Eden Burning (8 page)

“No thanks Dickie. Keep it.”

Tom’s mother didn’t last long in Purdysburn. Within a month she was dead. The day before she died Tom visited her in hospital and she told him, “Tom, I have something for you.” She reached into the bedside cabinet and took out a small silver medal. On one side there was an image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel with the words ‘Virgo Carmel’. On the back there was
an image of the Sacred Heart with Jesus pointing to his heart. It was the size of a large thumbnail. Tom placed it in his pocket. Later with a small safety pin he pinned it to the inside of his shirt. She also gave him a small book with curled up corners, smelling of mothballs. It had a picture on the front of a medieval man bent over a walking stick. He had a long beard and a tight fitting skull cap and rested his hand on the shoulder of a kneeling friend. The book was called ‘The Book of the Lover and the Beloved’ by Ramon Llull. Ramon’s name in gold leaf was sunk deep into the frayed edges of the purple hard cover.

The day before his mother died, Tom held her hand. He knew that she couldn’t have long to live. It was unbearable to think of her not existing. Her death, her ‘goneness’ was much more unbearable than the thought of dying himself. He looked away for a moment to the left, fixing his gaze on the white wall. It was as though in that simple head movement she had disappeared. She had gone. She was dead. The movement of his head was an echo of death. He should get used to it.

He turned back to her, feeling the immense poignancy of her presence, all of her being here and yet soon to be gone. The deep love for her settled in his stomach, churning with the knowledge of what would come.

“Let me show you.” She took the book from him and carefully turned a few pages. “There is a short meditation for each day.” She opened the book at Verse 9.

“So the Beloved asked: “If I double your trials, will you still be patient?” The Lover answered: “Yes, so you may double also my love.”

His mother asked, “Why do trials double love?”

“They allow you to find patience – to know God’s heart beat,” Tom replied without hesitation.

His mother nodded. “Yes. That’s true. Patience, like love is
tested and purified in the fires of suffering. Suffering becomes love if you know how to suffer.”

“How did you learn?”

“Life taught me. It will teach you too if you let it.”

He took the small book from his mother and put it into his jacket pocket with the medal to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. He threw his arms around his mother as she lay propped up on the pillows. Tears rolled down his face as he whispered, “I don’t want you to die.” Even as he said it, he knew it was a crazy thing to say. She had to die. Whatever is born has to die. His mother looked at him with a tangible gentleness, her head tilted to one side, smiling softly, with the kind of smile that wanted to tell Tom something more than could be told with words. She didn’t move her arms to hold him. Her arms stayed crossed on her lap. She then looked at him again quizzically as Tom pulled back, rubbing the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. She whispered, “You’re lucky. You can cry. I’ve never been able to cry.”

Tom threw his arms around her once more. Tom’s mother caressed his hair with soft even strokes.

“It’s my time Tom. You have to let me go.”

As Tom worked carving grooves in the leg of an oak chair, his thoughts were constantly of his mother and her approaching death. He didn’t know what he could do to help her. He could only think of her. By keeping images of her in his mind, he felt her presence filling him, wiping out any other reality. As he turned the back of the chair in his hands, the smoothness of the warm oak reminded him of her skin, the curve of the wood, her nose, the warmth of the sun shining on his back, her caress. His body flooded with a sweet sadness, a melancholy, a piercing poignancy. The image of his mother now seemed to sink from his head to his heart. He couldn’t clearly see her at all but felt
her essence beating within his heart. At ten minutes past four he experienced a stabbing sensation above the groin on his right side. He sat still on the chair on which he had been carving.

Was it the beginning of appendicitis? He pressed his hand into his side and felt his body flood with a mingling of peace and joy. In the peace was the sinking sensation of silence. He felt as though he was dropping through clouds of feathers, breathing slowly and deeply. The accompanying feeling of joy was as though he was simultaneously being lifted back up again to the surface. The feeling was so extraordinary that he wanted to laugh out loud. He felt light, buoyant, bubbling with a sense of anticipation and pleasure as though he was waiting at a railway station for a long lost friend arriving on the approaching train. He found himself observing these unusual sensations in his body with confusion. His body was being playful – like a kitten bouncing up a tree in the garden, patting with its paw at a flower or like a lamb jumping high into the air. Why, he wondered, did he feel so sublimely happy with his mother dying? Later that evening, when he returned to the hospital to visit his mother, Nurse Anne rested her hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Your mother passed away at ten past four. Would you like to see her?”

