The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next)

by Colm Herron

  “England’s nothing but a pup,” said Seamus. “A mongrel pup too.”

  “A bastard pup,” added Willie Henry passionately. There was a look about him now that made me worry. This man was in need of a drink and there was no telling what he might end up saying or doing.

  “Oh dear,” said Margie. “Maybe we shouldn’t be using language like that, showing disrespect for Maud that’s lying there.”

  “Not at all,” Seamus reassured her. “Maud knows nothing that’s going on here now. Sure the soul only stays in the body three hours and then after that it’s in heaven.”

  “Or the other place,” Willie Henry said clawing at his front of his trousers like there was something at him again or maybe it was the nerves. Ready for the hills anyway.

  He looked up then for a reaction and, receiving none, held out his glass plaintively. Plaintiffly. This latter gesture was directed at me of course but I resolutely ignored it even though I had a strong idea how dire his state was. I felt sorry for him, as I did for myself, but there was no way the drink was coming out again till that bastard Braddock left.

  Mister Abel Doak prosecuting stated that the defendant William Henry McGillycuddy, who had earlier made a submission to the court requesting that he be referred to as the plaintiff, had been intoxicated when he trashed and subsequently dismantled the wakehouse in Marlborough Terrace (the only items left intact being the softwood casket and its contents, viz., the earthly remains of one Maud Abilene Harrigan) yet by his own admission was not so intoxicated that he was unaware of what he was doing. Defending, Mister Jules Bernestock made the point that all the defendant William Henry McGillycuddy, hereinafter hopefully called ‘the plaintiff’, had been seeking was one miserly shot of Paddy, being still in a badly shaken state after having encountered what he took to be a corpse welcoming him to the wake. “To quote the plaintiff,” said Mr Bernestock consulting his notes, “I was just after saying a Hail Holy Queeng in the corphouse standing looking down into the face of the poor dead woman when I turned round and there she was fornenst me saying ‘It was wile good of you to come Willie.’ [At this point Mister Justice Tickel van Rumpole showed commendable Dutch courage in facing down an unruly courtroom, threatening to have the have the place cleared forthwith if the merriment did not cease, on foot of which threat order incrementally returned to the proceedings.] And all I got to bring me round were two nips of Paddy you could hardly see.”

  Mister Justice van Rumpole, on occasion sipping from a hipflask which transparently contained water-colored liquid, then asked Mr Bernestock to clarify Mr McGillycuddy’s request to be dealt with as a plaintiff. Mr Bernestock thereupon came out with a whole load of stuff in Latin to support the legal argument that a defendant can in certain cases, one of which this clearly was, ask the court to declare him a plaintiff. Mr Justice van Rumpole accepted that as it had earlier been established that Mister Jeremiah Coffey the householder, hereinafter called ‘the possessor’, had been aware of Mr McGillicuddy’s distressed state and therefore (it could be argued) was partly culpable for the Marlborough Terrace premises being effectively removed from future ordnance survey maps. “Yet,” he concluded, “although it may well be that there was equal fault on both sides, the burden is always placed on the plaintiff, and the cause of the possessor is preferred. How and ever this is a matter for another court thank Christ. Next case please. Now where did that flask go?”

  “Tell us this,” Willie Henry went on, lowering the glass glumly. “One of the masters would know the answer to this one. If Maud, God have mercy on her almighty soul, is in heaven this minute, do yeez think she would know what’s going to happen? Here in Derry like? Does she know how it’s all going to turn out does she? What I’m saying is, for an example now, could she tell you the date Ireland would be free could she?”

  “That’s a good question,” said Margie thoughtfully. “I think there’s something in the Bible about that. Even somebody simple, God bless the mark, would know as much as Einstein once they got to heaven. I’m not sure about predicting the future though.”

  “Or Shakespeare,” said Jim. “Maud’s there with God now and He’d be telling her everything.”

  “Naw, that’s wrong,” said Seamus. “It’s like the barrel and the thimble. If you’re like a thimble in this world then you’ll be a thimble in the next one too. A thimble can only hold so much. That’s the thing you see.”

