The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next)

by Colm Herron

  I just can’t take it, that’s what’s wrong with me. Ham and eggs every morning they get (one sausage or two, Father?) and then around about half twelve they tuck into a nice lunch and they all finish up with a big feed of meat in the evening. Except Friday of course. Friday the day of abstinence, no haunch of venison or roast swan on Fridays, no, rules is rules, so they have to make do with wild salmon and beurre blanc sauce, cream potatoes, cauliflower, fresh carrots and garden peas.

  Though they don’t always get their own way. I heard a story Margaret the housekeeper over there told somebody. She comes into the dining-room one morning and Father Finucane’s sitting at the breakfast table reading his mail and she’s got the egg boiled and all and she says to him You’ll have a boiled egg Father? And he says No, I think I’ll have a fry Margaret. Some bacon and egg and could you make it two sausages please? And she says back to him You’ll have a fucking boiled egg Father. And he says, nearly choking with the laughing, I’ll have a boiled egg Margaret.

  But that crowd at the wake couldn’t have been more right about Maud and the money. You wouldn’t have believed it to look at the cut of her and the shape of her house. Well she’s booked her place in heaven now anyway. Come into the garden Maud, for the black bat Life has flown. Welcome to Paradise Maud, I am here at the gate alone; and the woodbine spices are wafted abroad and the musk of the rose is blown. Come sit on My right hand, O good and faithful servant, for your name is written in the book of heaven. No, hold on, on second thoughts, why don’t you try this nice wee garden stool instead? No shortage of tulips here, what? See those blue ones over there? Especially for you. Don’t mention it. Now, where was I? Ah yes, the book of heaven. Let’s have a looky.

  Hmm, you have indeed given sterling service to the church, to the tune of, let Me see, seven hundred and fifty thousand plus ninety-five thousand which, if I’m correct, comes to eight hundred and forty-five thou. Sweet music, Maud, sweet music down from the blissful skies indeed.

  And We’re not finished yet, are We? There are also, ah, I’ve lost the place, yes, here We are, four houses, twenty-seven and three quarter acres of prime land plus the rest Maud, plus the rest. And the vintage Bentley of course, offside mudguard slightly rusted but no matter, that should fetch a fine penny. Now we’ll overlook the Child of Prague who’s missing two fingers and part of a nose anyway and the ducks and other wall furnishings which are pretty near worthless unless they’re of sentimental value to somebody though I can’t imagine. In fact you showed extremely good judgment there if I may say so, Maud. Pity about those neighbors of yours but in time they will learn to offer it up.

  I doubt it somehow. Maybe Mammy will but not me. She’s only the executor. I’m the one has to do everything.

  In loco parentis. Loco’s right. The second time at the probate office I was ready to kill somebody. Mammy’s here to execute the will and I’m here to execute you you and you. You there sitting in your pinstriped three piece on your swivel chair with your nose in the air, prick, if you tell us we have to come back a third time I’m going to strangle you with this dental floss I have here with me in my pocket. Look, see it? And you too, Bob Cratchit, head down in your dusty ledger hiding behind your big desk trying to let on you don’t see me. And I’ll have more than enough left for you on my way out. Yes, you, you in your tacky uniform, what are you anyway but a fucking doorman? Two-bit job and you’ve the nerve to look at me like that.

  +++++

  To hell with them anyway. I can just hear them now, all those religious for want of a better word, smug as hell in their holy houses, lapping up their good fortune. But they can’t take it with them can they? To hell with them, I’ve other things to think about. Would you believe I went to the Armagh march just to see her, not talk to her if she didn’t want to talk, just see her, that would have been enough.

  It’s weird when you think about it, she lives a hundred yards away and I travel eighty or ninety miles just to try and get a look at her. And she was there, she was there. In the middle of thousands of civil rights marchers there she was, so close I could nearly have touched her. Ten thousand there must have been, singing We Shall Overcome, blocked by a Protestant counter-demonstration.

