‘Can you give an enema?’ Nurse Joe O’Reilly asked me over dry biscuits and strong tea. ‘You’re not a nurse unless you can give an enema.’
He talked the tools of his nursing trade. He talked circles around his frustration and softened its edges for a while.
I asked him of Thomas Cave.
‘You’d think he couldn’t talk, but he can,’ Joe O’Reilly advised. ‘No, he’s choosing not to talk that one, anything to be difficult, like them all in here.’
After hours of the same – Thomas Cave screaming help for my ears alone – it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He sat, still and silent, reeling in the hour of his lost death, alone.
Don’t go near him, Joe O’Reilly advised. Don’t go too close is the first rule of a good nurse. There’s only trouble in that. But I had to go near. I sat on the edge of his bed.
Come closer, he pleaded. I leaned towards him.
‘I stayed silent a long time too,’ I told him. ‘You must speak words. I know you have them.’
‘Bring me something tomorrow,’ he whispered in his real voice.
It went deep and dug a permanent path with its gravel tones. He was the first man to find that way and he did it with a voice that scraped and rubbed against the softness in me.
19 ∼ Thomas Lives Again
THOMAS CAVE found his way to a dream place. He woke with a start and a scream.
The night attendant rushed to him before the other sleepers were wakened and he found Thomas Cave shivering, wet and stinking. The attendant wrenched him out of the bed and put him back in his chair with a blanket and left the bed to the day staff.
But the night was to give him no more nightmares. He had the first pleasant dream since he had woken up from a great blackness many months before and found his body twisted and cold. When you have not moved much in a long time your blood stills and turns to coldness.
In the dream his blood was honey-warm and flowing.
Thomas woke, but he kept his eyes closed and cherished the warmth and did not wish to open them and face the grey surroundings.
After a time he realized his movements were not his own. He squinted down, not wishing to disturb the girl kneeling at his feet which were placed in her lap, where she rubbed life into them.
He believed on that first day, when she had dressed him with a tenderness he had never felt, that she had come to release him, to give him the tools to die soon and without further suffering. But as the days went on he stopped calling and it was then that she sat on his bed and leaned closer to hear him, though he had thought never to speak again.
‘I stayed silent a long time too,’ said the girl with the green cat eyes that he felt he had known and the cat walk. ‘You must speak words. I know you have them.’
‘Bring me something tomorrow,’ he spoke with a voice grown hoarse and stale with non-use.
Now she knelt at his feet and she fixed the cat eyes on him and she said with a soft purr that stirred him, ‘I brought proper socks and a pair of slippers. They came with the last delivery of clothes. Your feet are like blocks of ice. At long last we have something in the way to fit your feet. Like canal barges they are. A man must keep warm to live.’
He cried silent and warm tears.
He had thought her to be death’s sweet messenger and instead she brought a sweetness of life with her that was too tantalizing to taste. To make him swallow what he had not the courage to while young, now, when all was lost? Cruel life.
He saw not her but all that went with her, surrounded by figures too shadowed for him to determine. And the smell of her! Citrus fruits and fresh cut flowers. Her hips moved easily, like water, and would have moved more easily if it were not for their straining against the uniform, cut for another shape.
He could not have imagined a more beautiful woman and her beauty had come to wake him. She had not come to put a spirit to rest, but to move it restlessly in a body that had lost movement.
In that moment Thomas Cave was lost. Life had won.
* * *
This is how the wanderer that was Thomas Cave came to be stilled.
In the darkness of the boxroom Thomas Cave had studied the pattern of the curtains. In the course of his nonliving he tried to patch up the pieces of his memory that remained, but lost track of the time, as you do when you are faced with eternity.
He exhibited his past as a series of photographs, which he hung carefully in his mind. Photography was how he had made his living. He had no great love for it any longer, but it was how his imagination worked.
His imagination did not hide truth – many of his recollections were uncherished. Some were glimpses of lost times that could not be restored because there were no pictures, but undeveloped images. Out of the darkness came not even shadow but a suggestion of one that darted and danced away from him.
He could make out other pictures, but could put no story to them.
Grey, early morning and the bare shoulder of a woman dressing, the captured and fading coolness of an iced drink in draining heat, unknown arms holding a young child wriggling with expectancy. He was left with nothing more than a sense and an ache to know what had occurred in those times. He was left with the memories of a stranger.
There was one thing in the gathering of memories that Thomas Cave was certain of. These pictures were of the times of other people and not his own times. They were happenings that he had watched and did not belong to.
This did not stop Thomas Cave from wanting to retrieve all he could.
There were gaping holes now in the lost commonplace – where his knowledge of other languages used to be. Now they all merged into one confused tongue that he dare not speak. And that tongue, once also an educated palette, was half frozen. There was a twisted hand that had once curled naturally around the body of a camera and allowed him to survey the world of his choosing.
Thomas Cave now knew that all the choices were fate’s prerogative. His own body, his own mind were not his. They belonged to the callous events of the moving world.
