Bog Child

by Siobhan Dowd

  Suddenly Mam’s fingers were biting into his shoulder. ‘Give it here, Fergus. Give me.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ he told the caller. He unwound the wire from his fingers and pressed the receiver into Mam’s hand. ‘He’s alive,’ he whispered.

  ‘What news do you have of my son?’ she rasped.

  Fergus watched as Mam listened. Her forehead furrowed, her mouth became an impregnable line of defence.

  ‘Can I see him?’

  The faint buzz of a reply seemed to satisfy her. ‘I’ll be there tonight.’

  A further buzz seemed to be arguing.

  ‘I understand.’ She met Fergus’s eye, holding the receiver away from her ear. ‘It’s only the beginning, he says, Fergus. The beginning of the end.’

  She turned back to the receiver. ‘I’ll come anyway.’

  She set down the phone and crossed herself. ‘Fergus. You and me and Da. This is the moment. Now. We’ve got to talk.’

  ‘Talk?’

  ‘About Joe.’

  ‘What’s there to say, Mam? Haven’t we said it all?’

  ‘No. We haven’t.’

  She went back into the kitchen. ‘Malachy,’ she said.

  Da looked up from the paper, his eyes stricken. ‘It’s over, isn’t it?’

  Mam shook her head. ‘No. He’s in a coma.’

  ‘A coma?’

  ‘The doctor says it’s the beginning of the end. He won’t wake up again.’

  Da folded the paper up into neat quarters. He put it on the table and smoothed it down. ‘Then it is over.’

  ‘It’s never over until it’s over, Malachy.’

  Da put his forehead onto his palms, shaking his head. ‘Should we drive over? Would they let us see him? Would he even know we were there?’

  Mam sat down by Da’s side. ‘Fergus,’ she said, ‘make another pot of tea.’

  Fergus put the kettle on and got the teapot down. He put three spoonfuls in and poured hot water in with great concentration.

  ‘I’ve a proposal to make,’ Mam said when tea was on the table.

  Da looked up, raising his empty hands.

  ‘The prison chaplain called us together today,’ she said. ‘He’d spoken to everyone. Prison people. The doctors. Sinn Fein, even.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘They want the strike to end. Everyone.’

  ‘Sinn Fein? I don’t believe it,’ Da said.

  ‘The man’s a priest. He wouldn’t lie.’

  ‘Priests are the best bloody liars of the lot.’

  Fergus poured out three cups of tea. It was strong and black. He poured in the milk, with two spoons of sugar for himself and Da, none for Mam.

  ‘Fergus, put a spoon in for me,’ she said.

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘Never you mind.’

  Da took a sip, then snorted. ‘What does it matter what other people want or don’t want? Our Joe’s an inch from death. He’s in his final coma. It’s over.’

  Mam took her tea and stirred it again. She lifted the cup to her lips and drank. The motion was deliberate, as if the tea was a magic potion. ‘We are Joe’s family. We can say it’s not over. That’s what the prison chaplain brought us together today to say. We have the right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Fergus said.

  ‘We only have to say the word and Joey will be saved.’

  ‘Saved?’

  ‘He’ll have a drip put up. A drip to feed him.’

  For a fleeting moment Fergus thought of Lazarus, coming out of the tomb in his swathing bands. The thought made him shudder. Da pushed his teacup away.

  ‘Pat, that’s nonsense.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘Joe wouldn’t thank you.’

  ‘Maybe not. But I’m his mother.’

  ‘You are. But Joe’s life is his own.’ Da said the words slowly, as if to a five-year-old. ‘His own to take.’

  Mam’s face crumpled.

  ‘Pat, listen to me. We can’t play God.’

  Mam put the teacup down crooked, so that liquid slopped into the saucer.

  ‘It’s not playing God. And I don’t care if Joe wakes up and never talks to us again. At least he’d be alive. He’d be alive with his life before him. I could live with that. I could.’

  ‘Pat, I’m telling you, Joe’s life is his own. Not yours.’

  ‘If he’d taken an overdose–if he was on top of a building, about to jump–we’d save him, wouldn’t we?’

  Da shrugged. ‘You said yourself–or that chaplain of yours said so a few weeks back–what Joe’s doing isn’t suicide.’

