in this kitchen
elaborating and embellishing this fantasy for some time instead of taking responsibility for what was happening around me because in truth what really tormented me was that all this filth and disorder offended my engineer’s sense of structure, everything out of place and proper alignment, everything gathering towards some point of chaos beyond which it would be impossible to restore the place to its proper order and yet I stood looking at it, locked into a silent battle with the house itself and all the things which were slowly vacating their proper place, furniture and dishes and cutlery all over the place, curtains hanging awry and chairs and tables strewn about while books and papers slid across the floor, everything slowly shifting through the house as if they had a meeting to keep somewhere else, possibly in some higher realm where all this chaos would resolve into a refined harmony which had no need of my hand or intervention so
I stood back and let the place run to wrack and ruin around me for another two weeks before
Mairead eventually brought the stand-off to an end the day I turned from the sink to find her standing in the middle of the floor, twitchy and etiolated, like one of those apparitions who materialise at times of crisis, standing there with her bags beside her on the floor as if the past nine weeks had never happened and we were now at that juncture in our lives where we had to find those options which would enable us to fix whatever it was that led us to this point where we now stood eyeing each other across the kitchen floor with an abyss between us, fully recognising that our next words would define how we would manage the rest of our days together and as we stood there it became obvious that, with the autumn light closing in around us, we were now becalmed in a marriage which had lost direction but which we could not turn our backs on as the child she was carrying now complicated the situation with something more serious – these were the thoughts running through me as I stepped towards her with my right hand raised, swearing
never again, as God is my judge and
those weeks of separation had given Mairead a resolve which she did not have to put words to so that
her silence said everything she had to say and
eighteen months later, when our family was rounded out by Darragh’s arrival we drew on the strength of the oath sworn over her belly that day and even if I could not explain its exact terms or conditions, which remained vague but stringent, it served to draw the focus of our lives away from ourselves and towards our children, so that even if it was not the ideal way to begin family life together, it is safe to say that a lot of good marriages have been built on a lot less as we settled into a love of each other for the sake of our two kids, securing them within the embrace of a loving family life, adamant they would not want for anything and that if, in any way, they sensed the desperation which sometimes swelled up between Mairead and myself they would have experienced it as nothing but a kind of distant grating on the margins of their lives, hardly anything at all, just the slightest dissonance, nothing to worry themselves about or keep them awake at night, listening in the dark to our strangled voices and stifled recriminations, so that in this way
they may have suffered our love for them as a desperate load, especially Agnes, an attentive child who was acutely sensitive to the slightest vibe between her parents and who, when very young, quickly developed a protective aura of airy distance around her which sometimes baffled and hurt both myself and Mairead at the time, but which we also suspected she used as a ploy to find her way out from under that love she was so relentlessly subject to, bearing down upon her so heavily, and beneath which she might have found herself so full of childish anxiety that, young and all as she was, she could not settle in the world and was wholly intolerant of its shortcomings, things never perfect, always needing correction or amendment of some sort or another – the sleeves of her coat too long, her food too hot or too cold or too lumpy – forever working herself up into a ball of frustration whenever she found herself unable to accommodate that smidgen of mess or chaos which is necessary to keep the world turning and human so that sometimes, as a toddler, she was overtaken with one of those pale, blue-lipped rages which threatened to strangle her and which she took off to her room where she would smoulder and grind face-down in her pillow, those tantrums before she perfected the fits of breath holding which she would draw down with her eyes closed and her throat locked, all raging concentration as her face turned puce and then blue before she would faint to the floor in a crumpled heap, Mairead in panicked sobs over her prone body, certain those first few times that she had lost her and slow to believe the GP who assured her that you cannot hold your breath unto death and that it was nothing, it was something which she would grow out of, which she did, a couple of years passing after which she eventually came through a thorny growth phase that was
very different to Darragh’s way in the world which, as a child, was to give us as wide a berth as possible, as if he had come into the world with a clear sense of how things stood between Mairead and myself and had decided from the beginning that he wanted to go his own way and have very little to do with us so that if he ever felt our genuine love he did nothing to acknowledge it, laying it aside as gently as he could, as if it had never been offered, becoming another distant child, eternally preoccupied with various building projects spread throughout the house, constructs which seemed carefully conceived to involve no one but himself, the boy-builder who even at that young age had an independence of spirit about him that was easy to admire, something stubborn in his childish insistence on going his own way, labouring with bricks and construction kits in shadowed corners of the house where he raised so many besieged castles and cities and forts, harassed settlements and stockades, small parables of beleaguerment everywhere we turned, room after room, the whole house expanding to some fragmented vision of adversity which seemed to consume his whole childhood, making him an overly solemn kid for such long periods that we were resigned to seeing him being eternally preoccupied and slightly old before his time, that was till sometime in his early teens when he confused us further by rousing himself and coming towards us with open arms, a ready smile and a smart-assed turn of phrase like someone who had been gone on a long journey but who was now greeting us on his return with a relaxed willingness to participate in family life, becoming suddenly the more sociable of our two children since Agnes had by now almost withdrawn herself completely
