Malarky

by Anakana Schofield

  The places she can see her husband:• at the table.

  • shaving in the mirror.

  • bending down to pull his wellies on.

  • staring and nodding at the cattle market on Tuesday.

  • sat in the chair, staring into the distance, the television on, but he’s not watching it.

  Did I let him get away or was he already gone? Our Woman wonders.

  —There were others.

  I don’t start easy on Grief. Her face brave but pallid. She’s getting over a cold, she tells me and it knocked her sideways and how are you?

  —There were others.

  —There were.

  —There were.

  —Whatchyamean?

  —There were other women.

  —Really. She moves the clipboard. To her ‘I must record this’ knee. She writes. She looks up. She looks tired. She looks obliged.

  —Tell me about the others.

  And In Conclusion Grief says sometimes when people die we can learn the worst about them, but in fact in learning the worst about them and up and blah and up and blah and time’s up. I haven’t heard much of what she’s said. I am still with my husband at the front door, ringing the bell, inquiring, my mother, like you know, is sick and fragile and I’m lookin’. He was gone, Our Woman concludes. Long gone. Gone longer than I could imagine the point at which he left maybe. For it musta been a good while before he rang that bell.

  Grief is not unhappy as I tell her how ecstatic I am finally to have been accurately identified as a widow.

  —It’s important to you isn’t it Kathleen.

  —It is. It’s mighty important.

  —Why? She wants to know.

  I am just after giving her an answer and she’s back with another question.

  —Because you told me it was important.

  She settles her hands, watches me and nods.

  —Did I really? Did I really say that? She says.

  —Do ya think if you see your child at something you don’t want to see you can ever be shut of it? I ask Grief the counsellor.

  —Well it depends what they were at and how you felt about what they were doing?

  —Let’s say you didn’t feel good.

  —Well now if we don’t feel good it’s best if we go through it all over again and try to understand why we don’t feel good. In fact I’ll tell you something, to be free of something you’ve to get closer to it than you might imagine.

  Jesus Janey Jesus Janey.

  —But when I was seeing the naked fellas you told me to scrub the floor?

  —That’s right. I did. And did it work?

  —I dunno.

  —Are you still seeing naked fellas?

  —No.

  —Well now.

  —I am now seeing half clothed ones.

  —The half clothed ones may need a new approach, she admits. They’re a different formation. It would be like trying to move a square to a pyramid.

  —I’ve had a change I told Grief in the last session before she turned me over to them.

  —That’s great. What kind of a change?

  —They’re not naked anymore the fellas I am seeing.

  —OK. Great. This is good.

  —No, they’ve clothes on them.

  —Hats and coats is it?

  —No, little red underpants.

  —Right?

  —And I am wrestling with them.

  —Whatchya mean?

  —You know wrestling.

  —Wrestling?

  —Yes one at a time.

  —And do you like it?

  —I do, I assured her, I like it very much indeed. I can’t get enough of it. It’s keeping me awake all night thinking about it.

  She grew quiet and then issued some terminal words.

  —I am beginning to worry about you, she said.

  No matter how I explained it to him, Halim did not comprehend the pressure of being a widow.

  —You must no longer visit me.

  —I will visit you every Sunday.

  —You don’t understand I am a widow now.

  —Yes I do understand. I will visit you every Sunday. I must help you.

  Now she was a widow Halim could not visit her anymore. It was a simple rule that she respected about widows.

  Joanie said I was to lock the door. I had to remember. Bina said if I didn’t lock the door she’d personally come down here and attack me herself if only to teach me to lock the feckin’ thing. Still I didn’t lock it. There was no particular reason, other than the matter of them both telling me, I had to let them know just because I was a widow I wouldn’t have anyone telling me what to do.

  Jimmy came home to me in 7 boxes. 6 small black ones containing his belongings and one containing his body. I allowed the 6 discreet postal delivery, but his body I met in Dublin. I stepped off the train at Heuston Station wearing my good coat. I walked the length of that platform, absent, because I had walked this platform so many times rehearsing his collection. Remember I had known how he’d come home to me. I shunted between two people with big cases, one minus a wheel, remember I was ahead of them all. They’d tried to send his body to Shannon, but I’d told them no. My son would come home to Dublin. His cremation arranged on arrival. I asked them to deposit the flag that accompanied him, wrapped him like an envelope, into the fire. Mossie at the local funeral home was obliging when I had a quiet word with him. My son will be coming home, I’d appreciate some discretion, it’ll be a quiet affair.

  They asked if I wanted to see him, one last time. I approached, put my hand on the edge of the coffin. We’ll only show you his head and shoulders they said. They were gentle whoever they were. He was in a desperate state my Jimmy. On one half of his face especially. His skin was cold, I’d never considered how cold he’d be. Honestly they had pieced him back together and stitched him into his uniform. He wasn’t my son in that box, the way they had covered him in cheap purple satin. Take it off, I said. I want to see his hands. They didn’t advise it. Get him out of those clothes you have on him. But in his face he was young, that was what struck me the most, how young a man my son was. Nothing could obliterate it.

  Sand down the windowsill before winter came, did I realize how damp the house was, we’re living in a puddle, these were the words that woke me.

  I had a terrible time getting up the day I buried my husband. No desire to move from the bed. Granite-limbed, immobile. I felt like a flat battery. Jimmy sat there on the end of the bed and talked out into the damp bedroom air.

  —We’ve to do something about the house, he said, we’ve to make it comfortable for you through the winter.

  —Come on, he said, come on ’til we have the tea now.

  The girls were not staying with me and I do not remember why. They were staying with Joanie because they were organizing. Wait now that’s it. All the organizing I didn’t agree with. But they took it over when I said that cremation could be better than burial, and after that the whole funeral was organized by my daughters.

