On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  But I didn’t have words to describe it so I just promised to be a good girl and he patted me on the head and went into the kitchen. I eavesdropped on the staircase.

  ‘Sure isn’t it great if she likes sums,’ he said to my mother.

  ‘She was cheating, George, the teacher said so.’

  Later my mother was doling out rashers and egg. ‘What are you looking at?’ I said. Kieran raised a startled head. I offered her my most insolent glare.

  ‘That’s enough out of you, madam. You’ll get up to your room right now with no tea.’

  I scraped back my chair.

  ‘I’m very disappointed in you. Your brother never got into trouble like this,’ she called out as I slammed the door.

  I stomped my protest upstairs and lay on my bed with the curtain billowing in the open window, the sound of summer evening football, the punishing chant of other children playing on the road until the day dissolved into a pale grass-scented evening, the downstairs mutter of adult TV and the clatter of washing up. I poked my head under the curtain and watch the girls play a last game of German jumps in the fading light. Áine Kenny stood with the coloured rubber bands twanging at her ankles. Last Sunday she sang a solo ‘Ave Maria’ at Mass, her voice a startling sweet that had all the parents reeling in the pews. On Tuesday Emer walked on her points across the entrance hall, one chequered square at a time. All these girls could do the special things that girls do.

  I heard the closing click of Kieran’s bedroom door and then the music seeping through the wall. ‘It’s not fair,’ I said from the threshold while he lay reading on his bed, lost in his book, his favourite Russian stories tucked inside a tattered green hardback. But Kieran didn’t hear, he was with Chekhov on the shores of the Black Sea or gazing at the chandeliers in St Petersburg. I flopped down on the floor, kicked the skirting boad. ‘I don’t want to be different.’

  ‘So don’t be,’ he shrugged, turning the pages. ‘Just pretend.’ I rolled over on my back and looked at him upside-down. His extra eight years put him in an unimaginable place. ‘Just keep your own secrets.’ He smiled and considerered my upside-down face. He was pulling further and further away from me and soon he would be gone. ‘Now be quiet and I’ll read you this story.’ And I knew it would be a sad one because Kieran was always reading sad stories. He read aloud to me in the watershed hours between school and teatime, even long after I was able to read myself. I can still see him sitting on the floor with the thick green book and Tchaikovsky on his cassette recorder. He picked stories that made us both cry, as if constant immersion in raw emotion and pathos was some sort of poultice that would keep us tender and vulnerable, so that everywhere you looked the world was flooded with casual injury. Scabbed horsehide and slinking dogs who bare their cringing teeth at a raised hand, Scott’s ponies sinking up to their necks in the snow until the crack of a bullet laid their misery to rest in the Antarctic wasteland.

  I used to lie on the bed digging my toes into the soft press of his pillow imagining the starving she-wolf lying in a bitter March snow, suckling the cubs who prodded her emaciated belly with their paws. And I cried, retreating to the numbers in my head, multiplying my way into the future in a hypnotic sequence of numbers that only got bigger, while Kieran sat motionless in the fading afternoon, the book open on his lap, a single tear rolling down his cheek.

  Pie Man breathes the noisy labour of the obese. There is a sprinkling of powdery white across the red mountain of his sweatshirt, rising and falling like some great dormant rumbling, molten lumps on the verge of sudden ignition.

  ‘So I took Kieran’s advice,’ I tell him. ‘I took my secret underground, thinking maybe darkness would stunt its growth.’

  ‘You mean you pretended?’

  ‘Though sometimes I really couldn’t hold it in.’

  Maths class aged twelve and the intolerable discomfort of an error transcribed by the teacher from the textbook onto the board. That’s wrong, Miss. Seeing the mistake before knowing why or how – the shape, something wrong with the shape. The class gawped and sniggered while the teacher stood beached in a shaft of sunlight, before packing my impertinence off to the headmistress and I wrestled with the urge to beat her brains out with the wooden edge of the chalk duster. My erratic test results fitted the profiler of a cheat and teachers issued occasional warnings. I was sullen and unresponsive. But the nuns didn’t worry themselves about underperforming girls since there was an endless supply of average men who would provide for them. I was alone since no one could follow me into that other-worldly space. On the other side of a blackboard or at the end of an equation hovered a universe vast and unknowable, like the frozen steppes where a sled would whoosh me away to a place of no return. And that’s how it would be, there would be nothing for me to be except different.