  Willie Henry wasn’t having this. “No harm to you, Seamus, but you’re ignorant, if you don’t mind me saying, no harm to you. It was the masters here I was asking.”

  “Did you hear that, Seamus?” said Margie, shoulders going. “You’re a thimble.”

  “That’s an interesting point you’ve brought up,” responded Bill, blinking owlishly in Seamus’s direction while doggedly avoiding Willie Henry’s gaze, “about the relativity of knowledge.”

  There then followed a partly political broadcast by and on behalf of Big Bill Braddock about happiness and knowledge and moderation and seeing through a glass darkly and seeing through a glass brightly and Daniel O’Connell the Liberator and Saints Gregory and Sylvester and the Little Flower and plenty more not to mention the Venerable Seraphim of Sarov or maybe the Venerable Sarov of Seraphim it was. What he seemed to be saying leaving aside the politics was: Our Maud who art in heaven, hollow be thy brain. Thou will be dumb in heaven as you were on earth. The broadcast went on for some time without so much as a heckle and partway through Willie Henry lost interest and returned to sleep. When it was as clear as the nose on your face that Bill had finished and wasn’t just drawing breath Jim shook himself with the air of a man about to come out for round two.

  “You mentioned Daniel O’Connell there,” he said. “Great patriot and all. Do you want to know what a lot of the people away down in Kerry say about him?”

  “What?” asked Bill guardedly.

  “That when he was going round liberating Ireland you couldn’t throw a stick over the wall of a poorhouse without hitting one of his bastards.”

  Bill winced but quickly rallied. “Protestant propaganda put about at the time and the Republicans got into bed with them so to speak.”

  “I don’t think the Republicans were the ones getting into bed with housemaids now so to speak,” said Margie smiling sweetly.

  “There’s no smoke without fire,” added Seamus darkly.

  Bill took a deep breath and launched into a robust defence of the Liberator. “The fire in this case was lit by an unholy alliance of Planters and warmongers.” he explained. “The Planters hated him because he fought for Catholic emancipation and the Republicans hated him because he said violence was stupid and wrong.”

  “Except when he was the one doing it himself,” shouted Willie Henry, the west having suddenly wakened up again. “Didn’t he shoot Fred Astaire didn’t he?”

  A mystified silence followed while the rest of us pondered this claim, wondering just what to make of it, until it was clarified by Bill. “You may be thinking,” he said, “of John d’Esterre, a member of Dublin Corporation. O’Connell criticized the corporation for being anti-Catholic and this man d’Esterre challenged him to a gun duel. O’Connell won and d’Esterre died from his injuries.”

  “Well there you are then,” said Seamus, stroking his stomach with satisfaction and sticking his thumbs inside the belt of his trousers. “Political violence. The very thing he was death on himself.”

  “Aye,” seconded Willie Henry, “there you are, the very thing I was after saying. Except when he was doing it himself.”

  “Stupid and wrong? Is that what the oul goat said is it? Well that’s a goodun,” cried Jim, eyeing Bill with mild venom. “So Michael Collins was stupid and wrong then? If it hadn’t a been for Michael Collins the British would still be here today so they would.”

  “But they are still here,” returned Bill. “And what exactly was the result of all those killings he organized down south? A confessional state. A confessional state where the Irish army attends ma
ss clicking their heels and armed to the teeth.”

  The room was seething with insurrection now, the only ones out of it being me and Maud. My pressing need at that particular time was to empty my bladder but I had a feeling that if I stood up I would fall down so I sat tight if that’s the right word.

  “So do nothing then?” demanded Seamus. “Is that what you’re saying? What are you anyway? An Ulster Unionist? A Paisleyite?”

