My angel was a bachelor. Alone in his house in Drumcondra he had cultivated a brand of good manners that was not readily available elsewhere, and he knew that the appropriate line with victims of tragedies where the father has been burnt to a crisp in the living room is to punctuate the silence with sage nods toward the surviving son. Say nothing, just look over when you come to a red light and nod twice; as if to say, Oh yes, my friend, I know just how bad it is, and do you know how you know I know? You know because I know it’s so bad I can’t even begin to say, you know? Then drive on.
We covered miles like this. I was not sure where we were going, except that tea had been mentioned and that my clothes smelled of birds. We travelled back through the city, got caught in traffic, sat mute together with a few brave half nods and then purred slowly out into the suburbs on the other side. I gradually realised that what I was supposed to do was forget. I was supposed to be making a beginning at the proven equation of distance travelled times company equals grief-erasing. But it was hopeless, there were ashes on my shoes and so much of me was already dead: all my father of me dead and all my mother. What was left? I sat hunched in the sour burnt smell of tragedy and arrived at Flannery’s house in mid-morning like a propped-up corpse. He turned off the ignition and staring straight at his garage door gave a slow nod. He came around to open the car door for me and reached in the hand to take my shoulder again. We went together through the doorway of a house that was almost the model of our own, except for the neatness of everything and the smell of air-freshener that betrayed a life of disappointed love.
‘Now, tea,’ said Flannery, speaking for the first time in an hour and leaving me in the sitting room between the twin cushions. ‘Unless . . .’ his head popped back in again, and he held a whiskey bottle. ‘No, no, tea.’ He nodded to his own advice and went out.
I think I knew then that he was not aware that he was my angel. He had no idea of the wheels and minute mechanisms of life I was only then gleaning for the first time. He didn’t know – as I slowly began to see – that the meaning was in the plot, the shape, that the way and whom we met in the course of our simplest doings was so intricately and finely fitted into a grander pattern, that all we had to do was follow the sign – as I was following him. For otherwise everything was random and chance and the inconsolable truth about the Coughlans was that there never had been a call from God and that my father had ruined our lives and killed my mother for no reason at all. It couldn’t be true. There was a reason, a meaning, and with the smudges of the cinders still on my clothes I sat there on the sofa waiting for tea and knowing that Flannery was the next spoke on the turning wheel. All I have to do, I told myself, is follow the signs. There is something I am supposed to do next.
‘Some people like honey in it. I don’t. But, well, that’s it there. Now.’ He laid a tray before me and sat on the armchair opposite, his hands pressed together between his knees.
An hour passed. Perhaps it was two, I cannot be sure. The tea was cold by the time I drank it. I picked up the cup and put it down an age later. Or so it seemed. For the moment in which I held the cup became two moments, shortly ten, then twenty. And in just this way the days after my father’s death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows. Without exactly knowing it, I had moved in with Mr Flannery; it didn’t seem intentional, it was as if I was the forward pawn of a long-abandoned chess game, a piece left in position and stalled between promise and defeat as the dust gathered. I was living in the guest room upstairs across from the bathroom. I had a set of clean and pressed towels and could sit freely in either of the downstairs sitting rooms all morning and afternoon while my host went to the office. Before he left he programmed hours of Mozart and Bach on the player and I awoke to harpsichord or piano, lying there in the bedcovers wondering how I could possibly go on.
The official government allotment for grief is five working days; it was to take five days for me to deal with my father’s arrangements, settle his papers. After that I was expected back at my desk where the vacant space I should be occupying in the room galled McCarthy like an empty chamber in his revolver. As it was there were no papers to be settled and Flannery took care of the arrangements. I stayed in bed with Bach; I lay in the music and in the pause between the movements heard the leaves begin to fall outside. After two weeks, or perhaps longer, McCarthy himself arrived at the front door. His blue car gleamed in the driveway and he locked it and then looked at it momentarily before turning up to the house. He used his civil service walk and brought his suit square-shouldered to ring the doorbell. I looked down at him from above, the perfect C of his combed hair, and heard the firmly pressed bell disturb an allegro. He stood back. He looked down at his car, still there, still gleaming. They exchanged smiles. Then he turned and rang the bell again, pressing it through the music like a knife and holding it there until he was sure I had heard. He was on government time; he knew his moments away from the department left it loose and idle and he wished to return. But first he would speak to me. He rang a third time and added a knock. He stepped back and turned a look up at the house. When he saw me gazing down at him from the middle upstairs window he was unsure for a moment and made a little wave with his right hand as if flagging from a distant shore. I waved back. It threw him briefly. Then a woman passed the gate with a child and he spun automatically to check his car, and looked up at me with sudden urgency. He waved his arm for me to come down, first mouthing the words as if I were deaf, then soon shouting at me: ‘Come down, open the door!’
