind his back. He caught sight of himself in the wardrobe mirror and saw a man who looked as if he had been hastily assembled in the dark. His hair stood out from his head and his shirt had lost a button during the night and now hung askew over his bony chest. His trousers were streaked with oil and he cursed inwardly for having handed such an easy opening to his father. He tried hopelessly to smooth his hair down.

  ‘Your mother wants the two of you over for the dinner this evening.’

  Mark pretended not to hear.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘And tidy yourself up, for God’s sake; don’t come over to your mother looking like that.’

  ‘Jesus Christ would you ever …’ Mark’s despairing curse was cut off as his father pulled the door behind him, leaving him standing there in the livid heat of his rage. It took a long moment for him to collect himself but before leaving the room he checked for messages on his mobile; there were none so he tossed it back into the middle of the stale bed.

  After he’d showered and put on clean clothes he went into the kitchen. The old man had the table set and was pouring two mugs of tea.

  ‘Get this inside you,’ he said, taking a plate of chops and peas and fried potatoes from over the range. He placed a small basket of bread in the centre of the table and pointed Mark to the chair.

  The smell of food opened up a void in Mark’s belly. He hadn’t eaten since dinnertime the previous day and the hunger he had gone to sleep on now had him airy and light-headed. He took a piece of bread, squared his elbows and it was a good ten minutes before he spoke.

  ‘The ould fella was here a while ago, he was looking for you.’

  ‘I thought as much, I made myself scarce when he pulled up.’ There was a mischievous glint in the old man’s eye and Mark thought that if he was reading his mood correctly it might be safe to probe a little.

  ‘He was saying ye had a row yesterday.’

  The old man shook his head and smiled. ‘We had words, that’s all. He hasn’t changed and neither have I. There was a pair of us in it.’

  ‘Like old times?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  In his blue jeans and T-shirt and with his grey hair slicked back, the old man looked every bit the returned Yank. But his bone-thinness exuded a terrifying and unnatural cleanliness. The insides of his arms glowed pearl-white and Mark wondered if this was one part of his body not running with the filth that was corroding him. This was how Mark pictured it – a black granular filth sluicing through the gates and channels of the old man’s body, clogging up the juices and rhythms of his life. And now that he thought about it he was surprised to find that he had no idea where the pancreas was or what exactly it did. Set deep in the soft mass of the belly, he imagined, endlessly sieving and distilling, some task of essential refinement now hopelessly compromised. He picked up his knife and fork once more. ‘Take no heed of the ould fella,’ he said, ‘he’s all talk. Are you coming over for the dinner this evening? Mam wants both of us over.’

  ‘Sure, why not.’

  The old man got up to clear the table. This cooking thing was something Mark had not fully got used to. More often than not he would come home at night to find some plate of food ready in the kitchen for him – a bit of stew in a pot or a plate of cold chops in the fridge – nothing fancy but all good stuff and all made with some skill. At that hour of the night there was something tender and unexpected about it, something delicate beyond an old man’s desire to make himself useful or pay his way. ‘It’s the least he can do,’ his father had scoffed when he’d heard about it, ‘he’s getting it all for nothing.’ Mark did not care for this cynicism. He appreciated the gesture and saw in it the fellowship and consideration of a man who had known hard times himself.

  ‘He ate a good meal,’ his mother said later that evening, ‘the heat of the conservatory will put sleep on him.’ She bent to gather the plates. ‘Mark, have you had enough?’

  ‘Yes mam, thanks.’

  ‘It was nothing; sure you’re used to having big feeds now with your new lodger. I’d swear you’ve put on weight since he’s moved in.’

  She moved towards Mark and placed a kiss on the middle of his head; her milky smell covered him like gauze and caught in his throat. Now that he’d eaten, he desperately wanted to leave. The thought of a few pints before closing time pulled at him, but with the old man asleep it could be a while yet before he got away. His father turned from the fridge and handed him a can. He considered for a moment and then pulled the top from it and drew hard on it; fuck it, why not. His mother stood over him and sighed, her relentless need to comfort getting the better of his wish for silence.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mark, this is a good thing you’re doing. Offer it up; God will love you for it.’

  Mark groaned inwardly and found himself repeating an old speech. ‘The house is there, mam; he can come and go as he pleases and he’s no bother to anyone; it suits everyone. You know well he wouldn’t have stayed with anyone else.’

