The strange thing about drowning is that it’s so close to surviving, only a few gulps away. There is even a diagnosis called phantom drowning or false drowning, which brought it home to me exactly how death by inundation of the lungs works. While fighting off the water you bring the worst on yourself. Instead of remaining calm, you voluntarily join the dead and drowned of all time. You already see them in the dark coming along the sea floor with their absent eyes open and their lipless mouths singing. They are no longer breathing and have become fully adapted to being underwater. You see their hair floating upwards and their starfish hands held out towards you in greeting. Their soggy clothes billowing and their heavy shoes keeping ballast. Sand and stones and bits of shells in their pockets. Their limbs half-eaten by the scavengers of the sea they keep for company. Hundreds of drowned people waiting at the mouth of the harbour like a large choir performing the great underwater lament.
The maggots have got your eyes. The crabs have got your lips.
There was not much more time left for me in my misery at that point. I managed to escape from the jetty, out to one of the yachts, but they followed me and I didn’t have the energy any more to keep myself under the water.
And then it all came to an end. To me it seemed they just got tired of it or already thought I had joined the choir of the drowned.
What I didn’t know was that Johnny had come out of the building to assist me. This was something I had been trying to avoid at all costs. But I realised it too late. After a period of silence, I took the courage to rejoin the living. I wanted so much to belong to this country and pulled myself out of the water, even though I expected them to finish it for good. I came out coughing up water so it took a while for me to take notice of anything.
Then I heard the gasping. The sound of sputtering coming from the jetty, close by. I turned to see that it was Johnny, lying on his back. The gaff was stuck into the side of his face. He was trying to dislodge it but there was no hope. Each movement caused him further agony and loss of blood.
I ran to him and held his head. He was covered in blood and could not speak. I tried to make him comfortable, taking off my wet jacket and placing it underneath his head for a pillow. Then I realised that it was not the gaff that was the problem, but one of my own chisels, stuck right into his chest. I could hear a siren in the distance, howling through the streets, and wished it would come faster. He was very quiet when the rescue services arrived and he didn’t have long to wait before he was carried away. They brought him through the building and out the main door because the gates were all locked.
I was arrested and taken away, which is understandable because I had no business being in the boatyard and there was blood all over my hands and my clothes. Johnny was not able to speak up for me. No matter how much I explained the situation to them, I think my accent and my choice of expressions worked against me and made me look more like a culprit. In the absence of any other suspects, this seemed like a logical precaution on the part of the Garda to take me into custody. I insisted that I wanted my legal advisor and friend to be there with me before I would say anything.
They began to put words into my mouth, hoping that I would nod at least. But I shook my head like a real criminal and said I would give them nothing until my friend came to see me. They contacted him but he never came. He refused to stand by my side and I was left alone. They asked me if I wanted them to arrange legal aid, but I turned that down. Right into the early hours of the morning, they continued to try and get me to speak against my will, until my silent memory of events was finally corroborated by the video evidence.
31
It’s impossible to forgive yourself for surviving. I heard it said once that the living sometimes envy the dead, and I only believed that after Johnny died.
He spent roughly three days in hospital fighting for his life. What troubled me most was the fact that it was my own chisel which had killed him. After my release from custody, I tried to go and see him in the hospital, but was not given permission to do so by the family. Nor was Helen. Strictly family only, according to the nurses.
He didn’t regain consciousness, so maybe there was no purpose in speaking to him, only for my own sake and for my guilt. While he was still alive, I wandered around the streets in a terrible heap, worrying and blaming myself again for bringing such disaster with me to this country. When I heard the news that he was dead, it became even more difficult. It was not something you learned in school, was it? How to grieve. It was not like you took lessons in letting go of people you love who are taken from you by force.
The one good thing to come from all of this was that I had reunited the family. Though it was difficult to rejoice, it was great to know that the Concannon family were now grieving together for their father and you could allow yourself to be happy at least that this tragedy had brought them closer than ever before.
‘Johnny, Michael, Máire Concannon. Furbo and Dublin. Beloved husband and father, dearly missed by his wife Rita and children, Kevin, Jane and Ellis, as well as brothers in Canada and the USA and friends at home and abroad.’
In death, he had come home at last. He had returned to the land that would always love him, as they say in the song. He never made it back into the house, but there was a nice bed made up for him and he was surrounded by his close family when he gave his last breath in the hospital.
The details of the funeral arrangements were published in the newspapers. The death notice was accompanied by the remark ‘funeral private’ as well as a further request that there should be no flowers sent to the church or their home, and that the money should be given to charity instead.
By ‘private’, I accepted that the general public was not encouraged to take part, but I would never have considered staying away from the funeral myself. I discussed it with Helen and she encouraged me to go because I was Johnny’s friend. She had never met him and didn’t want to complicate things for the family by appearing at this time. She sent her condolences by letter to Kevin instead.
