BUT LET THAT wait. Let the poor chicken wait awhile.
Here I am on the Brighton line, on my way to collect my brother’s body, or view it, or say hello to it, or goodbye, or whatever you do to a body you once loved. Pay your respects. It is a mellow autumn day. I look out the window and am surprised that the Downs exist. There has always been something childish about England for me.
Haywards Heath
Wivelsfield
Burgess Hill
Hassocks
Names so silly and twee they must be made up. The constant surprise of this land, that it is actually green and actually pleasant. That it is actually there. It moves past me, but at different speeds. In the middle distance a swathe of countryside moves serenely on, while the far hills run backwards slightly, in a narrow strip. I try to find the line along which the landscape holds still and changes its mind, thinking that travel is a contrary kind of thing, because moving towards a dead man is not moving at all.
Then my sister Bea rings.
‘Hello?’
‘Are you on roaming?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, if you’re in England you’re on roaming.’
‘All right, I’m on roaming.’
‘Well, I won’t run up your bill,’ she says. And she starts to talk.
Some ancient impulse of my mother’s means that she wants the coffin brought back to the house before the removal, so Liam can lie in state in our ghastly front room. Though come to think of it I can’t think of a better carpet for a corpse, as I say to Bea; all those oblongs of orange and brown.
‘It’s a carpet,’ says Bea.
And I say, ‘Oh come on.’
‘Just do it,’ she says.
‘Do it?’ I say, meaning, I’m fucking paying for it.
‘It’s how Daddy would have wanted it,’ she says, meaning, I am the keeper of the flame, and I am so furious with her that I can not hear what I say, or what she says for another little while as the countryside, in all its different speeds and directions, runs past the window and we fight our way back to safe ground.
She is right, of course. Daddy grew up in the West-he always knew the right thing to do. He had beautiful manners. Which, if you ask me, was mostly a question of saying nothing, to anyone, ever. ‘Hello, are you well’, ‘Goodbye now, take care’, the whole human business had to be ritualised. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble’, ‘Put that money away now’, ‘That’s a lovely bit of ham’, ‘It is your noble call’. It bored me to tears, actually: all that control. The dignity of the man somewhat undermined by his crazed rate of reproduction. Daddy died of a heart attack in 1986, and mourners laughed about it in the church porch, like he had worn himself out with too much shagging. ‘He would have been so proud to see you all,’ one of the neighbours said. ‘So proud. Sitting in a row, like steps and stairs.’ I did not say it, but I did not think so-not particularly. I did not think he would have been particularly proud.
He did have beautiful Irish. The language was a romantic place, for him, and it is the place where I love him, even now.
He wasn’t the worst. Daddy was a lecturer in the local teacher training college, so, between the long holidays and the short hours, he was often around; marshalling, ordering, directing traffic; carrying in boxes of winter vegetables from the early morning market like he was running a summer camp and not a family. Though all this must have stopped sometime too-by the time I was in secondary school we lived on sending the twins down to the corner shop for rashers; Ernest or Mossie jingling the change in his pocket to see if there was enough there for a fry-up. None of the Hegartys was mean. Even I, the coolest of the Hegartys, am not stingy. This is more than a social thing, it’s like a religious taboo; a mean person still makes my skin crawl, I have to turn and look the other way.
So what does that make me?
I’m fucking paying for it.
A disruption of the natural order, that is what I am.
Meanwhile, the train chunters through England, clicketty-clack, and Bea talks on, sitting on my dead father’s knee with a ribbon in her hair, like the good little girl she has always been, and I look at the hills, trying to grow up, trying to let my father die, trying to let my sister enter her adolescence (never mind menopause). And none of these things is possible. None of them. There is a line on the landscape that refuses to move, it slides backwards instead, and that is where I fix my eye.
‘Good luck in Brighton,’ Bea is saying, and I am yanked by her voice into the bushes whipping past.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Look after Mammy,’ and I close my phone, wondering have I said the words ‘body’ or ‘coffin’ or ‘corpse’ into the nice English silence of the carriage, thinking I would rather eat shit than-what?-angels on horseback with the neighbours, around my brother’s dead body in the old front room.
That fucking carpet.
And not just the neighbours, but the remnants too of Midge-Bea-Ernest-Stevie-Ita-Mossie-Liam-Veronica-Kitty-Alice-and-the-twins-Ivor-and-Jem. The dead, the pious and the office managers (also housewives, ex-journalists, failed actresses, anaesthetists, landscape gardeners, something in IT, and something else in IT). We will look around and say, One less. One less. While the kids run around, stripping the house down to the bare plaster with the sound of their screams; Rebecca playing with her cousin Anuna, who is actually my grand-niece-so don’t ask me how many times that is whatever it is ‘removed’.
Oh! he was desperate-that is what we will say. He was a terrible messer. He was always full of it. He just couldn’t get it together. He had a good heart. He was all there. He was the best of company, we will say. Oh! but the wit. He had a tongue in his head, there’s no doubt about that! But he was very sensitive. It was a sensitivity thing with Liam. You wanted to look after him. He was not able for this world. Not really.
‘Yes,’ I will say. ‘He was a messer.’
I don’t know if it is my earliest, but certainly one of my strongest memories of Liam is of him peeing through a wire fence into a smooth lake of water on the other side.
‘Wheee!’
The pee spattering against the mesh, and then not, while I skated past. Skates! When I remember them now, I think that Ada must have spoiled us, too.