  Bill’s cheeks flapped like a flibbering jib and his waistcoat swelled fit to burst threatening to send buffalo hoof buttons, for that indeed was what they were made of — I had this from Bill himself at the last staff do in the Castle Inn — ricocheting round the room like shrapnel. It was at this parlous juncture that Father Hourigan chose to make his entrance. The Reverend Doctor Xavier Hourigan no less, cathedral administrator, chairman of three school boards — including mine God help me — and scourge of slacking teachers in the parish of Saint Eugene. I’m tempted to tell you that I was never as glad to see anybody in my life but since that would be a lie I’ll just say I was mighty relieved that a blazing row had been nipped in the bud. I jumped to my feet like a squaddie when the sergeant comes in and the room began to swim in front of me butterfly style. In an instinctive attempt to remain upright I used what is known in the States as the two-handed greeting — I’ve seen politicians in their presidential campaigns use it as a way of gaining support for their cause, Richard Nixon and George Wallace being two examples that come to mind at this minute in time.

  I suppose I should elucidate here. The two-handed greeting is a vigorous handshake with the right hand while grasping the other person’s upper arm with the left. Support your local drunk. I was bit free with him I grant you, a bit touchy feely considering this was a man who lived by certain immutable tenets on the matter of physical contact but what can you do, it was either hold on to his arm or fall by the wayside. The cleric drew back like a scalded cat, then recovered his poise somewhat and gave me a long searching look down the length of his nose. Regular old trouper, never put out for too long. On the matter of his nose by the way. The hairs that sprout from it like curly weeds are gray as befits a man of his age but look at his hair, I mean to say the hair on his head. It’s as black as your boot. So there, what does that tell you? Vanity. That’s what I’m talking about. Vanity pure and simple.

  He glanced round the rest of the company and nodded stiffly, reserving a greeting of sorts for Big Bill Braddock who, though still steaming from his recent altercation with the rebels, managed a good to see you Father in return. The priest then moved with great gravitas towards the coffin and as he did so a vicious stab at the base of the bladder told me how desperate I was to do my number one so taking advantage of the fact that Hourigan temporarily had his back to me and that I now found myself in a standing position I made my way carefully to the bathroom dislodging and miraculously catching and then replacing a flying duck in the process. Pointless things these ducks. Never liked them. You’d be better with a blank wall. Once locked in I gripped the wash-hand basin and slumped back on the toilet seat. I hadn’t done a pee sitting down since I was about three or whatever but I thought Why not? If I do it standing up half of it will probably end up on the floor so I may as well do it where I am. It stung a bit at the start but when I was partway through I was thinking, Christ, this is as good as sex nearly, this is like a bloody orgasm so it is, and when I got near the end I fixed my eyes on a particular spot on the wall hoping the focus would help me to get the best I could out of it.

  And that was the moment I saw him doing the same old tricks. I don’t exactly know what class of an insect he is but he’s been there for years. If it wasn’t the same boy then it had to be one of his offspring though if that was the case it was very strange indeed because there’s never been more than a day between his death and the appearance of his fully grown replica.

  But there he was anyway, swinging his way down the wall, for all the world as if he was abseiling only without the props, enjoying I would say stunning aerial views of the wash-hand basin and bath and scuffed lino and me on the toilet seat, swinging with gay abandon and what do you call it, consummate skill. The thing is, he’s always there, day in day out, no winter break, he’s not one of these lads that disappear into a hairline in the wall to hibernate, no, this boy’s at it all seasons, abseiling away there on that part to my right above the bath, always the same place too. I watch him a lot of times I’m doing my number two when I’ve forgotten to bring in the newspaper. It used to be sort of amusing watching him till he started this other trick he has sometimes of jumping about like a bed bug and then disappearing so you haven’t a clue where he’s got to, if he’s maybe in your hair or somewhere worse. Those times I felt like waiting for him to reappear so I could kill him with the toilet brush but he never did and anyway his patch is just that bit out of reach when you’re sitting down and you wouldn’t know what would happen if you came off the toilet seat in the middle of it all to clock him one. It’s as if he knows you’re at a disadvantage and he’s teasing you. And then when you’ve got your business finished and the toilet flushed and your trousers back on he’s gone of course. He just goes. It’s as if he only comes out when certain smells are there.

