Falling out of Heaven

by John Lynch

  ‘You’re…Mrs…’

  ‘You calling me a liar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good, because there’s nothing like a disagreement to dull a romance.’

  As she says this she places her hand on my thigh and lets her fingers do a little dance there.

  ‘I’m lonely, son. So lonely. Sometimes I can’t breathe…I’m that on my own. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘I know you do. It’s in your eyes just like it’s in mine. They don’t fucking understand us. There’s fuck-all talent in this dump…Well nearly fuck-all…’

  As she says this she looks at me and she licks her lips, just like the femmes fatales in those black-and-white films that I watched as a child.

  ‘A little bird told me that you’ve been talking to that fat slob Mrs Johnson.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘She’s a liar.’ She leans in as she says this, her head coming in close to mine; again I smell the heavy odour of cheap face cream.

  ‘She spreads rumours about me. None of them are true.’

  I watch as she tilts her head away from me and looks up at the sky. She whistles the piece of a tune that I can’t quite place. It takes a moment, at first my brain doesn’t want to believe it, but there is no mistaking the strong scent of alcohol. It seeps into my nostrils, into my thinking. I realise that she has hit the bottle. Instinctively I pull away from her, moving to stand to put some distance between her and me.

  ‘Where are you going?’ As she asks me she puts her arm across me, as if I was a distracted child about to cross a busy street.

  ‘Listen…’ I say.

  ‘You know something?’ Her eyes are wide as they look into mine and her breath comes in slow heavy bursts. ‘I could fuck you dry.’

  They found her two hours later in the small wood beside the treatment centre. She was singing, a soft song, the kind that you sing to a child who is afraid of the dark. She was topless and her hair had lost its pins and its ties. She tried to run from them but she was too heavy and too drunk. Someone had sneaked in the booze for her, one of her friends who didn’t believe her problem was alcohol. She left two days later as Mrs Johnson, back to her prim and organised self. I was sorry. I had never got to meet Angelina the princess. Three days after that she was dead. Sleeping pills and vodka came and took her loneliness from her.

  Light and Stone

  I am with Thaddeus. I have softened towards him. Sitting beside him in the grey overcoat of a November day I feel warm despite the cold. He has been keeping his eye on me more and more, especially since our talk with my sister. He knows it can’t have been easy for me to sit there and take what she had to say. He is as immaculately dressed as ever and now and then leans forward to straighten the crease in his suit trousers, smiling at me as he does.

  ‘How long are you sober now?’ he asks me.

  ‘I don’t know…A couple of weeks…’

  ‘Right. You know it’s important that you remember…We spend so much of our lives trying to forget.’

  ‘I suppose…’

  ‘What’s the longest you were ever sober?’

  ‘A few days…maybe a week…Something like that…’

  ‘So this is by far the longest you’ve been without a drink.’

  ‘Yes…Yes, I suppose you’re right…’

  ‘You know, you’re still hedging.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your bets. Hedging your bets.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He sits up and begins to mimic me, hunching his shoulders and saying, ‘I don’t know.’ And, ‘I suppose so.’ I look at him and nod.

  ‘You know we could sit here forever letting each other off…Shrugging our fucking shoulders and saying maybe and perhaps until the world goes up in flames. It’s time to think about being strong.’

  ‘Right…’

  ‘We had someone leave here the other day. And three days later she was found in a cold bath, dead…This illness lives off I don’t knows and supposes…’

  I don’t reply but look away across the garden we are sitting in and see the bench that Cassie and I sat on only days before. It was hard to believe she was dead. It didn’t make any sense. I know what he’s trying to do; he wants to put the fear of God into me, and I no longer have the same cynicism. I know that it has begun to shatter. I look at the mist that lies in pockets in the wood beside us and imagine Cassie in there, her naked torso stained with sweat and dew, her eyes focused on a faraway land where all her pain would fade. I think of how insanity had conquered my thinking too, how I ended up crawling around in the filth of what the rest of humanity threw away.

  ‘My wife did exactly what your wife did to you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She sectioned me. Just like yours.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Nineteen years and five months ago…Well, let me see, five months on Saturday…Not a day doesn’t go by but I don’t think about it…but that I don’t taste it…You know, here…’

  He gestures to his heart and then places his hand over mine.

  ‘And that’s where you need to taste it too…’

  He gets up gently pulling the back of his jacket down, and then runs his hand across his face and glances up at the sky.

  ‘You never know, there might be sunlight yet.’

