All That I Leave Behind

by Alison Walsh

  ‘She was someone Mammy and Daddy knew at the time. She’s still around, I think. Lives up the way.’ He didn’t see the need to explain any of the details. It didn’t merit digging up after all this time.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Well, there you are, Rosie, mystery solved.’ Father Naul smiled, a flash of white, even teeth. ‘Does this put your mind at rest?’

  Rosie nodded, thoughtful, before agreeing. ‘Yes, thanks, Father Naul. I really appreciate your help.’ But she seemed dazed, Pius thought, dazed and confused.

  ‘C’mon, Doodlebug, let’s go home.’ Pius took control, shaking Father Naul firmly by the hand, promising to drop by to take him fishing some night and leading Rosie out of the parish centre and into his car, not saying anything until they reached the house, when he turned to say the words that he’d been composing in his mind all the way back from Monasterard. But she was fast asleep, slumped against the window of the car, her head propped up against her elbow.

  He hesitated for a bit before deciding that he couldn’t leave her in the car, and so he got out as quietly as he could and went around to the passenger side, opening the door gently so she didn’t fall out and lifting her as carefully as he could. She weighed nothing in his arms, a little bird, and she didn’t even wake, head nodding back on his elbow as he carried her through the front door and into the living room, where he nudged aside Sunday’s paper with his foot and placed her gently down on the sofa. That should have been your husband, he thought, as he dragged Jessie’s blanket out from under her feet. That should have been him, carrying you across the threshold. He felt a huge sadness for her then, sleeping on his sofa like a young child, sadness and irritation that she was like a boil on his skin that he just wanted to lance, to cut it away from his flesh, so that he was clean again. Clean and free.

  He made himself lunch – packet tomato soup and a hunk of stale bread because Rosie wasn’t around to lecture him about it – and sat at the kitchen table to read the newspaper. He looked forward to having a few moments’ peace, but the second he sat down, he felt his eyelids begin to droop, resting his head on the table. When he woke up, sweaty and disorientated, a feeling of panic rose in his chest as the doorbell buzzed, a long, insistent ring.

  He opened the door and stood stock still for a moment.

  The Mermaid was standing there, holding the hand of a little boy in a pair of faded blue shorts, a red T-shirt with ‘Ban the Bomb’ on it and a pair of bright green Crocs. Her red hair was crammed into a horrible woolly hat with a Euro 2012 logo on it and she was wearing mismatched tracksuit bottoms and a top.

  ‘Hi,’ he managed.

  She ignored the greeting. ‘Is Rosie in?’ And she looked behind him, as if Rosie might be lurking in the hall somewhere.

  ‘Ehm, yeah, in the living room,’ he said, standing back to let her in. ‘Hi,’ he said to the little boy.

  ‘Oh, this is Dara,’ the Mermaid said. ‘How is she… after the visit to the priest?’

  ‘Oh, you know …’ Pius said.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head.

  ‘She’s … still a bit upset.’ Jesus Christ. Her husband had left her, and she’d discovered that her father possibly wasn’t her father. Upset just didn’t cover it. Mind you, he could never admit it, the dart of happiness when the Yank’s rental car had disappeared off up the towpath, two weeks after the wedding. Apparently, he was going back to the States to ‘clear his head’. Leaving his wife to deal with the fallout. Some guy, he was. Pius hadn’t asked Rosie what her plans were: he kept telling himself that it was because he didn’t want to interfere, but really, it was because he didn’t want to know – it was all far too messy for him.

  ‘Right. I’ll go up and see her then. Will you keep an eye on Dara?’ She clumped off into the living room in her battered trainers.

  Pius looked down at the child, wondering what on earth she meant by ‘keep an eye’. Could he just go and have a cup of coffee and let the child out into the garden, or should he go with him? What did you do with a boy his age anyway?

  He sighed and looked down at Dara uncertainly, about to suggest a walk, when Dara rescued him. ‘My mum says you have hens.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Can I see them?’

  Pius cleared his throat then and nodded in the direction of the garden. ‘The hens are outside.’