  The anguished workings of Mam’s mind worked across her face. Fergus could see she’d been out-manoeuvred.

  ‘Da. Mam—’

  ‘What difference does it make if it’s suicide or something else?’

  ‘Every difference.’

  A terrible thing happened. Mam stood up and made as if to strike Da across the face. Da didn’t wince or move. He caught at her hand at the last second, trapping it in his. Fergus froze, terrified he was going to strike her back. But he didn’t. Instead he held Mam’s hand close to his face and stifled a sob. Then he stroked her fingers and gave her palm a kiss.

  ‘Pat, love, let it go. Just let it go.’

  She pulled her hand away. Grabbing a tea-towel, she pressed her face into it, sobbing.

  ‘I can’t. It’s Joey. How can I let go of him?’ Then, ‘Fergus? Haven’t you an argument for Da? Haven’t you?’

  They waited while she cried. At last they heard her breathing calmly. She folded the tea-towel over the bar on the cooker.

  ‘Sit down, Pat,’ Da coaxed.

  Mam sat down, her face ravaged.

  ‘Mam?’ Fergus whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If they did feed Joe, could they really save his life?’

  She folded her hands together. ‘That’s what the doctor says. But he said something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The longer we leave it, the more likely it is Joe will be…damaged.’

  ‘Damaged? What kind of damage?’

  ‘I don’t know. They don’t know.’

  ‘Physical? Mental?’

  Mam put her face in her hands. ‘He might be all right,’ she whispered. ‘God willing.’

  Da thumped the tabletop. ‘This is sickening,’ he said. ‘You’d interfere with everything Joe’s done, everything he’s done for his country, everything he’s tried to achieve by this amazing, courageous sacrifice. You’d interfere, just so he’d end up a cabbage?’

  Mam looked up, white. ‘It’s only a risk. And if we gave the go-ahead, here and now, the risk would be lower. Please, Malachy. We’ve only to pick up the phone. We’ve only to say the word.’

  And Joe will be saved, but not healed?

  ‘No,’ Da said. The word came out low and soft but had the finality of a commander’s order to his troops.

  ‘I say yes, Malachy. Doesn’t my word count as much as yours?’

  Da bit his lip and turned away. ‘If Joe was here, you know what he’d say, don’t you?’

  There was no denying it. Mam raised two protesting hands.

  ‘So that’s two to one.’

  Fergus swilled the last of his tea-leaves round in his cup. ‘Two to two,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m with Mam. Sorry, Da.’

  Da glared. ‘I cannot believe my ears.’ His face went purple. ‘You’re just a kid.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m eighteen. I voted, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you did. For Sands. And now look at you. Turncoat.’

  ‘Da, I’ve wanted to be a doctor for as long as I can remember. I’ve no choice but to vote for life. Please. My vote counts.’

  Da’s face was rigid. Fergus put his cup down. The sword had fallen from Joe’s grasp and his arm in the water was sinking until only the wrist, shorn of its watch, was visible. ‘Theresa and Cath, Da,’ he pleaded. ‘They’d want Joe back alive too. At
all costs.’

  ‘They’re too young to understand. Leave them out of it.’

  ‘What about Uncle Tally, Da? What would he say?’

  ‘Leave Uncle Tally out of it,’ Mam snapped. ‘He’s not immediate family.’

  Da thumped the table. ‘He is immediate family. And Uncle Tally would agree with me. You know it.’

  Fergus stared. ‘I’m not so sure, Da.’

  Da waved a dismissive hand. ‘He’d either agree with me or say nothing.’

  Say nothing? Yes. That was Uncle Tally. He never wanted to get involved. But in this case, doing nothing was the same as letting Joe die. Fergus pressed his fists into his eyes.

  ‘But anyway,’ Da was saying, ‘it’s not a voting matter.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Mam said. ‘It’s a matter of you, Malachy. Laying down the law.’ She got up, pushing the table away from her. ‘This house, it’s not a republic. It’s a bloody dictatorship.’ She seized the cups off the table and threw them into the sink. The hot tap gushed, teaspoons rattled. ‘I will never forgive you for this, Malachy. Not so long as I ever live. So help me God.’