  I didn’t move to get outta the bed when Jimmy said come on, but he didn’t bother me.

  —I’ll leave the tea in so, he said.

  I could hear rattling of the kettle beyond in the kitchen, it reassured me if he was to stay all would be well. I had the feeling he would stay, that he would tell the army he’d to stay. Everything in the bedroom was still, the curtains were closed creating a dullness that made all ugly but we’d peace in there, a sad, cold peace. We would not have it once we left. It is this light that sometimes replicates inside the Blue House. The light of sad, cold peace.

  —Daddy, I said, he wasn’t a bad man, I said, when Jimmy came in with the tea.

  —I know, he said. Sure I know. Take your time when you get up, you might be dizzy havin’ lain so long. I’m going to heat the pan.

  Jimmy was full of useful sayings now and maybe it was the army taught him them, or maybe he always knew them.

  Later that day at the funeral
I’d no part of because it was relieved of me and wasn’t I glad to have it relieved, I was, for I’d a been no use to them only thinking ludicrous things about urns and cremation, as if such a thing were possible, but I remember they didn’t lay him out in the house, why was that? My daughters were organizing it all with Joanie and the girls and I think they decided it would be unsettling for me and so into the funeral home in Foxford we went instead.

  People flocked to me. I sat on a chair. I didn’t stand up. Mossie gave me the chair. There’s no need to stand up, Mossie said. At one point the son of a local man who must have worked beyond in the fields with my husband came to me and put his arms around me and sobbed what are we going to do without him? I was squashed beneath him.

  Stood about that coffin was a life my husband had been living outside my kitchen, in which he mattered to so many and I had known of it and what harm was it that he left it at the back door when he came in at night. Better he came in. Better he came into me, I told myself, than not at all. And yet more’s the pity he couldn’t have made a bit of room for his son, I caught myself thinking. I was disappointed I couldn’t escape that last thought. The way it stalked me and staked itself into the ground. Wasn’t I weak to let it come to me that way?

  Later when all was said and done, I said to Jimmy: Wasn’t that something, I said, Daddy, how he mattered to those young fellas you know. Isn’t that something? I repeated. Did you see them crying?

  —Oh he did, of course he did, Jimmy said. No bitterness, nothing, no more words than were necessary. But we have to get you into bed, Jimmy said, it’s been a long day for you.

  That someone knew I’d had a long day was something. You see I hadn’t really been present that day, I was floating above and around the whole thing, confused. I remember there were a lot of questions, but I never remember answering even one of them.

  —Age is a great leveller, I told Jimmy on another walk. Daddy for example he’s not a bad man. He’s a desperate man, yes. But I too have given him the odd sight at despair he mighta been spared.

  Jimmy looked at me. He did not believe me. But he kept it to himself, exactly the way I had trained him.

  Another time when we walked that way we did, Jimmy said to me that he had watched me and had learned different.

  —What d’ya mean? I said, not wanting to know at all what he meant.

  —I know what it is to love a man and not be loved back.

  —Was it the fella you brought down to us that time?

  —No, he was the opposite. That’s why I brought him see. He was able to love me, I wanted you to see it, but you wouldn’t.

  —I saw it. I said. I did. But he was awful dull.

  —And so you’ve to stop worrying, he said lightly.

  —I’ll never stop worrying, I told him. It’s why I am here.

  I meant it, you know, I meant it in the way I am sitting here now looking out my back window, where it’s raining, waiting for the postman to come before I bring the flask of tea up to the Blue House to Jimmy and must be back before the girls descend in on me and start worrying if they don’t find me here. The doctor has already phoned, I’ve to call down to him tomorrow for the new prescription. My floor is washed because I have washed it. It looks well so it does. The cows are already fed. Today I am ahead of meself.

  It’s beautiful when it all makes sense, so it is. Occasionally it makes sense, just for a moment.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The references to pink neon signs in Episode 5 refer to a 1997 visual art exhibit called “For Dublin” by Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, whose public art installation of neon script quotations from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy I remember so fondly.

  Malarky is the culmination of ten years work. During that time many people offered encouragement and afforded me their patient ears despite my undulating despair.

  Thank you to my agent Marilyn Biderman, Tara, Dan at Biblioasis and John Metcalf for boldly embracing Malarky.

  My mother Hannah has the best-looking bovines in Co Mayo and is never short on humour. I thank her for helping me check dialect and place names. I thank my sister for the teabags and plane tickets.

  Go raibh mile maith agat go Edel Ni Chonchubhair for translating a few chapters of Malarky as Gaeilge.

  Thank you also to Helen Potrebenko for writing the novel Taxi!, Caroline Adderson, Keith Ridgway for the homoerotic consult, indefatigable Retta, Jenny and Ian, Sara, Carol, Marina Roy, and Gertrude who told me to imagine an ideal reader.

  Suzu Matsuda and Larry Cohen, my family here in Vancouver, have helped me in so many ways, including their exquisite love of my son.

  Finally thanks and love to my partner Jeremy Isao Speier and my son Cúán Isamu who has rocked my world for the past twelve years. I love you pet. You are the best.

  About the Author

  Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. She has contributed to the London Review of Books, The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, the Globe and Mail, and the Vancouver Sun. She has lived in London and Dublin, and now resides in Vancouver. Malarky is her first novel.

  1 See Martin John: A footnote novel.

  Copyright © Anakana Schofield, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Schofield, Anakana, 1971-

  Malarky / Anakana Schofield.

  eISBN : 978-1-926-84539-5

  I. Title.

  PS8637.C563M34 2012

  C813’.6

  C2011-907870-8

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA