The Ikon Maker

by Desmond Hogan

  15

  Her brother came for her. He was back from Cyprus, apparently, and he collected her in a black car. She kissed Michael. Then she turned to Susan and twisted her finger – with tender movement. ‘Take care.’

  The car drove off.

  She wept later, Susan did.

  She cried like a woman would for the dead long ago in Ireland.

  She wept for the souls of her dead friends, for Eleanor and Michael, their failed romance.

  That night they returned to the carnival grounds, Susan and Michael.

  He bought a bunch of red balloons, Michael did. They were so red they looked like tomatoes. He stood beside a gully of the river and let them off.

  ‘You should have given them to a child,’ Susan said.

  ‘I don’t really like children,’ Michael retorted.

  16

  A letter from Alice, her niece.

  What in God’s name are you doing in England? In York, God save us. What about your business? Come home out of that and get some sense. You haven’t fallen in love with a chimney sweep, have you? I hope not.

  Susan darling, it’s August, August, and you’ve been away for a long time. Your mother complains. She says I don’t make cornflakes and hot milk at night like you do. Come home, love, and start preparing for winter. People are talking. They’ve nothing else to say. They’ll think it was in trouble you were. At your age. But you know the way it is. Where’s Diarmaid? Is he in York, too? God save us. They’re a desperate generation as the wireless says.

  Goodbye now,

  Love, Alice.

  This letter was prompted by a card showing a door which Susan had sent to Ireland – rather unwisely – bearing her York address. She took it as a rebuff, Susan did. What business was it of theirs?

  Scorched she searched for solace. She went out, walked, attended a fashion show. She was after all having the time of her life – or was she? Was it not time to go now? Had she not made this decision? That Diarmaid was in need of her, that she was going to him because like a trapeze artist he was flying on a very high tightrope.

  He was getting drunk a lot now, Michael was, and her mind was wandering. She felt this now. Was she going batty? Putting on lipstick – Eleanor had given her the shade – dressing up, walking among ladies with their poodles.

  She’d watched Michael but that was it. He was drinking whiskey. She watched as though he were a very audacious child but like some very solid matron having given up hope of change. They looked at one another often with the look of inmates.

  Then one night she got drunk. On brandy. The wallpaper pink she shoved thoughts of going to Diarmaid out of her mind. Lately she’d been thinking of it, she’d been wanting it, but knowing she couldn’t move. This house stuck to her. Like a pillow. She just felt like going on and on here. There was nothing to do. Michael was slobbering now.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said to him.

  She was surprised at her own vindictiveness.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said to her. ‘Fuck off, you old hag.’ Then he looked at her laughing. ‘Come to me.’ He put his arms about her.

  ‘You’re the loveliest person I’ve met.’

  She stroked his hair; her palm felt his skull.

  ‘Darling.’

  She wove her hands through his hair.

  ‘You’re tired,’ she said to him. ‘You’re very tired. You need a rest.

  You need to be away from England. You should take a holiday. Put your troubles aside.

  Leave them alone. They’ll go away.’

  ‘They won’t.’ He was weeping.

  ‘Yes, love, they will. They will.’

  She woke up some hours later. She’d actually slept beside him. There he was, head on a cushion.

  She got up, steadied herself. Lord Jesus. What would everyone say? With some delight at the idea that she’d slept alongside a man half her age, she rose.

  Then looking at Michael she realized it wasn’t so much a man she’d slept beside as a child.

  She fetched a rug, put it over him.

  And quietly – in a way she’d not forget – went to bed.

  17

  ‘I’m going to London. I feel I must see Diarmaid.’

  Michael looked at her.

  ‘You’ll find he’s changed.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. For one thing he’s cut his hair; he looks older. In fact he’s quite a person now. And a bit less guileless than he was.

  In fact he’d cut your throat in a minute.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Diarmaid is now a young man.’

  She tried to picture him with his hair cut again, but couldn’t.