  Forty-two

  Mam left the house soon after and drove off to see Joe. Da went to bed without a word. Fergus put away the tea things. Soon Theresa and Cath came in, worn out after a day at the seaside. He made them hot chocolates and they went off to bed without protest.

  The house grew quiet. He took a kitchen chair out into the garden and sat in the middle of the lawn, staring into the half-dark. Fergus, Mam kept whispering in his head. Can you think of some more arguments? A breeze stirred. Heavy flowers nodded on their stems. He could smell Drumleash and feel its slow, steady pulse. He looked up towards the silhouette of the mountain, imagining the huts Cora had drawn and the life it had once supported. A feeling of all time running concurrently came over him. Was it AD 1981 or AD 80? Could both times exist at once? Could the last kiss with Cora by the crab-apples be happening for ever, in a universe where every moment was eternally present?

  After the morning bell, Fergus, the door opened. And there was Rur.

  ‘Mel,’ he said. ‘Oh, Mel.’

  He remembered Cora’s drawing of the living Mel, her jauntiness, her bonnet half on, half off. Then her laughing face melded into Joe’s, as it had been the time they’d gone dipping in the lough. ‘Get in, Fergus.’ ‘I won’t.’ ‘It’ll freeze the bollocks off you, Fergus. It’s like being baptized.’

  ‘Fergus?’

  The voice came to him across the garden from the kitchen door. Cora? But the ‘r’ wasn’t right. He turned. It was Felicity, hovering in the kitchen light.

  ‘Can I join you?’

  He waved a hand as if to say, Feel free.

  She came out and stood at his side, staring up at the shadowy rise of the mountain and the fine dots of stars beyond. ‘It’s a fine evening.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And mild.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fergus?’

  She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘What?’

  ‘I know.’

  He stared up at her. ‘You know?’ About Joe? How could she know?

  She nodded. ‘About how you feel. For Cora.’

  ‘Oh. Cora.’ He sat forward clasping his hands, eyeing the ground. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  Felicity smiled. ‘Cora told me. This evening.’

  Fergus shifted on his chair. ‘Where is she? Is she all right?’

  ‘In bed. She’s a bit under the weather. Nothing serious. Tired.’

  Fergus nodded. ‘Tired.’

  ‘I’m not putting this very well. After the meeting closes tomorrow, Fergus, we’re straight back to Dublin. Then, on Friday, Cora’s flying off to America.’

  ‘America?’

  ‘Michigan. Her father lives there.’

  He remembered what Cora had told him. My dad lives in Michigan, with a new woman and kids. Good luck to him. I haven’t seen him in years. ‘For how long?’

  ‘I don’t know. As long as she chooses.’ Felicity walked over to a dahlia, lifting a drooping head. She bent to smell it.

  ‘They don’t have much fragrance,’ Fergus said.

  ‘No. So they don’t.’ Felicity let the head drop back. ‘For years, Cora’s struggled with what happened between her father and me. After he left, she refused to discuss him. And she got faddish.’

  ‘Faddish?’

  ‘About school. Eating. Everything. She got wild, angry. Sometimes she’d take it out on me, but most times on herself.’ Felicity’s face looked pale and strained. ‘I had to get her seen by doctors, Fergus. Doctors and psychologists.’

  Fergus peered at Felicity’s face through the darkness. ‘I’d no idea.’

  ‘She’s been a tearaway. Boyfriends, late nights, diets.’

  Fergus dug his fingers into his knees. ‘I see.’

  ‘She’s getting better, Fergus. Maybe it’s partly down to you. She’s definitely calmed down since we started coming here.’

  ‘Really?’ He twisted his sweatshirt around his fingers.

  ‘Yes. She likes you. I can tell.’

  ‘Then why does she have to go away?’

  Felicity sighed. ‘It’s her anger with Kevin, her father. Kevin and myself, we’ve persuaded her to take a year out. She’d given up on her studies anyway. So she’s off out to Michigan to see her dad. And maybe that will help.’

  ‘Is it what she wants?’

  Felicity didn’t answer. Instead she sat down on the grass beside him, cross-legged, plucking at the grass.

  ‘It isn’t what she wants, is it?’

  ‘It’s what she needs. Trust me. I’m her mother. I only want what’s right for her. This trip will do her good. Kevin and me, we weren’t right for each other. But he’s not the demon she makes out.’