  ‘OK’, the little boy said, and then he slipped his small hand into Pius’s, looking up at him expectantly, as if to say, ‘Lead the way.’ The boy’s hand felt odd in Pius’s much larger one, so small and soft. It felt good, Pius realised. ‘Right,’ he said, more confidently, ‘let’s grab a bucket and we’ll give them their breakfast. They’ll be starving.’ It was a lie – he didn’t normally feed them after midday and they’d be half-asleep, but hens never say no, he thought.

  Pius gave him Mabel to hold, a fine black speckled hen with a nice personality, who sat in Dara’s arms and clucked appreciatively while Dara stroked her. ‘She’s very nice,’ he said.

  ‘She is. She’s a gentle lady. Now Gwyneth over there, she’s another kettle of fish altogether.’

  Dara wrinkled his brow and looked over to where Pius was pointing at a small, brown hen who was scuttling around on the grass, an anxious look on her face. ‘I saw her scare the fox once,’ Pius said. ‘Gave him the fright of his life, so she did.’

  ‘How did she do that?’ Dara looked up at him, eyes round.

  ‘Well, it was early one morning, just before dawn. Norman wakes them every morning,’ he nodded in the direction of the cockerel, ‘but this morning there was a commotion in the henhouse, lots of fluttering and clucking and I knew something was wrong. So I tiptoed down the stairs,’ Pius began, and then paused for dramatic effect.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Well, I’ve never seen anything like it. I saw him out the kitchen window, slinking around to the front of the henhouse, head bent low, and suddenly the door just burst open and she came at him, clucking and squawking and, I don’t know what it was, but he turned tail and bolted over the field there towards the canal.’ He didn’t add that he’d also been standing by the gable wall, pointing an air rifle at the mangy beast. It sounded better that Gwyneth be the hero of the day – and she was a feisty girl, that was for sure.

  ‘She looks very brave,’ Dara said.

  ‘She is. And because of her, I’ve never had a problem with a fox since. She’s like Cerberus at the gates of Hades.’ As he said it, he chastised himself. The child wouldn’t have a clue about Greek mythology – they were all into computers and stuff nowadays.

  But Dara nodded. ‘Hmm, I know, Daddy told me that story. His name is Kevin and he lives in New York. He’s coming to visit me soon because I’m seven. Do you think he can come and see your hens, Pius?’

  I’d rather die, Pius thought, before managing a smile and a change of subject. ‘Maybe we should call her Cerberus, what do you think?’

  Dara shook his head and burst out laughing, and the sound was so sudden Pius started in fright. ‘Oh, no, Pius, she’s a girl, silly. Cerberus is a boy.’

  ‘Of course. I’m such an eejit.’ Pius smiled. ‘Now, let’s go and pick a few peas for tea. If you and your mum are staying, I’ll have to do better than packet soup, which is what I normally have.’

  ‘I like packet soup. Do you have Quick Soup? I like the tomato one, even though Mum says it’s junk.’

  ‘A man after my own heart,’ Pius said, thinking as they walked back towards the house about how it must feel to be a child, finding things out for the first time. When everything was new and surprising and changed the way you thought about things for ever. And how you could look up to adults, the way this little fellow was looking up to him. It came as a shock to him, that someone would actually look up to him in this way. Him. A drug dealer. And it came as even more of a surprise when he remembered that he had looked up to Daddy in the same way once.

  He remembered that Daddy had taken himself and Mary-Pat out into the bac
k field when they were both children. He’d lifted them both onto the fence and said, ‘Look up, and tell me, what do you see?’

  They’d both been transfixed for a bit, looking up at the stars in the inky black sky. It was full of them, and a wisp of what looked like candyfloss that Daddy said was the Milky Way. He’d been talking about the planets. ‘We can see Venus,’ he’d said, pointing to the Evening Star, ‘but why can’t we see Mars or Mercury?’

  ‘Because the sky’s too small?’ Pius had said. He’d thought that the sky was like a canvas, stretched over the earth, with not enough room to fit all the planets. Those that couldn’t fit in would simply fall off the edge.