The morning of the funeral was damp and still. The rain held off, only just, suspended like a tarpaulin above the mourners. There was quite a crowd in the church in spite of the request for privacy. The lifeboat men were there, as well as many of the people from the yacht clubs. The Garda on duty and some of the ambulancemen I had seen on the night came also, along with nurses at the hospital who had looked after him while he was dying. It was touching that they would all take time off work to go to the funeral.
From the back of the church I could see Rita Concannon in the second row, with Kevin on one side of her and the girls on the other. She had her arm around Ellis during the ceremony. As is customary, the son went to the pulpit to say a few words. The whole congregation of mourners was moved by the gentle tone of regret in his voice. He said his father was a great singer and a great hurling player and a great Irish speaker and that there was something about him that represented a time gone by which would never come again. His absence from the world would be a loss not only to his family but to many of his friends and to the country as a whole. He had entered into our memory now where he would live for ever.
It felt as though he was speaking directly to me, even looking right into my eyes. I found myself nodding back and believing that this tragedy had finally reconnected us and brought me back into the family as well. But I was only deluding myself.
There was a special song chosen for the occasion, sung by a young girl who was related to the Concannons, a cousin. Her voice was unique, a breathy echo in the back of the throat that I had never heard before and was not even discovered yet by any pop star I knew of. Because it was an old, familiar song, sung by such a young person with a strong, new voice, the frailty in the words broke everyone’s heart.
‘Bring flowers of the fairest, and roses the rarest.’
Afterwards, the mourners were gathered outside the church. There are no lessons you can get for how to behave and how to approach the bereaved, so I decided not to
go straight to Rita but over to Rosie first, her next-door neighbour. The family were all mobbed by neighbours and friends, so the idea of this being a private ceremony had been ignored completely. By ‘private’, they had possibly only meant to exclude the unwanted. People were heard saying what a lovely man Johnny was and what a crime it was for him to be taken away from us in such a brutal way. One of the brothers from Canada had come back and he looked very like Johnny but more well dressed and healthy. People talked about other things and told stories that had nothing to do with Johnny’s death. In other words, life went on with great speed at the same time.
When I got to Rita finally, she stalled in front of me and I didn’t know what to say.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, because I didn’t have any better words and the rest of my thoughts stopped in my throat.
I could remember the funeral of my own parents and all the mourners around me, suffocating me and using up the air outside the church. I could remember wishing they would all go away and not impose their grief on me. I could not understand the process of bereavement, because you don’t get lessons for losing your parents overnight and dealing with the guilt of their deeds left behind on your conscience.
I never really went along with the belief in the afterlife either. It was nothing more than a poetic explanation for the void created by the dead. We are the afterlife, I thought to myself. Us, the people left behind.
I could understand the difficulty that Rita had in speaking to me. It takes courage to accept warmth from people. I also think you have to have warmth inside you in order to receive it. Rita Concannon gave me her hand, finally, and then she wanted to say something that didn’t fully come out in the right words because she was crying at the same time.
‘I was so unfair to him,’ she said, but then she seemed to change her mind again because Jane started pulling her by the arm.
‘Come on, Mammy,’ she said, her face as stern as ever.
It’s terrible, the assumption you make that you can be of some assistance, expressing your condolences, trying to help the bereaved to be strong. It’s the other way around, the mourners upsetting the grieving family and putting all kinds of rubbish in their heads. It’s the bereaved carrying the rest of the world on their shoulders.
Kevin came cutting through the crowd directly towards me. He had been discreetly inviting certain guests back to the house for a reception after the burial. I didn’t expect to be included and it would have been absurd to stand there eating sandwiches in the room that took me months to renovate, much and all as I would have liked to see it full of people. I wanted to reassure myself that the Concannon floor was solid. I wanted to be sure I had left enough bounce in the boards, but not too much. Awful that, when you walk across the room and the glasses on the sideboard jump. I had been in houses where the floor was more like a trampoline.
It must have been clear to everyone that Kevin had something quite personal to say to me. They knew that I was his friend. They also knew the circumstances of Johnny’s return home and how he was barred from the house. But everything always turns out fine if the story ends well, isn’t that so?
Kevin put his arm around me. It was like old times and he led me quickly towards the side of the church. I felt the great weight of his friendship resting across my shoulders.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but it was a mistake even to attempt anything in language.
We stood at the side of the church, with the granite wall so beautifully constructed beside us. There was a copper lightning conductor coming all the way down from the spire, passing us by and going into the earth. The metal was grey and green from verdigris.
He looked into my eyes. He rested his hand on my shoulder so that I was at arm’s length. He paused and chose the words he wanted to deliver with all the care of his professional training, making sure they were clear and would not have to be repeated.
‘How dare you turn up here,’ he said. The bitterness sprang from his eyes. ‘You have the nerve to go up to my mother after all this. You have brought nothing but disaster to this family since you arrived.’
