How many days had passed like this? Three? Four? Through the floorboards, he could sometimes hear his ex-wife Shelley’s muffled directives to their daughters. Often he woke to the sound of the nurse stirring sugar at the bottom of her coffee mug, or to the bass line of his neighbours’ music reverberating through the party wall. More rarely, he heard the tight, compressed breathing of Eoin, his brother, as he turned the pages of the Independent beside his bed. At night, he listened to his lover, Abby, turn in her broken sleep on a rug on the floor across the room. Other sounds were initially harder to identify: the slow shuffle of his elder daughter’s grief on the stairs; the angry jingling of his younger daughter’s bracelets as she moved in and out of his room. Twice an hour, unmistakeably, the trains hurtled past the nearby crossing, as loud as avenging angels at the dead end of his street. He was fifty-two.
He had expected a heart attack. His doctor had explained that tumours need blood; that, in time, there wouldn’t be blood enough for him and them both. He had imagined himself reading at his desk as the ghostly boot-blow was dealt to his chest, and Abby or one of the girls finding him, upright, in his black jeans and green pullover, resigned, gone, but okay. He hadn’t expected to wake, without actually waking, to cold, soaked sheets below him; to the sensation of a catheter being threaded through him. He wouldn’t have believed that he, he who’d always been so able to turn a phrase, would some day communicate his thoughts in a code of stuttering eyebrows and eyelids.
More than anything, he would never have dreamed that his body was capable of such stillness.
Now, the brightness of the room seeped through his eyelids. Flies were buzzing against the skylight’s pane when he felt Abby’s hands on his feet, rubbing the soles.
Downstairs, Katie – or was it Sonia? – thumped across the floor to answer the phone. Beside his bed, a newspaper rattled. His brother had entered the room. Abby said, ‘I’ll just go for a Nescafé, Liam. I won’t be long. Eoin’s here with you now.’ Then, as if taking her cue, Eoin’s hand, cold with nerves, found his beneath the sheet, and Liam felt again the vibrations of his life.
He’d last held his brother’s hand in 1957 as they queued to see Calamity Jane at the Imperial Cinema. Calamity had arrived in Belfast in ’54, but she didn’t make it to Newry until three years later. Liam was six years old; Eoin, ten, and already grave; grave for their father’s sake, who didn’t want his sons picking up the habits to which, he feared, they were, by birth, predisposed. Drink. Wildness. Music. Fast talk. Shallow charm. Hadn’t his own brothers been prone to the worst excesses? Wasn’t the border only a stone’s throw? Weren’t his own people, the native Irish, prone to trouble?
Yes. There they are, he and his brother. In the queue for the Saturday morning show, Liam begs his brother for an ice cream soda but Eoin only frowns, shakes his head and squeezes the half crown in his thin, hot hand.
Soon enough, Liam forgets all about Eoin’s locked fist. He forgets about ice cream sodas. All he wants now is to be Wild Bill Hickok throwing Calamity Jane on to the horse-drawn cart and yee-hawing her out of Deadwood. He wants to be a squawling Indian brave, running in her wake. At the very end, when Calamity Jane swaps her buckskin and boots for a wedding dress, he wants to be the gun hidden in the bustle next to her backside.
Calamity Jane is Liam’s first love, and all the way home, he swings on Eoin’s arm, begging him to turn back for the afternoon show. ‘Just once more, Eoin. Please, Eoin. Come on. Let’s just see that fil-im again. It was something, wasn’t it? Didn’t you think it was something? They won’t even be home till suppertime. There’s money enough. Let’s just, why don’t we, we’ve still time, and you could have my next week’s allowance and my Atlas bodybuilder’s book. Come on, Eoin. Eoin? Please, Eoin. Come on, please now, be a legend.’ He swings madly on Eoin’s arm.
Older now and bigger. At the strange cemetery a wind is blowing. The trees are bending and scraping like a rich man’s servants; the pansies are flouncing, and Liam’s running into the wind, his legs like pistons, his cheeks flattened and red.
His mam and his Great-uncle Gaston have slowed on the uphill walk. ‘Attends! Attends!’ his mother calls, a ribbon of a voice in the wind. It is the first time she has spoken to Liam in her native French. He doesn’t like it.