to her bedroom which she had turned into an artist’s studio of sorts, the whole place cluttered with jars and brushes and rolls of paper along the work bench I had installed for her against one wall, this room in which Mairead worried she might poison herself with all its vapours of oils and turpentine, a dizzying haze swelling through the house whenever her bedroom door opened but which Agnes assured us had no effect whatsoever on her, and which she often eulogised in poetic terms whenever we voiced our concern about it, telling us not to worry, the windows were open, the room was well aired and besides, paint was now her element and if she drifted away on a cloud of its vapours then that was fine by her, she would be one with her medium and that would be the fulfilment of her deepest wish, one of those speeches that Darragh would later refer to as
the ecstasy of Agnes
Agnes the Unhinged
those several names he called her in that way of prodding and poking which became their way of relating to each other during their teen years when Agnes took up the studied role of the scholar-artist while Darragh set aside his sharper mind to caper around and tease her, not exactly trying to highjack her efforts but driven daft in himself by his own abilities which were real and glittering but were cut through with a fatal measure of laziness which to this day has short-circuited so many of those projects he has started – the PhD he registered for but which, to the best of my knowledge, he never wrote a line of, or the year he intended working in Africa with some NGO, digging aquifers on the edge of the Sahara, two full months going around getting vetted by the guards, medical clearances, jabs and shots, getting v
isas sorted out, papers and application forms piling up around him and then
nothing
not a thing
the whole project evaporating into thin air and all the forms and documents on the desk drowning in a rising swell of more paper, this time his notes on the 1981 Republican hunger strike as a strategy video game, an idea he was going to pitch to one of those game development companies that had set up in Galway with the hope of tapping into a steady stream of IT graduates, all his nights spent poring over accounts of the hunger strike till he had amassed a broad and detailed comprehension of the background material and the complex political context in which the strike occurred with all its ebbs and flows, all its moves and countermoves till, for whatever reason, this idea too just seemed to fade away into oblivion as
he gradually stopped talking about it and did not care to be questioned or reminded about it so we just marked it down as another of his enterprises which had come to nothing, neither Mairead nor myself really surprised now – worried yes, but not surprised – because this seemed to be that time in his life when he could suck the life out of any project no matter how promising it appeared, all Darragh had to do was lay his hand on it and somehow it wilted and died, the good gone from it before it was ever fully conceived, things half started before being fully abandoned, aborted projects building up all around him, his life a breakers yard of such things, till the day
he pulled the round-the-world ticket out of his jacket and stood here on this kitchen floor gazing at it as if it had materialised from on high with no effort on his part whatsoever, a ticket with an itinerary which would circumnavigate the globe by way of Thailand, Sydney, Perth, Hawaii, Boston and back home to Dublin, this permit that would take him to the ends of the earth where he would spend a season wandering in the wilderness trying to find whatever it was he had lost, but with Mairead looking at him from where I’m sitting now, in two minds about the whole thing, glad to see him doing something, anything, but sorry that this something was taking him away from her, putting the whole world between him and
do you have money for this trip – the question blurted from me before I realised
yes, I do
how
I’ve been working
what sort of work
making medical components
he looked up from the ticket in his hand, the bemused expression still on his face
medical components, I thought you were studying
I am – I was – it’s complicated
I’ll bet, so what were you doing with these medical components
this company – AbMed – they needed extra hands to fulfil an emergency contract for the American army, the coalition forces in Iraq
there was an emergency so they sent for you
yes Dad, others recognise my worth even if my family do not, anyway, I spent three months sweeping stents and catheters with UV light for flaws, I got well paid for it, that’s where the money came from and
did you know about this, I said to Mairead
I think it’s great, she waved the question aside, he has a ticket to the world and his own money and
Christ
I weary of my son sometimes
even from the other side of the world he has this psychic ability to reach across latitudes and time zones and lay his twitchy hand on my heart and squeeze it which sets me to worrying about him all over again, the thought of him enough to dampen any mood and
a change in the light now
all radiance washed from it as if it is worn out, residual of light which has passed on to elsewhere and
how strange this day is