  ‘Your brother gave you the wrong advice,’ says Pie Man softly. The red mountain rises and falls. ‘You should ask him what he thinks now.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You could try,’ he says coaxingly, gently, as you would encourage a small child.

  ‘Kieran’s gone.’

  Darkness has fallen. And I am being dragged now back into a past I’m supposed to have shed. The whole point of leaving is that you don’t take the shit with you, but there it is seeping under the door like floodwater.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ says Pie Man. ‘Finish the story.’ And it seems that is all the prompting I need. But I don’t have much to remember: I was so young and everything is wearing out. There was the sandpit in the back garden where Kieran used to cover my legs completely and then tickle me. Oh, everyone loved him, the boy with chestnut hair and ocean eyes. All the mothers on the road used to say he had eyelashes like Tony Curtis in Spartacus and I’d see his name tucked inside the scrawled hearts on the back door of the girls’ toilets at school. Sometimes on my way home, he’d cycle past me with a bunch of friends, making a whooping noises and doing wheelies, ties streaming from their necks. Kieran lagged behind, a back-pedal distance between him and the others, looking round at me with a secret smile, though he never stopped, never broke ranks.

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph, my mum shrieked the day he strolled through the front door brandishing his Leaving Cert results, an excess of As, my mother screeching he’d be getting into Med then. Kieran stalled in a threshold shrug, his accommodating grin and the lack of an alternative suggestion, unable to resist the grinding force of academic success, my mum racing out onto the road to tell the neighbours about the fledgling doctor, the first generation of university material.

  A week into his first term, I came in from school to find her standing by the sink, tears rolling down her cheeks, saying it broke her heart to see the Weetabix packet lasting three days now he wasn’t having all this meals at home.

  I remember the first time he came home late, I was lying in bed imagining him crumpled in a gutter with his brains spilling out all over the road, clutching the crushed bike as the tail lights of a drunk driver faded away into the night. Then I heard the slam of the back door and my mother tiptoeing down the stairs, Did you have a nice time? she said, while Kieran puked his guts out in the toilet. She let him miss Mass the next morning and lie in till noon, cooked a big fry to help him get his strength back. He’s only pissed you know, Mum, he’s not sick, I said as she handed me the tray. Wash your mouth out, miss. Your brother is studying day and night and he needs to let off a bit of steam. You could take a leaf out of his book, I’m telling you.

  Strange books everywhere, littering all the rooms with their anatomical detail, red and blue cross-sections of skinless body parts, skeletal quizzes at the breakfast table, the curved shelf in his bedroom collapsing under the weight of future responsibilities. But Kieran didn’t talk anymore. There were unfamiliar voices on the phone. And he’d stopped reading to me. Floated past on the stairs like I was invisible. There would be a ring at the doorbell and he would disappear for a whole night and come back thinner. He was leaving us for another world. Once
I sneaked into his room, crouched down by his shelf of spine-crinkled Russians and slowly, methodically tore the first eighteen pages of The Idiot in half, the satisfying thrill of injury, the dust-sweet smell of tattered yellow pages, their transparent flimsiness, such a tenuous link with immortality. Hurting is a very easy thing to do.

  And then I was eleven, nearly twelve, walking home from school. I stopped in our front garden, there was a dead sparrow on the grass, I can still remember the grey underside of its wing, the way it was so small, the way the feathers looked, the raindrop lightness shattered by a broken wing, but the image doesn’t hold. What I hear instead is my mother screaming and me running inside and upstairs where Dad was splitting open the bedroom with an axe. Hurry George Hurry Oh God George, my Mum’s jabber, God help us, hack hack, the wood splintering a jagged opening, Dad’s hand shoving through, the click of the key, Mum, I’m scared, my hands pawing at her back, Oh George, and the door burst open onto a fallen chair, a shoeless dangle, the trouserless legs below the naked body of the mangled face that filled the space where the light should be. The shape, the body, a swinging carcass.