He runs past flower pots with rotting stems; past sad-faced stone ladies with their gowns sliding off their titties; past funny street signs at the junctions of the paths, as if this is actually a town of the dead; past graves that aren’t graves but fancy stone houses with only one room because, he supposes, the needs of the dead are few. (Why are cemeteries surrounded by fences? Because everyone’s dying to get in. Ba-dum! Tommy Murphy told him that one.)
He decides it is better to die in Ireland than in Paris because in Ireland the outdoors looks like the outdoors and gravestones are mossy and chipped, and the letters wear down with the wind and the rain so everyone gets forgotten in time, and life flies on.
But he won’t tell his mother’s uncle as much because Great-uncle Gaston is soon for the grave himself; he’s the last of a generation, his mam explained, and that’s why she’s come and brought Liam for company, because he will make her old uncle laugh. It doesn’t need to be said: neither Eoin nor their da would ever be able to make an old French uncle laugh. ‘Oncle Gaston is big in his ’eart,’ she says. ‘’E made me laugh when I was a little girl. This is where you get it.’ It seems odd to Liam. An old uncle who likes to laugh who has worked all these years as a cemetery keeper.
When they are at home in Newry, Liam never thinks of his mam as French. In Newry, she’s just ‘foreign’, and for Liam she’s just his mam with her sing-song voice and her full lips that push out more than everyone else’s when she speaks. He knows Jimmy Quinn from school fancies her when he serves her at the butcher’s on Saturdays, and Liam could flatten him for it.
She arrived by accident in 1946 when the bus she was travelling on with her elderly boss, a respected French chocolatier, broke down in Newry. They were on their way from Dublin to Belfast where she was meant to take notes on chocolate distribution at J. Lyons and Co. When his da spotted her, smoking elegantly under the bus shelter on Canal Street, he drew breath at the sight of her legs crossed at the ankles and the red silk scarf tied at her neck. He was twenty-three and already bored by Irish girls and their eagerness to marry. When he heard her speak – to ask about lodgings for the night – he was beside himself with emotion for the first and last time in his life.
Liam knows the story. His father let it slip last year on St Stephen’s Day after his annual glass of port. But the truth of the matter occurs to Liam only now as he runs towards the cemetery’s far side: that he, Liam O’Donnell, came into the world because of a bus’s broken water-pump. It makes him laugh so hard he has to gasp for air as he runs. Wait till he tells Eoin that he’s also on this earth because of a broken water-pump. Eoin won’t like it. Not one bit.
He’s grinning at the thought when he comes up short at the sight of the angel.
It’s not a pretty angel this time with soulful eyes and a slippery dress. No. It’s a big fucker with broad square wings rising from its back. And the face is ungodly, as Father Hurley might say. In fact, the angel looks too disdainful to bother with the likes of either Father Hurley or Liam. It looks in a mood, like Mr O’Flaherty the history master when he turns away from the boys, disgusted by their ignorance.
But the wings mesmerise Liam. They’re powerful things that rise above his head, with long feathers carved into the stone, feathers that are longer even than those on an Indian brave’s headdress.
He steps closer and, bending, peers at the naked angel’s undercarriage, as a farmer might a bull’s, because the angel isn’t upright like a man. It has flanks, not a torso, and – he has to look twice – a broken stump of a penis without balls. Another faulty water-pump.
He turns at the sound of voices. His mother and her uncle have caught him up at last. Liam backs away from the stumpy remains,
not knowing where to put his offending hand, but Uncle Gaston booms with laughter and crooks an arthritic finger. ‘Viens,’ he rumbles.
They return to the keeper’s house, a house which Liam is relieved to discover has three good-sized rooms, not the single room the dead seem to favour in Paris. It is good to know that Great-uncle Gaston is indeed alive, even though his skin is almost see-through.
After all the sunshine outside, Liam has to blink himself back into the world. When he does, he finds his great-uncle pointing to a dusty metal desktop beneath the single window. And there they are, on top of a pile of papers. Oscar Wilde’s angel’s bits.
His uncle lifts the fragment of stone from the desk and lowers it into Liam’s hand, wheezing with laughter.
‘Heavy,’ Liam says.
‘Mais oui!’ the old man declares.
