This fella today is under the rubble that’s himself, inebriated against it all, even a strange woman mopping him up on the bus. And what it is to have someone pull at your hand and demand the blood come back to it. What it is. What it is to have someone mutter oh Jesus Christ on your behalf. What it is.
Through the window, she forces her attention onto the landscape in the hope of any explanation that might take her from yet another public dissolve. Long finished, uninhabited developments gouge the edge of the countryside, leaking out from every village with names more redolent of fizzy wines than serious settlements. They infringe where cattle once grazed. Eventually there will be nothing left between villages, no lead into them and no lead out. You don’t see people walking so much anymore, she thinks. There’s no rhythm to lull you. There’s no slow pace of a person headed up the town. The town that’s two streets and a crossroads. They say the population is swelling but the roadside is so bereft of people you’d swear they’d been wiped off by an epidemic. The development and its pace are akin to the disgrace of him beside her. Caught up in itself it pays no heed to those wandering among it, just the gallop forward and he, like it, just the daily lift to the lips, never mind where he shits or sleeps or makes a fool of himself.
Yet there’s something to admire in all the disgrace of him, that he cares so little, that he’s proudly reduced. Were he in her situation he’d act on her desires. Desires that have taken her into this bus to Limerick to knock at the door of a man who has instructed her to return for his verdict. He’d lay his head where ever he has cause or need to and would not go to Limerick to ask permission, nor hesitate asking permission to do this or that. He needs no permission to head to the pub each day and there’s no pub would caution him until he started to smash the place up.
She’ll do like him. She’ll no more wait to enter the Blue House. She’ll go back to your man next week to seek his permission to be in a house he doesn’t give a toss about because she’s committed to do so. She’s tired of fellas telling her yes and no. Tomorrow she’ll go over to the house and decide on the state of it.
The next Thursday she found out how bitter he was. She returned against her better judgment, against instinct, she returned only because he told her to.
—Oh it’s you again, he snaps at the door.
—You told me come back.
—Well it’s a wasted journey. The place is not for rent. And I’ll hear no more about. Don’t come bothering me again do ya hear?
Before he can shut the brown door.
—Where was it again you were born, where in the family were you, the youngest or the middle?
—What would you want to know such a thing for?
—You’re not the youngest I am certain?
—That I am not. The youngest is gone. Cirrhosis of the liver he had and his own stupidity what gave it to him.
It’s just a moment. She stares into that moment. It’s interrupted by the clip of the door closing. But he has given her a moment and it means he’ll give it again.
Like a mad woman she calls through the letter box.
—I remember your Granny at the front of the house. She had something in her hand she was always fixing. Bad tempered she was. I felt sorry for you all.
Silence.
—I don’t know why you hold onto such a place if there’s nothing good held in it for you.
Silence.
—I could make it nice and then you could come back to it.
The shadow marches back through the glass growing wider as she lifts her brow away from it. The door’s pulled back sudden.
—If you don’t move away from my door immediately I’ll have you removed. Get gone.
She doesn’t move. She examines his blushed red face and unkempt random strips of hair.
—You’re awful unfriendly, she states blithely.
—What kind of a lunatic are you? Go home woman and if you cross this path ever again I’ll get an order against you.
She moves away. She’s light. Whatever it is, he doesn’t like meddling women. She’s not a bit afraid of him. He reminds her of the man on the bus, only he’s upright, but inside, he’s as broken as any of them.
Since Jimmy’s death she’s become more reckless. She says strange things she never would have dared to before. She acts on her impulses. Like now, his wheelie bin is out in the road, probably left there for days. She opens it. Empty. Then wheels it back to the door and knocks. His face is astonished. The kind of astonishment where his arms could take an involuntary swing at her. She doesn’t give a hoot.
—Don’t leave your wheelie bin out on the road or the lads’ll turn it over on you. They’re expensive. We don’t have them up our way. Take care of it.
Somehow, these sentences and his slamming the door, and her, scuttling away, are in perfect unison, so there is no outright victor. She hears another bang at the end of the path, which suggests he watched her disappear in bewilderment.
On the bus she sleeps. Her face slides and smears the cold window to wake her. The fatigue of what she has to do now, to settle this situation, all is clear to her.
That night she is manic with excitement at her performance. I was terrific she thinks. I stood there and I was terrific. To celebrate, in the dark, she makes her way to his house and admires the windows with her torch.
In the Blue House today she sits on the low Chinese fabric stool amid the rubble and jumble of the life that departed here so inexplicably that day. Those waves from Jimmy’s hand are still with her from the bus and new ones arrive as she sits in the house she is not supposed to be in. Her back is cramped down. She looks at the wall and there’s Jimmy now waving back at her. Hello mam, he says, it’s not so bad, once you get used to the cold, sure it’s not.
