A Slanting of the Sun

by Donal Ryan

  A long man shouting short sentences burst in here this morning. He had men to pay. Kids to feed. He wanted what was owed to him. I felt sad for him. I told him I knew how he felt. I tried to placate him but he wouldn’t stop shouting so I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and alternated a low hum with a loud lalalalalalala. When I opened my eyes again he was sitting silent and wide-eyed, unblinking and red. He was a rugby player once, I’m fairly sure. Thickly handsome. A backward forward. Jesus, he said, and shook his head, and hulked away. He left some papers on my desk. I haven’t touched them yet. I admonished Agata for letting him in. Sorry, she said. She’s very beautiful and so I forgave her. I forgive you, I told her. Oh, okay, she said, and rolled her ice-blue eyes away from me, towards heaven, and back to her magazine.

  Some manner of navvy rolled in an hour or so ago. I spotted him as he skidded to a stop, lengthways across two wheelchair spaces. DENIS O’SULLIVAN BUILDING CONTRACTOR it said on the side of his van. I rang down to Agata and said under no circumstances was she to buzz him in. I am not a stupid, she said. I watched through my privacy glass as he stood roaring at the door, stabbing the buzzer. Eventually he seemed to tire and crumple; his chin dropped chestward and he was silent and still except for a slow, rhythmic shaking of his head and a corresponding hunching and dropping of his broad shoulders. He pulled the windscreen wipers from a Mercedes that he must have supposed was mine before he left. I don’t know whose it really is. One of those chaps from the auditors next door, I suppose. A pair of bored and oily men came to the house for my car weeks ago. They attached a hook and chain to it and dragged it onto their truck-bed. Olive cried and hid from the neighbours. I’ve been driving her Micra since. It’s a slow and uncomplicated little thing. Just like Olive.

  Another breaking voice on the phone. Something about the apartments we were building. Who’s we? Me and my echo. Me and my impatient ghost. I am a director of seven companies. I can’t remember all their names. Workers protesting, occupying the sites. Union goons on colliding warpaths. Subcontractors suing. All the pies my fingers were in are stale and crumbling. But still my fingers won’t come out. Something else about the horse. Lame, or dead. Olive’s voice on the phone, tear-strangled and shrill. Something else about our daughter, or our son, or a credit limit reached, or breached, or rescinded. Agata swept in and brought clarity with her. She hasn’t smiled at me in weeks. There’s a light I can move towards: a smile from her. I took four folded fifties from my wallet for her weekly ‘expenses’ and watched her perfect closed face as I handed them to her and she glanced at them and secreted them fluidly in some dark delicious fold. I ache to follow the money in there, to hide in the hills and valleys of her. Busy, busy, she said. Yes, I agreed, happily abetting her lie. She pierced me with a sigh and left, taking a random folder with her.

  Pyrite, someone was saying just then. I’m not sure exactly when. Blocks crumbling like Weetabix. Class action. There was something on the radio about this the other day but Olive’s stereo emits mostly static since she left her aerial up in the carwash. Thank God, I thought, we escaped that one, at least. Now here it is, joining with the others at the mouth of my cave. A pack of red-eyed fang-bared beasts, sensing my weakening, slavering, waiting for my fire to die so that they can enter and devour me flesh and bone. Agata will tend the flames and hold them at bay. Until the firing runs out. I haven’t many fifties left.

  A cave with Agata. Me in a bearskin, she in her bare skin. My head spins as my blood is summoned to its most base and necessary duty. I should eat. Olive hands me something in the mornings as I leave, pungent and seed-covered, casketed in Tupperware. I thank her and I kiss her cold cheek and I empty the box into the dog before I drive away. If Olive died this day I’d cash her in and run. I’d stop in Paris on the way east and show Agata the Place de la Concorde. I’d kiss her by that phallic rune that was heaved there from some eastern place; I’d ask her to say that she loved me. That lie from her lips would be sweeter than any everyday truth.

