Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ Patrick said.

  ‘You did so mean to.’

  What had happened was this: Patrick had taken Veronica’s coat and another girl’s coat and stuffed them into the fireplace. No: not merely into the fireplace, but into the actual fire burning on the sitting room hearth. Nobody knew a thing about it until a dense black cloud of smoke and an acrid smell issued from the room and into the hall – for the coats were not burning with a quick, hot flame, but rather smouldering, and releasing horrifying amounts of black smoke, the blackest. Suddenly the house was filling with smoke, and Veronica was screaming, screeching and the other girls and even some of the mammies were screaming and screeching too. The rooms, the whole house were filled with screaming.

  Her own mammy soon put a stop to that. She appeared with the bucket from the back yard, and she elbowed her way through the crowd and without saying a single, solitary word doused the fire in the fireplace with water, and that was an end to that. The coats hissed; they still looked horrifying, there in the hearth. Like black, twisted bodies. And yes, her mammy didn’t say a word the whole time: not a word; she stayed silent until the fire was out and the windows and doors opened; and then the kettle went on again; and only then did she say anything at all.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, looking around. ‘I’m afraid Patrick has been showing off.’ She took in the scene. ‘I think we all need more tea.’

  Meanwhile the girls were crowding into the sitting room and then Veronica began screaming louder than ever. She had seen her coat: ruined, soaking, blackened and reeking in the fireplace; and she turned and pointed a finger at Margaret.

  ‘You did that on purpose, Margaret Jackson! You did! – you did it on purpose!’

  There was no way back from this. She was out of the group now.

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ Patrick now repeated. This was so obviously a lie that Margaret didn’t know what to say: the fight had gone out of her, suddenly, gone out of her legs; and sensing this, her brother crept closer, within range. She pulled her legs in tightly – her dress was covered with sooty smudges, it was ruined – and wrapped her arms around her knees; and now Patrick sat down on the floor too and burrowed his small, dirty face into her shoulder.

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘You did so mean to,’ Margaret whispered and then she did what she always did: she pulled him closer still to her, and they just sat there. This was what she always did, always, always, when things happened. After a moment, she sensed her mammy’s eyes on her, standing there in the doorway, but she kept her own eyes tightly closed; and when after a few more moments she opened them, the doorway was empty and her mammy gone.

  And it didn’t really matter. Not really. Patrick was sniffing into her shoulder and snorting back his snotters and his tears, but all of this, it didn’t really matter. She closed her eyes again. Cassie was coming along the hall: she was shy of strangers, she’d stayed in her room, so Veronica hadn’t seen her. And now she was coming again, shuffling, padding. Surely she would get a hug from Cassie. Surely everything was fine.

  *

  But in the kitchen, tucked out of sight from her family – for the fridge protruded a little, and unsatisfactorily, not sleek and streamlined like the rest of the kitchen, she would have to see if something could be done about that – Sarah had set down carefully the stack of plates, was gripping the edge of the counter, was looking down at her knuckles. A young woman again – a girl, really, though she didn’t think so at the time – and Cassie was hovering at her shoulder. What to do, what to do? There was nothing to be done. Nothing, no: not a thing. And then the moment passed. Everything was fine: the pork, the potatoes were fine. And the family was fine – and only Cassie absent – and again Sarah felt a gust of something, dizziness, wretchedness – pass through her. Five years dead, and still Sarah felt unanchored, untethered.

  ‘Begin again,’ Cassie told her long ago. ‘You can begin again. Can’t you?’

  The sound of the explosion was caught, still, in her ears, a high, shrill ringing; the fire puffed out a little turf smoke; in the black outdoors, the frost was settling on the farmyard. ‘And what will you do?’

  Cassie’s clear, light laugh. ‘Follow you, maybe. But I’ll look after Brendan, first.’

  Brendan?

  ‘He gave me a home. I’ll stay with him, until it’s all over.’