When Tom saw his mother, she was lying on her side. The bedspread with its tiny roses covered her shoulders. He approached her, slowly, cautiously, seeing first her open mouth, spidery red veins around her nose, closed eyes. Her long black hair spread over the pillow like an oil slick. Her body gurgled and he could have sworn it moved. For a moment Tom thought that she hadn’t died, that they had made a mistake and that she was only asleep. He touched her forehead. It was cold and hard. He looked at her closed eyes. They were solid, slightly open but he couldn’t see the eyes themselves which before had looked at him, sparkling like the twinkling surface of a summer sea, or on
occasion pierced him like the thrust of a sword in fencing. No, her lashes were sealed as though with glue. He stroked her silky fine hair against the pillow case. He fingered her arm through the long cotton sleeve of her nightdress. It was still warm. He held her hand for the last time, her chipped nails, long fingers that wanted to play the piano but never did or would. He squeezed her hand tight, wanting to see her fingers flutter like a butterfly and settle once more onto the sheets.

When Tom left his mother, the world had changed. Everyone he now looked at, it seemed as though he was seeing through them – seeing into them. Their bodies were moving but the people themselves didn’t know what moved them or even that they were being moved. Tom knew. Tom didn’t see the world through his eyes anymore. It seemed as though he was looking at the world from no fixed point at all, although if he was asked, he would have tried to say that it now seemed as though he was seeing from his heart – not a fixed point in his physical heart but from his heart which was now everywhere. Tom had the sense that he was a part of everything that existed and that like an air plant, he was taking all the nourishment he needed from the air. Everything that he needed was in his breathing. When he breathed in, he breathed in the whole Universe and when he breathed out he breathed out the Universe. He didn’t really know whether he was breathing in and out the Universe or whether it was breathing in and out Tom. It didn’t matter which way it was. He was intimately connected with everything around him.

Sitting on the number 57 bus rolling along the Crumlin Road, it now seemed to Tom as though everyone was made up from part of someone else – Ena Martin had his mother’s lips, Roísin McKeever his mother’s hair, and Angela McFadden his mother’s feet. It went on like that until he felt that his mother hadn’t died
but had only been redistributed around Belfast in the smiles, the laughter, the joy, the sorrow, the sadness of everyone he met. God the artist had painted everyone from the same palate of paint. Colours were dotted onto bodies like canvases. When he found himself filled with a sense of peace, he didn’t know whether he was at peace himself or whether it was his mother who was at peace within him.

He could feel her breathing inside of him. She was there in his nose, in the sensation of air moving along his nostrils into the back of his throat as he breathed in. She was there in the warm air he breathed out through his mouth. She was there in the beating of his heart, in the touch of his chisel against the cherry wood. He no longer felt that he was one person. Neither did he feel that he was two people but rather that he was one and two people at the same time.

When Tom went to daily Mass and received Communion he used to feel that the host dissolving on his tongue symbolised everything on earth that he needed to survive. To make the bread, someone needed to sow the wheat, it needed sun and water, it needed someone to harvest, someone to grind the wheat, someone to mix the wheat with water and to add salt. It needed another fire like the sun in miniature to cook the bread. It needed someone to cut the bread, a van to transport it, a priest to be present as mediator between God and man. When the bread dissolved on his tongue he felt he was receiving the whole Universe that had created it for him.

In those days after his mother died, Tom felt when he went to Mass that his body was the host on the tongue of God. That God was receiving him and giving thanks for Tom’s being – that he was dissolving, dying on the tongue of God. His death and his mother’s life and death were this – small appearings and disappearings on the tongue of God who received them into
himself. It was God who was transformed by eating them. These thoughts and feelings didn’t last very long at all – maybe at most for three days, until he had a dream.