Years later Liam will read about it: the public outrage at the monument, the tarpaulin, then the infamous blow of the hammer. But unknown to the official histories, the following morning the dutiful keeper collected the fallen fragment, wrapped it in a piece of chamois leather and returned to the keeper’s house where he deposited it, sheepishly, upon his desk.
There it would remain. At the end of his tenure, he would bequeath the bollocks to the next keeper, who would in turn bequeath them to the next and so on, up and down the decades, until the day the commune took over from the arrondissement and deemed there would be no more permanent keepers. Uncle Gaston in his blue serge uniform was the last of a line, and in more ways than one. He and his wife had never had children.
The Newry postman could have had no idea of the contraband he delivered. The beloved bollocks arrived one summer’s morning in a bundle of newspaper and a box marked ‘M Liam O’Donnell’.
Liam’s father and brother frowned at the sight but his mother reached up, put her arms around her son who was a head taller than she was and whispered in his ear that he should be proud. This was Art. History. Tradition. The sculptor wanted to show life, didn’t he?
Just months later, on a November’s day that never grew light, Liam would return home after school, late from dawdling in the record shop with Patrick Dunn, to find his mother dead. He can still feel the strange sensation of his legs giving way; can see her, pale against the feather bolster with the eiderdown riding up over her yellow-soled feet; can see his father at the mean window, upright in his dark tie and jacket, his face pinched.
‘Another stroke,’ Dr Kearney murmured. He bowed his big boiled-egg of a head. ‘I’m very sorry.’ He had a soft voice for so big a man. ‘She was a wonderful woman, and too young.’
Liam’s father nodded, bitterness seeping from him. ‘I used to tell her . . . I used to tell her she needed to quit the gaspers, didn’t I, Liam? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I used to tell her.’ He looked warily across the room to his younger son. ‘Now don’t be chivvying me with that black face of yours, not while your brother is already on his way to the rectory, making himself useful.’
Years away from Newry, in his attic room, on his own deathbed – a bed that obliges the visiting nurses to bend lower than their union permits – Liam hears once more his uncle’s rumbling, laughing voice somewhere in the space between the bed and the eaves. As Abby lays her hand, cool and light, on his forehead, he hears his mother call again, ‘Attends! Attends!’
Because he’s climbing into the van with the others. He should have scarpered when he had the chance, but it’s too late now, and he’s trembling like a fly on flypaper because the one in the black balaclava has already shown them the handgun beneath his donkey jacket. Liam has no idea where they’re going. There are no windows in the van. All he can see is Neil in the seat across from him, worrying a stick of gum in its silver foil like it’s a flaming rosary, and he has to shout over the roar of the engine, ‘Neil, will you sit quiet, for Christ’s sake!’ But the one in the green ski mask stands up and punches him in the eye for speaking, and he’s sure it’s Jimmy Quinn who used to fancy his mam.
When they tumble out, there are only trees, tyre tracks and a few empty food tins by a fire pit. Their captors line them up against the van, heads down, hands where they can see them, legs spread – Seamus O’Shea, Tommy Murphy, Patrick Dunn, Neil Flynn and himself – in other words, all the Newry boys who are aiming for university – and Liam wants anything but this. This waiting. This limbo of dread.
All because Pat Dunn mouthed off in the pub last week over in Warrenpoint. He dubbed the Provos – Jimmy Quinn’s gang – the goddamned mafia of Newry and now, now hours pass with the lot of them spread-eagled against the van, and the warning still ringing in their ears: ‘The first one of yous that turns round is the first one to get it.’
Liam’s hands are splayed against the dirty side, and he doesn’t dare turn his face to catch the eye of Tommy who’s beside him. He doesn’t dare do anything but train his ears on the darkness, listening for any sign. He hasn’t heard so much as a twig crack since before nightfall. Maybe his father was right about the Irish and trouble – because that’s what they’re calling it on the telly every night – The Troubles – and he’s never been in such trouble in all his eighteen years.
By dawn, Seamus O’Shea is so sick and crazy with sleeplessness that he forgets not to look over his shoulder when the wood pigeons wake and flap in the trees. And, ‘Thank Christ,’ he says. ‘They’ve fucked off. It was a goddamn wind-up.’ But no one’s laughing. Neil is throwing up into some bushes. Tommy is crying because he shat himself. Seamus and Pat start to row about Pat shooting off his mouth in that pub. Liam lies down on the ground and stares, with the eye that isn’t swollen shut, at a sky he thought he’d never see again. There’s a sliver of a moon so sharp you could cut your wrists on it.
