Gone (2 page)

When I leave him at the house he is frantic with wanting to know where I am going. I tell him I want to be alone. I want to go to Grannie's house. I am desperate to be with Ruth, to be with what is left.

The sunflowers Ruth planted in the garden are in full bloom. I go around the back and let myself in through the kitchen. There is still the sharp odour of fresh paint. I had been painting the place while she was in the hospital as a surprise. She had done well that week and got out early, before I finished. When she came in the back door she had to run out because of the paint fumes. The chemotherapy made smells repugnant to her.

The paint job was never finished, the pink undercoat grimy with use. We had a phone installed in the house but it never rang, was never picked up. There was never any emergency. The drama of her dying was sirenless. I sit for a while in Grannie's chair looking at the telephone. I lean over and pick it up, expecting it to be dead; clear electric buzz. There is tremendous tranquillity inside the walls. Finally, I rouse myself to go. There is the funeral to do.

*   *   *

The first thing my father wants to do is to get rid of everything. We drive to Grannie's house and I begin loading all of Ruth's belongings into the boot of the car. We shove everything into black plastic bags. He wants to take it all to the nuns, wants to wipe her out. I keep removing things from the boot—her Bible, the Flannery O'Connor stories, the three packs of Dunhill she didn't get to smoke, her old pink jumper—and putting them on the backseat to save. Bits of her. Daddy is saying
fuck
quietly to himself. I laugh at the strangeness of hearing bad language coming out of his mouth and he glares at me. He is spending a long time walking around the house picking up things and putting them down again. He's looking for a system. Room by room we fill bag after bag and carry them out to the car. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

After we drop the full load at the convent we drive to Dolly-mount strand where I used to go with Ruth from time to time. We would park the car close to the water's edge, and sit there with the doors open, listening to the sea come in, and when the waves began to lap around the wheels of the car we would reverse back slowly, waiting again for it to catch us, reversing back a few feet at a time, toying with the risk of sinking into the softening sand. We would sit and listen to the waves. I tell him this now as we walk the length of the pier.

—What did you talk about?

—Nothing.

—Yous must have talked about something.

No. We didn't talk much at all. I asked her if she'd go to that clinic in America if we got the money. She said she wouldn't make it. He doesn't believe me, thinks I'm holding some luminously private moments to myself, that I'm selfishly cherishing the profound and intimate conversations. But I am being honest. There was nothing left to say. We stop at the end of the pier and Daddy looks up at the statue of the Virgin Mary.

—Fuck all use
she
was when she was needed.

He looks at me, face of a naughty boy who has gone too far. As we walk back down the pier we link each other. It is the first time I have ever linked him and he is crying. I want to be far away from him. I have no stomach for his sadness. I will leave and not come back. He is ashamed of his tears. Tears have crumpled him into nothing. People are walking along Clontarf promenade. Dogs barking and chasing each other. All the years I cycled out here with him to work in the houses of the middle class I hated. He must have hated them too, the money they held so tightly. You wouldn't do the window out the back if there's a drop of paint left? No problem Mrs. The silent years of childhood by his side hating them and smiling at them and taking ten pence into my hand and saying oh thank you very much Mrs. There was one other time he cried I remember. One Christmas Day many years ago. It was the second Christmas after our mother had left. Ruth and I had been fighting. Suddenly he started crying and the two of us stopped and looked up at him, frightened that if he gave in to it all we would be alone. How friendless it was for him after she left, a life without adults.

We go to Jennings Funeral Home at the Five Lamps in North Strand. We have passed this way hundreds of times on our way into town to buy paint in Wigoders of Mary Street. I won't always be around, you know that, he would say. You and your sister will have to take care of each other. That's why you shouldn't be fighting. There's no one else will give a shite about you when you're in trouble but your sister. Jimmy Mulligan works in Jennings and ask for him when I kick the bucket. I could not imagine him being dead—he was too big a man. As we grew older and he would tell us he wouldn't always be there, that he'd be going soon, we would ask him when he was going and did he want a packed lunch. Fierce funny you are.