  And she was as good as her word, Sarah thought. She had a promise to keep and she kept it, and then she came to live with me; and died too soon. Too young.

  *

  Patrick accepted a drink. And what happened then? In a few more minutes, their mother called them and an evening of gluttony commenced: roast stuffed fillet of pork, accompanied with home-grown steamed potatoes; and followed with lemon meringue pie and ice cream, with cheese and crackers, and coffee. And then the over-stuffed birthday cake, cream and mandarin oranges and more cream.

  Strange, the memories that cling. He remembered that the dining room curtains stayed pulled back, so that light flooded from the house, shining in long, white squares across the back garden, the sodden lawn. Shining, he remembered, onto the pampas grass that my mother had planted years and years ago in the middle of the lawn, that was indestructible. What a scene, as though we were on stage, stuffing ourselves: how must we have appeared to a watcher, as potatoes were passed and cream spooned, wine poured and more wine, silently, on the far side of the glass. Margaret blowing out the candles on her cake, with a flourish.

  The memories that cling – bolstered with hindsight. He remembered too that on that same night, a bomb – not a huge bomb, though big enough – exploded in a car parked in front of a shop in the city centre: the damage of course substantial. He remembered the Indian family who owned the shop: well, they would have wondered if it’d be worth, this time, clearing up and applying for the compensation package, worth beginning all over again. They did apply, they did clean up, they did begin all over again: they did, he thought, because he bought a jacket from them a couple of months later.

  Why remember that bomb? Of all the bombs, why that one? I remember it, he thought, because a few minutes after Margaret blew out the candles on her birthday cake, the windows buckled the way they always did when a bomb exploded. The sound wave travelled along the river from the city and collided against the walls of the house, and the windows bulged in on us: bulged, but did not quite explode. We were too far away from the explosion for our windows to come in on us. How complacent. Still, the sight of them, moving inside the uncurtained frames: this was not very nice; the sort of sight, he thought, that stays. We watched them buckle, and then there was the usual short silence, and then we got back to our cake.

  Something else Patrick remembered – though no, not remembered, because he was not aware of it at the time. Yet there it is in my memory, he thought, as though I was actually there. He shifted uncomfortably in his blue bed. Along the coast, further up Lough Foyle, another family was also sitting together. Sitting in trouble. Yes, he thought, poetic license is needed for this one – though not much, because later I drove past the house and took it in, got some sense of its layout. Its glassed-in porch, filled with wicker furniture, a caned-legged table. I got a sense of the place. And the trouble with the family, it was this: their youngest girl was gone. Was missing. Out there in the darkness, all hell was breaking loose: her father was combing the lanes, the police were involved already; the foreshore of the lough had been searched already, in the fading evening light. The house was filling up: neighbours making tea, the inevitable priest, a policewoman. The lane outside the house was jammed, as for a wake – which in effect it was.

  The child’s mother was sitting in a wicker chair in the chilly porch of her house and weeping and weeping for her daughter; her husband was outside in the darkness, trying to keep it together. In the warm living room, her remaining daughters sat, dry-eyed and silent and rigid, and wrapped their hands around their elbo
ws, their knees.

  In his memory. He thought: chances are.

  His was a lucky family that night, in comparison: lucky them, that night, gathered together under a tight roof, clinking the ice in their drinks, and living off the fat of the land. What a lucky, complacent family. Were they not? To be sure, they blinked, they jumped as the wall of sound from the bomb blast, rolling down the river from the city, collided with the windows of their house. They watched the windows swell visibly, ripple inwards: they felt startled, as always, wondering if one day these windows would shatter and blast inwards. But sure, they recovered rapidly enough. This was merely an aspect of everyday life. It was nothing to cause undue alarm: and there was a birthday cake to deal with, besides.

  Patrick, searching through his memory, remembered now how watchful his brother-in-law was that night, how little he took part in the conversation. Even less than usual, that night. But now – no: this was with hindsight. His memories in this regard were not to be trusted.