A warning. Get out of town.
So he’s on the ferry chucking up over the side and dodging Father Hurley who’s going to visit his sister in Kilburn; he’s old now but Liam can’t forget how he used to try to get him to talk dirty in the confessional, so he lets Father Hurley smell the stink of vomit on his coat and he doesn’t see him again.
Then it’s ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ in every lodging-house window, and he’s busking at Piccadilly, singing because that’s what the English think the Irish should do at street corners, and he’s got no address for Eoin who’s God-knows-where in London, so things go from bad to worse till he starts pushing dope, which is how he meets Shelley. It’s not love at first sight there in the subway below Piccadilly but he doesn’t want romance – he just wants shelter, shelter – and Shelley is his harbour, all safe and mothering, and earning a wage too in an office somewhere. They’re okay – she’s not Calamity Jane and he’s not Wild Bill – but it’s okay, he makes her laugh and they marry because Shelley can’t get into the Civil Service if they don’t. The new flat isn’t much and he can’t afford to finish his A levels, but pushing is still better than busking, and soon enough he gets a real job, putting up sheds in the big gardens of rich Londoners so, for a while at least, at last, he and Shelley rest easy.
Only the carpet is sour, why does the carpet smell sour, did he knock over his beer? But he can’t stop to think because they’re on the floor, Shelley all soft and warm beneath him, and they’re making a baby – ‘Get drunk for a girl,’ they used to say in Newry – but for all his humping, he can’t come and Shelley says she’s getting sore with him going at it. It’s been nearly half an hour, and can’t they turn the telly off? It’s nearly over, he says, trying hard not to laugh at Frank and Betty Spencer who are in a hotel room for their second honeymoon. When Frank lowers Betty on to the bed, the bed collapses and Betty’s shapely bottom bobs up, which is when Liam gives way at last, the tendons in his legs trembling like slingshots. Shelley lifts her legs into the air and stays like that, staring at the ceiling, all dreamy like, while Liam watches the end of the show. Then nine months later, Katie is born, and Liam falls in love all over again as he and Shelley fall out of love, if love – married love – it ever was.
By the
time they decide that Katie needs a brother or a sister, Liam has been sleeping on the settee for nearly two years. At least he gets the work for his A levels done – better late than never – and after that, his degree. It’s amazing how two people can share a home by stepping around one another. It’s also uncanny how other women seem to know when you’re not sleeping with your wife and put temptation in your way. Liam can only be grateful. And there’s the garden centre van too, his home away from home, with his Hamlet exam quotations Sellotaped to the dashboard. But when Shelley tells him the calendar says go, all systems alert, he smiles cooperatively, and slips into his old room and in and out of her again, so that by the time he returns to the settee – his sperm more fervent than he – Sonia, his beautiful girl, is conceived.
Outside his attic room, the trains at the level crossing are getting louder and louder. Twice an hour they tear past, as if, at any moment, they’ll explode into the room and bear him away. The four walls shudder, and he wonders blearily if death is as lonely a thing as those days long ago, after the split, when he ached for his baby girls. He worries for a moment about how the undertaker will get his body down from the attic – the staircase is narrow, steep and bending – it’s a black comedy in the making – and he’d be the first to laugh if he weren’t in a goddamn coma – ha-ha – and there weren’t already tears slipping down his cheek. Ba-dum! ‘Liam,’ Abby lulls, ‘sssh now. Ssh, sweetheart. I’m here. You’re not alone.’ He doesn’t know whether to blink once for Yes, as in Yes, I hear you, I understand – or for, Yes, I am alone, I’m alone in here and frightened.
Abby. It’s the college picnic and already he loves her but she’s married and it isn’t right, it isn’t right, he knows full well, but it’s midsummer and the grass in the clearing is long. It waves him on as he pulls off his shoes and socks, and runs madly forward into the handspring, his arms, back and legs moving into line . . . Then he lifts his left leg, extends his knee, plants his hands as far as he dares from his final step and kicks his right leg up, his body a perfect vertical, his abs tight as the blood rushes to his head. He pushes his arms back, arches his ribs, then springs forward to land, miraculously, on the balls of his feet.
all the beloved ghosts Page 7