In the dream Tom saw his mother eagerly scrambling over smooth red rocks, jumping like a goat from rock to rock, and climbing the mountain at great speed and with great dexterity. He slowly followed behind, looking for foot holds, grasping at the rocks with his hands to pull himself forward. He was amazed at the progress his mother was making. As he looked up, he could see that she had reached the top of the mountain. He wanted to shout at her to be careful, not to go so fast and to remember that she had a weak heart. He didn’t shout. Instead he watched her sitting peacefully at the summit on smooth red rocks. Her hands were again on her lap. She stared straight ahead, into the distance, towards the horizon. She didn’t look at Tom at all. Her expression was serene, joyful with a mysterious ineffable quality – a look beyond emotion. Tom kept watching his mother. It seemed as though she was telling him something that he couldn’t really understand. It had something to do with her serenity – something to do with going beyond emotions. There was something important about the fact that she wasn’t looking at him but was looking straight ahead. She could have turned and smiled at him. Why didn’t she? She knew he was there right below her, looking up.

• • •

Elfie remarried within two months of Tom’s mother’s death and moved into a terraced house in Ardoyne. With his new wife, the woman in Dickie’s photograph, he started a second family.

It was only then that Elfie confided to Tom that he used to hide from his own father when he came home from work. His father would search the house, looking for him. Elfie hid in the
glory hole under the stairs. He listened as his father drew closer. He heard him turn the knob on the glory hole door. He saw a hairy arm reach down towards him in the darkness and seconds later, Elfie’s father dragged him screaming into the sitting room. Elfie curled up on the floor, pulling his arms in around his head, withdrawing into himself like a snail into its shell. Elfie’s father removed his leather belt with its metal buckle and thrashed Elfie making sure the metal buckle cracked repeatedly onto his spine until he was too tired to hit him anymore. Elfie’s mother sat in the rocking chair crocheting a table cloth with white linen thread. Tom wondered if it was then that his father’s heart had turned to stone. He prayed that his father would be given a new heart of flesh like the one promised in Ezekiel. He wanted his father to receive a heart that knew how to suffer, a heart that could throb with a conscience and learn how to love.

Years later, on a cold wintery February in 1939, Elfie lifted a pint of Guinness in the Crown Bar in Belfast. He held the glass perfectly vertical before taking the first sip, the creamy top sticking to his upper lip. “What will you be having?” he called to Danny, Eddie and Sam. The frothy cream settled slowly at the bottom of the glass as he struggled to his feet, squeezed out of the cubicle, to walk with heavy slow feet to the bar. He placed four pints of Guinness on a wooden tray, walked back towards the cubicle, placed the tray precariously on the edge of the rectangular oak table. Then he held his hands in the air as if he had remembered something important to say, or wanted to ask permission to speak. He coughed gently, patting the air, as if acknowledging an invisible wall. A hush fell over the bar. The silence spread to the enclosed cubicles, bounced off the opaque etched glass windows, the dusty arched mirrors, the fleur-de-lis, the marble pillars. Elfie smiled and with a small nod of his head to the right and left, acknowledging the silence or surrendering,
he took another step forward, towards the table, where the tray, now holding one pint of Guinness, was stable. His lips moved but no words could be heard. His arms and shoulders circled while his legs remained steady on the tiled floor. The circle widened. His lips moved again, this time two words were heard by everyone.

“Thank you.”

He dropped backwards, falling in a perfect 90 degrees arc to the floor, his head crashing onto the polished black and white mosaic tiling, breaking open like a dropped Easter egg. A thin snail trail of blood oozed from his nose, the sunlight danced on his curly red ringlets, forming a halo around his head. It was the first time in his life that Elfie had said thank you for anything.

Tom on the other hand was a man who was a grateful for life. Shortly after his father’s death, his gratitude turned to Lily who appeared in his world.

Lily met Tom in the Plaza Ballroom at a tea dance where the men sat on the right hand side of the room and the women sat on the left. It was 1939 just before the start of the Second World War. The women waited patiently to be asked to dance. Sometimes it could happen that you were left alone. You were known then as a ‘wall flower’. It was one of the worst things that could happen to you. You would be forced to sit and look at your lacy gloves and pray for the dance to end with an excruciating burning pain in your belly. That night Lily arrived with two girlfriends. She didn’t know Tom. She waited for the music to start. Those five minutes after the music started were magic. In the five minutes as she looked across the room, time seemed to move into eternity where nothing happened and yet everything happened. She felt as though in her head danced all of the stars in the Universe and in her heart swished all of the waves from every ocean.