  Daddy had laughed then, throwing his head back and roaring, the earring in his left ear flashing in the moonlight. The earring he wore because he was a gypsy, or so he told them, a Traveller whose family had wandered the roads of Donegal. Then he’d reached out his hand and ruffled Pius’s hair. ‘The sky goes on forever, Pius, on and on into infinity. We’re just hanging here, spinning around in space on our tiny planet.’

  Pius hadn’t been able to get his head around how the sky didn’t end somewhere – didn’t everything end somewhere? Wasn’t there an end of the road, where things kind of piled up in a great big heap? It was bewildering and exciting at the same time. And the person who had told him about it all was Daddy, a Godlike figure who seemed to possess knowledge about just about everything. Maybe Dara thought about his father in the same way. And maybe that, too, would change, Pius thought, as Dara skipped ahead of him up the front path. And maybe that was why he’d never become a dad, because he didn’t want to risk it, falling from grace. He didn’t want his son to feel about him the way he felt about Daddy.

  Pi still remembered the time Eoin Prendergast had called the house at three in the afternoon and asked Pius if he could come and collect Daddy. ‘He’s taken a little turn,’ had been the man’s explanation. Only thirteen, Pius knew the lingo: ‘A little turn’ could mean anything from a sugar low to a cardiac arrest, so he’d jumped into the car, which he barely knew how to drive, and roared off up the towpath, hoping to God Garda Kelly wasn’t around to catch him – he was a stickler for illegal driving, probably because half the county had no licence.

  When he’d pulled up at the door, bumping the car against the pavement before remembering to brake, Eoin Prendergast had been waiting, a cigarette clamped between his lips. He looked like his pub, Eoin, sagging and grey and dishevelled, a brown cardigan buttoned up over his substantial belly, his face unshaven. He had hair coming out of his nose and ears. Pius had thought he might vomit at the sight of it.

  ‘He’s in the kitchen,’ and he’d nodded to the little laneway at the side of the pub. Pius had hurried into it and through the half-open door into the kitchen. He’d never been in the kitchen of Prendergast’s. He’d had no idea they had one, considering the only food they served was ham sandwiches on white bread. Daddy had been lying on one of the big steel tables under the glare of a flickering striplight, entirely still, and for a second, Pius had thought he was dead. He’d been rooted to the spot, thoughts careering through his head – how would he organise the funeral, or should he bring him to hospital first. How would he break it to Mammy and would she be sad or pleased? Did that mean he was the head of the family now – did it all fall on his shoulders and how would he be able to manage … and the final thought, that he almost didn’t let himself think, thank God. Thank God it’s all over.

  ‘He was in mid-pint when he just keeled over,’ Eoin had explained, breaking into his thoughts. ‘You’d better take a closer look at him.’ And he’d nodded in Daddy’s direction.

  Pius had crept over to take a look, his heart thumping in his chest – at which point his daddy gave a little snort, like a pig, and had opened his eyes. ‘What the –? Where am I? Am I dead?’

  Pius had let out a little scream, and the two of them had stared at each other for a few seconds, his father’s face a mixture of alarm and rage. ‘No, you’re not, Daddy,’ Pius had eventually managed.

  ‘Just resting so,’ Daddy had said, lying back down on the table, his eyes closing again.

  It had taken four of them to manhandle him into the back of the Beetle, an audience gathering on the other side of the street. Pius felt the hot flush of embarrassment, and he’d wanted to just disappear into any available black hole.

  ‘Are you driving that thing?’ Eoin Prendergast had had the grace to assume a concerned expression on his face, but not the wit to get an adult to drive them both home. Instead, Pius had wobbled off up Main Street and over the humpback bridge, whereupon Daddy had slid sideways towards him and he’d had to push him back against the window, almost losing control of the car in the process. It would have been comical were it not so awful, Pius would later think. When Pius had got home, shoulders stiff with the tension of driving, Mammy had been standing on the doorstep, arms folded. She hadn’t said a single word as he’d got out of the car, legs like jelly.