—But it is bad, it’s awful bad Jimmy. You’ve no idea how this cold bothers me. I’m freezing all the time, I’m never warm these days Jimmy.
You’ve to get yourself a continental quilt and stitch it onto yourself now, do ya hear? He calls back and they both laugh. Is it cold there too? She asks him. Ah mam, it’s freezing once you’re dead, only you are numb and you feel none of it the way you do in life. I miss you so much, she tells him and she lowers her head because of the push of tears.
Then he’s gone and the cold damp is down on her. With little left in the way of roof and negligible light, torch and lighter alone, she pulls the blanket round her and cramps the knees into her chest and huddles. If it was light, she could get on with something in here but because it’s dark, she’ll just sit and when the cold is unbearable, she’ll rock a bit. She’s glad to be here. Sad and glad, her strange combination.
The doctor phones her early.
—Can she come down? He wants to check her blood sugar.
It’s most inconvenient for she wants to head to the Blue House first and continue what she commenced yesterday.
Episode 14
Nobody understands how tired widows get. At first everyone wants a bit of you. A slice. To peel the skin from the orange. Then slowly they all leave you alone unless say you go mad or get a haircut or something useful. It’s easy to forget widows. They illuminate themselves once a year around anniversaries of other people dying. Then people remember they are the remnants of the person who has gone. Often about what’s gone are widows, rather than the matter that they are still here.
I must appreciate why my daughters were angry with me? Grief said.
I did not.
—You kept the news about Jimmy quiet. Deliberately quiet.
And she wondered why I had done that? Why was that?
I didn’t like her question. I didn’t like her tunneling into me like that. I thought she’d gone bobbins. I didn’t want to tell her the truth I had known long in advance of them telling me he was dead that he was dead and none had believed me.
Grief persists, nudges me a touch.
—I want to know why my daughters are angry, don’t I?
This is true, had I maybe asked her the q
uestion, had she any idea what made girls so angry the way Áine has gone angry on me. I don’t recall if I asked her.
—Have you ever been angry?
—I was angry once I said. I was very angry with my son once.
—And what did you do?
—I worked my hardest to have him go away. To have him out of sight, so I wouldn’t have to look at him anymore.
—And that was the only time you were angry?
—No I was angry, particularly angry twice with my husband. He forced Jimmy outta college, cut him off financially. And he was perhaps unfaithful to me in my marriage.
—And which made me the angrier?
—It was another time that made me angrier it was the day he prevented me from making my son a decent breakfast. The day we went to the funeral and wasn’t I racing to be home and have the breakfast made and didn’t he take off to Ballina instead of leaving me home and you know how the story went.
—But you too, you wanted Jimmy gone, isn’t that right? Why was that?
—You’re asking me too many questions I said. You’re giving me a headache. I’d like to talk about what was on the telly last night instead.
There was a long silence which I gave into.
—You’ve to understand I was telling them long before he was gone, that Jimmy was dead. I’d long buried him by the time he died. It was my husband’s death that took me by surprise.
—Lookit if I knew why I kept it quiet then I probably would not have kept it quiet at all.
—Right.
—Jimmy and I had an understanding. And in that understanding he wanted me to tell people only when I was ready.
—And how did you know this?
—We’ve talked about it, I said. Defeated.
—Do you talk to him regularly?
—As a matter of fact I do.
—As a matter of fact that was how my husband put me inside the hospital.
—As a matter of fact it was.
—Did you know that?
Grief shook her head.
—I only know what it is you want to tell me. She replies.
As a matter of fact I had had enough of this grief counselling.
As a matter of fact I’d had enough of Grief herself.
As a matter of fact there are a hundred people I would rather talk to.
As a matter of fact.
Did I think that the fact I kept their brother’s death so quiet might have angered the girls? Grief carried on.
—They were angry long before he died. I left it at that.
She would never understand me that’s why I had been sent to see her. They always want you to chat to people who don’t understand you otherwise they’d have no job to do. I was sat here doing a favour and a service to this woman, so I was.
A short silence, that should have been a long silence, a very long one, that I should not have given into.
—Jimmy was everything to me and he left me with the decision about how to tell or say when he was or was not dead. He had told me earlier than the rest of you. We’d talked about it. And even after his death we talked about it. Take your time mam he’d said. I was visiting him up in the Blue House sure.
And it’s out of me, and I am looking at it like it’s someone else’s washing on the line and I have done the very thing I vowed I wouldn’t to Bina. I have alarmed Grief and it’s a bad turn I have taken.
Sure enough Grief can’t see me for a couple of weeks, but she wants me to meet someone else in Castlebar while she is gone and she’ll be calling me with an appointment.
That extra appointment surged in me the need to inhabit the Blue House because I felt they were coming for me. Simply inhabit to not be here, to not listen to the details of the appointment. I had no strength for listening this day or any day. I wanted only to sit on the small Chinese footstool and talk to Jimmy. He never bothered me with these incessant questions. He only worried about me catching cold. I longed to be back talking to him no matter how uncomfortable the house.