  Kieran Molloy

  Beloved son of George and Patricia

  Brother of Geraldine

  Taken to God March 2nd 1979

  Later, a lifetime later, after the front door had finally closed on the procession of priest and doctor and neighbours, we were left alone with our horror. Why’d he do it? I tugged at Dad’s sleeve and when he didn’t answer I kept repeating the question, louder, louder. You must know, you must know why, but he didn’t even move, I thumped his back and Dad led me from the kitchen, hugged me limply and then shook my shoulders, Geraldine, shush now, shush, don’t be upsetting your mother.

  In my mind we are all still in that room, suspended in that moment: a family in the grip of a question never answered. And that is how it would always be. Nothing we could do, that moment defining past, present and future and rendering it all meaningless. The pain binding us together and keeping us apart. Time passes but the scene doesn’t change. A teapot frozen in mid-air between the cardboard cut-out of my mum and dad, stone-faced and absent, seated at the kitchen table. The things I knew she touched secretly when alone, sitting on the cold narrow bed, running her hand over the dry electricity of memory, her insides scooped out and filled with pain. So she had to lose herself in a wilful dementia or shrivel up and die.

  Kieran was in a coffin swamped with coloured wreaths in the cool sanctuary of the church. My whole class filed through in craning curiosity, the subdued thrill of event that I remembered so well from my only other funeral experience the previous year: Helen Murphy, leader of the Heather Patrol and with the longest hair in our class, who died of leukaemia, aged ten. In the pew I held my mother’s handbag while her clawed hand bit into Dad’s arm. I followed their shuffle out into a heartless rain in the new scratchy black coat that Aunt Joan made me wear, while men in dark suits shunted the coffin into the jaws of the waiting hearse. My mother’s wail broke the crowded stillness, a flock of birds burst from a tree and I pushed through the mourners and ran and ran and ran, through the car park, down the hill, slamming my feet on wet cement until I could run no more and lay down in Mullens’ driveway.

  It was the day the tinkers set up camp on Chestnut Road and never left.

  Pie Man lies with his mouth open and gasping in erratic snores. Rex’s gold is silvery in the lowlight, his front paws still raised and bent and twitching a little in dream. A million heartbeats and it’s all over.

  I pull at the duvet but I can’t contain my shivering. I will drift into exhaustion, but there is only a drift backwards, the unceasing pull of a past. An unravelling all around me, an unbearable sadness that has nowhere to go.

  ‘Go on,’ says the red mountain. ‘Finish the story.’

  ‘After Kieran was gone I learnt to stop concentrating.’ It was really a surrendering to dream. In the grey drizzled mornings of English class I could feel myself slipping into a beckoning open grave, in wistful pursuit of the elusive nightingale, scribbling tiny notes in the margin of Keats’s reverie, flicking soft, worn pages to the condemned Pearse, his love for God, mother and country fused into an alluring vision of glorious death and eternal life. Late at night watching the orange street light seep under the too-short curtains, they all collapsed into one exhausted tangle: I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge / My two strong sons that I have seen go out / To break their strength and die, they and a few / Now more than ever seems it rich to die / To cease upon the midnight with no pain / In bloody protest for a glorious thing / They shall be spoken of among their people / The generations shall remember them / And call them blessed; / Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth…

  My mother’s first few weeks in hospital, that time when it still seemed reasonable to believe it could be temporary but was really the beginning of her irreversible decline. And all these years later she is still there. On Christmas Day just gone my father drove me down to the hospital for our first joint visit in five years, buzzed through a thick glass security door. A giant foam lozenge that serves as a couch in the centre of the ward. Dad leaned forwards in the couch, arms folded on his knees, head lowered, sleeping or praying or avoiding, looking more like an inmate than a visitor. Two nurses stood chatting over by the station, their shoes like great dollops of cream and I wondered: do they see it? All the broken relatives, the battered families thrust into despair? And what do they think about the inmates we visit, the homewreckers who choke on the mess of their own lives, unwilling or unable to stop its cancerous infection, like creeping parasites of destruction. Their existence whittled down to the gaps between medication, days measured out by little white cups. Once I sat in the middle of the ward and watched while a woman set fire to the hem of her pink dressing gown and the nurses sprayed her head to toe with foam. And I thought: why not just let her burn?

