THE BODY STILL has not arrived.
Tom leaves the property supplement out on the kitchen table, with rings and ticks around derelict bits of the inner city. He underlines the words ‘In need of refurbishment’. I think he means me. I also think-thanks, Tom-that this is a great thing to do when your brother-in-law dies.
I go in to exchange Mammy’s shawl and wander around town, and after a while I find myself crying on the escalator in Brown Thomas, which is only a shop. And the fact that makes me cry is that there is nothing here that I can not buy. I can buy bedlinen, or I can buy a bed. I can buy posh jeans for the girls or a Miu Miu jacket for myself, if it doesn’t look too boxy. I can buy the plastic Brabantia storage jars that I am now staring at on the third floor, that I actually might need for pasta and rice and lentils and pumpkin seeds and all sorts of dry goods, expecially the ones that are never cooked or used that live on my top shelf. I try to count. Should I get one for the polenta, that has been sitting in its packet for the last five years, waiting for the day when we would need all the dry goods we could get? What about the chickpeas? The jars are half price. I need nine, I think. I start piling them into the crook of my left arm, crying a little more now, as I imagine the flood, plague and nuclear bomb that has us locked in the house eating five-year-old polenta. If anyone asks me, I can tell them that I am crying for the end of the world. And suddenly I want to throw the nine Brabantia storage jars into the air and shout, or go over to the till and empty my bag on to the counter, and say, What about the starving people in Africa, with their bellies out and their eyes running with pus? because I can buy anything at all in this shop. My brother has just died and I can buy anything at all.
‘You need a challenge,’ says Rebecca, primly, being eight.
And I say, ‘Sure haven’t I got you?’
Are they good children? Are they decent human beings? In the main. Though Emily is a bit of a cat, and cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.
Sometimes I wonder about Michael Weiss-whether he too has succumbed, with a high maintenance wife, and kids who live the middle-class dream, but with avidity, as my pair do. And I feel he would be able to manage that; he would be able to manage the world of pink, of liking Barbies but not too much, and buying them, or not bothering to buy them after all.
Liam never went into a shop.
So, in honour of Liam, I put the storage jars back and I drive home, pointing out all the changes to him, now that he is dead.
‘Look at that row of street lamps!’ I say.
He is not convinced.
I used to do this when he was still alive, actually: all the little changes and irritations, residential parking, gridlock, the seven million orange cones between here and Kinnegad, all of these things I pointed out to him, because he was living five hundred miles away. And though he came back in a sporadic way and took his holidays in the West, all of these changes went on without him. And though not one of them meant anything much, I was sad at the way he had been left behind. Liam existed in the seventies, somehow. He might, in reality, have been more cosmopolitan than we were-cooking curries over in London, having all sorts of amazing friends-but when he came home, he always seemed a bit of a throwback, a hick.
My emigrant brother makes an old-fashioned ghost, and when he died, I dressed him in worn-out wellington boots, as the Irish seventies dipped back into the fifties in my mind.