I AM EXPECTING the house to be crammed, but Bea shakes her head slightly by the door.
‘Just us, really,’ she says. ‘A few neighbours.’
‘What do you expect?’ I want to say. ‘Who’s going to come and look at a dead body in your living room, when there isn’t even a decent glass of wine in the house?’ But I do not say this. Tom is behind me. He has taken my elbow, and is using it like a joystick to steer me around her, and I would be annoyed, but his grip is so old-fashioned. No one holds you like that any more, except Frank at work who was gay, and is now dead.
‘It’s all in the eyes,’ he said once, as he eased me into some awful corporate bash. And, Poor Frank, I think. Why did I not grieve for Frank? And I realise, suddenly and with great conviction, that I must carpet the upstairs, Frank would have been all for it. And get a cleaner again. I must get a cleaner to deal with the extra fluff. Then I remember Rebecca’s asthma-as I always do at this point-and before I finish remembering this I am looking at Liam’s dead body in the front room.
Haven’t we met before?
I can see the exact colour of the new carpet I want. ‘Driftwood’, I think they call it.
Why do you keep following me around?
The room is almost empty. There is no one here that I can talk to about children’s lungs or carpet colours, about weaves and nubbles and seagrass or percentages of wool. Dead or alive. Liam does not care about such things. I sit down. They have put him in a navy suit with a blue shirt-like a Garda. He would have liked that.
Who dressed him?
The young English undertaker, with the full mouth and the pierced ear; talking on his mobile to his girlfriend as he lifts the heavy head to slip the tie around.
The suit, I am sure, will be on the bill.
I expected the coffin to be set across the room, but there is not enough space for this. Liam’s head points towards the closed curtains and there are candles behind him, set on high stands. I can not see his face properly from where I sit. The wood of the coffin angles down, slicing across the bulge of his cheek. I can see a dip in the bone where his eyes must go, but I do not get up to see if this dip is correctly filled, or if the lids are closed. This lift and fall of bone is all I want to see of him, for the moment, thank you very much.
The armchairs and the sofa have been pushed back, but Mrs Cluny, who has paused to pray, has chosen to sit on one of the hard chairs brought in from the kitchen. Kitty is on duty by the far wall in case a mourner should be left indecently alone with the corpse, in case the corpse should be left indecently alone. She looks at me as I perch on the arm of the sofa and she rolls her eyes. After a minute she comes over and says, quietly, ‘Will you stay?’
‘No,’ I tell her. She does not understand. The whole business is finished for me now, it is beyond finished. I just want to get the damn thing buried and out of the way.
I say, ‘I’ll get Ita or someone. No. I can’t. I have the kids.’
‘Oh, the kids,’ she says, slightly too loud.
‘Yeah, you know. Kids.’
And in fact Rebecca is in the room of a sudden, backing towards me until she bumps into my knees.
‘Where’s your father?’
When I look over, I see Emily swinging out of the door handles with her eyes fixed on the coffin and her shoe kicking the paint.
‘Would you stop that,’ I say.
She doesn’t.
‘Will you stop leaving scuff marks on your Granny’s door.’
Then I realise where we are.
‘It’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘He’s dead.’ Which is not, when I think about it, the most comforting thing I could say.
In a sudden flare of kilt and sandy-coloured hair Rebecca is back at the door, and they are both gone. I hear them laughing in the hall, then running up the stairs, although they should not be running upstairs. I have a surge of rage against Tom who insisted on bringing the children but can not be bothered to mind them, not even with a corpse in the house, after which someone pushes the mute button again, and it is some time before I notice that Kitty has gone and I am the only living Hegarty in the room. I don’t know how long this lasts, but I feel like it is a long time, tracing the girls’ whispered hysteria through the upstairs-tied to them, wherever they go, and tied too to this piece of garbage in the front room. The back of the house is dense with the sound of people I do not want to meet, and so I stay where I am, and decide not to complain.
So this is how Ernest finds me when he walks in the door, fresh off the plane. He is so incontrovertibly himself-it is some moments before I stop seeing him, my big brother, and pull back to see what he looks like, these days. He looks good, I find. His clothes are a bit sad, but at the top of the anorak and polyester slacks is his head, large and healthy and getting more handsome over the years. It is Grandpa Charlie’s pate, I realise, that is gleaming in the candlelight, and Grandpa Charlie’s two big hands that grab one of mine, and I don’t know, as I stand and Ernest clasps me to him, whether this is a priestly or grandfatherly hug-no breasts anyway: my small breasts are not, with this hug, in the way.
How does he do it?
It is his job. My brother has a trained heart; compassion is a muscle for him; he inclines his head when you speak. He barely looks at the coffin, but apprises, instead, the look in my eyes. Then he turns slightly towards the body.