  9

  Patrick looked out of the window into a silver moonlit night.

  The garden was – changed, somehow. Not as it might if snow had fallen, or a light mist come down, altering the life, the dimensions of the place. It had changed completely. The lawn no longer broad, substantial: instead, it had become hemmed in with plants. Plants crept out across the grass: some unfamiliar, white-flowering, their blossoms catching the moonlight; others he recognised – dead nettle that grew rapidly and choked invisibly, ivies set on strangling in silence the plants around them. Tendrils moving along the ground and winding into the surrounding trees, round and round their trunks; and the trees unfamiliar too, with silvery leaves and smooth bark that shone white in the silver light. The moonlight, the garden, the world, now: all was silver and shadow-dappled.

  What is this place? Does it belong to him? – no, not to him, that much was certain; and his eyes filled with tears at the thought, for he knew that here at least, in this garden at least, he had sometimes felt safe, comfortable. In hides, in dens, behind curtains of blackberry brambles. No longer.

  His mother was responsible, somehow. And Robert. They had arranged all of this. As a treat, he knew, somehow: arranged as a treat – for him, in secret and silently, without saying a word. We won’t say a word, he heard them say – though indeed, neither his mother nor Robert was anywhere in sight. We won’t say a word, they repeated; and now here they were – here they were in sight now, standing behind him, framed, paired in the doorway. Patrick opened his mouth – but no, they were having none of it; would not meet his look, for one set of eyes flickered away and then another; and now they were gone; and the door closed silently.

  He returned to the window. He looked out for some time: then, he caught the clasp on the window frame and opened it wide and slid out into the garden. The moonlight was more distinct here. Harder: the silver light filling the air was gone now, replaced by a clearer white and black – the white of the moon, the black of the hedging, enveloping shadows, the white gleam of leaves, the black of shadowed trunks and stems. The tendrils of the unfamiliar plants crept across his bare feet – but no, they did not wind around his bare legs, he would not be throttled by them, he knew that he was – not safe, no, but not in danger of death either.

  Not yet.

  He looked again around this white and black garden, and now he saw something else: that each of the trees, each of the shrubs was dead. There had been only a semblance of life: for the trunk of each tree, the stem of each shrub had been severed – a clean cut, surgical, close to the ground. The moonlight had deceived him: he must bend, now, to see the minute signs of incipient decay in the form of shrivelling leaves, as though the plants were frozen by a frost. In no time, he thought, each of these leaves will wither; there will be no more pretence. In the morning, the decay will be complete: when I look out of this window in the morning, I’ll see death. This was not a shock: he seemed to know it, as though he’d anticipated it, seen it countless times before. There was no sorrow now: this was simply the way of it.

  Yes: they – his mother, Robert – had caused the whole thing: the occlusion, the creeping shadows and the disturbed, fitful light; and the clean slice in the trunks of these living things. They never stood there in the moonlight, they never actually figured at all, they’d vanished behind that closing door – but as is the way of dreams, he felt the message, as one might feel a blow to the back of the neck.

  Carrying this knowledge, he slipped back across the grass to his window, let himself in, fastened the clasp once more.

  *

  ‘Well!’ said the nurse. ‘What happened to you, then?’

  She fingered – not unkindly – the brushed cotton on the collar of his pyjamas. The paisley pattern, bottle green and sky blue – an odd choice, this nurse thought, not very attractive, poor fellow, who bought those for him? – was darkened a little: by perspiration. The temperature of the room was held at an even, pleasant level; the window was closed; she moved a little closer to feel his forehead, her mind swung to her thermometer, held at the ready.

  ‘It isn’t anything – clinical,’ he murmured.

  ‘Oh?’ said the nurse. She’d be the judge of that.

  ‘Of course, you’ll be the judge of that,’ he murmured. His eyes were closed; there was little spark in him today. ‘But it was only a dream. A dream, night sweats; happens all the time.’