something about it which, sitting here and looking out on the back garden, gives the impression that it has already turned through the best part of itself, nothing left that is not pallid or faded beneath a sun too bright for this time of year, stalled over the world at too high a declension, bleaching the proper tones from everything while
sitting here at this table
waiting for my wife and kids to return to this kitchen with this anxious feeling that everything around me has settled into places and patterns unknown to me, things no different or mysterious in themselves but everything off a degree or two, this slight imprecision all around me as if things have shifted out of position just enough to make my hand hover over them for an instant before picking them up or moving them back to where they should be, some things wholly out of place, like this tablecloth in front of me, a white tablecloth which, if memory serves, is normally never used except at Christmas but which now, on the second of November, is spread out before me like a snow field with all the vast extension of a tundra, white and unblemished and rolling onto its own frozen horizons, my hands outspread over it as if I were extending some sort of blessing upon it from on high, or trying to steady it against some instability in the table beneath or the house itself, panicked by the idea that
everything in this room might suddenly rise up through the ceiling to some proper place in the sky above, chairs and tables and cupboards and worktops, everything rising up into the air, while drawing with them all those connections which have now made me so hyper-aware and awash with a giddy fit of enraged irrationality, sitting here, grinding with frustration, something peevish in me upset at having my expectations confused by this tablecloth or the chair at the other end of the table for Christ’s sake, standing with its back to the wall when normally it should be pushed into the table, that type of thing twisting me up into such sudden rage that makes me want to rise from the table
seeing myself rise
and take it by the two legs to smash it against the wall, the desire so strong I can feel its collapsing impact, the give in its legs and frame as it disintegrates, the shock of it through my arms as it splinters apart with every nerve and sinew of my body on edge, this anxiety cutting through me like referred pain or interference, the source of which is elsewhere, possibly outside myself at arm’s length but still close enough to be inside my circumference, something which will not allow me to rest in the here-and-now on
this day
this fucking day
that has done nothing but drive me deeper into a grating dread which seems so determined to conceal its proper cause and which is all the more worrying since there is no doubt whatsoever of its reality or that it is underwritten in some imminent catastrophe
for me
or upon me
or through me
this fear which is
the whole mood of my vigil at this table for however long it’s been since the Angelus bell struck so that even
while sitting here with my milk and sandwich, gusted to the core of my bones with the conviction that my wife and children will never come this way again, never return, this dread singing through me from the headlines of the foreign news page of the newspaper – all news feels foreign today – telling me that an outbreak of cholera in West Africa has endangered thousands of lives and threatens to cover a large section of the western part of the sub-Saharan continent, reaching into Chad and Cameroon, while somewhere in South Korea an outbreak of avian flu has crossed the species barrier, diagnosed in a twenty-two-year-old medical student who is currently in quarantine, God’s creatures bound together in a common suffering, our aches and pains one and the same as those of the duck and the turkey and the chicken and
stop
mother of Jesus stop
this is how the mind unravels in nonsense and rubbish
if given its head
the mind in repose, unspooling to infinity, slackening to these ridiculous musings which are too easily passed off as thought, these glib associations, mental echoes which reverb with our anxiety to stay wake and wise to the world or at least attentive to as much of its circumstances as we can grasp while
come to think of it
thinking of it now
now being thought
it must have been this same sort of unspooling coupled with the same fatal aptness for fant
asy that consumed my father and unravelled his mind in that last year of his life, especially during those last months when he lost his grip on the world completely and withdrew to the old house where there was only himself and the dog to keep each other company in those days after Onnie’s death, the long winter nights when the full weight of her absence must have come upon him with so much fear and loneliness that his grief was eclipsed completely in disbelief at the fact that his wife of over forty years could ever leave him for any reason whatsoever – death included – leave him all alone now, a fate he had never envisioned nor prepared himself for so that when it did come the raw shock of it scrambled his sense of the world so thoroughly it was as if something essential to the proper balance of the universe itself had been casually set aside and replaced with some new but shoddier circumstance which so keenly insulted something delicate within him that
in no time at all his strength and resolve was undone, he slackened and lost interest in the world before withdrawing completely to the house with the dog where, in the half-light of those narrow rooms, behind drawn curtains, his confusion and grief deepened to that fatal awkwardness with which there is no talking to so that very suddenly he grew angry and rancorous and fell out with myself and Eithne, took against us with such sudden vehemence in those weeks after Onnie’s funeral that we had no time to fathom its proper cause but were nevertheless left in no doubt by his rage that some shameful blame had accrued to both of us for some reason or other because when we went to see him he dismissed us from behind the closed front door, telling us to leave and not come back and calling us a
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