  Buried Alive

  ‘Describe him for me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘There’s no such thing.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Take a breath and describe him…Tell me what he’s doing…Go on…’

  ‘Please…Please…’

  ‘Come on…You’re doing really well…’

  ‘It’s too difficult…’

  ‘If it wasn’t difficult…it wouldn’t be rewarding…’

  Everyone is looking at me. It seems as if I have been sitting in this chair in the centre of the room for a day, but I know that it’s only been minutes. The session is called Trauma, and one by one we are being asked to come up and sit in front of our peers and relive a moment from our childhood. Our facilitator is called Tanya. She has biceps almost as big as mine and a short spiky hairstyle. She is tough, that’s what she wants us to think at least. She has seen many things and been many people, just like you, she said, pointing at all of us as she arrived to take the class. It is a week since Clive left and I have only a couple of weeks to go. I am apprehensive about what will happen to me when I leave, about the first days without the walls of this treatment centre to hide me from the world.

  ‘What is trauma?’ Tanya had asked as she stood in the centre of the room when she first arrived. ‘Does anyone know?’

  ‘It’s pain…isn’t it? Someone said.’

  ‘Yes…Yes…But more than that…Something else…’

  She then pointed at me, singling me out. She looked at me as if to say, any ideas? I shrugged and quickly looked away. I could feel her eyes stay on me for a moment and then she turned her attention back to the matter in hand.

  ‘Trauma is pain which has been buried alive.’

  As she said this she began to pace up and down in front of us, letting the weight of her words sink in, a small smile playing on her lips.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘So imagine…In the heart of every one of you is this alive…screaming pain…And it has brought every single one of you here to my door. It has fed your addiction. It has made you so angry that you burned everyone who reached out to you. It has lain down with you at night and brought terror to your dreams. Now you might think that this is a little strong…A little rich…But look around you. Peer into the lives that you have, the relationships that you have tried to foster…And you will see trauma lurking there…’

  She then looked over to me again and told me that she needed a volunteer. I know that she was reacting to the look I gave her a few minutes before. It was when I shrugged and looked away. I wasn’t in the mood for the day that
was happening around me. My sister was on my mind. I could still see the look of disgust she gave me as she sat in front of me. I look at Tanya.

  ‘What about the trauma we give to others,’ I said.

  ‘Very good. We certainly do that…please…?’

  ‘Gabriel.’

  ‘Gabriel. Take your seat and come and sit here in front of us.’

  For a moment I thought about saying no, but I knew that this was no longer the way, neither was anger, or rage, these things have been taken from me, they have to be.

  As I sit I look at her. Her eyes are hard and seem to glitter like pebbles on a winter beach.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she says.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Well we’ll see…’

  She moves away from me past the rest of the patients, now and then looking back, as if at any moment she expects me to bolt. When she reaches the back of the room she asks if I feel comfortable.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t you think your life deserves a better response than that?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Right…Okay…Maybe…Perhaps…You can’t build much on words like these.’

  ‘Who says I want to build?’

  ‘Who did you give trauma to, Gabriel? Who is walking around with pain inside them that you put there?’

  It shocks me how quickly she changes subject. I think of my wife, my child. I look away.

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Who are you thinking of?’

  ‘My son.’

  ‘Describe him.’

  I see the look on his face that time long ago when the world poured unfiltered into my mind. He is standing in the hallway of our house watching as I hurl his mother against the wall.

  ‘I can’t,’ I say.

  I hear again the scream that came from me that night. I see my wife move away and I continue screaming at the blank wall she had stood against only moments before. I feel my breath bouncing back into my face and all the while my son watching, his face a mask, his small fists clenched.

  ‘Tell me. There’s nothing to fear, Gabriel.’

  Tanya is now kneeling in front of me. She is looking up into my face. Her eyes are softer and she is smiling as if to say it’s alright, everything is alright.

  ‘This stuff will kill you, Gabriel. If you don’t let it out.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  ‘I’m ashamed.’

  ‘I know you are, I know.’

  ‘I hurt her. I broke everything she ever gave me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And my son…My son…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He saw…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He saw my hands around her throat…He saw my fists on…On the wall…Beating…Beating…Oh God…’

  ‘But you were sick…So sick…You knew no better…’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘It’s alright…It’s brave…Brave what you’re doing…’

  ‘Yes…No…I’m bad…I’ve always been bad…’

  ‘No…Do you hear me, no…’

  I look at her. I see the urgency in her eyes. I wonder at this woman who only minutes ago I had dismissed, and now is closer to me, to my pain, than anyone has ever been.

  ‘You’re no different to me…To a lot of people in this room…’

  Afterwards a few of the men come up to me and stand with me. One or two place their hands on me, touching me on the arm or the shoulder before moving on. A couple stay with me, one of them is Greg. He asks me if I need anything but I shake my head. I smoke one cigarette after the other. Every nerve in me feels shredded. One or two of the women avoid me, I expected nothing less, it must have been difficult for them to listen to what I said. I think of Clive and wonder what he’s doing, if he’s drunk, if he’s on his back. I know now that he was right, that we have to get rid of the shit inside us, offer it up to the heavens, to the world around us. I look at the sky above me and watch as a bird tumbles in and out of cloud, its small body twisting and falling.

  I smile as I look at it; I feel the beginning of something inside me, like the small push of a daffodil through frosty ground. I watch the bird again and realise that it’s me I’m looking at, and that maybe I’m not falling after all.

