White Church, Black Mountain
Page 31
*
The pre-surgery relaxant they had given him to lessen anxiety was making him woozy and morbidly pessimistic about his prospects.
Eban wished that he had written down somewhere the words he would like on his gravestone.
He remembered again the text from Psalm 91 that he had first learned in Sunday school with John Parkes.
In the white mission hall under the dark silhouette of the Black Mountain.
He that dwelleth in the shelter of the most high shall abide in the shadow of the almighty.
His eyes felt heavy but underneath the enveloping chemical blanket he could discern the adrenaline coursing through his body in expectation of the coming ordeal.
Abruptly he was aware of two figures standing by his bed.
When his failing focus revealed to him that they were not in medical uniforms, he squinted hard to make out their appearance in the half-light.
Anne Breslin and her mother moved uncertainly closer to his bedside.
“We saw you when they brought you in… through A&E,” said Anne. “They said you didn’t have anybody with you, so me and Mammy… well…”
She hesitated, seemingly uncertain as to whether this intrusion was appropriate.
“Do you need anything?”
Eban was momentarily speechless.
He coughed, clearing his throat, and pulled the bedclothes up around him a little.
He reached over for the glass of water on the bedside table, but Anne, seeing this, reached for it first and handed it to him.
Eban drank, then spoke. “But that was hours ago… have you been here all this time?”
Anne exchanged a glance with her mother and then said, “We’re here with Joe…. he’s… very bad…”
Anne reached across, and taking her mother’s hand, held it to her.
“Would you not go back up to the café, Mammy… order us both a cup of tea? I’ll be up in a wee minute.”
Mrs Breslin turned to leave, but before she did she turned back again and reaching into her handbag, produced a small crucifix.
Leaning over Eban, she pressed it to his lips whispering, “Pray to the blessed Mother for grace and deliverance.”
He felt it would be churlish not to comply, but her action had only served to further alert him to the gravity of the situation.
Mrs Breslin shuffled out, dabbing at her eyes with a hanky.
“No atheists in foxholes,” said Eban, feeling awkward and reaching for some gallows humour.
Anne didn’t respond.
“What happened to Joe?” Eban suddenly became animated. “Was it that bastard Herringshaw?”
“In a way…” she said.
Eban understood her ambiguity immediately. “Ahh, God no… he didn’t…”
Anne shook her head. “You never got to know him… if you had, you’d realise what a softy he was… how easily hurt he could be…”
“I’ve let him down,” said Eban, and he bit down on his lip. “Again…”
“No… no…” she protested. “He never would have blamed you… probably wouldn’t even blame your brother if truth be told.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Joe lived his life one day at a time, and he tried never – ever – to look back…”
She started to cry. “My God… I’m talking about him like he’s already gone.”
“How is he?”
“He took a whole stash of meds – antidepressants… blood pressure… painkillers – he has a fifty-fifty fighting chance, they say. It’s just… I don’t think he wants to fight anymore.”
She pushed her dark hair back from her face and despite the worry and sorrow in her eyes Eban saw a grace and poise in her that he’d glimpsed before, on the night she had taken pity on him for the first time.
“Mammy doesn’t know about you… I just explained that you’re somebody who knew Joe a long time ago.”
“Thank you.”
“He was never the same… what they did to him… he couldn’t have weans of his own, you know, and his girlfriend Delores… well, you couldn’t expect her to… the way he was. And then Molly, and seeing Herringshaw again… it’s just a pity, that’s all.”
“And he wasn’t bitter?” asked Eban, disbelievingly.
“Our Joe” – she smiled with affection – “didn’t have a bitter bone in his body.”
“Did he ever… talk about it… what happened… that night, I mean?”
“Never – well, not to me anyway. But Mammy said he wasn’t himself, you know… after it, I mean. It must have been hard – he was so young; his whole young life… his manhood taken away…”
Anne could see that Eban was deeply affected by what she was saying, and quickly regretted saying it.
But having no-one herself to confide in, to articulate her feelings, a great wave of sorrow rose up in her and she could not help herself.
“It’s just… I just think he wanted to give up, you know? He was just tired, God love him, and now… now I’m frightened that they’re going to ask me to decide whether to switch off his machine or not…” She looked distraught. “I shouldn’t have to decide something like that…”
Anne looked like she might collapse under the weight of it and lose herself in a torrent of anguish. She gulped back tears twice with deep inhalations of breath, then somehow she pulled herself back from the brink.
Eban reached out and took her hand.
It seemed the right thing to do.
It felt delicate, soft and cool.
She did not pull away.
“Your mother… do you think she’d want to know? Would she want them caught and punished?”
Anne seemed to think about this for a moment. “So much suffering… so much death… no, no, it’s in the past. It won’t change anything, or give him back the years he lost. I know she forgives.”
“But how can you be sure? Why would she do that… why would Joe… why would any of us?”
Anne looked at him, and furrowing her brow, allowed herself a weak smile.
“Sure, to keep Jesus in his glory and the saints rejoicing.”
She pressed his hand between both of her own, laid it gently back on his chest, before turning from him and walking slowly from the ward.
Eban was overwhelmed by the strength of emotion, the unexpected surge of affection he felt toward her.
*
When they arrived to take him to theatre sometime after that, he was ready.
One of the porters wheeling his trolley spoke of the breaking news story on morning radio.
Of how the Attorney General was talking complete amnesty for all past crimes.
A move that would render Alex and Fish, Tootsie and Sledger, Anto and all those involved in terrorist and sectarian crime over all the years exempt from prosecution.
The porter told the nurse it was all about ‘making peace with the past’.
But where would he find his peace? He had carried around his guilt and his frustration for a lifetime, and for what?
No-one cares about the victims, the families, the dead and those left behind them, he thought. Their heartbreak, their long, slow, lonely creep toward the end… without their loved ones…
They were made to feel like the ghosts at the peace.
Expected to keep quiet for the sake of the next generation.
For the sake of a future they could not share in.
An awkward, tragic postscript that belonged to the newsreels and libraries.
To be consigned there and forgotten save for empty platitudes and memorial Sundays in draughty churches.
*
When the smiling anaesthetist leaned over Eban’s scrubbed and prepped body, he asked him to count backwards from ten. The anaesthetic pressed down upon him in what felt like a relentless wave of shimmering chemical subjugation.
A calm voice in his head told him that he was about to die for some short while.
But unlike Elvis, he would never leave the building.
Mome
ntarily, a brief eddy of recent and long passed memories bled together.
But no corridor of light.
No celestial waiting room for him.
Just the clunk and hiss of pumps and tubes.
Pushing thin red lines down drip, up catheter.
Nothingness.
Not fear.
Nor regret.
Nor suffering.
Nor loss
Just void.
Until returning, dulled and sore, perhaps to touch her hand and see her face again.
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