Virginia laughed, holding her cheek, remembering the heat of Razor’s hands on her hips, his lanky frame stretched beneath her, and she above him, controlling him, her hot-blooded, angry punk.
“It’s none of your business,” she retorted and tried to push past him.
“Answer me, slut.” He shoved her back against the wall.
“Don’t bully me,” she shouted. “I’m not a kid any more.”
He lifted his hand again and struck her cheek. She turned on him, her anger as strong as his own, and answered him. “We were fucking in Razor’s flat. It took longer than expected because we did it twice.”
Horror-struck, Josephine lifted her hand to her mouth.
“You foul-mouthed tramp,” he roared. “How dare you use such language in front of your mother. I’ll make you give up that punk bastard if it’s the last thing I do.” He struck her again and again, his face flushed so deeply she thought he would have a stroke. “There’s plenty more where that came from if you don’t stop behaving like a little whore.”
There was always more where that came from. When she was young she believed there was a magic spell in Sonya’s house that took all the angry lines from her father’s face. But the spell only lasted until they reached the end of her road. She had grown up with the sting of his hands on her legs, her arms and her face, his bullying voice loud in her ears. She had loved and hated him in equal measure. It was her love that kept Sonya a secret and her hatred that released it that night, when she screamed, “What about your slut, Sonya? When are you going to give her up? How many years now … how many years have you forced me to lie?”
The sound her mother made reminded Virginia of pups. The same helpless, whimpering cry she used to hear from the room where she could not go. Only now it held anguish and the acknowledgement of a truth long denied. A truth that longed to be denied. It was the loneliest cry in the world.
Her father moved out the following day. Shortly afterwards she also left home and moved in with Razor. Her mother joined a bowling team.
* * *
At last his body was flown to Dublin. The atmosphere in the funeral parlour was restrained, polite greetings, whispered condolences. No tears were shed as the mourners filed before the open coffin and Virginia, shaking hands, smiling, accepting sympathy from her father’s Irish relatives, wondered how soon the charade would end. Josephine, arrayed in widow’s weeds that looked as if they had rested in mothballs since the reign of Queen Victoria, was the only person who wept, and this she did with relentless force. Edward’s plump arm comforted her. His children, two boys and a girl, all endowed with his earnest, round face and their mother’s pale complexion, gazed longingly towards the door when Josephine ordered them to kiss their grandfather’s forehead in farewell.
Brian Cheevers bowed his head in prayer then stepped back from the coffin. Donna took his hand and they stood together, offering condolences to Josephine, refusing to make eye contact with Virginia. The ingrained veneer of civility working against the odds, she thought. Still no sign of Lorraine or Ralph.
They followed the coffin into the church and sat in the front row. Behind them, the whispering, fidgeting and coughing gave way to an anticipatory silence. Virginia did not need to turn around to see whose footsteps clicked sharply up the aisle. The friction of separate particles rubbing together and igniting. Adrian shifted in his seat, as if he too could feel the electricity in the air, and moved slightly away from her.
The funeral mass was swift. The priest had never heard of Des Cheevers and had no inclination to eulogise a stranger. Wafted with incense, doused with holy water, the coffin was wheeled briskly back down the aisle. Statues and stations of the cross wavered before Virginia’s eyes. Burning hearts offering everlasting forgiveness – but there was no forgiveness in the cold gaze of Lorraine Cheevers, who stared unflinchingly as the small family procession approached. The brash red jacket she wore should have clashed with her hair but it added luminance to her appearance, a vibrant statement. Virginia knew it had been chosen with care.
More handshaking outside the church. Virginia smiled at the elderly men who came forward and told her what a card her father had been. A great man when it came to the wine and the women. As if the latter fact needed verification, a woman in a Zimmer frame twinkled up at her and confessed that she and Des had quite a thing going in the olden days, not a twinge of arthritis between them, the pair of them as frisky as young goats. She guffawed loudly and shuffled back into the crowd. Ralph had also arrived during the funeral mass. He shook hands with Edward and kissed Lorraine for longer than was appropriate at a funeral ceremony. Virginia signalled the undertaker to depart for the cemetery. The day was gathering its own momentum, sweeping them haplessly on its back.
At the graveside they stood opposite each other, Lorraine flanked grimly by her parents. The hole into which Des Cheevers was being lowered was only a fissure in the distance separating them. After the burial people hung around the graveside. Virginia wanted to clap her hands and scatter them. The Irish had no sense of decorum. They turned every gathering, even a funeral, into a party. Her jaw locked painfully when her mother again related the boiled-egg story, this time to Ralph, who listened, his head tilted to one side, and asked if it had been hard or soft boiled.
Firmly, Virginia escorted her mother back to the mourning car. She slammed the door on her protests and walked back to Ralph. “Thank you for coming.” Her tone was as formal as her handshake. “Don’t let me detain you any longer.”
“Des was a fine man. He’ll be sadly missed.”
Her smile glittered. “He was a bad-tempered bully who never cared where he landed his fists. I remember he planted them in your teeth once. It’s a memory I’ll always cherish.”
“Indeed … memories. Where would we be without them. Fancy your father dying in Josephine’s bed. Who knows? There’s hope for us yet, my darling.”