I could not think of anything that might disagree with that. He was absolutely right, I had brought this whole disaster with me.
‘You stay away from us, do you hear me?’
Placing emphasis on those words, he took hold of my shirt around the neck and pushed me right back against the granite. His grip was so tight that I remembered nothing but drowning.
‘Don’t let me see you ever again. If you come to the cemetery, I will call the guards, do you understand me?’
With that he swiftly brought his knee up into my groin. All I could do was to utter an involuntary vowel sound. The slow pain brought tears to my eyes. And maybe this was the real farewell to our friendship, a more solemn departure. His words could no longer be misunderstood.
He let me go and I protested, but not in a very effective way, bowing forward towards him with my hand on my stomach. I told him not to deny me the right to pay my respects like everyone else.
‘Go and plant a tree somewhere,’ he said.
He wore his lovely suit with a light grey tie. He stared at me as though I was a defendant in court. He was ready to walk away, but then he remembered one more thing. As if there was a handwritten word or two at the bottom of a notepad reminding him not to leave without making this final important point.
‘If you go near Helen, I will fucking kill you.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You were always a sponger, Vid. One eye on the money and the other eye on the woman.’
‘That’s not fair enough,’ I said.
‘If you even as much as lay a finger on Helen, I will personally come and kill you, that’s for sure.’
It struck me to tell him that he was too late. But he would find out sooner or later and I didn’t want to speed on that revelation.
It was clear that he regretted ever meeting me in the first place. He despised himself for all the information he had given me and for taking me so intimately into his confidence. He was withdrawing all of that now in one go. All the stories he told me, all the fun we had, all the jokes. Every one of the pubs we were in. All the pints we consumed together. The fishing, the travelling, the landmarks he pointed out. The entire map was being taken away from me. The story of my brief time here deleted. It was the saddest place to be, not knowing where I stood any more. When he disappeared back into the crowd and finally drove away in the black limousine, with one arm around his mother and the other around Ellis, I felt nothing but emptiness, as though he had even taken away the right for me to be lonely.
The pain began to spread at the base of my stomach, as though I had not eaten in a month. But it had nothing to do with food. It had nothing to do with being kicked either and everything to do with having the ground taken from underneath me with such force. I stayed out of sight and waited for a while. Then I straightened myself up and put my finger on the lightning conductor, just out of curiosity and having nothing better to do.
Helen was the only person I wanted to speak to. I may have been a guest here in this country, but I had no intention of staying away from her, even at the risk of his rage coming down on me. I phoned her and she said it was a disgrace to ban me from paying my last respects to a man who died saving my life. She insisted on driving to the cemetery and walking with me on her arm right up to the small gathering of mourners. The coffin was resting on its trellis with carrier bands ready to lower it down. The priest going over the last-minute prayers and everyone saying goodbye for good.
I was glad to be there, because otherwise I would not have heard the priest say a few words in Johnny’s own language, in Irish. We stood far enough away not to attract attention, but close enough to hear the words in Irish coming across the cool autumn air towards us. Helen translated them for me before they evaporated.
As the coffin was being lowered, she whispered and asked me to look at Ellis.
‘There’s somethi
ng wrong,’ she said.
‘Why?’ I asked, because I thought they were the perfect family now, all holding on to each other, supporting their mother and letting her know that she was not alone.
‘It’s not like her,’ Helen said.‘Something about her standing there with her family like that.’
‘Do you think she’s had the termination?’
‘Unlikely. Not with all this happening.’
‘So maybe she’s going to keep the baby?’
‘Look at her,’ Helen said. ‘Not like her to be so obedient.’
It was true. Ellis had become docile and distracted. Looking away at a crow landing on a headstone, at the windows of the houses outside the perimeter wall of the graveyard, at the grey fire blanket that sat on the funeral. She was in her own world, as far away from this consecrated place as it was possible to be.
They were throwing bits of gravel on to the coffin. It sounded like beads falling. Ellis playing like a child, wanting to throw more gravel into the grave until Kevin took her away quite forcefully, I thought, making sure that she didn’t slip from the grasp of the family again.
There was nothing stopping me now from saying farewell to Johnny. When the mourners were all gone, I stepped up to the grave and looked down at the coffin. I took out the paper with which he had wrapped the gift with the hurling medal inside. I promised to keep the medal, but I had the wrapping paper with me, neatly folded in my pocket. I opened it out and let it go. The Galway colours floating down without a sound after him.
32
This was where I entered into the story of the country at last. I became a participant, a player, an insider taking action. Not letting things happen around me as if I was still only an immigrant and it was none of my business. I was not trying to make a name for myself or anything like that, but I was entitled to play my role as an ordinary inhabitant who belonged here.
Helen described it as a distress call. On the night of the funeral, we agreed that we had to do something to rescue Ellis. There would be plenty of time to waste on talking for the rest of our lives, but now was the time for intervention.
Hand in the Fire Page 22