‘Don’t tell the rest of them I’m here, will you?’ he says. ‘Not yet,’ and sends me, with a nod, out the door. And of course, this is why I hate him too, in all his priestly candour-this fakery. Still, Ernest was always nice to me, growing up. We were just the right distance apart.
Out in the hall, I give an ear to the voices in the kitchen-a sharpened American note, that must be Ita’s. And Mossie’s wife shushing her perfect kids.
I turn and go upstairs to find my own.
‘Rebecca! Emily!’
The stairs are narrow, and steeper than I remember. I can hear the sound of their laughter, above me, like children hiding in the branches of a tree, but when I reach the landing they are gone.
It is a long time since I have been up here. This was the girls’ floor: Midge, Bea and Ita at the back; me, Kitty and Alice at the front, with a view of cherry blossom, and slanting black wires, and a white street light. It did not seem small, at the time. Kitty’s overnight bag is on her bed, the other two beds are bare. Framing the window is the maze of shelves and little cupboard doors my father built for us out of white MFI. A few schoolbooks are left on one shelf; none of them in English-perhaps this is why they were not thrown away. Das Wrack by Siegfried Lenz, and stories by Guy de Maupassant, one called ‘La Mer’ in which, as I recall from school, a sailor stores his severed arm in a barrel of salt in order to bring it home. The books look soiled as opposed to read, but we did read them too:
Tá Tír na nÓg ar chúl an tí
Tír álainn trína chéile
I turn and find the girls at the door.
‘Come on, down you go.’ And these children, who never do a single thing I say, turn and walk ahead of me down the stairs. At the bottom, Rebecca takes my hand in hers and walks me to the kitchen, like a mislaid giant she has found in the hall.
There was a thing Mossie would do with our hands. He would squeeze the small bones until you screamed, running the knuckles across each other, over and back. He is there in the kitchen, standing with Tom at the table: the two professionals in the room, talking man to man. Why do men never sit down, I think, then realise that all the chairs are in with the corpse. I look around. Ita is leaning back against the sink. She looks smaller. Even her face looks smaller-perhaps it is the light of the window behind that has her so reduced. But she is too well-preserved and I have, as I kiss her, a retching sense of the waxed flesh next door.
Then the twins are hugging me from either side-as they do, being always delightful, and hard to see. I look around for Kitty and see her outside in the garden, smoking. The mysterious Alice is not here. Probably mad, I think suddenly. The mysterious Alice was probably always mad.
Midge’s children stand in a gang and I turn gratefully towards them, but Bea throws a look at me, swinging her hair back over one shoulder.
All right. All right.
I go over to where my mother is sitting and stand by the wing of her chair while a neighbour finishes saying the ritual words.
‘Yes. Thank you. Yes.’
The neighbour, Mrs Burke, is bent low, telling some great and particular secret into Mammy’s ear; stroking her hand, over and over.
‘Yes,’ says Mammy, again. ‘Thank you. Yes.’
When Mrs Burke moves on, I step forward to kiss my mother.
It has happened. She sat watching television for the past ten days, waiting for something which has now well and truly arrived. It has, as they say, ‘hit her’. Like a truck. There isn’t much of her left.
Always vague, Mammy is now completely faded. I look her in the eye and try to find her, but she guards whatever she has left of herself deep inside. She looks at the world from this far place, and allows it all to happen, without knowing quite what it is. It is hard to tell how much she takes in, but there is a peacefulness to her too.
‘Oh. Hello,’ she says to me, and there is a hazy kind of love in her voice-for me, for the table set with food, for everyone here.
‘Mammy,’ I say, and bend down to kiss her cheek, and although she was never good at kissing or being kissed she does not flinch from me now, but angles her face like a debutante to receive the childish pucker of my lips. I suspect she has forgotten me entirely, but then she takes my hand, and sets it flat between her two light hands, and she looks up at me.
‘You were always great pals,’ she says.
‘Yes, Mammy.’
‘You were always great with each other, weren’t you? You were always great pals.’
‘Thanks, Mammy. Thanks.’
Tom’s hand is warm on the base of my spine. At least I think it is him, but when I crook my head around, he is not there. Who has touched me? I straighten up and look at them all. Who has touched me? I want to say it out loud, but the Hegartys and the Hegartys’ wives and the Hegartys’ children are some distance away from me: they shift, and talk, and eat on, unawares.
‘Are you all right there, Mammy?’ I say, by way of taking my leave.
‘I need to see the children,’ she says.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’
‘The children,’ she says again. ‘I need to see the children.’
‘They’re upstairs, Mammy,’ I say. ‘No. They’re here. I’ll go look for them, Mammy. I’ll find them for you.’