I didn’t. I watched him growing more exasperated below me, stepping away and coming back, pressing the doorbell, knocking, and giving me his sharpest eye. I could read his looks like old paperbacks: I am sorely disappointed in you, sorely. You who had been spoken of above, Mr Coughlan, and let me down so badly. So very badly. Open this door!
I did not even shake my head. My father had once told me that when anyone is watched carefully for a little time human behaviour quickly resembles nothing as much as the random traffic of insects on a plate of grapes. Now it struck me: here he was, the portly beetle criss-crossing the Welcome doormat unable for a moment to understand my looking down on him from another world. McCarthy’s patience had a four-minute fuse; he repeated everything he had done once more, ringing, stepping back, circling the grapes, glaring, and finally giving up. When he moved away at last I gave him the same little wave we had begun with and watched him drive away with the end of my civil service career.
I felt a flush of elation and the giddiness of being in freefall. I got up and walked around the house; how pleasant it was to do nothing, to sit or stand at a whim, to hold breath or release it. There was nothing ahead: I had no money, no job, and only temporary lodging. When Uncle John returned in the evening to sit with me for tea I told him I was not returning to work. I was waiting for a sign.
He was a patient man, and passed me nods like biscuits. When the tea was done we sat in the long sitting room on far chairs, and the music played over us. We sat like that for a while, as if expecting the arrival at any moment of our conversation. When it didn’t come we sat on, strange figures in the suburban night listening to the music and waiting for the plot to turn. Uncle John gave it an hour, untopped his whiskey bottle, then opened his briefcase and drew out files, working over figures until they blended into the scores of sonatas and concertos, returning him to the safe places of his bachelorhood. The evenings drew around us, gradually I became invisible.
I lived in the house through the autumn and winter, waiting all the time for God to speak. The little business of life clicked on without me. When the weather grew harsh and the night air thick with coal smoke, I decided that perhaps God would not visit me in the house; I needed to get out and walk and await chance encounters. So, each evening after tea, when my angel moved into his sitting room and put a match to the fire I pulled on a coat and headed out in the hail-winds
where He might be waiting. What was I to do. What was next?
Tell me.
The roads were deserted and the curtained windows of the homey houses sealed in the world. Cars nosed endlessly through the dark, creatures in a purgatory of no arrival, moving restlessly onward along the curving mesh of roads at the edge of the city. So many going somewhere; if I walked more slowly maybe a car would stop. Maybe I will come across a breakdown. Maybe, what? What was I hoping for? I can’t really say; something to show me the shape of the way ahead, to erase the randomness and make clear a sense of purpose.
I walked on through the night, snaking back and forth through avenues, lanes and closes until I found myself back at Flannery’s. I let myself in and went to bed. The following evening I went out again; making a routine of the empty ring around the suburb, my striding round nothingness when no God spoke. I walked into February; in March when it snowed and froze over, making hard white glass of the roads, I slip-skated out in case it was a test and destiny was at hand. In the dark that night nothing was moving; for once the roads were emptied and I could gingerstep and slide down their centre like the first man in the new world.
