Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  There is a hug that happens after all the hugs, which is more valuable than gold. It is the extra hug. It is the hug that happens when someone is leaving, when the goodbyes have been said, and the fussing over luggage has been done twice over, and when the tears have been avoided and the manly coherent hugs have all been delivered and the emigrant is about to step away and become a ghost for ever. And then something is remembered. The keys. A passport. Or a cardigan. And at that last moment, the one who is about to leave turns again and says, ‘I forgot something,’ and suddenly there is time for one last, enormous hug; that extra hug that a child can carry with them across the mountains and over the ocean.

  It’s what I longed for from my mother. But which she could not offer. She burned with love for her children, but she failed us. And the pity is that I failed her too. I could have hugged her. I could have made myself a father to her child and made her warm and safe in her old age but in that I failed terribly. So we circled one another. And like the oyster in pain who wraps time around the sand and grows a pearl, so she weaved her widowhood in solitude around small regrets until she had become aloof and dignified in her sorrow.

  The morning after I heard Little Lotus speak of her mother’s hug, I walked into town, past lawns that in summer time had been drenched with flowering hydrangea, fuchsia, variegated ivies and big juicy red rose bushes. Now they were all dead. Bare branches and wrinkled rosehips stood in the winter fog. The laurel and the box hedges had been clipped back to smooth and severe lines. Clearly the middle classes had not been idle during the autumn. The cut lawns of Farnham Road glistened in a film of dew and the air was crisp.

  In Dunnes Stores, I went around the familiar aisles and filled my shopping basket with all her favourite groceries, which I knew by heart. I bought a packet of Barry’s tea, and six Activia yoghurts, and two slices of Brady’s ham, and a half-loaf of bread. I bought cheese slices and half a dozen sausages. And for myself, I bought a Danish pastry and a bar of soap and three bottles of bath salts and oils, and at the checkout there was yet one more old lady ahead of me in the queue, counting her change. She had a wine-red beret on her white head, and was suspicious that the checkout girl might have cheated her. Everyone waited patiently. There was no telling how great were the things she had lost in a lifetime, or what was in her heart, but she got no satisfaction from the checkout girl before she walked away muttering something about life not being fair.

  I walked home again, past the bus and the train stations and past McCarron’s bacon factory where Nellie Finlay’s father had sold his pigs. He would buy the pigs in Belfast, and convey them by train to Cavan. Mr Dolan, the old man at my mother’s funeral, told me about him and how a crowd of young boys would gather at the station wall as the train pulled in, everyone hoping big John Finlay was on board, and that they might earn a few pennies by driving the pigs from the station down the hill to the factory.

  In my own childhood, the factory owner, Tom McCarron, a remote patriarch with watchful eyes, had a Jaguar car that floated silently down Farnham Road and bounced up on the pavement outside the factory like a big boat coming to rest on a beach. I would finger the chrome cat on the bonnet as I walked home from school and listen to the squeal of pigs inside the factory, as they were shuttled along cables upside down to their awful death. I could not imagine what was in their hearts, but I certainly deduced that for some unfortunate creatures life was never fair.

  That evening I cleaned out the bath. There was a seat in it for an invalid, whereby the care worker could wash my mother in the years when she was still able to climb upstairs. And all around the floor, there was dust and old wallpaper and flecks of peeling paint from the ceiling where the pipe had burst in 1996. I cleaned the bath and took musty towels from under the sink and threw them in the washing machine. I turned on the immersion heater downstairs and after a few hours, I poured half a bottle of bath salts into the steam. I lit incense sticks on the corridor and on the window ledge and in the bedroom. And then I undressed and got into the bath. I was ten years old again, a time when my body was small and fragile, and I longed to be a grown up. I soaked for half an hour and got out and dried and lay on the bed and fell asleep.

