Though the sky grew darker still, Myrna sat, so slowly the youth in me wished to push her down.
‘We’d better go back,’ I suggested. ‘You don’t want to get wet.’
But the truth was I did not want find my way up the brambled laneway to the house in the darkness. The light came on in the kitchen of the house by Noreen’s ghost hand, an answer to the growing night.
‘No, let’s not go back just yet,’ Myrna said. ‘The rain can wait and the darkness is a friend, Sive. We’ll come to no harm in it.’
‘I’m glad you think so,’ I sat beside her. ‘I can’t get used to the noises it makes – and the shapes it makes.’
The wind shaved the waves on to the shore and swept what it had gathered in spray over us.
‘Now,’ Myrna smiled. ‘That’s a freshness I haven’t felt since I was a girl.’
She put a finger to her face and lifted a salt-water pearl to her lips.
‘How was your work today?’
‘The same as my cleaning work at home yesterday,’ I said, watching the sea.
Even in twilight the white-capped waves were visible and could be heard calling to each other. Myrna gathered her skirt about her.
‘It took me a long time to sit down and I suppose it will take me a long time to stand. Can you help me?’
I placed the crook of my arm under her shoulder and bent my knees to take what was left of her weight. I lifted her easily.
‘Professionally done,’ Myrna raised an eyebrow and looked at me as I put her on her feet.
‘I learned today,’ I said, with a little pride. ‘From Sister Saviour. It stops your back straining when you lift the men.’
‘I have been lifted in such a way in the place I was kept,’ Myrna said. ‘On and off potties like I was a battery hen laying eggs. “Come on then,” the nurse would say. “We haven’t got all day for you to do your business.” “You have,” I said. “If you don’t want to see my business done somewhere you don’t want it done.”’
Myrna picked her way carefully over the same stones that Carmel’s feet had skimmed over on a day gone by.
‘Now, Sive,’ Myrna squeezed my arm. ‘You are in the same work as I have been in for many years, making men more comfortable.’
‘The men up there can hardly get out of bed, much less think about the other.’
‘You have not done the other with anyone have you?’
‘Once,’ I said. I pushed the men who climbed over my thoughts and memory away. ‘They make sure they get what they pay for.’
‘They do,’ Myrna agreed. ‘No matter what way you make them happy, you earn what they give you. In this St Manis Home you will not have to do anything to the men you don’t want to do. I promise you that. But you want to do your job well, Sive?’
I nodded.
‘Then listen to me. This is for all of your life and especially the life that is with you today. Look beyond what is broken. There is always something whole. See where the mends can be made in the broken. Find what is whole and true.’
‘How do I do that? I don’t want to be giving it to the men. I want that behind me.’
‘Do you think that is all I gave the men I went with?’ Myrna asked me, the setting sun now two flames in her dark eyes.
‘I don’t know. I only know I did it once and that was enough.’
‘There are ways of doing things that make sure you give nothing of yourself. I gave the men nothing but themselves to be happy with.’
‘How?’
Myrna did not answer until we had stopped at the end of the laneway and gathered breath and strength for the walk up it.
‘You are turning into the wind, Sive, make good with it.’
‘Make good with what?’
‘With all you have and with all that’s coming.’
‘What sort of…’
She put a finger to my lips and turned to the sea again.
The sun was going down on the horizon, in Myrna’s eyes it fell until it disappeared and left nothing but blankness.
‘No more tonight. Your curiosity is a good tool,’ Myrna smiled. ‘I am also curious to know what we can do with the same bread and eggs we had for breakfast.’
‘The same as we did with them the night before,’ I sighed. ‘I would love chips now.’
‘I would love anchovy paste on rye bread,’ Myrna fantasized. ‘And apple juice. I could eat a tub of ice cream. They make good ice cream here, so Eddie tells me. But it comes in vanilla or not at all.’
We went on trading food longings and by the time I put a hand to the latch of the kitchen door, the darkness had grown around me and I had not been afraid. It was the first opportunity to grow used to the night that now makes me so welcome as I do it.
18 ∼ This One Never Talks
JOE O’REILLY took up where Margaret had left off in the telling of tales. Joe wore his hair long and uncombed with sandals on his feet no matter what the weather. His grubby T-shirts bore loving slogans of the sixties, which had all grown stale.
When Joe was alone with me little was said, but when he and Margaret were together they bickered with a childishness the outside world would not tolerate.
It did not take me long to realize that all the staff who had rooms in the home were as tied as the ones they tended. Each one had plans to leave, Joe O’Reilly wished to go back to London where he had trained as a nurse.
‘You’ve been going for fifteen years,’ Margaret would gibe.
‘And what about your famous trip to America?’ he would lash back. ‘Let us know when you have the ticket, Margaret. Sure we’ll make a banner for you and give you a little send off. Then we’ll all wait around to welcome you when you sneak back on the next plane.’
Each called the other a live-in, as if their arrangements were temporary. This was what they fought over when we had lunch, the same lunch as the men ate. Food with no love in it. They were birds pecking at each other for the crumbs of my attention. For I was the thing that tight worlds are starved off, novelty. Then my newness wore off and I became part of the walls and the day and part of all that was endured in this place. I became known for my silence in St Manis just as I had been known for it elsewhere.