*   *   *

Mulligan sits with his hand in his chin listening about Ruth's long illness. Already the story of her life coming out of my father's mouth is sounding worn out at the elbows. Mulligan says yes, it's been very hard on you, Francis.

—She was only young. The wife and now her.

Ma isn't dead, I want to say. She's worse than dead. I wish the slut was dead. He has some infuriating need to explain all to strangers. He knows Mulligan thirty years but they are strangers to each other, and yet he doesn't understand this. Maybe he does, maybe he understands everything. I don't know my father at all. Mulligan can tell I'm judging him, he takes my expression in slowly, pretends not to notice. He lets my father talk until finally he is out of words, sitting there like a toy that's motor has stopped. Mulligan lifts up his book of coffins.

—We want the cheapest.

Mulligan nods at me and manages to ignore me at the same time. He puts the book in front of us. He begins to explain the various features of the coffins.

—The cheapest.

He smiles tightly and nods.

—This is a nice one, he says, tapping the book with a finger. Cheapest, too. It has gold-plated handles, but of course you won't be able to lift the coffin by them. They're plastic. Glued on. But it's a solid piece. Fine wood.

He rubs his nose with a knuckle as if he's a farmer selling a pig. He's not going to spend much longer with us. He can see Daddy is ready and he slithers towards the sale. The word obsequious was invented for undertakers. He starts to list what else we might need.

—Nothing else, Sir.

—You'll need a hearse?

—No.

—Ah Stephen the man's right. Unless we put her on a pram, he laughs to make Mulligan feel more comfortable. The family disease—the effort to make strangers comfortable, to be liked. We decide on a hearse and one limousine for the two of us. Aunt Muriel will travel in it too. The bill is just over twelve hundred pounds. Six hundred for the hearse alone. We stare at Mulligan and my father repeats the price of the hearse.

—We didn't have her insured.

—Yes. Well maybe someone has a car. A friend. That way you'd save on the limo.

—No. It's alright. We'll manage. We'll have the limo, right?

Daddy looks at me, pleading with his eyes to go along. I stare at Mulligan, wanting him to understand he is profiting from grief. Outside, we argue about the need for the car. I'm worn out and agree with him, will agree with anything now.

*   *   *

The priest wants to meet with me to arrange the reading at the funeral and to say a few words. Father Macken had visited Ruth from time to time at the hospital, uninvited. She had no intention of giving her soul to him, and this is how it was, he would sit by her bed and pray for her, hoping she would come back to the church she had left. She had abandoned Catholicism, but not God. If she could have given Father Macken her soul, she would have, she would have emptied the brown paper bag of his grapes and slipped her soul into it for his care. The presbytery is ringed with barbed wire. He's been broken into five times the previous year. I ring the bell on the outside gate and wait. He comes down the steps slowly, even though he's a young man. He's walking with the gravitas of the bishop he wants to be. He shows me into the sitting room and goes through the selected readings for the funeral service. I dislike them all and tell him so, and that, more importantly, my dead sister would not have cared for them. He seems to be as offended by me referring to Ruth as dead as he is by the effrontery of considering any passage of the bible inappropriate. He suggests I take a few minutes to find a suitable passage and leaves the room, wiping the palms of his hands on his thighs.

I look around the room for the first time: heavy floral wallpaper, bookshelves, dining room table with a vase of hydrangeas on it. I thumb through the bible, uninterested. Nothing is suitable. I shut the bible quickly and open it and stick a blind finger on the page—it is from the Book of Psalms, Lamedh. Your word, O Lord, is eternal. This would do, anything would as long as it wasn't chosen by prickface. I wait long minutes for him to return. Reluctantly, he agrees to the reading but is unhappy I want to say a few words as well. It might upset people, he says. Might upset me not to say them, I say. He suggests I say my few words afterwards at the cremation and not in the church but I explain I want to say something to the neighbors who will not be at the cremation. He will give me the nod, he says.