The streetlights lit the snowroad like a runway. At first my steps were tiny, flat slippy movements and the sudden jolt backwards of my head as I toppled. It was all edgy and expectant of falls. The city roads in the empty whiteness were beautiful with stillness. Sleep flanked them, and the grey world was vanished under the ice. Stars glittered under my feet. It took an hour to travel half a mile. I didn’t care. I walked on down the centre of the runwayroad knowing a flight would arrive at any moment. My foot slipped but I didn’t fall, and within a moment it seemed I was no longer walking but skating between the streetlights. I gathered speed, took slippy little run-ups and threw out my hands, sliding giddily forward. And again. Down the road, a little falling apart gallop and then the smooth rush of the skating. It was dazzling; the ice carried me like a lightweight, the houses flew by and I gathered speed with each go, skating down the roads of Dublin, my arms flung out like wings and my coat flapping behind. I skated into roundabouts and out, through stop lights and yield signs with my eyes closed. Let something crash into me now, let the world collide with me anyway it wants; now, now!
But it did not. I skated on through the empty suburbs, the ice coming through the thin soles of my shoes, so that only when I looked down could I be sure my feet were there. I skated one-footed, tried mini-arcs and twists to tempt falling, but stayed upright, a tall wobbling figure passing through the whiteness of the night. It seemed the city had been made vacant for me; had been prepared like a setting for the minor drama that was my sudden realisation that I was alone. Even as I skated there it struck with a force for the first time: I had no friends, my father was dead. A pale jellied nausea turned in my stomach. My father was dead. I was alone. I made no movement and let the ice carry me downhill, feeling nothing now below my knees. My father was dead; it was as if there had been an amputation and the part that was missing hurt now. I wobbled on the ice once, and then crashed headlong.
13
How long I lay there I can’t be sure. Blood from a wound in my forehead mingled with the ice and made a little map resembling Norway. My feet had no feeling; there was a throbbing and a needling as if small creatures with sharp teeth were working at my forehead. My right eye was against the road, the packed ice cooling tears. I lay there and could not move, gazing down the long ribbon of frozen white until at last I saw the figure of a man approaching. Perhaps he was a dream. He was a mile away but moved with a kind of high and angular purpose that made little of the snow. He was a mile, then a half-mile, then in no time almost upon me, as if the film jumped forward.
It was my father. He was unburnt and fresh-faced, beaming at the snow. It was such a miraculous night that he had gone for a walk out of heaven while my mother was tidying up.
His fingers were warm in the wound on my forehead. His blue-blue eyes were upon me like lights and I felt a charge of electricity rush to my toes. Dad, I wanted to say, Dad, hold onto me, please, don’t let me go. I want to go with you.
And then he lay down on the road beside me. I had everything to say to him but could say nothing. All the words dissolved like snow on my tongue and we lay on in a hush gazing starward. Time may have passed, but pain did not grow, and in that lying-down stillness of the frozen night I suddenly began to see with my father’s eyes: the star-shine, white-stippled sky, its razzle-dazzle, snow-slowed majesty, its million-berried amaze, softest and silent falls of snow off high branches of a spruce tree, powder-light, falling now as if an invisible hand had brushed by, light itself splayed across the heavens, the quality of the cool air, made, composed like music, glittering like silver.
I lay beside him and saw, saw the world infinite in detail and design, the map of its every star and snowflake exact with beauty and majesty. Then I turned to my father.
But he was gone.
14
Dreams, my father was certain, are the other you talking back. He never made it clear where this other you was, how exactly he lived or what he had for breakfast, but he was alive and talking in pictures when we slept. He told me this as a child while he was painting a picture called Fragment of Dream. It was nothing I could make out, blues and greens and perhaps a monster, if monsters exist. But for weeks afterwards when I lay upstairs awaiting sleep I had the sense to make space on the pillow beside me for a dream. My other me was fairly hopeless at talking in pictures. He was pre-primary school. Everything he said was completely muddled and made no sense. He wet his bed. He was chased by figures who moved like smears of oil-paint and daubed the stairway as they came up it. His mother was a vacuum cleaner. After a while I decided to ignore him altogether and woke in the mornings with a tight criminal feeling of having erased the night completely.