  My man in Bangladesh is still recruiting happily. If he gets me twenty more that’s sixty grand, enough to float my canoe downriver from this creek. We know all about your agent, the plastic-shoed fellow from earlier in the week said. Your agent is a visa salesman, he said. That’s defamatory, I replied. Oh, he said, is it? I thought defamation required an absence of truth? And he slammed an A4 page of foreign words on my desk and he raised his grisly mono-brow and smiled. I’ve never seen that before, I told him, and he told me that I was not obliged to say anything and so I said nothing except Get new fucking shoes. His biro had pissed itself all over his shirt by then and he still hadn’t noticed. But the shoes were the worst of all.

  A noise from across the room, near the filing cabinet. Agata let the cleaner in, then. How long ago, I wonder. A different one comes each time. Twice a week, I’m nearly sure. A man with a ratty face and hooded eyes undercut the last crowd by fifteen per cent. How is that possible? I asked him. Oh, he said, there’s loads of ways, all legal and all, like, of getting round all a them things that makes business impossible to do. His breath stank of dead things. Sure you know yourself, he said. I do, I do, I agreed pleasantly from behind my left hand, which was clamped across my nose and mouth. He didn’t seem to notice; he only had eyes for my right hand, which was signing his little contract.

  The cleaner has an Aztec cast to her features. She’s young, brimming, strong-legged and squat. Shapely rump, though, and a tight black skirt. Has she an indolent husband, I wonder, in a pitiless favela, chewing the shoots of some opiate plant in a shanty’s lee, awaiting her airmailed wages? So he can swagger and swan and squander the price of her labour in some flyblown hooch-dive. Has she babies left behind, in the care of other mothers? The ache in her, the sorrow in her brown eyes. She has an extraordinary chest. Up the walls, she says, looking nervously at me, smiling into silence, as she upends my wastepaper basket into her refuse bag. A sweet and guileless affectation, projecting the vernacular of here onto that of there, a spoken palimpsest.

  Olive will die soon enough. All of her womenfolk were smote early, her mother and aunts and sisters, by diseases that seem to prey on slight and nervous women. They all succumbed quietly, obligingly, and left their men to their horses and golf and secretaries. I’ll miss her shuffling presence when she’s gone. My chiselling indifference eroded her. I never loved her enough. I don’t know if I loved her at all, or how I’d know, at this remove. I can’t remember how I was then, when I was young. I could have another life as long again as this one’s been. I’ll have to become something to which squalor is suited. A writer, maybe, or a painter, sleeping on an ancient ornate bed in the corner of a wide and open garret, dissected in the day by sunbeams in which fiery dust-motes dance. Jars upon jars of brushes in water, tubes and charcoal and bottles and palettes and canvases covered in dashes and daubs to which others can ascribe meaning. Or reams of paper covered in jostling words, mugs of pens and chewed pencils, an ancient Underwood set before a sunlit wall on a table of oak, chipped and stained.

  I gave a man with dark blue eyes a cheque one day for a share in a seven-star hotel on a heart-shaped island in a shimmering silvery inland sea. He smiled at me and shook my hand and his footsteps rang loud on the floor as he left. Cloven feet, I thought, and laughed to myself, and laughed and laughed. Agata drank champagne with me that afternoon and early evening and sat for a while on my lap. I went home in a taxi, with a light head and leaden balls. The island sank and all the things upon it were drowned and the souls who could not strike for shore were lost. I never again saw that blue-eyed man but I felt his presence once or twice behind me, and turned and there was no one there.

  My father was always happy to see me. Ah, there you are, he’d say, and smile, as if we had been in one another’s company all along, filling time in some gentle, pleasant way, and had been momentarily separated. He had a weakness one day and he fell on the street and was taken by force to a hospital where he was poked and scanned and told he was dy
ing. Too much of the good life, he said. Isn’t it grand all the same, he said, to be dying from a good life, and not from a bad life? Aren’t I as lucky as bedamned? And he drove to Coonagh Cross and checked and filled and primed his Cessna and arced that sparrow heavenward and pulled back hard on the throttle and jammed it open. He’d have laughed into the blue and passed into blackness before the rivets gave. I wouldn’t have the guts for that. But nor have I the guts for this.