  ‘Listen. I’ve had enough. I know I must see him. I came here to see him. I’ll go and see him.’

  ‘O.K. Go.’

  Michael left the room. He came back in a minute.

  ‘You won’t have anything to say to him, he’s changed so much.’

  When Michael had gone to visit a university colleague Susan wept and wept.

  18

  They drank again that night.

  ‘You’ve been betrayed by age,’ Michael told her. ‘People like you shouldn’t grow old.’

  She was beginning to hate him.

  ‘You loved your son. You poured love on him, but now look at him, crazy, mixed-up.

  For God’s sake, woman, wake up. You and your son, it’s over. You can’t live in your womb all your life. Live in someone else’s.’ And he laughed, bitterly, cruelly. ‘I hurt him,’ he then said. To himself. She thought he was going a bit crazy.

  It was three o’clock. He was wearing a bawneen sweater.

  ‘Did you know? He tried to kill himself. That’s why he left.’

  ‘No. Why? Where?’

  ‘It was too much for him – the sin, the sex. He was totally confused. He called me a pervert one day. I said nothing. Then replied he was as much involved as I. Besides I told him he was a twit. He needed me. He cared for me. More than his bloody mother or Derek O’Mahony. Someone like Derek had only clung to him because he was sympathetic. Derek was a savage, too. He’d drained part of Diarmaid.

  Then one night – we had a fight – Diarmaid slit his wrists. Peculiar, isn’t it? And wailed “I want to get out.” ’

  ‘Out of where?’ Susan questioned urgently.

  ‘Hell.’

  ‘But Diarmaid, Diarmaid,’ Susan said, ‘was in Heaven. He was happy just waiting for trains or buying records in Ballinasloe. He was simple. Like his father. I don’t care what you say.’

  Diarmaid. Diarmaid. Diarmaid. Who was he anyway? His reality had failed. Her son had fled. And suddenly she saw him – in a white jersey like Michael’s – totally before her, streaks of blond through his hair. He was her son, a boy, and also her closest relationship. She must go to him now, immediately. He’d tried to die because it wasn’t happening any more, the intensity.

  It was over, marshland football pitches, packets of cigarettes in the wind. And a song called ‘Ruby Tuesday’.

  He was a man with his adolescence now. He was a human failure.

  ‘No. Diarmaid wasn’t just happy waiting for trains. He’s not that simple. He’s complicated. Like the rest of us he wouldn’t give up his childhood dream. Now look at him. Off with a girl somewhere, another misfit.’ Michael went on and on. ‘Everything was black and white to him once.

  He’d borne a grudge – well. Against school, against life, against those who’d driven Derek O’Mahony to kill himself. They were evil. But in his relationship with me he found good and bad – mainly bad.

  He found – among the bed-sheets – evil in himself. That he couldn’t understand or take. He’s always wanted to believe himself an angel. You’d helped complete the picture. But it didn’t work out. It broke. He broke with it.’

  Michael’s eyes were red, ‘red as roses’, Susan thought, and it occurred to her how frigid her language and thoughts had become, like poetry, a distance between them and life. Where h
ad she strayed? To a picture like Diarmaid’s ikons, to a way of life which substituted art for life.

  Here she was, make-up on, discussing her son as though he were a plaything. It was so wrong. She had to find him now, hug him to her, make him real.

  ‘He’s cut his hair.’ The phrase rang. Yes, he’d cut his hair. He was different, adult. All that was intense and problematic was probably gone. But what remained was what she wanted to meet, an adult child, someone she wanted simply to say ‘Hello’ to.

  19

  She left early in the afternoon. She’d delayed because they’d made a big breakfast, threw everything into the pan, apples, ham, eggs, radishes, tomatoes, onions, remorseless scallions.

  It was hard to divorce yourself from a way of life which made you a queen, an empress, an undefeated exponent of art, of country, of culture. There in York she’d been accepted as a sort of Celtic demi-goddess, and she’d known how to play up to people’s wiles.