Then Tom is finally, actually, at my side. He dips to take my mother’s hand in wordless sympathy, then straightens up to take my elbow again and wheel me around to the rest of the room.
‘Have you been in?’ I say.
‘He looks,’ says Tom. Then he stops. ‘It’s not him.’
‘I wouldn’t really know,’ I say.
Tom’s fingers grip my arm. They are very full of themselves, these fingers of his. They do not leave me in any doubt. This is the man who will fuck me soon, to remind me that I am still alive. In the meantime he says, ‘He looks like an estate agent.’
‘It’s the shirt,’ I say.
‘Ah. It comes to us all.’
Then the children come up: Rebecca, Emily, and Róisín, who is Mossie’s youngest-so often seen, so seldom heard. Such a cutie. She stands before me and swings her tummy from side to side.
‘Will you say hello to your Auntie?’ I say. ‘Will you say it, or will you squeak it, like a little mouse? Squeak. Squeak.’
I tweak her tummy with my witchy old hands. Then I straighten up and mutter at Tom, ‘Mammy says she needs to see the children.’
‘Right so.’
‘Would you ever fuck off,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘Why does she need to see the children?’
‘Well,’ says Tom.
‘It’s not what children are for,’ I say, quite fiercely. And he gives me a look of sudden interest, before twisting the girls by the shoulders, to push them across to their Gran.
‘Give your Granny a kiss, there, go on.’
The girls stand in front of my mother. There is a chance that Emily will actually wipe her mouth in front of her-she does not like wet kisses, she says, only dry ones ‘like her Daddy’s’. In the event, there are no fluids involved. My mother lifts her hand and places it on Rebecca’s head, then she turns, quite formally, and does the same to Emily, who receives the gesture with large eyes.
I watch this configuration as from a great distance. It is as though I am not related to any of them. But there is a roaring in my blood, too.
‘So what are they for?’ says Tom.
‘They’re not for anything,’ I say. ‘They just are.’
And I mean it too.
Rebecca comes back to me. Her face is full of unshed tears and I take her outside for a minute. The other room is occupied by the coffin so we have nowhere to go except the stairs, where we sit while my gentle, drifting daughter weeps in my lap for something she does not understand. Then she sharpens up a little.
‘I want to go home,’ she says, still face down.
‘In a little bit.’
‘It’s not fair. I want to go home.’
‘Why is it not fair?’ I say. ‘What’s not fair about it?’
She is insulted, in her youth, by the proximity of death. It is spoiling her ideas about being in a girl band, maybe-or so I think, with a sudden impulse to bring her in to the coffin and push her on to her knees and oblige her to consider the Four Last Things.
Jesus. Where did that come from? I have to calm down.
‘This is not about you, all right? People die, Rebecca.’
‘I want to go home!’
‘And I want you to be a little bit grown up here. All right?’
And so it goes.
‘I didn’t even like him,’ she says, in a final, terrible whimper, and this makes me laugh so much she stops crying to look up at me.
‘Neither did I, sweetheart. Neither did I.’
Emily has come out to look for me, followed by Tom. So we stand up and dust ourselves down and turn around, one more time. I have my children about me and my husband at my side, and I walk back into yet another family gathering; every single one of them involving ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and butter, and supermarket coleslaw, and cheese-and-onion crisps for the side of your plate. There are cocktail sausages and squares of quiche, and fruit salad for Mossie, who complains about trans-fats. There are Ritz crackers with salmon pâté and a single prawn on top, others with a sprig of parsley over a smear of cream cheese. There is houmous for Kitty or Jem, whichever one of them is vegetarian this week, in a trio of dips with guacamole and taramasalata. There is my smoked salmon, and Bea’s lasagne, and fantastic packet jelly wobbling in little glass bowls, made by my mother with quiet deliberation and left to set the night before.
There is no wine.
No, I tell a lie. This time, for the first time-perhaps in honour of Liam’s prodigious drinking-there are two bottles on the table; one red, one white. Everyone knows they are there, and no one, but no one, is going to drink them. Mossie tries to pour a glass for Mrs Cluny, who nearly beats him away with her handbag. ‘No no, I couldn’t,’ she says. ‘No, absolutely not.’
It is great to be nearly forty, I think, and lashing into the fizzy orange.
Jem goes in to rescue some chairs from the room next door, and Bea passes around the plates, and we get the show on the road. For a while I try to keep the kids in check, and then I don’t bother. I lean against the wall and watch my family eat.
When we were young, Mossie used to insist on silent chewing. He didn’t mind sitting with us, he said, and we could talk as much as we liked, but he would not abide the noise of the food being mashed up in our mouths, and any slurps, even the slightest squelch, would get you a thump across the side of the head. He kept his eyes on the table for the duration, but he moved fast and blind. I don’t know why we put up with it-it must have been fun, too-but, watching my family scoffing the funeral meats, I do sort of see where he was coming from.