  How long has Agata been standing at the open office door, I wonder, with that look of disgust on her face? How long have my tears been turning my visitors’ documents to pulp? How long has the cleaner been standing beside my chair, shushing me softly, her warm hand on mine?

  And to a dot it will return, laden with the weight of everything that ever was.

  Physiotherapy

  I SQUEEZE THE rubber ball three times and raise my arm so that my left hand meets his right and he always seems to smile as he takes the ball from me and grips it softly and I nod three times at him in time with his three squeezes. He reaches across himself with his good left arm and takes the ball from himself and repeats the exercise and I take it in my right and so on and so on and so on. The physiotherapist gave us a long-handled stick with a netted scoop at its end to retrieve the ball when we drop it the way we wouldn’t be hauling ourselves up and out of our chairs and exhausting ourselves before we have our exercises done. Why don’t you just give us a square ball the way it won’t roll, I said to him, and he got a bit sour I think, and muttered something about the bones of our hands or some such. He reminded me of a nephew of mine I haven’t seen for a long time. A curly-headed lad, long in the back and longer in the face, my sister Noreen’s boy, gone off to London or somewhere but years and years. A lot of them get lost out foreign, they don’t come back themselves.

  We were married at twenty, Pierse and me. He was older by a week exactly. I wore a simple white dress my mother made for me, and he wore a navy suit borrowed from his father’s brother who was about his size. We had our wedding breakfast inside in O’Meara’s Hotel and only our families were there and my friend Theresa who was maid-of-honour and his friend Mossy who was best man. We went for a week to Galway on our honeymoon in a Volkswagen Beetle lent to us by the manager of the co-op, who was a friend of Pierse’s father. Pierse held my hand every minute of every day, hardly letting me go even while we ate. I sat on his lap in our narrow suite and he hugged me fiercely, and he kissed my mouth and face and eyes. We adventured up and down narrow streets and watched fishermen on the quays as they inspected their nets in the mornings and hauled their catches in the evenings and Pierse tried a few words of Irish out on a chap one day and the chap only smiled and didn’t answer and Pierse smiled into the quayside stench and reddened so deeply I thought he’d burst.

  Pierse got into auctioneering through another friend of his father’s and he quickly gained a reputation for thoroughness and honesty and there was never a trace of sneakiness that was ever known about him, and people could see that in the first few instants of knowing him. He grew inches at an auction; it was the only place that time he seemed to fit, it was as though his gavel protected him from embarrassment, as though his practised ululations, inscrutable to me, threw up a wall of strength around him. Men as seemingly straight and quiet in their ways as him stood watching, nodding their bids, hardly seeming to care about the outcome. Pierse spoke slowly and clearly to potential buyers of houses, pointing out where work needed to be done, where things could be improved. He couldn’t do the hard sell, he couldn’t stretch the truth. Eventually there was a falling-out and he came home one evening and sat after dinner for longer than he usually did and our son looked with concern at him as he excused himself and went looking for his hurley and ball and he told me after long minutes that he wouldn’t be going back to Woodley and Woodley as there were underhand dealings going on and he couldn’t be a part of them. He started to buy old rundown houses and renovate them and sell them for an honest profit and he made good money and seemed happy with his work, but it never made him as tall as he used to seem at his lectern, sweeping his gaze, am-bidding, gavel in hand.

  I wonder what he thinks about all the day long. I should know, I suppose, or would, if I was any kind of a wife. Silence always suited him. That his silence now has been forced upon him by sickness hardly matters. I think a lot about the day he stole into the house through the back porch door and a present in his hand for me of a gold necklace with a heart on it and a diamond set in its centre and I sitting in the dining room at the table with James and his hand on mine and he gripping my fingers so tightly his knuckles were white. And a fool could know what was happening, what had happened, what had been about to happen. And he only punished me for that with silence. He left himself out through the front door and went down the avenue to his car that he had parked down there away from the house the way I wouldn’t hear him coming in and he could surprise me, back early from his trip to the north, and the necklace boxed and bowed and held out before him like a thing being taken altarward in an offertory procession and the thorns of the rosebush opened the skin of my hand as I retrieved it from where he’d flung it and the salt of my tears seared in the tiny wounds.