  I saw her and she saw me. I had hardly time to take her in when she looked away to speak to a girl she was holding hands with. Audrey, it had to be Audrey, turned to look at me and it was then I got the shock. There was hardly anything of her but what there was was beautiful. The way I’d pictured her she was dowdy and plain and definitely butch. This girl was thin as a reed with nut-brown hair cropped short like a boy’s but the furthest thing from a boy you could get.

  The short hair showed off her full face and what a face it was, pale, near enough perfect as far as I could see, something classical about it, like a painting. My mind tried to remember as she fixed me with bright bold eyes. Virgin of the Rocks maybe. Only this was no virgin. The idea of these two beautiful girls doing whatever it was they did alone together was outlandish but there they were, lovers to each other. And they looked comfortable, defiant as they stood there hand in hand. Imagine if they could marry, imagine if that could happen, would Aisling be the man? Who would wear the wedding dress?

  In my confusion I averted my gaze from Audrey to somewhere unfocused and when I looked back after I’m not sure how long she was still staring at me. What was that look? Curiosity, I’m sure of that, for she was seeing the man she had shared Aisling with, but there was something else. Looking at it now I think maybe it was guilt. Still holding hands they moved away and out of sight. Aisling. I’d hardly looked at her yet this was the girl that had transformed my life for a while, forever, and given me things no amount of sleep could dream.

  Maybe she’s not there. I haven’t called. Why? Why haven’t I called? I don’t even know. Maybe I’m afraid of what she might say. Of what I might say. I haven’t seen her once here in Derry since the wake, not once, not in the street, not in her playschool, not in the City Hotel. Maybe she’s moved, maybe she’s gone up to Belfast to live with Audrey for good. That would nearly be a relief. Because then I’d know she was a lost cause and I could get on with things. Couldn’t I?

  +++++

  For weeks now I’ve been walking the streets whispering her name and seeing her face in crowds everywhere I go. But she comes to me late at night always after I go to bed and her face is flushed with this kind of an opal light and each time she comes she reaches out as if to touch me and then goes away again.

  The night after Armagh I couldn’t sleep thinking about her and how she makes love. Up dark and early and the way I felt as I shuffled to the bathroom I didn’t think I’d ever be able to sleep again. No breakfast, breakfast was the last thing in my head. I closed the front door quietly behind me, stumbled along our path and the three steps down to the street, legs numb one second, sore and heavy the next. I’m not exactly sure why but I knew she’d be there this time, there in the flat, round the corner, down the hill, as if it was ordained. I wasn’t thinking very straight and I’d no idea what I was going to say but I kept telling myself how she’d know to look at me that I loved her. All of her, body, soul, mind, everything. Wouldn’t she?

  But here’s a thing. When you haven’t slept and you’re out in the street and the day has hardly started and there’s nobody about you see things you never saw before, not properly anyway, like roofs of houses and the slates dark and glossy from the rain and how big the chimneys are, unbelievable, big as coal sheds some of them, and the pigeons walking about with their hands behind their backs jerking their heads up and down at these invisible particles on the ground and others in the December chill fluffing their feathers and burying their beaks in their breasts and you see what pecking order means when a seagull lands in the middle of them all, oh you see it then all right. There wasn’t another being except a dog outside the chemists hunkered down relieving itself. My heart felt as if it was leaving me at the thought of her, at the thought of the sight of her and the smell of her. And t
hen I heard voices through the open doors of the cathedral and saw the worshippers’ cars parked nose to tail on the hill. Eight o’clock mass it must be and the voices quavering out into the air.

  I’ll sing a hymn to Mary,

  The mother of my God,

  The virgin of all virgins,

  Of David’s royal blood.

  O teach me, holy Mary,

  A loving song to frame,

  When wicked men blaspheme thee

  I’ll love and bless thy name.

  O Lily of the Valley,

  O Mystic Rose, what tree

  Or flower, e’en the fairest,

  Is half so fair as thee.