  ‘Yes but it didn’t have to be you, God knows you have enough on your plate,’ she said, looking pointedly at his father. ‘He has brothers and sisters.’

  ‘Let’s not start that at this hour,’ his father countered sharply from the head of the table. ‘We’ve been through this before. That man is in the best place and we all know it.’

  Before she could open her mouth to reply, Mark silenced his mother with a look; an argument like this could go on all night. He turned to his father. ‘So has he told you anything yet abo
ut the wilderness years? Did he let slip anything when you were rowing with him yesterday?’

  ‘He said damn all, he wasn’t giving anything away, still the mystery man, the man from God knows where. You mark my words; that man will talk only when he’s good and ready.’

  Mark had watched his father’s baffled frustration deepen over the last three months. Privately he conceded it must be difficult – a brother he had long presumed dead shows up out of the blue with no word of explanation. How do you square that? However he did it, his father had lost surprisingly little time in finding space in the family for the prodigal. After Mark volunteered the room in his house, he had sat with him in this kitchen and listened as he called his brothers and sisters with the news and put them abreast of the new arrangements. A month later he saw him ring them up again, this time with news of the terminal diagnosis. And yet, two months on, his brother appeared to see no good reason why all this effort and kindness on his behalf should be repaid with anything like an explanation or an account of his missing years. He had quietly taken up the room in Mark’s house and settled down to the business of dying. When he had time to think about it, Mark found himself torn between an amused admiration at the old man’s presumption and a private acknowledgment of his father’s frustration.

  But since his brother’s return, his father had never got a handle on his own angry confusion. Everything about it had thrown him. Without telling anyone, he had driven up on his own to meet him off the plane at Knock. Hardly believing that he would turn up – that it really could be him after all these years – he had stood alone in the observation lounge with the letter in his pocket that contained word of his coming. Mark had a vision of him standing behind the tempered glass, a shadowed figure peering out over the runway and the bogs beyond. How had such an unlikely vigil panned out like this?

  ‘What I don’t understand is how you knew him that day coming across the tarmac. How did you recognize him after all these years?’

  ‘The day at the airport?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His father considered. ‘I didn’t recognize him,’ he said carefully, ‘not the man as such but the cut of him … the way he walked and carried his bag, the way he held himself, it all came back to me. I spotted him coming across the tarmac; dressed like a lord he was, the suit on him, the collar and tie, the whole lot. I hadn’t expected that – I don’t know when was the last time I saw that man wearing a suit.’

  ‘You mean you don’t remember the last time you saw him at all.’

  The correction caught his father looking down into his plate. But when he spoke, his voice was soft and certain. ‘I remember well the last time I saw him; it was outside the billets of the Kerr Addison gold mine in Ontario. That was the spring of 1963, over forty years ago now.’

  Mark sat up in the chair. ‘This is the first I’ve heard of a gold mine. What were you doing in a gold mine?’

  ‘What does anyone do in a gold mine?’

  ‘Mining and …?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Sixty-two to sixty-three, I said, just the one year. I followed him to Ontario from London in the spring of sixty-two. He had gone over there a year earlier and was making good money and I was in London on the pick and shovel making damn all. So I boarded a boat in Plymouth and docked up in Fairfax two weeks later and got a train overland to Virginiatown in Ontario; I was picked up by the company truck at the station and dumped outside the billets. I spent a year there, digging in the richest gold mine outside of South Africa.’

  He sat back in his chair, surprised at this lengthy disclosure. He motioned in the direction of the conservatory. ‘That’s where he learned to cook, in that mine. We were grubbing bad in the company canteen – a crowd of Chippewa Indians ran it and they didn’t know much about putting on a feed – it was a constant grievance among the workers. But somehow the lad got his hand on a stove and he set it up in our billet. He spliced together a chimney from tin cans and ran it out the window and he would cook away for us in the evening – spuds and steak, the whole lot, he was a great man with the pan. But for him we’d have gone hungry like everyone else. It was no coincidence that we drew down more bonuses than any other crew.’

  Mark watched his father’s attention drift. For a moment he appeared lost in some detail beyond the margins of his tale. When he spoke it was as if he was chiding himself. ‘You know, if ever I got money that’s the one place I’d go back to. Back to those little towns, Kearns and Virginiatown, to see what they’re like now, to see what’s happened to them.’

  ‘I know where I’d go,’ Mark’s mother cut in brightly. ‘I’d go back to the church we were married in, the church of St Peter-in-Chains in Stroud Green.’

