Blue Mercy: A Novel. (2 page)

"Shocking it is, the way she throws herself at him and he young enough to be her..." But another burst of coughing seized Granddad's old-man frame, giving her the chance to fuss about him and break the tension.

When he came out of it, he said, "I'm the great burden, of course. Well, I never asked her to play Florence Nightingale, so I didn't."
Cough
. "I never asked you neither."
Cough
. "Well able...to look after myself. Always was."

"Shouldn't you be resting, Granddad?" I said.

"Rest, is it? Oh that's what you'd all like to see."
Cough, cough, cough
. "Me... going... to my rest..."

"Oh, Daddy, stop that old nonsense."

I went over to stand by his pillow. "She's poisoning me," he said to me, his bony finger jabbing the air.
 
"You'll be my witness now if I go early."
Cough
. "You make sure you tell the world."

Again, she tried to get me to join her in an eye-roll. "Star, would you hand me across that vial of pills. Thank you. Now Daddy, here you are...come on now, sit up."

"I can do it --"
Cough
. "-- myself."

But, at the same time as he was throwing out the defiant words, he was letting her place the two tablets between his lips, and swallowing them down, docile as a child. As she settled him back on his pillow, and tidied the locker and straightened the bedclothes, his eyes rolled closed.

"He'll be all right now for a while," she whispered. "Do you want to come through for lunch?"

"No," I said. "No. I think I'll stay here with Granddad for a bit."

Put that in your book Mom, why don't you?

I cross the yard, heading up the back pathway through the trees. Doolough Mountain oversees me. Behind her, further in the distance, the ring of Wicklow hills with their impossible Irish names:
Ballinedin, Cloughernagh, Carrrigasleggaun, Lugnaquilla
.
 

I walk the straight path towards the lake. Before there was a house here, there was this lake and these woods and the wild Wicklow hills. It wouldn't take much for them to take over again, to swallow up our house and land again. They're ready to do it, if we let off for the smallest while our cutting and trimming and weeding and feeding the plants we want over the ones we don't. Nature. It doesn't need us at all, but how we crave it.
 

That's what brings all the people, the hikers and bikers, the day trippers and weekenders, out here to Doolough, and Laragh, and Glendalough. The sound of a different kind of silence to that in their bedrooms and kitchens.

At the lake, I put the manuscript on the ground, kneel on it and lean in to see my reflection in the murky water. I look old today, older than I am. In this posture, gravity pulls my jowls and chins forward. She was beautiful, I am not. Was that the fullness of our story?

She never lost her looks. Most Irish people do, develop in age the distinctive features the English like to
 
call "potato-head".
 
Not my mother. I think of her that last day in Laragh. She had only twelve weeks left to live, but she was lovely as ever in a new, fragile way.

Knowing she was dying, as we did by then, I'd organized a day out together with the kids at Glendalough. Grandmother, mother, children. Picnic lunch. Gentle tour of the monastic ruins. Soft stroll through the woodlands. All of which we enjoyed. And then, my
coup de grace
, I thought. A visit to the churchyard at Laragh, where they've installed a sculpture, a bronze tribute to the story of St Kevin, the saint who settled this site. A saint so attuned to the spirit of the place that one morning, as he held out his hand in prayer, a blackbird laid her eggs in his palm and he continued to hold his hand up and out for her, still and steady, all through the nesting season until her chicks were hatched and reared.

We settled on a bench in front of the sculpture, while the children clambered over it and I read the bronze plaque inscribed with a poem about Kevin and the blackbird. It wasn't by Yeats, but the other guy who looks like a farmer. Even I could tell it was good, the way it asked us to imagine being Kevin, being able to submit your body to the needs of a bird. It moved me, so I was able to ignore Mom when she told me I should learn it off by heart.
 

"Poems have to become like the marrow in our bones to be appreciated", she pronounced. All my life, she'd said things like this. I let it go, and then was glad I had when I heard her murmuring the line to herself, "It's all imagined, anyway."
 

That was why I'd brought her here, why I'd thought she'd like it. That was her favorite word, always: imagine.

Mom, I thought we were happy, watching the kids, enjoying the sunny day with the small breeze on our faces. For five whole minutes, I thought we were united, by this gesture of mine, the bringing of us both there, to the village where Dad was born and raised, to the spot where we'd run into such trouble before, back in those awful days of 1989.
 
I thought you got it. I thought we were enjoying a seemingly small but actually enormous great reward for having managed to make a life together that worked, despite all.

But no. You couldn't let it be what it was. You had to pull the script out of your knapsack and park it on my lap, ruining everything.

I told you again, straight up, as I'd told you so often before: "I'm never going to read it, Mom."

"You must," you said, putting your hand on my arm, giving me a yearning stare.
 
And then: "It's your story too."

I
must
. How had you never learned that was the worst possible way to get me to do anything?

Now at the lakeside, kneeling on her script, I close my eyes and call them to mind again, the things I never thought I'd have. Husband, children, this place transformed from house of horrors into house of healing. It was I who did that. Not alone, but it couldn't have happened without me. My life has not been wasted. I am not a bad person.
 

Two hundred-thousand words of hers beneath my knees tell a different story, I have read enough of it to know that. Well, no.
 

I snap into standing, and assert again what should have been my birthright, but which I had to hand-stamp onto my DNA. The right to do what is right for me.
Me.
So I pick the hateful pile of paper up and I pull off the elastic, so determinedly that it breaks. I take a page and bunch it up and fling it, unread, into the lake.
 