The mourners filed from the graveside and were joined by a man who had been standing slightly apart from the main gathering. Virginia had no recollection of seeing him in the funeral home or the church. When Lorraine approached with her parents he stepped forward and spoke to her. She drew back, surprised by his appearance, then shook his hand.
Virginia was sure she had met him before. His face was familiar, the angular boniness and narrow chin, an expressive face, but arrogant too, and it was this arrogance that clicked the memory into place. He had come to Blaide House demanding Lorraine’s address and been unnecessarily rude when she refused to give it to him.
Lorraine stood talking to him. She allowed her parents to walk on ahead and laughed at something he said. So long since Virginia had heard her laughter. The sound shocked her. When she allowed herself to think about Lorraine, she thought only of tears and ranting grief.
Forty-six
They had lunch in a restaurant close to his apartment. Lorraine pointed to the first item on the menu.
“Same for me.” He placed his order without once taking his eyes from her face.
“What did we order?” he asked after the waiter departed.
“I’ve absolutely no idea.”
Her answer made him smile and reach across the table to take her hand. She had been shocked at his appearance in the cemetery and now, sitting opposite him, she was able to observe the difference in him. He looked carefree, happy to be with her, his body relaxed as he described how he had read her uncle’s death notice in The Irish Times and had arrived at the cemetery on the off-chance that he would find her among the mourners.
“You’ve no idea how much I wanted to contact you but I was afraid you’d hang up on me. Not that I would have blamed you. I should never have let you leave my apartment.”
“Why did you tell me to go?”
“I was caught up in something, Lorraine. It’s very personal and has nothing to do with you. But, at the time, I wasn’t able to make that separation.”
“If you’re involved with someone else –”
“No.” His denial was instant, emphatic. “It has to do with my son. I’d like to talk about it soon … but not now. I want the day to belong to us.” His gaze warmed her face, nothing hidden, none of the confused signals she had picked up every other time they were together.
“I accused you of hating me when you phoned that night,” she said.
“I remember our conversation.”
“I still can’t understand why you made me feel that way.”
“It was unforgivable of me. I love you, Lorraine. I’ve wanted to say that to you for a long time.”
His energy came towards her in waves, giddy, intoxicating, and his expression, free from ambiguity, seemed lit from within. Their time together had been so fraught with contradictions and confusion. Now, suddenly, everything seemed different but she was unwilling to trust the fusion taking place so effortlessly between them.
“I’m not ready to fall in love, Michael. It’s too soon.”
“As long as there’s a possibility that some day you’ll love me, I’ll wait forever.”
Their food was placed before them. Beef burgers, heaped with onions, luminous carrots on the side, a trickle of congealed gravy over mashed potatoes.
They stared at their plates and then at each other. Their laughter was spontaneous, so hearty that people dining nearby looked curiously across. He pushed his plate to one side and said, “I’ll make something to eat in the apartment, if you’d like to come back with me?”
She could leave him now and return to her refuge. The walls were strong, reinforced. There was wine in the fridge and a glass ready to be filled. But an afternoon stretched before them and the promise it contained shimmered like an oasis on parched sand. It was so easy, effortless really, to decide. He paid the bill. They walked together from the restaurant.
He drew the curtains to close out the day. The sun filtered through a chink and filled the room with shadowy light. Somewhere behind her a clock ticked, measuring time that no longer had relevance. Only a few hours ago she had stood in a cemetery between her parents, fragile as an invalid exposed to sunshine after a long illness. Her body shaking with the knowledge that there would be other family occasions when she would have to endure the sight of them together. Now she lay in another man’s arms, her lips racked with his kisses, feeling him hard against her, shockingly erect, no awkwardness between them as they undressed each other and stretched across his bed, soaking up each other’s nakedness. He could have spent a lifetime knowing my body, she thought, knowing the pitch of my pleasure, the depths of my passion. His hands traced across her thighs and she opened to him, her limbs receiving him, holding him captive. She was above him, beyond him, and he, within her, filling her, his eyes devouring her, drove deeper until there was nothing left except the sundering of body and mind. She wanted to hold the sensation yet she compelled him onwards until she felt the shuddering spill of his passion inside her and he, hearing her cry out, hearing her abandonment, buried his face in her hair, engulfed.
Afterwards, there was time to lie in each other’s arms. They talked until the room grew dark and the sounds in the apartment block began to change. Balcony doors slammed, a radio played next door and there were voices outside, a brief staccato of sound that quickly faded. They drew life histories from each other, exploring their contrasting childhoods; the leafy suburbs of Drumcondra and the commune where he had spent the first four years of his life.
His mother’s parents had died when she was young and, after the death of her father, which occurred just before her sixteenth birthday, Shady Carmody emigrated to America with her older sister. At first they lived in New York, then moved to California and on to Arizona, where they settled in Sedona, attracted by the boulders and rugged canyons they had seen so often in cowboy films. They were told stories about Native American tribes practising ancient religious ceremonies in secret caverns and, having been reared under the shadow of Croagh Patrick, where pilgrims stumbled bare-foot over stones, they were at ease with mystery and rite. They moved into a hippy commune and learned to meditate and weave lengths of fabric which they sold to tourists. But the older sister grew tired of sunshine and chanting in the shade of red-faced crags. She felt it was time to explore Alaska.