  ‘The church of what?’ Mark blurted. From the corner of his eye he saw that his father had now tuned out completely.

  ‘The church of St Peter-in-Chains. Isn’t it a lovely name? It seemed so holy to me when I first heard it, something no one could make up, something straight from God. I knew that when I got married it would be in that church with that name.’ She smiled wanly and, too late, Mark saw that she’d carved out the opening she’d been seeking all evening. She leaned towards him. ‘Has Susan been in touch?’

  ‘No,’ he sighed, ‘and I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Be patient,’ she soothed, ‘a marriage isn’t something you walk away from so easy.’

  And with that, something in Mark collapsed and he suffered one of his turns. All of a sudden he experienced a heaving sourness towards everything and everyone around him – his mother’s scent and his father’s presence, this house where he was born and reared, this room and everything in it. He was consumed with disgust towards all these good things, and the worst of it was that this mood was illuminated at its core by a vivid sense of how pitiful he was in these moments, how crabbed and anxious to take offence, to pick fights. And this is what Susan had sensed all those months ago. This is what prompted her to begin the slow withdrawal from him that had ended with that note on the kitchen table. She may not have been able to put a name to these moods but she was smart enough to know that she did not want anything to do with them. And she knew also that they were not something that could be worked through together. This wasn’t between them, this was his alone, this was within.

  ‘I’m going,’ he said quickly, rising from the table. ‘Wake that man up, he won’t thank us for letting him sleep this long. He’ll want to wake up in his own bed.’

  His father saw the look on his face and shook his head in disgust. His mother squeezed his hand and rose from the table; when she had left the room his father spoke without sympathy.

  ‘I’m telling you one thing and not two things: you need to pull yourself together … and fast.’

  When they got home the old man sat beside the range to pull off his shoes and socks. Mark sat into the table and looked out on the back garden. It came to him that the happiest hours of his marriage were those mornings when he would rise early and sit at this very table with a cup of coffee and watch the day brightening over the fields and the distant hills. He loved those early hours when he could feel the house warming to the new day, the eaves and facia crackling and expanding, the whole structure flexing itself like a living thing in the sun. In such moments he was nearly content and he would sit there until Susan entered the room and saw that look on his face that told her she was never a part of his happiness.

  ‘So he told you about our time in the mines.’ The old man pushed his feet out and flexed his toes, grimacing with pleasure.

  ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘I heard a piece of it.’

  ‘It’s a good story.’

  ‘I’d imagine it is.’

  ‘But he didn’t say how it ended, why he left; he only stuck it a year. I suppose he threw it all up; that would be just like him.’

  ‘No, no,’ the old man corrected sharply. ‘It wasn’t like that and don’t go thinking it was. Your
father was as good a man as ever took a shovel into a seam. He was one of the men you send up front to the blast point to shovel out the ore. He was small but he had a pair of shoulders on him and he worked side by side with big Canadians and Norwegians. No, it wasn’t the work that ended it for him, it was something much worse; it was homesickness that got to him. That Christmas we had a few days off so we sent out for some drink, a crate of beer and a bottle of whiskey to each man and we sat up on our bunks talking and singing and telling stories and of course it wasn’t long till the crying started; all these miners sitting around in their bunks, crying for home. He was young at the time, barely into his twenties and Ontario wasn’t London. I suppose I had a few years on him and I didn’t feel it so hard. Anyway, when he stopped crying he vowed he would never spend another Christmas away from home. And he was as good as his word; when his contract was up in the spring he went back to London and I doubt if he ever did spend another Christmas away from home.’

  The old man’s voice suited the gloom, it paid out like frayed rope into the room. Jolted by some new memory, he leaned forward onto his knees and spread his hands.

  ‘What I remember most – and you can ask him about this yourself – is going down into the mine at the beginning of a shift. Seventy-five men standing shoulder to shoulder, naked as the day we were born and our lunchboxes clasped between our ankles. Five minutes of a descent in a metal cage, down into the heat and darkness, five thousand feet. That’s what I remember most. Ask your father, he’ll tell you.’

  ‘I’m surprised he told me as much as he did; it surprised him too by the look of him.’

  The old man straightened up. ‘That’s a miner’s thing; mines leave their mark on a man. They’re a melancholy breed, not enough sunlight. You can spot them anywhere, these quiet men who stand apart with their heads pulled down into their shoulders, always expecting the worst. I’ll bet you see something like that in your father.’