by John Lynch
‘Gabriel?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you know where you are?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me.’
‘A hospital.’
‘Good. Do you know why?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Because…’
‘Go on. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’
‘Because I’ve been unwell…’
They wake me all the time now. In the hours since I’ve spoken they keep checking that I am still with them, that I am still connected to the world. I don’t mind so much, it’s like learning to walk again, familiar but at the same time strange.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Terrible.’
‘I can believe it. You were in some state when you arrived…’
‘Yes…’
‘Do you need anything?’
‘I’m thirsty…’
‘Bring our guest some water.’
I blink as my eyes get accustomed to the light. I was in a deep sleep and am always groggy from the drugs they are still forcing down my neck.
‘You’re going to feel very strange for a while. But it’s important that you trust us.’
‘Yes…’
‘I need to ask you some questions.’
‘Okay.’
‘Let’s start with your name.’
‘Gabriel O’Rourke.’
‘Where were you born?’
‘Newry…County Down…’
‘When?’
‘August 1961…’
‘Good man.’
‘And do you have any idea why you would be in a place like this?’
‘Because I fell…’
‘You fell.’
‘Yes, I fell.’
Wildflowers
Somewhere I knew that I missed him and that I still do, not the man he was but the man I saw glimpses of, the tender broken man who flickered into being sometimes like a ghost shimmering in the corner of a forgotten room. I missed the pact that held us together. I loathed myself for feeling this way. He was not a father, I tell myself, he was a vulture preying on my youth, feeding on the carcasses of my dreams. He took my heart and blackened it on the fires that were consuming him. I think of my mother and the kingdom she built in the dark corners of her life, the shining city filled with the love of God and the smiles and indulgences of dead saints. I think of the look that passed across her face when she spoke of the gift that she had been given, how she could look into other people’s hearts and see the heavy cargo of sins that they bore and the secrets they harboured. Yet she was blind to the horror in her own kitchen, oblivious to the devil sitting in her living room, his feet up, a beer in one hand and a betting slip in the other.
I knew that I would fight him all my life even beyond his death. I realised it at a very early age when his eyes found mine and they told me everything I needed to know. So when we buried him he became more alive than he had ever been. My sister never spoke of him after he died, she would smile blankly or deflect the conversation in some way if I ever brought him up. We never went to the grave, not even my mother. We discovered years later that Petey had gone every Sunday after Mass and placed a bunch of wildflowers on it. Maybe he felt responsible for his death, or maybe guilt for the feelings he had for our mother. Vincey, one of the gravediggers, told us about Petey’s visits years later when we laid our mother to rest. He said that Petey would walk the borders of the grave and warily greet my father as if at any moment he might leap out from the dirt and attack him. He would tell my father how everyone was, and eventually on the fourth or fifth visit he told the grave that he loved our mother.
Vincey said that it was quite the weekly event for him and his colleagues, that they would watch from behind a neigh-bouring gravestone as Petey would wring his hands and bring his handkerchief out from his jacket pocket and dab his balding head. Vincey said the look of fear on his face was comical and they could see the faint shake of his leg through his trousers, like a dog taking a piss, he said.
‘What kind of things did he say?’ I asked him.
‘Oh you know…What a bloody disaster, Johnny. Terrible. Terrible. Not what any of us wanted at all. Rest assured I’ll look after her. Rest assured that’s my promise to you. God bless you, Johnny. God bless you.’
Then he would kneel and bend his head in prayer. Sometimes either Vincey or one of his mates would throw a small piece of gravel, pinging it off another headstone and startle him.
‘You would have thought that hell was opening its gates the look of fucking terror on his face.’
I felt sorry for Petey, I always did. He was a child trapped in a builder’s body, ill-equipped for the world that had bred men like my father. He loved my mother, of that there was no doubt, and of course Jesus. He told me that he had a heart with room enough for everyone. I know now that when a man says that he is lonely, that life passes through him like the wind through an abandoned bus shelter in the depths of winter. He had never married, it was our mother’s fault, he used to joke later, and somewhere it was true, he had saved himself for her. He had followed her to the hem of our Lord’s gown; he had worshipped not only God but the God he found in her.
He made a real effort with me when my father passed away, but it was too late, I had already entered late adolescence and I had begun to run with a crowd of boys who wanted to tear down the world that had been built by people like Petey. I began to steal from him, taking money from his wallet whenever he was in our house, usually when he was praying in the front room with my mother and some of the neighbours. I would ask him for money when he came out from his prayers, invariably he would say sure and a smile would crease his large face. I would watch with a quiet satisfaction as he opened his wallet and stared for a moment at his money.
‘It’s okay, Petey, if you don’t have enough…’
‘No…No…I was sure there was another…’
‘What?’
‘Fiver in there…Strange…’
Then he would look at me, and I could see what he was thinking. He would grimace and shake his head. I knew he suspected me, but I didn’t care, in a second the thought would leave him. He was too good-natured, too trusting to follow the suspicion through.
‘Listen. If it’s a problem…’ I would say.