  Voices like a lament. The happiest hymns always sound like a lament in there. It must be the organist, he must be a depressive. I turned the handle of her street door and it opened and the stairs were in front of me, only the stairs and the door of the flat between us. The music was discordant now, suddenly discordant, twisting in the air, clashing with something, clashing with music from somewhere else, clashing with music coming from above. I pushed the door shut on all the lamenting and stood still. The Flower Duet. I held my breath and listened. In French was it? For moments the noise of my heart got in the way of hearing but then I heard. Yes, in French, two sweet voices. I remembered it and what happened the very first time she played it in French.

  Sous le dôme épais où le blanc jasmin

  A la rose s’assemble

  Sur la rive en fleurs riant au matin.

  Oh Jesus. I leaned on the banister light with the enchantment. I took the stairs in a rush then and stopped to hear again at the closed door, pictured her lying on the big wide bed listening to the music and thinking back to us together and in the middle of it remembering me yesterday just feet away, heart going out to me and wanting to come to me but afraid of the rebuff, lying now remembering us together. The door fell open at my touch and I saw WORKERS UNITE AND FIGHT on a placard up against the sofa and smelt the incense and saw the candle burning on the low table by the unlit lamp. The flame bowed as I came in and then withdrew for a moment before righting itself. A girl’s voice said Yes, yes, do it, please do it again! and I heard the dull thwack and a cry of pain and Aisling saying There, that’s enough. I’ll put it away now. Are you all right? Here, let me look at you. Oh my poor love. Let me put this on you.

  Put what on you? I stood at the locked street door. Discordant notes wavered in the wet air, lugubrious notes longdrawnout from the wide-open cathedral doors. They’re asleep in each other’s arms up there or in Belfast, sleeping off a night of love. Here or in Belfast, what does it matter?

  I hurried home under a lowering sky and bent my head against the rain. Outside the chemist’s I slipped on something and fell hard on one knee, rose, turned into Marlborough Terrace, limped, smelt the shit, limped and felt no pain. They were singing another hymn to Mary now and their voices followed me from the cathedral to the house and they didn’t stop till I slammed the front door.

  O Mother I could weep for mirth

  Joy fills my heart so fast.

  My soul today is heaven on earth —

  O would this transport last.

  “Would you look at you, you’re wringing,” Mammy said. “What were you doing out there anyway without a coat? And what are you looking at me like that for? What did I do?”

  +++++

  I’m in the City Hotel five nights a week now. Turning into a bit of a habitual drinker. But sometime she’ll come. She has to surely, she has so many friends in Derry that she’ll want to come back to see, she’ll have to come. And until she does there’s always company, no shortage of company. Doesn’t fill the void, but still. Marxist suicide marchers, other left-wing allsorts, Nationalist party stalwarts, Citizens’ Action Committee celebrities, spongers, sex-seekers. Sometime she’ll come.

  Thursdays and Fridays I sit at home with Mammy and look at TV. A man could grow old this way. On Friday we watch the Late Late Show. Stupid name of course because it’s not late late, it’s not even late. It starts at half nine and ends at eleven or so when the night’s only starting. Anyway, I was sitting watching it with Mammy this time and they were discussing the pope’s encyclical about birth control and of course the Pill had to be brought into the conversation. There was a theologian on about the spiritual dangers of using it and then a lady doctor started explaining how it can harm a woman’s health or maybe even kill her.

  Mammy always switches over if there’s anything to do with sex on but this time she turned the volume up. You wanted to hear it. Breast cancer, cervical cancer, blood clots, gall bladder disease, liver tumors, bad cholesterol, infertility, genital warts and all these other sexually transmitted diseases, everything but ingrown toenails and maybe those too if she’d had the time to get round to them.

  Mammy was nodding away at her head the whole way through it and I sat thinking, Typical!–that’s Telefís Éireann all over, just giving one side of the story. Now this boy Gay Byrne’s the presenter and he made a bit of an effort to act as devil’s advocate but you’d have thought by the end of it he was the devil himself the way some people in the audience were going on. He was lucky he didn’t end up tarred and feathered.