  ‘Oh?’ said the nurse again, this time with a glimmering of professional curiosity. She had a little interest in dreams.

  ‘So, nothing to worry about, I suggest,’ he said. He sighed, a hand moving up slowly to touch in his turn the soft paisley cotton. ‘You might change these, though,’ he said, and his body moved a little, straightened slowly and with effort. Preparing itself for this latest, miserable, small indignity.

  There was more he might have said. The room is too light, the curtains unlined, skimpy, insufficient; the silence insufficient too, making sleep an endurance pursuit. No wonder I bitch at you all. Last night, though, I managed something approaching a deep sleep – and this was the result. He might have said – but all of it unwise. He held his tongue.

  It hovered, this dream, on the edge of his sleep. Always had – for years and years. It had changed its complexion with the years, naturally enough, morphing with circumstance: at first, his mother ran it as a solo operation, dominating proceedings like a Colossus; and when he was younger, before he knew the names of certain plants, the masses of creeping foliage had presented itself as an undifferentiated mass of leaves and stems and tendrils. Knowledge, then, sharpened the dream – which just proved, he thought, that a little knowledge was certainly not always a good thing.

  When Robert met Margaret and she opted to marry him, the dream took on a changed form. Following their meeting in London, following the disturbed realisation that this unprepossessing character wasn’t about to shuffle away once more into the shadows – following this, Robert seemed to make common cause with Sarah: in his head, the pair of them moving smoothly to colonise his subconscious mind. And so the dream began, and lurked stubbornly – for years now, morphing and altering in complexion, but remaining essentially, tediously the same.

  This, Patrick had very often thought, was like having a tapeworm. You didn’t choose such a guest: you simply inhaled or ingested an egg – and there it grew, arranging itself happily, settling down for a good feed. This is what it felt like, to him: as if he had his own personal tapeworm. He had read in the paper one morning about a woman who managed to get a tapeworm lodged in her brain. It stayed there – oh, for ages, getting up to all sorts of terrible mischief. He spread some more marmalade on his toast and realised that he could identify easily enough with the poor dear.

  And yes: in the mornings, after yet another repetitive episode, he would wake to feel himself wet: his pyjamas – and then when at length he decided was too modern for pyjamas, his tee-shirt – damp, unpleasantly moist. If the dream woke him in the middle of the night, as it occasional
ly had the power to do, he would find the cloth saturated, and sometimes the sheet saturated, sweat trickling in runnels on his chest.

  Deeply unpleasant – not that there was ever anyone to share the sensation of a night sweat, to offer comfort in the darkness. No chance.

  Patrick always – always, always – for a moment imagined that this dream was real. Always, always did: always it took his brain a moment, two moments, to recover something of a grasp on the actual world. Then he would cross the room, his pyjamas hanging damply, and pull the curtain – or rather, yank it across – and open the window and pull air into his lungs, as though they were filled with some pestilence or miasma of disease. And then: then, he would shove his dream aside: until the next time it presented itself.

  And always there was a next time. Over and over this episode recurred; and over and over he shoved it aside.

  Patrick told himself from time to time that at least the whole phenomenon was a sign of his mind’s independence. It did its own thing, it made its own mind up, it sifted and sorted and judged. Well, perhaps: but this was a profoundly unconvincing argument, most of the time – though occasionally it retained a little power. He could see why: he had never been good at having things his own way. If Patrick has his way: not a sentence, he thought, to make a blushing appearance all that often in his life. Patrick will do as he’s told: this (of course) from his mother. Come on then, Patrick: reluctantly, at school, when chosen last at PE. We’re not going anywhere, not really: this from the boys at school, slipping off at home time for a bit of craic. Let Patrick have his way: seldom. No, never. He learned how to manage; later, as a teacher, he observed that all such children learn fast, and with such skill. Fleet of foot, speed like quicksilver: they learn how not to be hurt. Some of them in the process learn how to hurt others. Then they became adults. He watched all this, and said nothing.