It's hard to fling paper. It doesn't carry, there's no satisfactory plop as it hits the water. It just hovers there, hardly touching the surface, wimpily uncertain. There are more than six hundred pages in this manuscript. I will clump each into a paper ball. I will cast them each and all upon the lake and I will watch them, bob-bob-bobbing on the lapping shore, slowly soaking up the water that will see them sink.

an act of mercy that has unanticipated and injurious consequences or an act of revenge that turns out to be a mercy.

[slang: Irish]

*

Doolough Lodge,

Christmas Eve 1989.

Dearest Mercy,

I'm leaving this on our bed. The written word is always the best way to get your attention, isn't it, so maybe this might work? It's our last chance.

Nothing good will come of this, Mercy. Asking me to go will not appease Star. We must do what we should have done in the first place, and each of us simply speak our truth to her, and she to us.
 

She is neither as stubborn, nor as vulnerable, as you think. And she is certainly
 
too old for this treatment.

As for your father... Is he really the obstacle you claim, Mercy? If he was gone, you say, wistfully...
 

If, if, if... Another version of the same problem. It does no good for you to keep telling yourself that you don't deserve these things that life throws at you. Deserve has nothing to do with it. Deserve is an illusion. Does a father deserve to die? Does a daughter deserve to rule?

You're always quoting writers at me, Mercy, but long ago I gave you the only words you need to hear. I wonder if you remember? It was a line from The Talmud: "If you add to the truth, you subtract from it."

I remember how you tried to understand. You tilted your lovely chin, the way you do. Your ear went down to nearly touch your shoulder and the other ear turned to me, really trying to listen. Always trying. I love that about you. But, Mercy, why is it so hard for you to hear?

I say it again: this is our last chance. If I leave again, this time it really will be forever.
 

So I plead, knowing your mind is already made up. So I tell you again: Star will not thank you and you won't thank yourself either, in the end.
 

Life throws pebbles at us when we get things wrong, Mercy, and if we refuse to listen, we get stones. And if we continue to insist... Well, I'll be gone when the boulder comes crashing into this house but remember what I said and save yourself then, if not now.

So I'll go and leave behind

All my love,

Always.

Zach

I'll begin with the evening Star left, the day after the funeral, with the moment my father's journals came falling from their secret compartment at the back of the bureau. The big one -- long and thick, with a red hardcover, born to be a shop ledger -- landed on the floor with an unforgiving thump. And five smaller, black-covered notebooks came tumbling after.

Seeing them splayed across the floor prodded a memory: of my father sitting at this bureau to write, the bent back hunched over, the thick fingers clasped around a skinny pen. I reached for the big folder, opened it, flicked through. The familiar handwriting marched through the pink ledger lines, as though they weren't there. My pulse, already pounding, skidded at the sight.

Traces of him were all over these pages. Not just his writing, but the dog-ear corners he turned down, which meant he must have read them back. And other marks. Some kind of oil all over one page, an ink spill on another. Even those pages that seemed clean would have been brushed by his hand trailing across. His DNA could be reconstructed from these, I thought, and I knew then I'd found what I'd been looking for, even though I hadn't realized, until I saw them, that I'd been engaged on a search.

August 6th, 1914. "War has been declared," he wrote. That was his reason for beginning this book, as he immediately resigned his job as a butcher's assistant in a Paris meat market to sign up. "
Ma patrie
," he wrote, though his country was Ireland and he was only sixteen years old.

Not that it made any difference where you were from. Ireland, England, France; young, middle-aged, old; Europe, Russia, America; men, women, children: all were about to be caught up in the bloody mobilization, the mass movement towards the biggest war the world had ever known. I touched the inside cover where he'd stuck his conscription card and medical records. They slid free, the glue dry and dead. It would have been against regulations for him to keep this diary, but he was never a one for regulations, my father, not for himself. A policer only of others.

Yes, that's where I'll begin. With me, sitting to the floor to read about my father's coming of age, butcher boy to military man.

I could start a little earlier, with the moment when I first spied the hammer sitting under the corner table in the kitchen. It had been a long day. I'd already endured my father's funeral, Dr Keane's insinuations, Star's leaving, when my eyes snagged on the sight of that hammer, left there since I'd nailed a sprig of holly over the kitchen door a week before, my feeble effort at Christmas decoration. Its two curled fingers, the side used for prising out nails, seemed to twitch and beckon me across.

I picked it up, tapped its flat head against my palm, felt the weight of what I was about to do.

Pulling my mind shut -- no more thoughts allowed -- I let it swing, hard and fast, into the TV screen.
Smash
. Shards of glass went spiking through the air.
Smash
again. The glass cabinet this time. I regretted that Star and I had cleared the glasses and ornaments from the shelves a few hours earlier; I would have loved to unleash myself on them.

Thump
. I brought the hammer down on the little side table but it only made a dent. I threw it aside, running out of the room, through the kitchen, out the back door. It was dry outside and not cold, not for December. The security light came on, spotlighting weeds that cracked through the gravel, tough survivors.

Jerking open the bolt on the shed, I grazed my knuckles. I sucked on the pain, my tongue moving across bone and blood, as I hurried on. I felt like a hurricane, like a snowstorm, like a raging ocean, hurrying, hurrying through my wild throbbing hurry that kept thought at bay. In the corner of the shed, I found what I was looking for: the sledgehammer. Its heavy head pulled me down as I ran back inside and went entirely amok.

I smashed the coffee table and the sideboard. I smashed the fiddly occasional table that always wobbled, making us fearful for the lamp. I smashed the lamp.
 

I turned my back on the piano -- that I couldn't destroy -- and when I came to the bureau too, I hesitated. This was my father's most precious piece of furniture: bought in Paris, his only relic of his time in France. All through my childhood, I had watched him sitting at this desk to write, or do what he called "the books", the accounts that measured his income against his expenses, the largest of which – as he never failed to remind -- was me.