‘No…No…Here…Here…I’d be insulted if you didn’t…’
So he would stand there holding out a fiver and I would make a gesture as if to say you’re too generous and then snatch my second note from him.
‘Thanks, Petey,’ I would say and I’d run from the house ten pounds richer, laughing at the thick-headed gullibility of the man standing in the doorway behind me. It was no wonder that he believed in God with such a passion, a man like that would believe in anything.
The Kiss that Never Was
One day he left and never came back. He said goodbye as usual after the healing school had held its afternoon session and walked out into the June sunshine telling us that he would be there as usual tomorrow for his Saturday afternoon cup of tea. But he never returned. My mother was frantic with worry for the first few days. She had come to depend on him. After a week of fretting she sent me to his house to find out what had happened to him. I remember knowing that it was pointless. Both my sister and I had talked about it and there was something about the way he walked down the pathway of our house the week before that told us he was done with us as a family. Ciara said that he seemed to take in every single flower with his gaze as he moved towards the gate. When he reached it he stopped and took in the view of the town below and the roll of the hills leading to it. Then he softly shook his head, stood for a second and then continued on his way without looking back. So as I stood on the small lane that led to his small bungalow a week or so later somewhere I knew that he was gone. The shutters and boarded door on his house confirmed it. I knocked for a while on the front door more in hope than anything else but silence was all that greeted me. I walked the
short distance across the fields to his neighbour Sam Riley’s house and waited as I heard him shuffle his way to the door to greet me.
‘Young O’Rourke.’
‘Sam.’
‘What has you in these parts?’
‘I was looking for Petey.’
‘Ah. You’ll be a long time looking, son.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s gone. Upped and gone.’
‘Right. Where?’
‘Blowed if I know, son.’
‘Mum’s worried.’
‘Aye. They were tight enough your Mammy and he.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he not say anything?’
‘No. Not a word, Sam.’
‘Well, son. He kept himself to himself did Petey. He had God and that was friend enough for him, I suppose. We were never that close. We’d chew things over now and then but that was it. So one day he was there and the next he wasn’t. I didn’t pay it no heed. This country’s full of people who have left.’
‘Right,’ I said trying not to laugh.
‘Is there something tickling you, son?’
‘No, Sam. No.’
‘If he didn’t say anything to your mammy then I would take a guess that he didn’t want any bugger to know what he was doing or where he was going, if you get me?’
‘I get you, Sam.’
Sam was a timid man who spent his days hoping that life wouldn’t notice him. Sometimes he stayed in his house for weeks at a time peering out of his grubby windows, waiting until the courage to venture out came back to him. It gave him a distracted air as if he was not quite connected to the cut and thrust of the world around him. He had never married, didn’t have any pets, he just walked the floors of his house day after day and that was universe enough for him, thank you very much, he would say.
‘He could be anywhere, the bugger…England…the States…Scotland…He has folks there, I think. Sorry, son, I’m fuck all use to you.’
‘Don’t worry, Sam…I’ll tell Mum.’
‘Right you be…’
When I told my mother about the boarded house and what Sam had said, she just looked at me for a moment and then nodded that she had heard me and that I should go about my business. I left the room thinking that somewhere it had been no big surprise to her. It was only years later when my sister and I were tending to her in the final broken days of her life that we got some inkling as to why he had left.
One night we were both getting her ready for bed, ignoring her childish protests as we tried to get her to swing her legs up and underneath the bedcovers. We had spent minutes at this cajoling her, but she just sat there, her feet planted firmly on the floor, her lips pursed tight. At one point I leaned over her, my face close to hers to implore her to co-operate. As I did she turned her head from me and said: ‘We’ve been through this a hundred times, Petey Macken, a no is no.’
I remember freezing where I was, my body bent, my lips inches from hers.
‘What, Mammy?’
‘I said we’ve been through this.’
‘Through what?’
‘This kissing business.’
‘What kissing business?’
‘You’re a good man. A sweet good man, Peter. But I don’t think of you that way. I’m sorry, there was always one man for me. And God made him flawed. I tried when he passed. I tried to get rid of him. You know that. To say that was that. We move on. But you see I married him. In heaven’s eyes we were bound and there’s no in-between in the matter. So I’m wed and that is something you must respect. So put those lips of yours away.’
I remember looking into her eyes and for a second I thought that I saw the round baldness of Petey’s head reflected there. I looked at my sister and smiled. So now we knew. All those years ago he had made one more forlorn attempt to stake a claim in my mother’s heart and she had refused him as she had always done. It was one kiss too far for Petey and for him life without her was preferable to life as her companion, aching for something that she couldn’t or wouldn’t give him. Often after he had left I would look at my mother and see that she had regretted how tough she had been with him. Life was long and for someone like her there were many hours to fill, which from then on she would have to do on her own. We never heard of him again. I missed him, and no longer blamed him for what had happened to my father and I knew that my sister felt the same. He was a kind man and that was in short supply in our house.