  Then as a bit of relief they brought on these Irish dancers. It’s a funny thing about Irish dancing. There they were, the girls highstepping and you could see their legs right up to their panties and beyond if you looked hard enough and their hands were dead stiff by their sides and the boys dancing next to them weren’t going near them and they had their hands down the same way. There may as well have been a sign up saying Don’t touch, this is Ireland, this is Irish culture, don’t go on the way depraved ones do with their jiving and slow dancing and miniskirts. It’s no wonder most of the country’s screwed up. Short shrift to short shifts. Priestridden Ireland. No, that doesn’t sound right.

  It was supposed to be one of my drinkfree nights but I thought, What a ridiculous country and I told Mammy I was going out for a walk. She said something, sounded like she wasn’t happy about me going out for a walk on one of my nights in, but I wasn’t listening.

  I headed down Creggan Hill levitating for the length it took me to pass Aisling’s flat. A quiver in the waterworks. I paused at the top of William Street and peered through the dark. Stopped breathing for a bit and listened for the sounds of rioting. Things seemed quiet as I walked on but you can never be sure in this town. Like a graveyard one minute and the next it’s carnival time. Friendly nod from two guys leaning up against the wall of the Grandstand bar looking to tap me for the price of a drink maybe. That was a good one Mickey MacTamm told me the last time he was cutting my hair.

  As God’s me witness I seen it happening meself Jeremiah. His Lordship the bishop walking down William Street last Saturday. I see you shaking your head there but I’m telling you now, he was walking all right. On his own too, I swear it. Naw listen, sure didn’t I see him with me own eyes? I was coming up the ways on the other side of the street and I nearly dropped so I did. Never seen that man walking in me life before, always in the back of the big Rolls any time I seen him. Wait, I tell a lie. I seen him one time walking up the middle aisle in the cathedral there around Corpus Christi I think it was and a whole gang of men holding the canopy thing over him. Is that what you call it? You know the thing I’m talking about, like the roof of a circus tent if you can picture it. Well he’s going down past the Grandstand twirling away at the big black umburella and these three standing outside arguing the horsie odds for the day look up and there he is. So all together they salute him like he was General Eisenhower and then they say one after the other Good morning your lordship and you know what he does? He looks up at the Guildhall clock and sees it’s two minutes past twelve so he says back to them Good afternoon and walks on, head in the air. Put them in their place so he did.

  William Street quiet, still strewn with bricks and stones from the day’s rioting, but quiet for now. Turned into Waterloo Place, passed couples walking hand in
hand, others in doorways grinding up against one another, up for anything I’d say, making me remember, filling my throat, stopping me breathing nearly, soon to be stretched some of them on sofas, car back seats, beds, glutinous seed emptying, filling, infecting.

  A police car hurtled through Guildhall Square, cop in the back seat gave me the fingers. Or maybe it was the V sign. Amounts to the same thing. She might be there. That program about lesbians I saw on TV last week, somewhere in the north of England. Newcastle was it? Doesn’t matter where it was. Interesting. No, fascinating. No, titillating. Out of focus shots of bodies rolling and writhing in slow motion, pastel fluids running into each other, breasts merging. Mammy came into the kitchen in the middle of it and I was nearly going to change channels and then I thought, Why the hell should I? I pay the bloody rental. She didn’t catch on till it was nearly over anyway, stupid you see, when this dyke said I prefer girls mesel, men are hard see and adding My mar knows nowt aboot it. Well she knows now, dear, she knows now. My mar wanted it switched off but I held out. She made a scene and I couldn’t take in this part at the end properly with bottoms going up and down like billows, pale red and pink and purple, really arty and all, great camerawork but I couldn’t appreciate it. Stuff her, I saw as much as I wanted to see anyway. Still feel disappointed it never talked about bisexual girls though. Probably there’s so few they’d have to trawl for ages to find ones.