  Buying Beauty

  It is Sunday. Visitors’ day and I am sitting in the grounds of the hospital wrapped up against the cold, smoking and sipping from a lukewarm coffee. I tried to call my wife last night to see if she was coming but I couldn’t find her. I left a message asking her to think about it as it would mean a lot to me, especially if she brought John with her. It seems like an eternity since I saw him. I am angry that she hasn’t let me know one way or the other if she is coming or not, but then I suppose I can’t expect too much after what she said in the family counselling session. I try not to dwell on it. More and more in the last days I have begun to see my recent past with some kind of clarity. The noise and fear in me seems to be abating and for the first time in my life I am not looking to the next moment to save me, but seem to be content to sit where I am. I look at the couples dotted about the large gardens. I see Greg with his young wife who replaced his older wife. He told me the other day just after the session with Tanya that’s why the wheels came off. The older wife had him worked out. She could cope with the binges and madness. She would let him have his way, watch as he wrecked this, that and the other and then pick him up, dust him down and send him off to his nice big law office so the money kept coming in big weekly chunks.

  The younger one freaked out, he told me. She got drunk with him, and the two of them ended up in bits, house fucked, job on the line and eventually no weekly chunks of money, just a suspension pending assessment. So she got him a bed here at St Pat’s hoping that the cheques would reappear once he had been cleaned up. From what I can tell, she might need a dose of what Greg and I are getting, but it’s none of my business. She is pretty, but it has all been bought, from her cupid bow lips to her pert bouncy front.

  Josey is with her mother and I can tell that she is finding it difficult. Every now and then she takes a step backwards as her mother never seems to be less than six inches from her daughter’s face, as if she was trying to read her very thoughts.

  A car is pulling up in front of the main building. A woman is driving, beside her sits a small child. It is Cathy and John. I stand and begin to walk towards them. I watch as the child struggles to open the car door. When he gets out I can see that he has grown and my walk turns into a run. When he sees me he smiles and then drops his head. My wife gets out and comes round to the passenger side of the car so that she is standing with John when I reach them, her arms criss-crossed across his shoulders. Her act of protectiveness angers me but I push it back down into my gut. I stand there for a second, unsure what to do. I look at my son and then at my wife. I feel stupid as if I’m asking for permission to bend down and greet him. But after everything that’s happened I don’t blame either of them. Cathy nods and then gives me a wistful smile.

  His hands are cold when I touch them, so are his cheeks, and only when I say his name does he lift his head to look at me.

  ‘How are you, John?’

  ‘Fine, Daddy.’

  ‘Good…You’ve grown, son. You’re putting on the pounds…’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe we could play football later on. I think that one of my friends has a ball that we can borrow.’

  ‘Okay…’

  I’m allowed to take them to the room I’m staying in. I apologise for the mess, hurriedly clearing dirty clothes and AA books from the bed.

  ‘I didn’t know if you were coming or not…So…’

  ‘It’s alright, Gabriel…Don’t worry…’ Cathy says.

  ‘I left messages…’

  ‘I know…’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So?

  ‘So why didn’
t you let me know? You know, one way or the other.’

  ‘Does it matter. We’re here now.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And we can’t stay long. I promised my dad that I would take John up to see him.’

  I don’t say anything. They were here, I suppose that was something. I sit on the bed and ask John to come and join me. He looks to his mother who nods.

  ‘Do you want a cup of coffee? Or tea? Or something?’

  ‘No. We’re fine,’ my wife says, answering for both of them. ‘You look better,’ she says.

  ‘Well they tell me that I’ll never be better. That I have to be vigilant.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that. The drinking. I meant you. Your skin, complexion. You…’

  ‘I’m eating.’

  ‘It’s just you look better.’

  ‘Cathy…’

  ‘You don’t remember, do you?’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How you got here?’

  ‘Bits and pieces, that’s all.’

  ‘Jeffrey found you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The teacher. You brought him to the school open day. He called the ambulance service and then called me. You don’t remember?’

  ‘Jesus. No. Jeffrey?’

  ‘Yes, he said you were in an awful state. He was in Drogheda. He has an aunt there on his wife’s side. He said you were babbling about a sign or something…Half naked…I can’t believe you have no memory of it?’

  ‘I’ve thought of a lot of things since I’ve been here…In the lock-up…In the programme…Mum…Dad…You…But no…’

  ‘You owe him, Gabriel…You owe him a lot. He found you. You were lost and he found you…’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘People care for you, Gabriel. In spite of everything people care.’

  ‘Jeffrey?’

  ‘Yes…He was amazing. He waited until I got to the hospital…He sat with me. We could hear you screaming…It was awful…Awful…He doesn’t drink…He said that he knew why he was sober that day so that he could be there to lift you up from the gutter.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘How could you? You were…You were like an animal.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ll make it right.’