  The next night, I did it again. I used more bath salts and soaked again, this time with night lights burning in the bathroom and on the ledges of the windows, and more incense sticks burning throughout the house. I set them on every window sill, and in jam pots on the corridor and on the mantelpiece in the back bedroom. Everywhere, except the front bedroom. I didn’t go in there at night.

  Only in daylight did I open that door and go through her stuff systematically. I put away the linen, the clothes, the suits, the frocks, all in different bags. Some went to the waste disposal and some to charity shops. And one day, I was packing away a drawer of lingerie and night clothes and I found presents from long ago Christmases, unopened gifts she had received and purchases she had made, still in cellophane wrappers with the price tags on the side in old pounds and shillings and Christmas cards still in their envelopes. I found a blue nightdress in a dusty presentation box, unopened since the 1960s, and I took it from the box and shook it free from the cellophane wrapping. It was a coy thing that some young girl might have worn back then with a lot of lace trimming on the hem. A present perhaps from someone who hadn’t noticed the passing years; hadn’t realised that Mother was by then almost fifty. And perhaps that’s why it remained unopened. She may have felt herself too old for it. A light-blue, knee-length garment with short sleeves, lace ruffles on the shoulders and ribbons tightening the bodice and tiny roses in dark purple woven into the hemline. I brought it upstairs and left it lying on the duvet in the bedroom and stared at it for a long while.

  Each afternoon, I would go to a charity shop on Bridge Street with another armful of dresses and frocks and cardigans and conservative suits in tweed and wool. The daily bundles were small because each time they were sorted I would change my mind. I would put half the stuff back in the wardrobe, convincing myself that some items were too valuable to let go. They might be designer stuff, I argued. I might find some use for them. Perhaps my wife or daughter would like to have a look at them.

  But I forced myself to fill one bag each day until eventually the wardrobes and drawers were empty. Then at night, I lit the fire and the candles and put on the immersion heater and switched on her old transistor radio to hear concerts from the Wigmore Hall and Budapest on BBC3. And at bedtime, the landing upstairs grew dense with incense and I went to the bathroom and soaked and softened and wept. And afterwards I lay on the bed and covered myself with the sheets and fell asleep, holding the blue nightdress in my arms. And one night I pulled myself into it and let it hang around my body, and lay there feeling its delicate texture all around me, and then sleeping felt like drowning in the place where she first imagined me.

  BUT YES, MAMMY, I was soft, and I am soft, and sentimental. And I’ve always believed in heaven. Ever since I was six and decided to climb trees instead of watching the Lone Ranger, which is when the Virgin Mary first appeared to me and enveloped me in her tenderness. I had gone up the main trunk of a chestnut tree, and sat on its lateral branches all afternoon, thinking myself equal to a monkey, when Desmond, my best friend, started pretending he was another monkey at the base of the tree. There was a dead spruce lying against the beech, which afforded me a path of escape as the other monkey came up the tree towards me. But the spruce was rotten and, as I scampered down, the branches gave way beneath me, like the shells of a thousand eggs, and I fell on my head and damaged my back. I lay on the floor of the wood, in awe of gravity, and terrified of you, because you weren’t soft, Mother, especially when we made mistakes. I knew you would scold me severely for climbing trees. But that thought was swiftly replaced by serenity as I looked at the sky. I think it was the branches whipping my back as I fell that put eggshells in my mind, and the blue of the sky that suggested the Queen of Heaven. My back may have been lacerated by the branches, but, inside, I felt l
ike a bird fallen from its nest, and was certain that Mother would come soon – not scolding, but rather enfolding me in her arms, and reassuring me that I was OK. I didn’t see anything as literal as the porcelain Virgin commonly associated with Catholic apparitions in my moment of ecstasy; it was more a vague feeling of security. Later in life, my therapist explained to me that it was my own unconscious that fabricated a heavenly mother in the blue sky. The point is that it wasn’t you, Mother, who held me then. It wasn’t you.