  It was late in the afternoon when the train reached the midlands and within a few hours it was dark.

  It was a cold, lonely dark which seemed to hold the ghost of Diarmaid crying last Easter. It was a different Diarmaid that existed now. ‘More’s the pity,’ Susan said.

  The train flew in past London suburbs, lighted houses. In any of these she and George could have made love during the war years. She felt an acute desperation. She’d never really lived up to George’s expectation of her. He’d always fled her, that was why. She’d been too calm, too timid and half in love with a grocer’s assistant.

  A woman on the train handed her an Evangelist prayer. Susan took it. The woman sped off. At the station danger encroached. Susan knew. There in the dark a cripple stood selling wilted flowers. She brushed past but it was as though his eyes said, ‘I know. I know all about it, your foolish life.’

  She took a bus to Ladbroke Grove. There Bridget greeted her.

  ‘Susan. Holy Mary, I’m cured. I’m cured.’

  And Susan kissed her, hugging her, as though it were she herself who was cured.

  20

  On Sunday they went to Mass in Westminster Cathedral. The Mass was sung. They received Holy Communion. Later they joined hands coming out of the church.

  21

  Such was their joy that they went to Battersea Funfair. There they bought ice-cream and behaved like children. The Thames flowed nearby. There were lights on Chelsea Bridge and Susan felt like wading towards them. It was all strange in her head now. Bridget’s cure had totally submerged her need for Diarmaid. These days were days of thanksgiving for a human failure.

  22

  She thought she saw him. Through the lights. Holding a girl’s hand. She ran. Speed picked him. Was it him? His hair was dark, blindly dark. Yet blond in it.

  She called. Then realized it wasn’t him. He’d cut his hair anyway and this boy had long streaks of dark hair.

  Last night as I lay on my pillow,

  Last night as I lay on my bed,

  Last night as I lay on my pillow,

  I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead.

  Bridget was singing, combing her hair which was grey.

  ‘I was wondering what I’ll do now that I’m to live. I’d planned for death.’

  ‘Take a holiday.’

  Susan seemed to be telling this to everyone now that her own holiday had succeeded so well.

  ‘Yes. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go back to Ireland. The green fields. Thanks be to God for these and to His Blessed Mother. Thanks be to God for life.’

  23

  Walking down a street she thought she saw him in a bus. This time his hair was short. The bus was an ordinary red one, but it looked like a weapon. Why was that? Perhaps because it reminded her she was in England and buses didn’t look like that in Ireland. She was in a strange country. Why? Basically in search of reassurance.

  For once and for all she had to see Diarmaid now and go.

  24

  Alice answered the door. She drew back from the sight of Susan.

  ‘H-hello.’

  And then ‘Come in.’ The room inside looked like the aftermath of a bad party. Cups thrown about, sugar sticking to spoons.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘O.K. And you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’re looking absolutely excellent. You’re not like a mother at all. You look like someone’s – ’

  She didn’t finish the sentence. She looked rather distracted.

  ‘S-sit down.’

  The girl looked into the older woman’s eyes. Her own eyes blue. And Susan thought her skin looked like the colour of woodbine.

  ‘Are you O.K. love?’

  She began to cry, the girl did.

  She wept with total abandon, then looked at Susan.

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s so different. Ever since he went to York, he swears and curses.

  He’s living with some Irish guys now who go on speaking about the Provisional I.R.A. and bombings as though it were fun and admirable.

  He curses, swears, fucks.’

  It took something to say the last word, but it was the only one the girl could have honestly used.

  ‘He beat me up one night because I wouldn’t make love to him. He’s gone round the bend.’

  Susan listened, glued to the armchair.

  She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ was all she could say. ‘That’s terrible.’

  25

  In Piccadilly Circus she wept until the tears ceased coming.

  No one looked at her though at one stage a Salvation Army lady threatened to approach.