“Harriet Carmody,” he said, and paused as if he expected Lorraine to recognise her name. “The travel writer,” he added, seeing her puzzlement, and she nodded, remembering a book she had once read about India.
Shady refused to leave the commune. Unknown to her sister she had fallen in love with a young man who was showing her other ways of travelling. When he spoke about his mother, he could have been describing an ephemeral being, floating by on fairy dust, and Lorraine pictured a young woman in a long skirt, hair to her waist, beads around her neck, smoke from a joint spiralling through her fingers. The sisters agreed to separate, one moving outwards, the other travelling to distant places in her mind. Michael was born twelve months later.
His memories were fragmented, wonderful descriptions of sunsets and towering rocks and of his mother weaving lengths of golden fabric. The women in the commune mothered him. They carried him in a sling, played for him on sitars and bongo drums, brought him food to a table under vines. There were men in the commune, beards and sandals; they all looked alike to him and he called none of them his father. Nor did he have any concept of fatherhood. He belonged to a community, not a family. When he was older, he discovered that his father had exchanged his sandals for deck shoes before he was born. On the last sighting, he was crewing on a yacht in the Bahamas.
It would be a few more years before Scott McKenzie turned San Francisco into a garden for flower children and “make love not war” became a cliché with a bitter aftertaste – but for Shady Carmody, the dream was already turning sour. Once, he found her unconscious. Many times he heard her crying in her sleep. She swung him high on elation, beat him down with her despair. Her hair fell below her waist but it was matted and her feet were caked with clay. He could not understand why she sang and cried on the same breath. He was four years old when his aunt returned to the commune and held him in her arms for the first time. She placed her sister and her nephew in the back of a pick-up truck and drove away.
Shady stayed in hospital – he had no idea how long, to him it seemed an endless time – and after she was discharged the sisters returned to Ireland. They lived in Dublin where Harriet quelled her wanderlust and set about writing her first book. His mother, restless and adrift, waited tables. In the summer of ’67 she travelled to Woburn Abbey, where The Festival of the Flower Children, England’s answer to Woodstock, was taking place.
“A little holiday,” said Harriet, who had been unable to prevent her going. He still remembered the rows and his mother crying on the stairs the night before she left. He was filled with foreboding and the belief that she was returning to the commune, terrified he would never see her again. He waved goodbye to her from the pier. Harriet said they would have a good view from there. Afterwards, she took him to the Broadway café on O’Connell Street and treated him to an ice-cream flavoured with raspberry syrup.
For three days Shady Carmody danced to the anthem of an era – turn on, tune in, drop out. The car crash occurred on the night before she was due to return home. The young man driving escaped with minor injuries. She died on the spot. A flower child with daisies in her hair. Shortly after her funeral, his aunt brought him to Mayo, to the house where she had been born and where, she said, he would be safe.
Lorraine drew him to her. His heart pounded against her breast. She thought about her own childhood, playing safe in a suburban garden with Eoin and Sally Ruane, their mothers in the kitchen exchanging recipes for chocolate cake, keeping a wary eye on their children playing safely on see-saws.
“I love you,” he said. He repeated her name, as if the sound was a foreign language on his tongue. “My sweet Lorraine … I love you.”
Forty-seven
Brahms Ward, Midnight
How could I have got it so wron
g? She was in New York. I want to say it again. Listen carefully, Killian. She was in New York. A continent away. In an Irish bar in the East Village, she sang “Ladies of the Canyon”. She sings off-key, said Eoin, always did. But she knows how to paint a quirky portrait. A railway station, of all places. Meg said it usually hangs in his study but they decided to show it off for their party and there it was in the living-room, a splendid thing to see.
We live in a small world but a magical one. How strange our paths never crossed before. Perhaps they did. Meg’s parties are crowded jamborees, as this one was, with crowds spilling into different rooms and forming huddles wherever there is space. Lorraine Cheevers should have been there. She rang and accepted the invitation than rang again to cancel. She had a funeral to attend.
Killian, my boy, my silent patient boy, I’ve no right to feel delirious but I’m wild with it. We talked about everything but the right thing. I told her about the commune, all of it, the dirt and neglect and how your grandmother lay like a crushed bird with no hope of ever flying free until Harriet lifted her up and tried to heal her. I’ve never spoken so freely about it. Not even in Slane. I wanted to lie beside her forever and feel her warm breath on my face but in the end she left and I’m here with you again. Back on the night shift.
I should have been honest with her. Yes, of course I should. Don’t give me that sideways look. I’ll tell her everything when I see her. It won’t be easy but she’ll understand. I’ll bring her here to meet you and you’ll see why I’m daft with happiness.
What will I say? Not to worry; I’ll find a way. There’ll be time to explain and she will listen. Just as she listened today when I laid those years before her. She’s afraid of love, mistrustful. What have I done? How could I have been such a fool? You brought us together but it was along a very crooked road. How can I even begin to describe it to her?
Fragile Lies Page 26