  And of course, it wasn’t just you who was growing old. It was also Oliver, your little brother, now alone, playing the piano and reading old record reviews he had cut from newspapers decades earlier, and dozing by the fire, until tiny cancers finally crept up on him and devoured all his music.

  And it was all the other folks in Cavan who you grew up with; the school friends, shop boys, chicken farmers, dressmakers, dancers, singers and hackney drivers, and the young girl friends with whom you shared secrets when they were having their babies; all those mothers walking the roads with prams four deep, proud as punch and not worried about oncoming traffic – they had all turned grey or were already gone before you to Killygarry graveyard.

  All over Ireland your generation was fading away; their histories were fading, the buildings they were familiar with, the geography of where they were born, and their own passions and memories, obsessions and fears, their views on world wars or communism or long hair or apparitions of the Virgin Mary; everything that held them was fading into a kind of grey dust.

  One generation always gives way to the next. Young people make noise and have the parties and claim the space.

  Carpe Diem!

  Old people shrink, retreat and dissolve into the bland paintwork of a doctor’s waiting room. And now I see myself dissolving, because I am next in line and young ones are already dancing in spaces where soon I too will not belong.

  And it’s the cold in an old person’s house that does the damage, when the electricity becomes too expensive and the damp creeps up. It rises from the ground and seeps in through the ridge tiles and runs through hidden webbed crevices in the walls until the entire house is musty and smells of old age. Glenasmole had been falling apart for two decades, even when you still slept upstairs, working your way up and down the steps on your backside, and the unused rooms were slipping into decline. That’s when I put a commode in the corner of the dining room, beside the china cabinet, because there was no downstairs toilet. For years, you had refused to have one built. Someone even suggested an escalator that might be attached to the stairs – a small chair that would run on railings along the wall from hall to upper landing – but you said you heard of a woman who got on one of those contraptions and broke her hip trying to get off. So you weren’t having any of that.

  It was ever so; you had your own peculiar way of doing everything. You slept in a different room from your husband. You said he was a selfish man sometimes. And sometimes you flew into tempers when you were washing the dishes. You didn’t like all his friends. And you said he didn’t appreciate the way you slaved in the kitchen, cleaning and cooking and making ends meet on the meagre cheque he handed you at lunchtime every Friday when you were going into town on a bicycle to do the messages. And you never hugged him. In fact, you avoided touching for so long that eventually you divided the geography of the house between the both of you, each claiming separate spaces: the big bedroom his, the small bedroom yours, the front room his, and the kitchen all yours.

  Of course, the nursing home was different. You found other people again. Sometimes I’d go in and you’d say, ‘Hello, Oliver,’ confusing me with your brother because all of a sudden there were lots of people around and you became tender for one final moment as you were held by all of them; the living and the dead drawing you on to a new level of being in the world, where you let go of all your possessions, except for the handbag, a gaudy red plastic pouch that sat on the floor beside your chair in the day room for two years.

  In the end you didn’t even come to the day room any more. You lay in bed, and after another few months, you moved away from us completely in sleep, struggling with each breath on your final journey into silence.

  But it was on the day of your departure from Farnham Road, heading for the nursing home, that my heart finally broke. I found it unbearable to sit downstairs in the kitchen, listening to you up there in the bedroom, going through your things, trying to decide what to take. And by accident you discovered some of those old photographs and mementos of long-ago weddings and you cried like a child. I felt ashamed that I was taking you away from your home – because it was your home. In the end, you brought nothing of any importance. Not even the photographs. It was as if you didn’t want to remember anything at all after that, as you were driven away from the wrought-iron gates of Glenasmole for the very last time.

  And there was so much I never said in that house and so much you never told me; so many stories that were hidden, so much resentment that I stored up as I watched you for years putting food into your mouth in slow motion. So much of you in the air and in every room, until death finally claimed you and I could open all the windows and doors, and allow the house to breathe once again.