  She wept until she could see no one and finally had to walk on without tears. It’s far from Galway, she said to herself. At least if she went home there’d be green fields and the sound of birds and the quiet of old people’s faces.

  Even if death were more imminent than ever. Her own death.

  For there was nothing left now but the slow trudge to the grave.

  26

  On Sunday she went to Trafalgar Square with Bridget. There they were able to view an Irish march against internment. Posters held up. ‘Give us back our sons’. ‘Death to the traitors’. They frightened her, the posters. Especially the ones bearing notes of vengeance. And she felt bitterness against these people. They’d taken her son. Would he be blowing up bridges soon or damaging the faces of innocent children? She hoped not. Yet as she looked she could only feel sorrow for the marchers. Internment indeed was a terrible thing, but vengeance impossible. No one had the right to vengeance, no one could take over God’s power. These women with their hardened faces would have to step back.

  They couldn’t kill, kill and keep on killing.

  Murder was stupid. Murder was remorseless, murder was evil.

  Walking away the voice of a Derry woman shouting from the crowd haunted her.

  ‘They’ve taken our homes, sons, husbands, families. They’ll never take our dignity.’

  And she wondered what dignity was in smouldering fires, and bombs waiting at shop doors.

  Yet she realized it was their problem, not hers.

  She couldn’t comment, she couldn’t cope with it. All she knew was that her own son was among the ranks of these people now.

  27

  Bridget took a few days off work so she stayed on to accompany her about London. They visited Christopher Wren’s church in Piccadilly; they visited many Wimpy Bars and some more staid coffee shops. They even went to a ballet, Giselle.

  They were lovely days; September weighed heavily inside Susan. It was autumn and days strolled by like polite children in the parks. It was time to go. Gradually, uneasily she packed. Then one day from a bus she definitely saw Diarmaid. Looking rather lost. She got off and searched for him. There was no sign of him.

  She looked all over Oxford Street until rather bedraggled she arrived in a coffee shop and started to cry.

&
nbsp; ‘What’s wrong, dear?’

  An old lady approached her.

  Susan looked at her.

  ‘I came to England searching for my son,’ she said in a strong west- of-Ireland accent, ‘and I can’t find him.’

  ‘Listen, love. I’m sure there’s a way.’

  The woman might have been from the North; she had a Yorkshire accent.

  ‘First he was a hippie; now he’s a member of the I.R.A.’

  Susan spoke like any grief-stricken Irish woman.

  ‘It’s a phase, love. It’s a phase. My own son was in jail for rape.’

  Susan looked at her – almost frightened.

  She took the other woman’s hand.

  ‘I know the country you come from. It’s beautiful.’ Susan was talking of Durham and Yorkshire, land that was lovely, but populated with bizarre factories.

  This time it was Susan who had the voice of comfort.

  ‘Young lads can be driven to desperate things when the lives they’re leading are unfair. It’s unfair to put a child in a school where he’ll be caned. It’s unfair to put a child in a factory where he’ll lose his soul.’

  The other woman clutched her fingers. ‘How true. I never thought of it like that.

  My son has been working in a factory since he was sixteen. I shouldn’t have done that to him. He deserved more. He always loved painting. I think he’s keen on being an artist.’

  ‘Give him the chance.’

  ‘And your son?’

  ‘He doesn’t know what he wants to be. He paints, too. Or rather he makes little collages. You know, putting bits and pieces of things together.’

  The woman from the North was fascinated.

  ‘They’re not far apart then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why don’t you go and look for your son now? Make a big effort and you’ll find him. Crying will get you nowhere.’

  Susan looked at her with gratitude and dried her eyes with a handkerchief bearing a message from Our Lady of Knock on one of its borders.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ she said.

  Later that day with words of comfort ringing in her ears she returned to Endsleigh Gardens.

  There she approached Alice who’d just come in from selling a pamphlet, a shoulder bag hanging from her.

  It had never occurred to her to ask Alice if she knew where Diarmaid was living now.