Ernest, the celibate, is particularly terrible to watch. Even my mother eats with a sudden greed, as though remembering how to do it. Some surge of recognition sends her scampering from one Ritz cracker to the next, she gets in people’s way, and they are, for a tiny moment, aggrieved. The neighbours take a little on their plates and set them down, and then, after a while, they forget themselves so much as to scoff the lot. A man I slowly recognise as my father’s brother is helping himself with thick fingers. He works pragmatically fast, amused by the array of little treats, concerned to get a decent amount of food into himself before night.
Daddy came from County Mayo-which is to say he left County Mayo when he was seventeen years old. Liam was sentimental about the West of Ireland, but I don’t think Daddy was, and I am not. But I am sentimental about my Uncle Val-or so I find. I watch him, thinking that, if I stare hard enough, my childhood will rise to meet him. Also, I want to see what kind of a man he is, now that I have met many other men, out in the big world.
Val is a bachelor farmer in his seventies, so he should, by rights, be half-mad. But he looks chipper enough. Also clever. He does one thing at a time, that is the notable thing about him. He wipes his fingers on a paper napkin and looks for a place to set it down, and when he finds none, he scrunches the tissue up and tucks it firmly under the rim of his empty plate. Then he looks at one or other of us as if guessing at our lives: the way they have gone and the way they will end up. Uncle Val loved endings. He was especially fond of suicides. He used to talk us through the neighbours’ houses, and tell us who shot himself and who used the rope. He told Liam a story about a local man who, when his wife refused to have sex with him, upped and got the kitchen knife and castrated himself in front of her.
‘The whole shooting gallery,’ he said. ‘The whole shooting works.’
‘Uncle Val,’ I say, shaking his hand, thinking I could have a panic attack, just by catching the smell of his suit.
‘Veronica, is it? I’m very sorry. He was a great lad. I think he was my favourite.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘He was very good company, always.’
‘Yes.’
I have loved my Uncle Val, I realise, since I was six years old.
‘He always enjoyed his visits to you,’ I say. ‘He relished them.’
‘Ah well,’ says Val. ‘We did our best.’
And it occurs to me that I wasn’t the only one who tried to save Liam-this man tried too, and this man, stuck out on his farm in Maherbeg, will always feel guilty that he did not succeed. The word ‘suicide’ is in the air for the first time-the way we all failed. So, thanks Liam. Thanks a bunch.
Ita reaches behind her and takes a glass of water which she has set in the sink. It has been teasing me all evening-why is she keeping it there? Then I realise it is not water, but gin. Amazing. She looks the same as she did when I arrived, though her face is a little more swollen and set. There is also the fact of her nose, which is without doubt a different, and more American, shape. Ita is looking at us all with undisguised rage. Maybe it is because we are so ugly. Though I can hardly complain-the way I react to the sight of the Hegarty mouths moving around food.
Meanwhile, Tom is back talking to Mossie again. ‘The only sane one, actually, in the whole family,’ as he says to me, annually, sometime around Christmas. And it is true, as I look at him, my brother does seem very normal, he has a nice job and a nice wife and he sends around a nice newsletter telling us how his little family is doing. ‘A big welcome for baby Darragh!!’ Truth be told Mossie has done nothing psychotic for twenty years. But still ha ha says Liam next door, as Tom my professional husband engages Mossie my professional brother in some political talk about the way the country is on the up and up. Ha bloody ha, says the corpse next door.
I want to get drunk. Suddenly. This is a calamitous thing to want, but it can not be denied. I want rid of my children and my husband so I can get properly rat-arsed for once, because God knows I have never been properly rat-arsed before. And there is Kitty rolling her eyes at me, from the other side of the room. Ita! I drift by the sink (because alcoholics are always useful when you want a good time).
‘We need a bottle of something. Is there a bottle, for after?’
And, through gritted teeth, Ita says, ‘I’ll have a look.’
There is a shift in the room. It is time to move, or go. I must talk to Midge’s girls, quickly, before they leave with children and babies and toddlers in tow. My niece Ciara is five months’ pregnant, and her face is violently mottled in the heat.
I dab at her forearm and she grazes my wrist, because pregnant women must touch and be touched, and my look, I know, is quite ardent as I say, ‘Are you sleeping? Did you get the new bed?’ Ciara strokes her stomach, then reaches towards me in another flutter of hands.
‘Jesus, life on a futon,’ she says.
‘That man of yours,’ I say. ‘He should be shot.’
‘It’s his back.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ and we both laugh-dirtily, like we have been talking about sex.