He was not a fool before this. The indeterminate nature of existence had not escaped him. It had simply never claimed him as victim. He had spent his life observing human experience – the edges of it that most eyes hid from: the movement of a recently severed hand removed for theft in the same crowded marketplace from which it had stolen; the clouded, fearful eyes of a gypsy girl put into a marriage at twelve; the silver spread of terraced rice fields and the colourful dots of humanity owned by the land.
Thomas Cave had seen and photographed life against every backdrop the world could present – mountain people, valley people, desert people, ice people, plains people and city people. And life had never come to him. He kept it at bay, as a series of journeys, tasks, darkrooms and published material. He had remained a stranger to all but the work. Now the lives of his subjects were the only ones he had known and their lives were denied to him.
Still he could not give up. His body had been broken up and his mind had been broken up. Each day he spent in the dark boxroom, denied the irregular shape of the world, he wished for life to end.
So out of his brokenness came the heart-driven task of piecing together the map of existence and the world it had taken place in. The curtains were his Asia – their shape presenting shadows and patterns, which, if he stared hard enough for long enough, would offer something in the way of memories. The ridges of the beige candlewick bedspread became the ridges of desert in the worn, old land of Africa and the many lives it offered. Lives in lush jungle, on open plains and lives on relentless sand. The three separate walls were bare but for the memories he had hung on them of India, the Americas, the frozen reaches of the polar caps and Siberia and Central Asia.
All this world he had lived in and not belonged to.
Footsteps could be heard. Thomas’s fear rose and he felt the ache in his frozen side as he twisted and shifted to fit himself into the corner furthest away from the door.
‘Father,’ Jonah Cave’s
long shadow entered the room before him. He threw back the bedspread. ‘You have soiled yourself again.’
Since Thomas had lain in the dark boxroom his bowels had almost ceased to work. For this Jonah punished him. It was Jonah’s considered task to spare his father no shame. Jonah wanted his father to remember all that he could not remember, all he had not been there to witness: the growing of Jonah, his child, the stretching of his bones towards the sky.
They had been fatherless bones. Jonah had grown tall like his father, so his small spirit rattled around inside a tall emptiness. When he moved there was a hollow echo in the cavern beneath his ribcage, which his father now heard.
Thomas did not weep when Jonah made the pain come, for even now he was not a man given to emotion. He cried single tears not for what his son inflicted, but for what had been inflicted on his son in his absence and because the time to put that right was long past. He found in the box of feelings he had opened that regret was the first to jump and grab him.
Sometimes Jonah would decide to turn on the main light, the bedroom light, which was not welcomed by Thomas, who did not like the ruin of his own wasted body – the skin had turned grey without daylight. Sores had formed on all points that rested on the bed, and when Jonah pulled back the sheets to survey this, the smell rose and Thomas closed his eyes.
Jonah’s face did not light up at the sight of his father’s wasting, he stared at it and occasionally he would nod as if to say he understood it, as if he were an artist studying a work in progress for clues as to where it might lead.
Thomas made efforts not to catch the eyes of Jonah, eyes that were not like his, in a face that shared no similar feature to his own. He saw plenty there of a woman whose face he had purposely forgotten.
The food that Jonah provided on a daily basis was serviceable. It served to keep the father awake and alive to the son. The son gave bread and the father ate bread, dry with a slab of dull cheese, the life processed out of it.
He dreaded Jonah’s violence less than his tears and he dreaded Jonah’s tears less than Jonah’s emptiness. It was a void he had helped create as carelessly as he had once coupled with Jonah’s mother and married Jonah’s mother.
‘Love me,’ Patricia Cave née Nolan had said, and he had loved her with his eyes on the wall.
‘Don’t leave me,’ Patricia Cave née Nolan said when he had found her under another man’s heaving. He had not been hurt, the feeling had been one of relief, one of a way forward opening that did not include her or Jonah. The child who was not even his own but might have been.
Jonah was two when Thomas left. The ring that he took off on that same day had not made a mark. Thomas made one or two visits in the first year after his departure. But as Jonah grew so did the knowledge that he was not Thomas’s son.
He forgot the boy who was not his own and simply sent money to Patricia and Jonah once a month and entry forms for good schools and fees.
Jonah was five when Patricia wrote.
‘Help me.’
When she drank she wrote and when she dried out she wrote. No mention was made of Jonah’s progress, or name.
‘Your son needs new shoes, your son needs a uniform, your son needs money for a school trip, your son needs…’
Thomas forgot the boy’s name and soon his existence, only the standing order that still left the account each month reminded him that Jonah still lived. Now he and regret visited many places together, including the short-lived days of his marriage.
For Thomas, then, there was no question that he had not behaved honourably. Even when Patricia died of her drinking, he had continued to send money to Jonah. The child had done with the money what the mother had done with it because the mother was the only one there to teach him.
Thomas Cave had reached seventy before he had learned his deeds were not honourable. Then the day arrived to teach him about that and much more besides.
* * *
It was a month after his birthday, a birthday that he had marked alone in his small and comfortless cottage in the emptiness of a western townland.
His chosen emptiness and isolation had near killed him when the white blindness and burning pain had shot through him and the cold numb after it. There was no one around to hear his cries but the black crows that answered them.