  ‘And I’m not right for her?’

  ‘You may be. Who knows? But you’re not the only lad who’s fallen for her. And her boyfriends never last long. Like I said, she has fads.’ Felicity shrugged. ‘I’d rather she met a good person like you and settled into something real. But she thrives, Cora does, on change.’

  Kissus continuus. Perhaps he’d always had a suspicion that whatever it was she felt for him was different from what he felt for her. He saw her eyes, always mocking and laughing, as if everything that had happened was a jaunty spin of a Ferris wheel.

  ‘Life is like that,’ Felicity said. ‘Meetings. Partings.’ She rested her chin on her knees. ‘For me, there was someone before Kevin. We were drawn to each other. But he was young and shy. Nothing happened. Sometimes, today, I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I’d taken things into my own hands.’

  Fergus watched Felicity brushing away the invisible visions of what might have been. They sat together in the dark, saying nothing. Time went backwards. The door that Rur opened, closed again. Mel was in her dark hut, waiting. In Long Kesh, Mam sat at Joe’s bedside, waiting. Cora turned in her sleep, pushing the covers from her.

  ‘Fergus?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you find time passes and you can’t forget Cora, then remember one thing, won’t you? It’s what my father told me years ago and I’ve never forgotten.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said that we suffer more from the sins of omission than the sins of commission.’ Felicity shuffled to her feet.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I suppose that often more harm is done by what we fail to do than by what we do.’

  Fergus felt her hand again on his shoulder. ‘And what you said today about Pompeii, Fergus, was amazing.’

  She left him then, and went indoors. Soon the light from the twin room was out. The garden plunged into deeper darkness. A large swath of cloud shifted eastward, covering the moon. A planet flickered in the lower sky, bright and hard, like a jewel.

  Forty-three

  The door opened, Fergus. It did. And Rur came in and said, ‘Mel, I’ve brought you some food.’

  Fergus got up f
rom the chair in the garden and went inside the silent house. He padded down the bungalow hall to his parents’ room. He knocked softly and called, ‘Da?’

  ‘What is it?’ came Da’s voice, anxious.

  Fergus went in, closing the door behind him. ‘Da, can we talk?’

  ‘What do you want?’ Da switched on the bedside lamp. His eyes were red. It was obvious he’d been weeping.

  ‘Da, it’s a known fact.’ He sat down on Mam’s side of the bed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We do more harm by the sins of omission than by the sins of commission.’ Fergus shut his eyes tight, forcing back his own tears. He grabbed the edge of the bedside table, then picked up the telephone extension’s receiver. The dial tone hummed. Anxiety waited at the other end.

  ‘God. Son. What’s all this baloney?’ But Da had his arms cradled around him.

  ‘It may be a sin to intervene with Joe, Da. But it’s a worse sin if we don’t.’ He swallowed, his heart thumping. ‘If we do nothing, there’ll be no forgiveness. Never. The future will go wrong. Everything will go wrong. I know it, Da. Believe me.’

  He didn’t need to say the rest. Mam will leave you. Theresa and Cath will grow up wrong. I’ll go wrong. Joe will be the lucky one, oblivious, his body breaking up underground, mindlessly. And the British will still own the North. The bombs will still go off. For years to come, the misery of it. The mourning and the weeping. The vale of tears.

  ‘Jesus. Is there no peace left, anywhere?’ Da raved. He grabbed the phone from Fergus. ‘God forgive me. What else can a man do with a family like mine?’ He dialled the series of numbers Mam had printed in large figures on the notepad by the phone. ‘Hello,’ Da bellowed when someone replied. ‘Is that the doctor treating my son? My son, Joe McCann?’

  Only say the word, Fergus. The one redeeming word.

  Forty-four

  Rur stood before me in the hut. In his hand was a bowl of steaming porridge.

  ‘Eat this, Mel.’

  He placed the bowl in my bound hands. I felt the warmth seep into my skin, my nerves, my bloodstream. I shut my eyes to stop the tears of relief that Rur had come. The coldness of death retreated with the warmth of the gruel.

  ‘Thank you, Rur,’ I said. He spooned the food into my mouth and I swallowed.

  ‘Mel?’ he said, on the last spoonful.