Tom is beside me, liking all this. I turn to salute Uncle Val who is being led off, rather spookily, by Mrs Cluny, to stay next door. When Ciara goes to leave, Tom organises her nappy bag and rounds up Brandon, her toddler. Then he drifts back to me.
He says, ‘Do you remember when you were pregnant with Rebecca and you wouldn’t go to the graveyard-whose funeral was it? You wouldn’t go anyway, because the child would be bandy, you said.’
‘Cam reilige.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what it’s called. In Irish.’
‘You’re a funny thing,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m a hoot.’
Cam reilige, which is Irish for the twist of the grave.
I walk away from him then, feeling, once more, the shadow of a child in me, the swoop of the future in my belly, black and open.
I put my hand to my stomach. It is like a pain, almost.
‘Well it worked, anyway,’ says Tom, still at my shoulder. ‘She has a lovely pair of pins.’
I don’t need you to tell me that. I turn around to say it to him, I don’t need you to tell me that, but instead of seeing my husband, I only see the opening circle of his eye. If we wanted another child, it is waiting for us now. I can almost see it. So it is not all his fault, the sex that happens later. It is not entirely his fault, that I do not enjoy it as sex goes.
Meanwhile he gives me a nod. ‘I’ll take the kids. Any time. Come home any time.’
‘Don’t stay up,’ I say.
And he says, ‘I might.’
It was my sister Midge’s funeral, actually, and I was big as a house. My niece Karen had given birth a month before me, at the age of twenty-one. I remember sitting in the church and looking at the tiny, moist baby, churring on her mother’s shoulder, a white hairband across her little, new head. Anuna-all Midge’s grandchildren have silly names-is dressed now in an expensive red, puff coat, a knockout of a girl, with the dreaded Hegarty eye; cold and wild and blue.
‘Goodnight, Karen. Watch out for that one.’
They are flickering at each other across the room now, blue to blue, as strangers and extras take their leave. Bea prises Mammy out of her chair.
‘You’re very tired, Mammy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come here and I’ll bring you upstairs.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll bring up your cup of tea.’
But there is something she wants to do before she goes. Mammy escapes Bea’s grasp and comes over to the table. She puts her two hands down on the wood, so everyone knows to stop talking. In her gentle, sweet voice, she says, ‘He would have been so proud of you all.’
We know she means, not Liam, but our father. She has got her funerals mixed up. Either that or all funerals are the same funeral, now.
‘He is,’ she says with horrible conviction. ‘Your Daddy is so very proud of you all.’
Bea turns her around, to leave the room. ‘That’s it, Mammy.’
‘Goodnight,’ she says.
‘Goodnight Mammy,’ we say, in a little family patter.
‘Goodnight now.’
‘Sleep well, Mammy.’
‘Get some rest.’
‘Night night,’ all out of rhythm, like the first drops of rain.
‘Coladh sámh,’ says Ernest, by the door, and she turns to him for a blessing, which my brother-the lying hypocrite bastard of lapsed-priest atheist-does not hesitate to give (in Irish no less) and she leaves happy. At least ‘happy’ is the look on her face. Happy. She is pleased with the people she has made. She is happy.
We are silent a moment after she is gone. Mossie sits. Ita takes a slug of her water, then her mouth twitches deeply down, in some riposte from the silent conversation she is having in her head. Kitty lights up a fag, which annoys everyone a little. And I think, I never told Mammy the truth. I never told any of them the truth.
But what was I supposed to say? A dead man put his hand in a deader man’s flies thirty years ago. There are other things, surely, to talk about. There are other things to be revealed.
Like what, though? Like what?
I start to help Bea with the dishes, while Kitty brings a pile of plates over to the sink.
‘What are you doing?’ says Bea to her.
‘Clearing up,’ says Kitty.
‘Oh.’
‘What?’
‘Oh. No, please do. Please do clear up.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘No, there’s always a first time.’
‘Oh, fuck off.’
‘Well, scrape them first, would you? Scrape it, would you? Scrape it, and stack it over there.’
Kitty lifts the plate over her head like she is going to bring it smashing down on the floor. No one looks. She holds it there for a long moment-then, with a toss of the head, she carries the thing, ceremoniously high, to the bin. She goes to scrape it, and then she just can’t help herself and stuffs the lot into the rubbish, plate, food and all.
‘Jesus!’ she screams, looking at the knife that is left in her hand, like it is dripping with blood. I glance at the ceiling-Mammy is still moving around upstairs.
‘Oh JesusJesusJesus!’ says Kitty, throwing the murder weapon into the bin, and she flees out into the garden to finish her fag.
‘Bea,’ I say.
‘What,’ says Bea, very fiercely, as she picks the crockery out of the bin. ‘What?’