  I finished it with James that day and never took up with another man again. Pierse ended his self-imposed exile from our bed after a few weeks but he got into the habit of staying up watching television at night, and drinking, never very much, but enough so that he’d sleep sedated and the smell of it would drift from his breath across to me. He was never bothered by the silence between us, only the loudness, when I’d burst out with something, to try to goad him, to wound him, to make him react in some way so that I could say There’s the long and the short of it, there’s what he feels; now I can know what I need to do to repay. But all debts are written off eventually, when it’s clear no payment will ever be made, that restitution isn’t possible and everything is then reset to nought.

  Pierse took to holding my hand daily again after our son died. As though to stop the shaking in himself, he gripped me, and took both my hands in his, and squeezed his eyes closed and bared his teeth and his breaths would rush and heave from him like silent screams. He’d helped him buy his ticket to Australia; he’d even contacted some people he knew over there to arrange a few weeks or maybe months of work for him on building sites, and he’d driven him to the airport and hugged him awkwardly but tightly at the departure gate and showed no sign of letting go until Stephen pulled back gently laughing from him. He asked me did I want to stop somewhere for a bit to eat on the way home and I said yes and we stopped in Limerick and in a corner table of a darkened restaurant he’d sat in front of a plate of untouched food and said Christ, Maud, I think I’m after making an awful mistake. Letting him off like that. I should have persuaded him to stay here and work away with me. And not three weeks later our telephone rang in the early hours and he took my hand as we walked up the hall from our bedroom and a voice half a world away told us our Stephen was gone, scaffolding had collapsed under him and he had been killed.

  There are days when it seems as though they are the only three things to ever have happened. I got married, I had a love affair, my son was killed. Someone now, some expert in the ways of human minds, looking from a cold distance at me and at the way I carried on, would say I was suffering then from some kind of depression or disorder or some such nonsense. But James stole into my life smiling, and the sight of him, his presence in a room, caused the air to thicken, my mind to slow, my heart to quicken. I don’t understand fully still to this day what came over me, or out of me, or what kind of a spell he cast on me, but I nearly drowned myself in foolishness and heat. The noise of those days, the burning joy, the wildness. He was a young widower; his wife had haemorrhaged in childbirth, his daughter was born to sadness and he told me these things in a soft voice, and he told me how he loved to talk to me, how he loved to look at my eyes, how he loved me. He kissed me and I lost my reason. When the church roof was mended and
the fundraising committee we co-chaired was disbanded he came to our house and sat in the dining room and gripped this hand so hard it pained me and he asked me to come away with him and his teenaged daughter to England, and to bring little Stephen with me, and I nearly said yes until some gentle draught Pierse created in his effort to surprise me caused me to turn my head and see him there, at that doorway, with his gift for me on the palm of his trembling hand.

  We’re going well now, with our ball. The squeezing and passing from left hand to right hand to partner, and the wait to take it back, have fallen to an easy rhythm. Our knees are almost touching, I can feel the warmth of him. A strange, fortunate symmetry, that his left side was struck and my right, his within six months of mine. Mini-strokes, the doctors said. There’ll be more, as likely as not. Tremors before the earthquakes. The ball falls from his hand; he sucks his teeth in crossness at himself. He looks at me, he stretches out his arm. He grips my hand and pulls lightly and I use the last of my fleeing strength to cross the space between us and turn myself so that I’m sitting on his lap. My necklace swings outwards, the little heart describes an arc and settles again on my chest. I’m seventy-seven and I’m twenty, my child is dead and he hasn’t yet been born, there’s a thickening of the air about me again in this day room, in this honeymoon suite, and my heart is slowing and my mind is quickening and the arms are tight around me and the breath and tears are on my face of the man I pledged to God to love and honour all my days.