It was not all bad. The work with the men offered me their grateful appreciation. Since Myrna had spoken with me I had looked at them differently. I saw Young Brian’s passion for any kind of motor vehicle – the home’s ambulance, the cars of visitors. Young Brian would watch them all from the dayroom window. Put his hands to the glass and Mauritius would catch him and cry, ‘Brian Justice, paw prints! Leave the glass alone!’
Young Brian would sit, like a trained bear and bring his big hands on to his lap and stare out at the cars as they came and went. I took him by the hand one day and brought him to the ambulance. He put his hands on it as if it were a jewel. I took the keys from my pocket and Young Brian sat in the ambulance and put his hands on the wheel and adjusted the mirrors and ran his hands along the dashboard. He looked, smiled at the road ahead and his heart took a trip down it.
‘What are you at?’ Margaret poked her head out the side door. ‘Your lunch is ready.’
I didn’t eat it and from that moment Young Brian and I used my break times to sit in the ambulance.
‘He used to be an ambulance driver,’ Joe O’Reilly told me, like I didn’t know.
In Mr Black, with a temper to match, I saw a man who had once drawn women to him. Loved too many and left too many and then no one was left to love him. His anger was against himself and the foolishness of his belief that he would die as fit as he had lived. Diabetes had cut a man who acted half his age in two by taking one of his legs. A stroke left him in a wheelchair.
With Mr Black I flirted with the fine fit man lurking in the corners of his eyes and the life was brought into him in those moments when he responded.
‘You do my heart good, Sive, what’s left of it.’
Dennis, the former priest, was one I never warmed to. His wheelchair rammed
my ankles once too often to take the too profuse apologies offered. If he thought he could make you run, he tried to. It was all he had left to do in the way of ordering about. His whining was his anger turned rotten and it piped out of him in tortured ways. No sleep and less waking.
I managed him by seeing things he needed before he saw himself, by offering a clean shirt, new towel, fresh socks before he asked. It did not make him ask less.
Ted Leyland believed Sister Mauritius to be the finest of women. I did not try to dissuade him from his belief because he was the finest of men. He was courteous to all of us. When he saw me coming he would open doors, tucking his stick under it so it would not shut.
‘Off to Mass.’ He would say. ‘Off to walk.’
He would fill his days with trips to here and there. Never out the gates. Ted told me his wife had loved flowers. Each week I found a small bunch, homes are full of them, and put them on his window sill. At night he would close his eyes after looking at them.
Peter, too well to be housed in a home, was one who did walk out the gates, though Sister Mauritius did not encourage it.
‘She doesn’t like us to stay fit,’ he whispered to me with a wink.
He walked to Scarna every day and sat with the fishermen and counted boats and boxes of fish and came back smelling of it. Sister Saviour would give out with a smile, ‘You smell like a kipper, Peter, or is it cod? No wonder, all the cod you give me.’
He was Sister Saviour’s favourite. She could not help having one because she loved a man who could help himself. Peter helped to clear away dishes and stripped his own bed.
‘Wouldn’t it be nice, Sive,’ he would say, ‘if we could have a nice party? I used to love them. Even at Christmas we don’t have a proper one, with proper drinks and women. Too bad those days are done.’
Peter was well enough to stay in the town, but the home rules were bed by eight. So he abided, out of having nowhere else to go.
I kept it in my mind to give him his party. Sister Saviour and I made sure he got overcoats if they came in and warm hats and gloves from the stock of dead men’s things that were regularly delivered to us by charities.
‘Make sure that Peter doesn’t get these,’ Sister Mauritius told Saviour. ‘It’ll only encourage him.’
‘It will,’ Sister Saviour agreed and passed them on to him straight away. She never disagreed with her matron in anything but her actions.
Liamy the vegetable’s only voluntary action was pulling on a cigarette, I discovered as I gave the old senile Colonel his in the dayroom. Liamy smacked his gums together loudly, over and over and eventually I heard what he was saying.
‘Would you like a try?’
He gummed the cigarette with delight and coughed and spluttered and smacked some more and the Colonel shouted ‘Hut Hut Hut!’ because he wanted it back so.
Once the Colonel got an unlit cigarette and ate it and I laughed to see him spitting it out and brushing it off his jumper. And he taught me, by looking sad and long and with both eyes and saying, ‘I don’t understand.’
I understood then that to light his cigarette and hold it for him was as much a part of my job as wiping his old bottom. With my new eyes I saw the men’s unbroken spirits rise out of their broken bodies to greet me.
* * *
The carers watched me with suspicion, even Sister Saviour, but since I got my cleaning work done before attending to other tasks she would not admonish me. Out of the carers came the fear of living their own lives; hiding behind ones already lived, they did not understand that the men needed looking after, because they needed looking after themselves.
I had been there a while before I asked of the one who never spoke, who sat in the end cubicle without looking up.
‘This one never talks,’ Joe said on the day Sister Saviour asked him to show me the correct way to turn hospital corners. We were making the bed, which I had cleaned on my first day. The man was asleep in his wheelchair.