And I know what she means. She means, What use is the truth to us now?
Ita comes in from the corpse room and plonks a bottle of peculiar whiskey in the middle of the yellow pine table.
‘It’s all I could find,’ she says. The bottle has a funny Irish name. It looks a bit decorative.
‘I could go to the off-licence,’ says Jem in a small voice.
‘No, no. Not to worry.’
We uncork it anyway, and put it into glasses where it sits, thick and sweet. This ritual is strange for us because, although the Hegartys all drink, we never drink together.
‘Look at the legs on that,’ says Ivor, swilling it round and holding it to the light. We sip, and consider a moment, and suddenly Jem picks up his car keys, and leaves in a shower of large notes and instructions about red wine or white. The Hegartys have had a long day.
Bea, still on her high horse, takes the first shift in the front room while the rest of us stay in the kitchen and mooch and talk. Ernest checks the cupboards-a little intensely, indeed; dipping his finger into ancient mango chutney and sniffing at the mustard. Mossie has the occasional large opinion at the pine table while Ita keeps him company, leaning back against the central counter, too immobilised by drink to wash a plate.
It is like Christmas in Hades. It is like we are all dead, and that’s just fine.
One by one we finish and sit, ready to uncork the wine when it arrives. And when it does arrive, we do not toast the dead but merely drink and chat, as ordinary people might do.
There is some talk of the mysterious Alice, also the surprise appearance of Uncle Val, who is looking so spruce.
Then Ivor says that he is thinking of buying up in Mayo.
‘What?’ says Kitty, who is turning stage Irish with the drink. ‘A bit of the old place?’
‘Well, maybe not exactly there.’
‘Jesus.’ Kitty stares ahead as if looking at it. She needs an angle of attack. We all do. We talk for a while about interest rates and flights to Knock airport.
Then Ernest says, quite mildly, ‘Not a lot of money up there.’
‘Well, I think that’s the point,’ says Ivor. And realises he is already on his back foot.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I could never do that isn’t-it-all-lovely and aren’t-we-all-lovely touristy shite.’
Kitty explodes. ‘Uncle Val could live for a month on the price of your jacket. How much was that fucking jacket?’
‘Also you’re gay, you eejit,’ says Jem. ‘Maherbeg is where gay men go to shoot themselves in the barn.’
‘Oh, so that’s where it is,’ says Liam. I start to laugh and turn to catch him, but he is not there. He is dead. He is laid out in the next room.
A silence happens, as quick as a door clicking shut.
‘It’s a nice jacket,’ I say.
‘Thanks,’ says Ivor, trying to figure it all out. He has never been called ‘gay’ by a member of his family before. Never, not once. Like the bottle in the middle of the table, it only happens elsewhere.
Mossie lifts his eyebrows, and dips his face into his glass. Still down there, he says, ‘What is it-Paul Smith?’
‘Em…’ says Ivor, checking the inside pocket. As if he did not know.
Nor do we talk about money-the idea that one of us, even an uncle, might be poor or rich, or that it might matter. Something has happened to this family. The knot has come loose. Then Ita gets up on her hind legs and gives it a yank.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘What a nice jacket.’
Here it comes. Ita has been drinking so long she has been made sober by it, and slow, and violent. She has some terrible revelation to make and I wonder what it will be. You never told me I was beautiful. Or something worse: You stole my best hairband in 1973 (I did actually). Family sins and family wounds, the endless pricking of something that we find hard to name. None of it important, just the usual, You ruined my life, or What about me? because with the Hegartys a declaration of unhappiness is always a declaration of blame.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’
By which I mean, What use is the truth to us now?
‘I’m going to sit with Liam,’ says Ita, finally, because the Hegartys also love a bit of moral high ground. She pushes herself away from the table at a good angle to hit the door. It’s the gin she wants, I realise. The grand exit was just an excuse so she can go and raid her stash.
I reach for the bottle, in a panic, and pour myself another glass. Liam taps his nose at me. But because Liam is dead I have to do it for him. So I tap my nose, three times.
‘What?’ says Kitty.
‘The nose,’ I say.
‘The what?’
‘Ita. The nose job.’
‘Oh come on,’ she says.
‘The tilt,’ I say. ‘The tilt.’
‘I’m with you,’ says Ivor, feeling grumpy now that he has lost his country house.
‘What do you call that?’ I say. ‘Retroussé?’
Mossie says, ‘What. Are. You. Talking about?’
‘The Hegarty nose,’ says Kitty. ‘Ita’s had a job done on our nose.’
‘I really think,’ says Mossie.
‘What?’
‘I really think. It’s her nose. At this stage.’
And we roar laughing, for some reason.