Dying Egypt, Dying
I’m talking to them about a poem. I know that some of them couldn’t give a toss. I’m telling them how important it is to see life as a series of moments, that they come and go like swifts skirting the gable of a house. I tell them that a great poem can distil a moment, that it can freeze it in its tracks like an ancient mosquito forever caught in amber. I am sweating. It smells of cheap whiskey. I took a few belts this morning to give some kick to my day. It is Wednesday, the worst day of the week, neither the beginning nor the end. I have just read the poem out loud and tried to ignore the snorts of boredom I hear from one or two of my students. It is Louis MacNeice’s ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’. And it never fails to stir something in me. I think about the scarred ground of my marriage and the loathing that I see rising in my wife’s eyes whenever I try to speak to her.
I begin the poem again; I know that one or two of the boys look to each other as I do and snigger. I read it at my wedding many years before; I had been too drunk to do it justice, tripping over its words and its fine sentiments. I remember how my wife had lowered her head with mild embarrassment as I began then stopped and started again. I take a deep breath and wish myself back to that day when I stood beside her, and our families looked our way. I start. I see the food on the tables before us, the cuts of roast lamb and the glint of the fine wines in their glasses. This time I will get it right. I see my mother, how she dabs her eyes with one of the table napkins. I know that she is pleased, content that I have found someone to take care of me. I will no longer have to, she had told me. My sister is beside her, now and then placing her hand reassuringly on her arm.
The musicians are milling around the makeshift bar waiting for the speeches to finish. I had a drink with them earlier, well more than one. They are good guys and joke with me that maybe I should slow down as perhaps I wouldn’t be able to get it up that night. Don’t you worry yourself about that, I tell them. I remember how the light moved through the grand hall where the reception was being held, how it caught the small pieces of dust in the air. I remember thinking for a moment that maybe there was a God after all, but the thought doesn’t last long, it slips away and I know that it will be a while before it surfaces once more. This time I think I will savour each word, I will turn it on my tongue and fashion it into life. The poem will come to life in my mouth and float into the air like the soft beating of angels’ wings. I see again the way you looked at me; there was love in your eyes, but also a small fear that had begun to live in the corner of your gaze. This time I will remove that fear, I will crush it in my hand like a small egg. I will reach the highest peak of your heart, I will climb there on the ladder of the fine words that I am about to speak. My finger is shaking as it moves across the lines of the poem.
‘Sir, sir…’
At first I don’t hear him, but when I do, I wonder why he is at the wedding, none of my pupils were invited. I look down at him and see Pettigrew looking at me as if I had taken leave of my senses. I decide to ignore him.
‘The sunlight on the garden, Hardens and grows cold…’
‘Sir, please, sir…’
‘We cannot cage the minute, Within its nets of gold…’
‘Sir…’
‘When all is told, We cannot beg for pardon…’
‘Sir, sir…’
I no longer see the guests, or my wife as her hand sought mine when I began to read. I don’t see the fine wines in their crystal glasses. I am back in the shabby classroom. The students are all gathered in the doorway and they are
sniggering. In their midst stands Boyle the principal. He is looking at me, there is coldness in his gaze. Pettigrew is tugging at my sleeve. I look at him; there are tears in his eyes.
‘Sir, sir, the bell for the end of the class went nearly ten minutes ago.’
Boyle steps forward and comes close to me. He sniffs my breath and then turns on his heel.
‘Go home, O’Rourke. I will call you when I want to see you. The rest of you boys go to your next class. Now.’
Snow
We find her in the snow. She is kneeling. Her hands are clasped. She has been there all night. Her body is stiff and angular. Her face is contorted in a final attempt at prayer. She looks like a statue guarding the entrance to a vast white land, one of frost and death. She is no longer the woman I grew up with, the one who steered and prodded us into God’s judging face. I think of the last time I saw her when she spoke of angels in the television. In a way she looks beautiful, the last moment of her hard life caught in ice, like a sculpture sent by God’s own hand. She must have wandered outside searching the darkness for the truth she always knew lay just beyond her reach. I stifle a cry. The countryside seems reborn; powder-fresh with new snow, as if a wide blank page had been laid across the blackness of our lives, telling us it was time to start anew. In its centre was the kneeling shape of our mother, the only remnant, the last gateway to the long fear-filled hours of our childhood. She died as she lived, prayers rushing from her lips like water streaming around a rock in a river. Two crows skirt the blue of the sky, their wings beating out a mournful pulse, their sharp caws mocking any grief that is beginning in our hearts.
My sister looks at me, neither of us knows what to do except stare at the finality of what is before us. Somewhere I wished that the land around us could stay like this, all its passions and fever held suspended in this architecture of ice and frost, everything hidden and stored in this white cargo of snow. It is too cold to cry; at least that’s what I tell myself. I think of the hours I spent at her side, hoping for the word to fall from her mouth, the one that would release me. It never came, and I know now that I was looking in the wrong place. A wind stirs in the branches of the trees that stand like sentries around her body, their skeletal bodies longing for summer.