  THERE IS MORE to life than just holding hands, and the English dictionary offers a variety of similar verbs – to hold on, to hold up, to hold out and to hold forth. There is a way of being held, and of beholding, which is not just touching or being physical but a way of holding each other that makes us human. In Tibet, the condition of being held is considered to be the ultimate reality of all things. The ultimate truth for Tibetans is not a god or a ground of being, but a dynamic whereby the entire universe is held, and holds itself, and holds us. Holding each other. Holding everything. It’s the ultimate reality. Everything else is a delusion.

  And it’s such a contentment to hold another human being, to abandon self-obsession, leave personal anxieties forgotten in the past, and reach forward towards other beings. It’s the kind of bliss that everyone talks about when they talk about being in love. What the saints talked about when they talked about a union with God, an awareness that, despite the atrocities of life, you are always being held by someone.

  It’s like listening to Chopin. It’s like being a child. I see it sometimes on a bus or train when a mother is holding a child. The two individuals melt into each other, and the mother becomes so fluid in her caress that it no longer matters whose body is whose. The mother says all and everything the infant needs to hear. And I think it’s the same with lovers who have reached a certain stage in their lives. Maybe young love is not quite like this because, in the early years, love is passionate and unconscious and clings fiercely, but the assurance that you are held is something that grows stronger through the years. It’s all in the wonder of letting go and trusting to another. It’s the parachute jump without the parachute. It’s even a bit like faith in God, as we understood it in the old days, the sense of letting go completely and trusting that the other person will hold you.

  I used to have a poster on the wall of my student bedroom many years ago. It was of an elephant clinging to a single daisy on the edge of a cliff. ‘Hold me,’ the elephant cried out. ‘I will,’ a voice replied from the clouds. ‘Just let go.’

  It was a nice, cosy little poster that didn’t ring true to me at the time since history was full of people who hung over cliffs and let go and then fell into hell. And yet that image remained with me.

  ‘Live your life with risks,’ my old friend the General would say. ‘Don’t just walk over the cliff. Go over blindfolded and with the confidence that you can fly.’

  You will be held.

  When I first met the beloved I sang, ‘Hold me close, and never let me go.’ It was a song we hummed together in far-off countries, walking down unknown streets where other couples were leaning on balconies under blue skies. And when I was away from her, in distant cities, I always ended up on a balcony on Sunday morning, looking out at the other apartment blocks aroun
d me and thinking to myself that the world was full of people holding each other. I would drink mint tea with lemon juice, and imagine them feeling happy and safe and sleepy, all in their private little apartments around me, and I too would long for my beloved to hold me again.

  Sometimes I say it when we are lying in bed. Sometimes when we are standing on the edge of the earth in Donegal where the waves fall onto the sand. Hold me. And I used to think it was risky. She might reject me, I thought. One of these days she might say, ‘No, I won’t hold you any more. I’m fed up holding you like you were some helpless imbecile.’ And then where would I be?

  I have said it on warm afternoons in July. And in the kitchen after midnight on Christmas Eve, when everyone had gone to bed. Hold me. It’s like a prayer.

  And we have held each other all over the place – on balconies, in trains and somewhere on the north side of Mumbai. I said it to her once on the roof of one of the Twin Towers, and on the back of a lorry as we were driven with other tourists through the Grand Canyon in Arizona. No matter how much I have been overwhelmed by exciting holidays, history, archaeology, or the size of the universe, or the amount of tequila left in the bottle, I could always rely on her. I could always say, ‘Hold me.’

  When we were first married, we bought an enormous bed in Boyle that took up the entire bedroom of our small cottage in the hills, and though we could do very little else in that space, at least we were able to lie quietly on Sunday mornings holding each other for the entire length of Sunday Miscellany.

  I would lie there imagining people all over the world doing the same thing. Holding each other; in cities and remote villages, in apartment blocks, small cottages and under canvas roofs, or under straw roofs, or under no roof at all.