After the laughter is finished, Kitty and Mossie are left staring at each other across the table. Enough is enough, I think. I can’t do the Mossie thing as well as everything else. Yes, he hit us, Kitty. He was fifteen. He hit us all.
I get up to go to the toilet, and meet Bea at the door.
Ita has taken her turn with the corpse. She is leaning against the door jamb of the front room when I pass; a glass of thick water in her hand. She is crying. Or just leaking, perhaps. She does not turn as I climb the stairs. From the back, she looks beautiful. From the back she looks like Lauren Bacall.
I go to the bathroom and pee and wash my hands and look at the same cabinet mirror that has reflected my face for thirty years or so. The silver backing is peeling at the edges. Who could blame it? I think. And turn away to go and face them all again downstairs.
When I get out of the bathroom, my mother’s door is open, just a crack.
‘Bea?’ says her voice into the gap. ‘Bea?’
‘No, Mammy, it’s me.’
I go to her. When I open the door fully, I find that she is already back sitting on her bed, weirdly, like a video that has been put on fast forward and then paused.
‘What do you want, Mammy, are you all right?’
‘I thought you were Bea,’ she says.
‘No, it’s me, Mammy. Do you want me to get her? Is that what you want?’
But she can not quite remember.
‘Come on. Into bed, Mammy. Into bed,’ and she complies like the sweet child she has always been. She sleeps on her own side, I notice. She still leaves plenty of room.
‘They’re all gone now,’ she says, after she has settled into the pillow.
‘No they’re not, Mammy.’
‘All gone.’
‘I’m here, Mammy. Will I sit with you? Will I sit awhile?’
There is no chair in the room. I perch on the end of the bed a moment, and I rub my mother’s ankle and foot through the counterpane.
Heh heh, she breathes in like a woman crying. Haw, she exhales.
Heh heh. Haw.
Heh heh heh. Haw.
And so, fitfully, she falls asleep, while I sit in the tang of her life: Nivea cream and Je Reviens and old age; the smell of my father, too, still minutely there, in the scorched wool of the electric blanket, maybe, and the slightly rancid paste that holds the paper to the walls.
I am crying, I find. My mother is not asleep but looking at me. Her eyes, as they stare out over the top of the blankets are wide and young.
‘Sorry, Mammy.’ I stand to go.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ I say, under this keenly intelligent gaze of hers, that still doesn’t quite know who I am.
At the door, I do not look at her as I say, ‘Do you remember a man in Granny’s?’
‘What man?’ She was expecting a question. And she doesn’t like this one.
‘No man in particular. Just a man in Granny’s, used to give us sweets on a Friday. What was he called?’
‘The landlord?’
‘Was he?’
‘We always called him the landlord,’ she says. And she gives me a most direct look.
‘Why?’
‘Because he was.’
And, fussed of a sudden, she lifts the covers and swings her legs out over the side of the bed, the unreadable body under her nightie sliding this way and that as she pushes herself off the edge of the mattress and starts to wander about. She goes to the door of the wardrobe and opens it, and shuts it again. She doubles back to the bed, then squints at the top of the wardrobe, in case there might be something up there.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘What are you saying to me?’
‘Nothing, Mammy.’
‘What are you saying to me?’
I look at her.
I am saying that, the year you sent us away, your dead son was interfered with, when you were not there to comfort or protect him, and that interference was enough to send him on a path that ends in the box downstairs. That is what I am saying, if you want to know.
‘I just liked the sweets, Mammy. Get back into bed, now. I just remembered the sweets is all.’
Because a mother’s love is God’s greatest joke. And besides-who is to say what is the first and what is the final cause?
The murmur of voices strengthens in the kitchen below, and there is laughter, followed by the slam of the back door. Kitty again, storming off.
‘I don’t know.’
Mammy sits back on the bed. She is tired now. She doesn’t like anybody now.
‘I don’t know where it is,’ she says. ‘The house stuff: it’s somewhere up high. It’s up on a shelf. I don’t know.’
But I have her by the shoulders, and am easing her around, to lie in the bed.
‘I’ll get Bea for you.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘I’ll get her for you now.’
But I don’t.
I close the door and look around the landing. I go over to the older girls’ bedroom, and I look on top of the wardrobes and open the cupboards, then I come out again and do the same in my own old room. I stand on Alice’s bed in the dingy yellow light and pull down a biscuit box marked ‘Papers’ in my mother’s weak and flowery hand. I am looking for what she failed to find, but the only things in the box are documents of the most arbitrary kind, certificates of confirmation, Kitty’s Irish Dancing; Ernest’s Public Speaking at the Feis Maithiu; my degree, strangely enough-my nice fat 2:1 from the NUI; Liam’s Leaving Cert., much good to him it is now. It seems that Mammy put away any bit of paper that was thick and rolled and useless. I cast my mind about the house wondering where the important stuff is, birth certificates and death certificates, photographs and contracts and deeds. I know where she keeps them, I think, suddenly, and put the box down on the bed.