He lay unconscious for a long while and when he woke there was a bright sky, then a dark sky. Then he saw no sky, but heard only the sounds of his life disappearing into light that he did not find peaceful, but in time all he could do was go with the whiteness and he left the body behind. But the postman found it while it still breathed in the grey-white dawn.
The postman prided himself on his role as link between outside world and forgotten people of the countryside, had delivered valuables and letters and, on one occasion, even a baby. After that he decided to do a first aid course.
So it was with great interest he stumbled on the whispering shadow of a human being turned blue with the lack of breath. And he knew how to pipe air into the losing lungs and splint the broken wrist. He lifted the twisted form into the back of his van, though it took a long while to shift the giant. To leave the man for any length of time was to let him die.
He transported Thomas Cave in his green van, on sacks of undelivered mail, to a hospital twenty-five miles away, whistling cheerfully in the knowledge that he would surely secure the Postman of the Year award for services above and beyond the duties of mail delivery.
* * *
So Thomas Cave was carried on the whinges of men and women who did not get their post that day, or for three days later in the year when the postman travelled to Dublin to receive his commendation at a special awards ceremony presided over by the Minister for Post and Telegraphs himself.
Thomas Cave was a known figure, a winner of many meaningless awards.
So a picture of Thomas, bedridden, was published in the papers alongside the smiling and rigid snap, badly composed, of a proud postman and a bored minister with his mind on lunch.
‘Photographer saved by Postman’, the clippings would not have a chance to gather dust in the postman’s scrapbook, so often would they be taken out and shown to canvassing politicians and door-to-door collectors and deliverers.
Those clippings brought an unknown man to Thomas Cave’s bedside, an unknown man who told him he was his son. Thomas knew on first sight that Jonah Cave was not his blood son, but he was the son of his experience. For both of them were tall and both of them had the small, rattling spirit of non-feeling.
The hospital was only too delighted to sign the care of the surly patient, after some months of no improvement, over to his only living relative, who took pleasure in transporting him to the nameless suburban dwelling of 45 St Peter’s Road. It was the house that Thomas had left Jonah to rot in, Jonah told Thomas as he pushed the wheelchair through the gate and up the garden of weeds and neglect.
Jonah closed the door between Thomas Cave and the world.
20 ∼ The Same Love
THE SAME LOVE Thomas Cave felt grew in me, though I had no name for it. I knew a horrendous excitement that robbed me of sleep and knew a calm that could help me dream standing up.
I did not know what to do with all that I was feeling, just as he did not. The tasks of caring for him in my daily work were tasks of loving. I had his hair cut and I found him clothes that never fitted but at least brought living back to him. I grew used to seeing jumpers that came only to mid-arm length and so did he. We would laugh about them.
‘Look at me, poking out here,’ he would smile. ‘There’s just too much of me.’
‘There is,’ I would laugh, and want to cry at the same time. I would want to ask – how come you came with no shoes, Thomas? Where are your clothes? You speak like a man who should have plenty of them and good ones at that. What has happened to you?
But I felt the thin line of pride that was in him was all that he had. I could not take it from him with questions of how he came to this. Though I did not know it,
he looked at me and thought the same.
Whatever we had to tell we would tell in our own good time. We were silent and the silence brought the questions and the questions brought more interest. My last act each day would be to fold down his bed and to straighten out the little he had on his locker.
He would thank me for it with eyes that looked away as I was doing it. A man, I knew, who had never had a woman do for him. I put a picture on his wall. A sad and tired thing left sitting in a cupboard, which featured ill-drawn mountains and a careless sea. But he looked at the picture like it was a masterwork.
‘Thank you, Sive,’ he said without a smile, ‘for bringing something of outside to me.’
The things I did for Thomas were not noted as unusual. I did the same for the other men.
In the dayroom Mauritius only allowed each man three smokes.
‘One for morning, one for afternoon, one for bedtime.’
The men had grown in a time when smoking was a way of life. It was the one pleasure they had left. Drinking alcohol was allowed on Christmas Day and Easter Sunday and on the birthday of each resident. Those that did not smoke were given chocolate. Three squares. As soon as their visitors had left Mauritius made it her personal business to gather from the men everything that was not allowed in the way of luxuries. These were kept in a ration cupboard and doled out by the matron herself. No other hand touched them. The men complained regularly about this, but she would reply, ‘What would you prefer – to eat and drink this in one go or to have it as God intended and recommended. Moderation in all things!’
And her soft, sensible shoes would carry her away on noiseless determination while the men grumbled and said, ‘Half of it will go missing.’
The men got a small allowance each week, but there was nothing to spend it on. Each month Sister Mauritius organized a tombola, for which the men bought tickets. The prizes were religious objects, left over luxuries from residents who had died before getting through their rations, personal effects that relatives had not claimed. The allowances tended to be squandered on this one event, which offered the only spontaneity in the lives of the men. Most of the men had a religious object in the cubicle. There were more statues of Mary and various saints to be won than bars of Cadburys and packets of Players or Sweet Afton.
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 12