  Anyway this particular night of the wake I was sitting on the bowl doing the last dregs watching the swinging pendulum kind of descent he does and I suddenly realized I’d been feeling hot and prickly for a while and then it came to me I still had my trousers on. Well fuck me, I thought, and then I said to hell with it, I’m nearly finished anyway. So I put my mind to enjoying the rest of it but the enjoyment was greatly diminished, nonexistent if I’m being completely truthful, because I was thinking that after I finished I should strictly speaking soak my lower half in the bath, a maneuver that has never appealed to me even sober, and then get magically dried with the wee hand towel Mammy had left in the bathroom and change from the waist down. Imagine only leaving a hand towel and all those people coming in. She’d shame you.

  The logistics involved in the washing and drying and changing seemed too impractical if not impossible to consider seriously since all my clean clothes were upstairs and to get there minus trousers and underpants and with only a small hand towel held in front of me would present some difficulty. I had a fleeting image of me charging through the hall and streaking past stunned mourners up the stairs like Tarzan. And to add to the gravity of the situation the wakeroom would be on my route of course which meant I’d have to pass Hourigan whom I could hear at that very minute holding forth in his pulpit voice on what drink was doing to family life in Derry. I therefore made up my mind on no account to exit the bathroom until the priest had left the building.

  The way I felt just then I wouldn’t have minded downing the rest of that Paddy and the thought of sitting on the toilet seat with the bottle for company held a certain appeal. And the thought grew until it became a preoccupation until it in turn became like an obsession and I was actively planning on making a quick sortie to the scullery when I heard women’s voices on the other side of the bathroom door which, in case I haven’t explained the geography right, is where the scullery actually is. Mammy’s was one of them and I was able to extrapolate from the mostly rubbish they were talking that they were making tea and opening packets of spring-sprongs, also known as coconut creams.

  So it was a case of sitting it out. I could live with that, I thought, though the wet clothes were an irritation and some had got through to my socks and shoes. Urine I remembered from a bar quiz was ninety-five percent water, which goes to show that there’s no such thing as useless knowledge, but I couldn’t remember what the other five percent was and then it came to me. Leonora the sister-in-law, disaster if ever there was one, going on about the causes of nappy rash and though I’d made a point of not listening to a word she was saying some of it must have percolated because it was then I made up my mind to take the thing by the scruff of the neck. So with only two minor falls one of which occasioned a split lowe
r lip I got my Y-fronts and trousers and shoes and socks off and dabbed myself dry with the hand towel which I then returned carefully to the side of the bath. Next up was what to wear. I scanned the bathroom and could see nothing but a flowered apron of Mammy’s drying on the convector heater.

  “Jeremiah!”

  Mammy. Say nothing. If I don’t answer she won’t know I’m here.

  “Jeremiah, are you all right?”

  Don’t weaken.

  “Jeremiah, it’s you in there, isn’t it?”

  On the other hand if I don’t answer she might think I’m lying unconscious and then she’ll get someone to force the door and then what? What will all those women think when they see the bottom half of me?

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” I called as matter of factly as I could. “Tell me, is Father Hourigan still there? In the wakeroom?” I tried to make these last two questions sound airy as if I wouldn’t have minded having a chat with him though it didn’t really matter that much but I don’t think Mammy bought it.

  “What do you want to know that for?” she shouted. “What does he want to know that for?” She could only have been directing the second question to the other women in the scullery. Two responses came, the first of which was: “What does he want to know what for?” and the other: “Here, I’ll go and see if I can get him.” Stupid woman whoever she was. Did she think I needed the last rites or what?

  A brainscalding pause that went on for anything up to five minutes, and then: “He’s away out the door. He left there a minute ago.”

  Blessed be God. Blessed be His Holy name. Blessed be Jesus Christ true God and true man.

  To add to the relief I remembered that weeks ago I’d stuffed a Woolworth’s bag containing a pajama bottom with dried in dreams on it into a next to inaccessible space between the bath and the wall. I’ll really have to buy a washing machine, I thought as I reached my hand in and dragged out the dusty bag slightly skinning my knuckles in the process. Least of my worries. The pajamas were quite stiff in places but apart from that, perfect. I replaced them with my trousers, underpants and socks and returned the bag to its hiding place. My coordination wasn’t the best because when I withdrew my hand this time the knuckles were bleeding. But no pain so that was all right.