  ‘He’s in the car.’ He’d nodded towards the Beetle, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for his father to need to be taxied home because he was in a coma at four in the afternoon.

  ‘Make sure you throw a blanket over him,’ had been her only words, and then she’d turned and gone inside, leaving Pius standing there, unsure what to do, Daddy snoring away in the car.

  He used to call me a ‘Mammy’s boy’, Pius remembered, because I liked to spend time with Mammy in the garden, because I liked to talk to her about propagation and the best ways of keeping weeds down. That was why Daddy didn’t like me. Pius thought Daddy loved him, but knew for sure he didn’t like him, because he’d sided with Mammy.

  He tried to shake off that feeling while he made risotto for his guests for supper, hardly able to believe, as he stood there for a full half an hour stirring, that he was capable of such a thing. He’d found some arborio rice in the cupboard, which he supposed Rosie had bought, and had followed the instructions on the packet. He didn’t have wine so used a glass of beer instead, but it didn’t taste that bad. Rosie had even managed to praise him. ‘Very nice, Pi. I didn’t know you were such a good cook.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, chuffed.

  Rosie seemed to be a bit brighter this evening. Maybe it was the visit from Daphne. She was sipping from a glass of the white elderflower cordial that the Mermaid had brought, even managing to smile at Pius’s ridiculous attempts to make conversation. ‘Honestly, Pi, who would have thought that once upon a time you couldn’t stop talking? You were like a machine gun, spitting out words so fast no one could keep up. And remember, you just couldn’t keep still.’

  ‘Daddy used to make me sit on my hands at the dinner table and count to a hundred before he’d let me start my dinner, because I’d wolf it down so fast,’ Pius said.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Daphne asked.

  Pius leaned back in his chair, surprised. ‘What do you mean, what happened to me?’

  ‘Well, you’re not like that now, are you?’

  ‘No.’ Jesus, you have a way of asking a question, he thought to himself.

  ‘Why?’

  Pius thought for a long time before answering. ‘Because … I was unhappy. It made me ill in the end.’

  He thought of the hospital corridor in St Loman’s, a sudden flash of distemper yellow, a smell of Jeyes Fluid in his nostrils. It had been six months after Katy left when it had all stopped for him. He’d been worse than ever those previous few months, drinking till he couldn’t stand up any more in the pub then pouring himself into Daddy’s old Beetle and roaring up the road, weaving all the way home along the towpath. And then he’d take all his clothes off and jump into the water, at three o’clock in the morning, before deciding that what he really needed to do was paint the living room, while listening to Daddy’s old Count John McCormack records, with the water of the canal still dripping off him and not a stitch of clothing on him.

  Then he’d woken up one morning and found that he co
uldn’t keep his thoughts in a straight line. That they’d all got jumbled up in his head. One thought didn’t follow another any more and no matter how he tried, they just wouldn’t join up. He’d sat bolt upright in bed, panicky, almost hysterical, trying to pull the thoughts together and lay them out in a line, like a row of dominoes, but they just kept jumbling up. His hands had shaken as he’d pulled on his jeans, an old sweatshirt. He’d said the words out loud to himself, as proof that he was still functioning: ‘jeans’, ‘sweatshirt’, naming each item as he put it on. ‘Car,’ he’d said to himself then. ‘Drive.’

  But he hadn’t driven to Mary-Pat’s – he hadn’t trusted himself – he’d cycled instead. He’d raced along the towpath in the lashing rain, the pedals slippery under his feet. He’d arrived, soaking wet, just standing there on Mary-Pat’s doorstep. He couldn’t open his mouth to Melissa, who’d opened the door. In the end, he’d managed, ‘Help.’

  Melissa had taken one look at him and yelled, ‘Mum,’ then bolted into the kitchen.

  Mary-Pat had come out then, in her pink dressing gown. ‘Pius? What is it? What’s the matter?’

  He hadn’t been able to answer. His lips had moved, but the words wouldn’t come out. He’d tried, ‘Thoughts,’ and then pointed to his head.