There could be no telling me. He was dead and gone and I knew it. No matter what their mouths said back to me. I knew exactly where my son was. He was in the Blue House.
It was after that session with Grief that the woman came visiting me at the house. The Outreach Team woman she called herself. Nice enough she was, sporting an emphatic bobbed hairstyle, a shortish round woman. She was friendly and clapped her hands together a lot, as if to say come on now lads, sort it out. Except there were no lads anymore. She would be coming to see me once a week and I was to be going to another clinic every other week. She asked an awful lot of questions I became confused about what I was answering and answered yes to every single one so she would go home and leave me in peace.
This was a bad sign. When they’re in your house, they’re coming for ya, Bina said.
Bina instructed me firstly not to let her in, then said she’d better move in to be certain they did not take me away.
Be careful Phil, she said, they’re comin’ for ye.
Episode 15
When they came; I’d been expecting them. Knew how they’d look, knew I would know they’d come before they knocked on my door. And I did. The phone rang. Naturally the phone rang. The phone always rings. This is the problem with the phone. I nearly miss the days when we’d to go two and a half miles to the pub and wait out the evening for the pay phone to ring for us, for someone to call out is so and so here: a call from England. And everyone would push out of the way and let you through in a hurry, all hoping the voice would still be there on the line for ya. The miracle of telephony, none of us understanding how it all happened. Nor did we want to, we only wanted the voice to be there. And it was similar when they came to my door to tell me about Jimmy. I only hoped the miracle would be he was still there, but I had known for so much longer than they gave me credit for, that he was not.
It was in the hesitant way they unlatched the gate and closed it behind them as if they’d be staying a while. I had the door open for I would not let them rest their knuckles on it and enjoy that pause before it pulled back. I unlatched it only because if they hadn’t delivered the news they’d retire to a local pub, and two and two would make eight and I wanted them gone from here with their blue and starched collars. Let it be in my ear canal rather than the entire village and mostly I wanted them gone.
—I know why you’ve come. I’ve been expecting you. Is it what I think it is? If it is just nod.
They commenced their emotionless speech delivered like they were brushing their teeth and avoiding the gums. She let them talk and at the end calmly nodded. She would not do what she’d heard the mother in Florida did, ran out to the garden threw herself to the ground, vomited, pulled at clumps of grass and roared. She would do none of it.
—Well you have him now, I said, you have taken all of him from me and now if you’ll excuse me I have chores to attend to.
I closed the door on them and returned to my kitchen table. I lifted my pen and wrote the number + 1 on the bottom of the table mat. Then I rose and put the flat of my right hand onto the hot range and wanted it left there for the count of four. I wanted to tattoo this moment onto myself. I could not last ’til four.
Finally after so many months, after administering that burn to my hand I no longer felt numb.
In her mind it was old news, she reminded herself, for she’d known all this since that time Himself had taken her to the hospital. She was telling them all that time Jimmy was gone. She knew that they would take Jimmy from her. And they had done it. There was nothing new in this, she told herself. She would not allow for surprise.
What did surprise her was how angry she became at her husband, who by virtue of his own inconvenient death had absented himself from this final chapter. She longed for him to see the results of their enterprise, to see precisely what they’d achieved. She stared at the wall and actively wondered how much more stupid two people could have been.
She would tell the world when she was ready.
She felt she’d a plan once she closed the door on them. She just could not recall what it was. She sat into the chair and immediately worried about what they had been saying in the bank, that Jimmy had gone to America to be shut of her.
Even tho’ Jimmy was nowhere near New Jersey she scans every scene of the film for a sighting of him, a boot, an elbow, an eyebrow – that rare remote chance. A television documentary about men waking up in New Jersey on the day they are due to ship out to Iraq surprises her in its timing and she compulsively views it knowing this to be a poor decision. There’s women stood among them; women, and not just that shiny-eyed wife she’s used to seeing hand over children, forever dressed in snowsuits, to their fathers. Women kiss their husbands good bye. The men aren’t going no place. Women in uniforms with rucksacks about them. Women, she repeats to herself, there were women there for God’s sake. Could Jimmy not have tumbled into the arms of some girl? The Lord Save Us to even think such a thought. It broke her out in a reluctant smile. It makes her sad for one reason and it’s not goodbye to families. It’s that her Jimmy could have found himself a wife. She briefly imagines Jimmy in some kind of a squadron or situation where it’s him, only him and thirty-two women in uniforms: she tries to imagine him among them. But he looks lost and the image of a shirtless male is all she can draw up. She can see her Jimmy looking at the man’s face and body and shame her as it might, the idea of it breaks her.
Malarky Page 13