But I have disturbed the ghosts. They are outside the door of the room, now, as the ghosts of my childhood once were; they are behind the same door. Their story is there, out on the landing of Griffith Way, waiting for me one more time.
Who are they?
Ada first, pragmatically dead. A thin old thing, she is the kind of ghost who is always turning away. Ada just gets on with being dead. The past is a puddle around her feet.
Charlie is there too, shambling and brown. Charlie, who had no badness in him and yet did everything bad-bad debts, and broken promises, and bad sex with shop girls and housewives and the occasional actress. Wanting his luck to turn, though his luck was always turning, and his luck was always the same. Charlie can not settle in to being dead until he can get it all back for Ada, his one true love.
These are my nightmares. This is what I have to walk through to get downstairs.
I turn the handle of the door and Nugent is a slick of horror on the landing. He moves like smell through the house. Nugent plays with his sister Lizzie, now they are both dead. They kiss each other and are consoled. They do not breathe; the tangle and slither of their tongues is endless and airless and cold.
I get across the two feet of carpet that brings me to the lip of the stairs. I fall down them, one step at a time. I am nine years old, I am six years old, I am four again. I can not put my hand on the banister, in case I touch something I don’t understand. The light switch at the bottom seems to recede, the quicker I go. Who turned it off? Why is the light in the hall turned off, when there is a corpse in the house?
The last is always the worst. My Uncle Brendan, in knee socks and short pants. He stands in the hall outside the twins’ room, the room where baby Stevie died, and his middle-aged head is full to bursting with all the things he has to tell Ada, that she will not hear him say. Brendan’s bones are mixed with other people’s bones; so there is a turmoil of souls muttering and whining under his clothes, they would come out in a roar, were he to unbutton his fly; if he opened his mouth they would slop out over his teeth. Brendan has no rest from them, the souls of the forgotten who must always be crawling and bulging and whining in there; he reaches to scratch under his collar and handfuls come loose. The only places clear of them are his unlikeable blue eyes, so Brendan just stares as I reach for the light switch, and his shirt heaves, and his ears leak the mad and the inconvenient dead.
The light comes on. Just as it always used to. And my body, in the light, is a merciful thirty-nine years old. And when I walk into the front room all is silent. There are no ghosts in with Liam’s body, not even his own.
The candles have burned low.
In the far alcove, near the window, is a piece of furniture-I think we used to call it ‘the dresser’-a thing of heavy oak, with shelves for glasses and vases, and presses down below. I check these presses and find nothing. Which is to say I find everything: an old liquidiser in a clear plastic bag made grey by age; my mother’s few 78s from the unlikely time before she was wed, ‘Jussi Björling’, and ‘Furtwängler conducts’; Scrabble; a game called Camel Run; a net bag with four, chipped pieces of artificial fruit; a support bandage for someone’s knee that stopped hurting long ago. Then I think to look up. There, behind the ornamental fretwork that crests this thing, are some boxes. I push the doily aside and climb up, and reach for a green shoebox. I poke it down, and catch it, and fumble around the lid, on which my father once wrote the word, ‘Broadstone’. Then I climb down and stand on the ground, and open the thing.
Inside, there is a brown paper bag containing a few photographs, all in sepia brown. Some receipts-the kind you would get in an old-fashioned butcher’s shop. A thick little fold of letters written on watermarked blue notepaper such as a woman might use, and held with a rubber band. A series of blue hardbacked notebooks, each circled on the vertical by a round of what Ada used to call ‘knicker elastic’, no matter what she was using it for.
They are rent books; starting in 1937, when my mother was eight years old. The first covers fifteen years, at twelve weeks to a page. The same handwriting, the same fountain pen, on line after line of Fridays, a small increase every year. The fountain pen continues through the second volume and only changes to biro in the third-when the rent is paid monthly, and the handwriting begins to shift to pencil or red biro or whatever came to hand.
What are these doing in our house in Griffith Way, sixteen or more years after the woman died? Why should anyone keep these things, except out of fear-of the long arm of the law, or of the Revenue Commissioners; investigating the tax situation on a house you never owned, and that your mother did not own before you? I have, as I put it back in the box, a sickening sense of what these books meant to the possessor, the rights they might afford.
After 1975 there is nothing. Pages of nothing. I wonder was this the year that Nugent died? I lift the book and turn to show it to Liam, and I see Ada watching us from the doorway. There she is. I see her not as I ‘saw’ the ghosts on the stairs. I see her as I might see an actual woman standing in the light of the hall.