The morning after the snow-walk I woke when Uncle John slipped out the door to work. I lay on the edge of sleep awhile, trying to reassemble the night it was my habit to forget. How had I gotten home? I sat up in the bed and looked out the window: the world was melted. The snow had been withdrawn in one swift movement like a magician’s cloth and the grey world beneath was shown once again. The semi-detached houses across the road smoked with morning fires and left open the gates where cars had already gone into the city. The air was puffy with fumes. I opened the window and the traffic came in, its smell and sound driving through the room. There was nothing unusual or portentous. How much easier it would have been if there was a clear sign, something written in a patch of uneven snow, a pattern in the clouds? But instead there was only the humdrum nothingness, the ordinary and dull continuance of time itself, the world as we knew it.
Yet suddenly I knew what to do.
When John Flannery came home that evening I asked him for a thousand pounds.
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘I need it. I want to make a trip.’
‘Well, Nicholas . . .’
‘Not all for the journey. I want to buy the painting back. I want to buy the painting that you gave away as a prize.’
He sat across the little kitchen table from me and put down his teacup. He was still wearing his suit. His eyes lowered to his bread and butter and left the baldness of his old head facing me. Within it ran the memories of the day he got the painting from my father, and back through the corridors to the moments he had first met William Coughlan, all the fret days of his courting my mother and the emptiness of the office on the day he had left. His own was a still life compared to it, and in the instants when he sat there across from me, his head lowered, I watched the sadness enshroud him.
‘Yes. Yes,’ he said at last and nodded. ‘You might get it back. It would be right. I’ll tell you where it is.’
The following morning I took the train to Galway. Uncle John left me at the station with a handshake and more nods.
‘You’re so like your father,’ he said. He stood back and looked at me and nodded, as if agreeing with some inner voice
that prompted angels. And then he was gone, disappearing into the traffic and leaving me with his faith in a good world and his thousand pounds.
That morning I took the train west across the country for the second time in my life. It was no different; my father was still somewhere ahead of me in the carriages, and I was travelling to bring him back. But now I had the name of a schoolmaster in an island village scribbled down on a piece of paper. I rolled and unrolled it as the train whirred with a smooth iron resolve across the soft green fields. Who was he, this Muiris Gore, the poet with William Coughlan’s painting? What had he done with it? Did he value it, did he still have it? I had never heard of him. The whole idea of a single schoolmaster on an island was so swept with the romantic that it seemed unreal. What kind of life was it there? I remembered the sea off Clare, the extravagant moodiness of it, its largeness, its blue and white turbulence that so nearly swept me away. An island there? It was as foreign as fairytales, and the more I dwelt on it, cut forehead throbbing on the cool window, the more the silver iron of the train that bore me west might have been the charge of knights heading for a fabled kingdom.
The plastic sandwiches brought me back. A boy younger than I bumped a trolley down the aisle and led a trail of toilet-goers. He was raw with shaven pimples. He sold me ham with cheese and I gave him one of Mr Flannery’s twenties. The plastic sandwiches came with plastic fruitcake and lukewarm water-tea. The first woman behind the trolley tried to edge past it, but the boy was having none of it. No one would pass until he reached the end of the carriage. It was his everyday power; his moment in a thin cheap white shirt and scarlet tie as he footed off the brake and moved the toileters another few feet down the train, stopping again, and gruffly taking another order. When he finished the carriage we crossed the Shannon; I wondered if it was his given schedule, the measure of his days, for the journey meant nothing to him. He never arrived, but shuttled back and forth across the landscape like a hare, flashing over the fields between darkness and darkness. I was exactly like him, I thought. Until today. Today I am hurtling to arrive, I thought, to get off and step into chance. For there was nothing left for me to do now; I felt I had to recover the painting before I could begin my life. I had to find it and sit down opposite it and stare and stare until I could see the vision my father had and hear the voice he heard and know the world held order and meaning, that the last fragment of his painting had some part to play, and until I found it I would not know what came next. The more I thought of it the more certain I became: the painting had not survived for nothing. It was a clue, it alone surviving out of all the ruins of our life. And so, as damp fields flashed past and cattle stood in their mud under hedges and briefly glanced, I sat in the beating rhythm of the tracks, crossing the country with the ghost of my father and imagining that the name Muiris Gore was the next turning of the plot.
Four Letters of Love Page 18