  A nurse patted my father’s wreck of a shoulder and he wandered off for a cup of tea.

  ‘Mum, we’ve come to take you home for Christmas lunch.’ The foot of my mother’s bed was just visible from the doorway, the blinded window casting a weak strip of horizontal sunlight across the grey carpet.

  ‘I… didn’t have any breakfast.’

  ‘You didn’t want any, remember? You told the nurses you weren’t hungry. And anyway it’s Christmas dinner in a few hours.’

  She hummed, a flat snatch of sound or extended sigh. The noises that she makes now startle me. She was always such an exact communicator, not given to redundant emissions.

  ‘Tell Kieran to come in here. Tell him I want him.’

  ‘Mum, you know Kieran isn’t here anymore.’

  I heard the snuffle from the bed, and I knew that this was just the prelude to the familiar head-banging that would descend to an inhuman moaning, a steady unchecked flow of tears and snot dripping down her chin and I walked over and put the box of tissues on her bedside table just as Dad arrived, rubbing his hands in false cheer. ‘It’s a fierce cold day outside, you’re well tucked up in here, girls,’ and he sat on the side of the bed and patted her hand, stuffed a wad of tissue onto her heaving chest. ‘There now, don’t go upsetting yourself, Pat,’ he droned in a practised soothe.

  ‘She asked for Kieran,’ I snapped. But he didn’t look at me, just kept on stroking her hand. ‘Jesus, Dad.’ I turned and walked past the glancing smile of the arriving nurse.

  ‘D’you know what would do you the world of good, Patricia, would be to get out of that bed and have a cup of tea with your family.’

  I backed out of the room, signalled for buzzer release.

  By my last year at school, Mum had been permanently installed in hospital and I took to practising smoking in Kieran’s bedroom, home alone after school, dropping cigarette ash on my uniform, going over the distant final moment I had spent with him. At 4:45 p.m. on 1 March 1979, I had met him wheeling his bike up the road. I asked how he could bear studying for six years just to end up looking down
people’s throats all day? He said it didn’t really matter what he did, looking at me with a smile that didn’t seem connected to his lips. Hours later I heard his low-volume Tchaikovsky, but I didn’t see him after that, just the crusts of dead toast on his plate when I came down to breakfast after he had left for an early lecture.

  The next thing I saw was his broken face.

  In all the family floundering over the entitlement of grief, I didn’t figure in the pecking order. My mum had granted herself a private abandonment. My dad finally gave up on the struggle to find something useful to say. God love him, wouldn’t he have made a lovely doctor? I began spending afternoons lying on Kieran’s bed playing his tapes, reading the Russians that he loved, suspecting the dead authors of a morbid intimacy with him, searching for some secret buried deep in Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Esenin and Tolstoy, some hint of what they might have been whispering in his ear. I read them all, quickly, thoroughly and it seemed that it was everywhere, death stalking the thin pages.

  I listened to his music, waiting for a sign. Staring up at the light fixture, re-enacting Kieran’s last moments, I wondered how long it took to lose consciousness. Wouldn’t a second-year med student have calculated all this? And why didn’t he write a note? I couldn’t believe he had nothing to say as he fingered the rope. I wanted to ask someone but there was no one to speak to about the shame and the guilt, what it meant. Eventually the batteries gave out on the little black tape recorder so I smashed it to pieces with a hammer in the backyard. Then I built a bonfire of his books in the corner of the garden and piled high all their Russian misery, their unhappy families, their ever-present suicide, whispering to him from their graves like sirens in treacherous waters, stealing him away. I watched them burn and I swore I would never be moved by a story again. I had recurring half-dreams, bloodstained water running over my hands down the sink. I kicked at Kieran’s bed and screamed: what about the ones you leave behind? How do the undead ever move on? He had taken everything along with his life.