‘Don’t bother trying to move him, leave him to me. He’s a big lad, even with what’s left of him. He won’t try, that’s what’s wrong with him. He’s younger than he looks, took a stroke at seventy.’
‘And his name?’ I asked.
Thomas Cave.
My memory called out to me, but I could not place the name. The flesh of Thomas Cave had already begun to rot before his heart stopped. His thick shock of white hair matted and stained yellow with room smoke, where they left the men to spend their waking hours with nothing but each other to look at.
‘We don’t go in for the beauty treatments,’ Joe said when I reached out to touch the hair. ‘Don’t go feeling sorry for him.’
He raised his head at my touch. I had not thought of what I had done, it had just seemed natural to do it. He put his eyes on me. No one had looked at this man; he looked at no one. He ate his meals with his good hand and he slept or stared into space.
As I took my hand away from him, Thomas Cave raised his head further and looked at me. I saw that he would frighten and awe those who truly saw him. I saw blue-black sapphire eyes and I saw that their piercing nature had not changed, in all that had happened.
Joe piled on lists of rules and instructions that held the men to their conditions and the staff to their routines and I stared at Thomas Cave and he at me.
I felt death in the look, not the creeping nature of it but the fierce battle that raged with it. Everyone was dying in this place including the no-marks that ran it. Everyone was running away from dying, or cowed in the face of it.
This man’s eyes said he was different. This man’s eyes said he was the only one who welcomed death. So it laughed at him and took others who should not have gone before him.
And he felt my knowing of this. All changed for me and for him. Once he had looked at me he would not stop seeing.
His eyes told me that he had been powerful. His rage was the kind that had turned in on him and had eaten him slowly. In this place he had no option but to kill himself that way. There were no dark corners or sharp implements, no independent movements.
‘I have watched men wrapped in sheets in early morning,’ his eyes said. ‘And I have wished it was me wrapped in whiteness and gone into it. Have mercy on me, bring me to an end.’
A need grew to put miles between myself and the smell and sight of that man who I knew now to be the photographer from Sergio’s Café. He did not know me as anything other than one who had taken the time to look.
The pull to come back the next day was even stronger. He took my sleep from me and his eyes followed me home to where Myrna watched and asked me what the days had brought to me.
‘The photographer, the one from the café years ago. You told me to watch for when he came through my door. I came through his. He’s there and you would not recognize him. His eyes won’t leave me alone. He’s fighting all around him.’
Myrna looked out at the day sky disappearing into night.
‘Thomas Cave. He will come through your door. The cards say it.’
‘If you saw him you would see how impossible it is.’
‘What happens in the darkness? Where will it bring us? We do not know. This is the time of day the old know best. The unknown is creeping in. The old have a harder fight than anyone. They have to let go of life. They are the ones to voyage to the unknown. You have only seen the ending of the old before. Now you are also sensing their beginning, my beginning. It’s upon me too.’
‘But you are not like them’ I told her sharply. ‘You are free to come and go.’
‘Not much further than they do. These old bones give me only death to consider. I have no lasting home but a grave and even then I do not know where that will be.’
Myrna did not hide behind the words. She looked at me. I saw eyes that had already lost their shine. She was putting her life into me and I would take it because that is what had always been done.
I had complained of living, resenting the burden she had brought me in herself and all the while th
is old, grey, twisted woman was quietly giving me her soul with a smile.
‘I would never ask you to leave here,’ I said softly.
‘No. And death will want me just the same.’
‘But this man is different, death does not want him, he wants death. It won’t come to him.’
‘Then he has something else to live for.’
Myrna ended the conversation by bending over the fire to begin its lighting. ‘And one of those things is walking through your door and I will be here to witness it.’
Later that night she came back to the words as if we had never left them.
‘The place where you are now,’ Myrna said. ‘The old of St Manis journey in an alone way. That is the only way to leave the unknown and come to the known. You will learn a lot from them when you have the heart to.’
* * *
When the night happened, still I did not sleep. In the late evening of the following day my eyes were heavy. Carmel spoke of the wild flowers, which would come soon to Killeaden headland and the hum that would be heard from the hungrily feeding bees.
Myrna smiled and said, ‘It is good to be in a country place for spring again.’
I did not answer, I had no knowledge of spring in the country. I did not know then that all can be mended by spring. Night brought me the first dreams of Thomas Cave.
I thought I had woken, but sleep had taken me further on and deeper to a place that felt like waking. I stared at my wall, at the shadows and longing cast on it. Then he came to me with what he had been. I watched my bare wall and listened to the life of the one who never talked. The movement of time and people with it had been all around him. He shared in none of the tragedy and none of the celebration. It had not touched him. He had watched too much and many to risk doing the same.
And I knew Myrna was right. It was not the end that he searched for, but a beginning.
So I found myself the following day, walking the hill before dawn, heavy with the need for sleep and peace and an end to all new knowing for a while. But I was not to be granted such luxury.
I worked that day away from him, though his thoughts screamed. My head was bursting with his one single demand.
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