*   *   *

My father disappears down to the church the morning of the funeral. Muriel and I wait an hour for him to show up so we can all go in the car. The doorbell rings. Ursula. Muriel lets her in. No love lost there. My father will be talking to whomever will listen, anything to distract himself. After getting the bloody limo it sits there with no one to go in it. I invite Ursula to accompany us in the limousine but she says it wouldn't be appropriate for her to go as she isn't family. I tell her I would like her to come with us but she says it is not the right thing to do. I am sick of her rigidness, her knowing what's the right thing to do. We take the limousine to the church and she follows in her car. When I look around at her I can see the strain on her face. In a way, she is the only person outside the family who cares. She had brought rich soup to the hospital, lotion for Ruth's bedsore legs, simple things that no one else did. But none of that matters—I am burning with dislike for her. Appropriate. What am I doing with a woman who says
appropriate?
People are blessing themselves as our car passes. This is what the black limousine is, a mobile stage for us to act out our sadness.

He is outside the church talking to neighbours.

—This is Mrs. White and Mrs. Grey. Do you remember them? You were only knee high to a grasshopper. I smile at them. Yes I remember. The bitch who made us eat our lunch in the garage and the bitch who didn't pay us for over a month. The Whites, the Greys, the Browns, the Blacks, Protestants so dull they couldn't pick good colours for names let alone their houses. He tells them Ruth and I had been very close, and they nod gravely affording me what they hope is a suitable degree of reverence. Mrs. O'Neill, the wife of the press secretary for the Taoiseach, is there. Didn't pay us at all for the last job. That's how they have it, is all my father said. But we'll get our reward in the next life, he'd say.

—You're needed in the church.

He looks at me as if he is about to be executed. Outside the church the pallbearers are starting to take the coffin out of the hearse. I ask them to wait and call my uncles over. I remember playing with them as a child but haven't seen them since they moved to the Southside. The four of us lift the coffin. We buckle briefly under the weight of her. As we walk up the aisle I notice how full the large church is, fuller than it should have been. Who were these people, come to mourn a woman they did not know?

Father Macken is talking and no one is listening to him. His voice carries no understanding of Ruth. He mentions Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ and the joy of suffering and I glance at Muriel and smiles spread across the two of us. He comes down to shake hands with the family during the service, and he skips me. I am astonished I am passed over, and Macken becomes more human, smaller, less priestly.

The time for the reading comes and I walk soberly up to the altar, open the bible at the section marked by the brown taper and stare at the words and start to read and then stop, only slowly absorbing that it is one of the passages Macken had chosen.

—This isn't it, I say, and then look up shocked that I have said it aloud into the microphone. People stare. I look down and pray to find the passage. I cannot remember where the section is. Lambeth. No, that's the place in Wales. I had picked it so quickly. Then I turn the page and there, like a small miracle, it is. I read it carefully, and when done, I turn and look at Macken. Macken looks at me blankly, without resentment, the look of foe respecting foe.

The service ends and he does not give me the nod to say the few words. Muriel puts a hand on me and says to let it go. But I am not going to let it go. I am not being bullheaded. I am cold inside and still. I am doing what Ruth would have wanted. The priest is stepping off the altar, people are starting to walk up the aisle to pay their respects, the pallbearers are making their way to the coffin. I ask them to wait and they look from me to Macken and when they get no sign from him they move forward. I tell them not to touch the coffin. Macken wets his lip with his tongue. My hands tremble with the look in the man's eyes. What was wrong that he would not allow us to grieve in our own way? I ask him where I should stand and he goes up and pulls the microphone down off the altar. I unfold the sheet of paper I have made notes on. I begin to remember her. Her patience with the scum we have for neighbours. Her courage, her humour, her despair, her love of God but not of organised religion. That does it. Macken grabs me by the shoulder and pulls me but I push him gently and continue. Then it's over. I've had my say and feel foolish. I want to carry Ruth out as we carried her in but am overwhelmed with the people gathered around us. People I don't know, people I do know and don't like, people who don't like me, people who didn't like Ruth, they line up with their words and their reasons for being there. Uncle Aidan, a man uncomfortable with touching, embraces me.