Gone (3 page)

I spend as much time as possible alone, but it is difficult to put Daddy out of my mind. I am full of resentment towards him—I tried for a long time to show him that this day would come and he needed to talk to Ruth before she died. Week after week we had sat on either side of her bed talking to each other, and she watched us as if watching a game of Ping-Pong. How well intentioned but impossibly stupid I was to foist my understanding on him. It was like this with everyone who came to visit her. The tentative
How are you?
was never really a question at all. Ruth said hospital is an unbarred prison. You enter, they take away your clothes, force a routine on you, force muck they call food down you, make you share your days and nights with strangers, and the visitors, the visitors are the worst of all; slinking in, fear mingled with guilt, and out with embarrassment, relief trailing behind them.

*   *   *

The scattering of the ashes. I telephone him to arrange it. That's taken care of, he says. It is not even a week since her death. Paddy Howard took me out to Howth and we did it there, he says. I am glad he has done it that way. I need to hate him. Now I can leave Ireland finally, without guilt. It's as if Ruth has died twice and I have been excluded from this more private funeral by my own flesh. I hate him. I hate him because I am closer to Ruth than anyone, no one could love her as much as I do. I didn't think she could be loved more, even by the man who had helped bring her into the world. The vision of Daddy climbing a hill with his favourite customer to scatter his daughter's ashes sundered the idea of who I was in the family. He had lost his only daughter. He, who had brought her into the world, and raised her, he alone would watch her leave.

Only in New York years later did I begin to feel how wrapped up in myself I was, and when I told Holfy about this, she told me I must ask him what happened. I couldn't. Daddy had been through enough. I did not want to bring him more pain. This is only partly true. Fear and anger kept me quiet. I was not certain what I was afraid of but I knew I was angry for being left out. Five years later when I did ask him, I did it in Lone Tree, four and a half thousand miles away. Daddy had only recently decided he could afford a telephone and when it rang he associated it with danger and expense. He went quiet when I asked him about the scattering. I don't remember about all that, he says. The contempt I am trying to rid myself of rises up. He isn't even sure where the hill is.

—Paddy didn't walk all the way with me if that's what you mean. I walked on a bit on my own. It was a lovely day. Very still. There wasn't a sound or a murmur anywhere. I got to where I thought was a good spot and said a little prayer, and I opened the urn and scattered the ashes. But just then a wind came up and blew the ashes in my face. It got in me eyes. Paddy said to go for a pint but I didn't think that was right so he drove me back to the house.

I am shaken when he tells me the story, not because of the wind, I can dismiss that as pure chance, but because he tells it so succinctly. I understand in the calmness of his voice how I have wronged him. He is an old dog after being abandoned by his owner and having no understanding of why he is alone. I see him differently through the few letters he has sent to me in America. Tentatively, humbly, he offers his son advice. He says he knows nothing of life and says he makes many mistakes. His age shows in the shakiness of his inelegant handwriting. His letters with their dates and their regular indentations at the beginning of every paragraph remind me that he is not just from a different generation; he is a man from a different era. And, despite the poverty he endured in the early years, he had held us together as a family. Nothing, not even our mother broke our family. Nothing, except death.

*   *   *

My mind died for a long time during her illness, and immediately after her death. I thought of her every day after she was cremated, though of her as ashes. Every night my last thought was her in the coffin in the mortuary at the hospice. She had been alone there. I cannot shake from my mind that she was still alive then, and scared. Thought of her as dead flesh, as ashes, as gone.

The Sunday before she died I took her out to the front of the hospice and wheeled her down to the Grotto. She was running out of cigarettes, and I said I'd go around to the shops to get her some. I walk down the long drive, and, as soon as I turn the bend, run. She might die there and then in the wheelchair. She is weaker than I have ever seen her. The shopkeeper is chatting amiably to a customer who is wearing a pink hat. Why remember that pink hat when I can't remember the sound of her voice? While I wait for the shopkeeper to be done talking I pull some sweets off a shelf. Maybe she would like some chocolates. Biscuits, too. A Sunday newspaper. When the man finally serves me I ask for eighty Dunhill. Always Dunhill when she was in the money. I shove them in the bag and rush out. No matches. I run back and throw ten pence on the table and shout
matches
at the man who has returned to his conversation with the pink hat. I stop running at the bend in the drive, slow to a fast walk. Her head is down, her chin on her chest, asleep. A cigarette, trailing smoke, held loosely between her fingers. I say her name quietly and she opens her eyes slowly, like a cat waking from a hot sleep. The cigarette drops from her hand. She can tell from my face I am thinking how close the moment is. She looks ashamed of herself, of the indignity of dying, dying before she becomes a woman. She reaches down to pick up the burning cigarette off the tarmac and stops half way, as she does I can see her as a teenager crouched for the four-hundred-metre relay, digging her spikes into the hard grass for leverage, the fastest finisher in the school. She could be behind thirty metres by the time she was passed the baton and still hit the tape first. I pick up the cigarette and hand it to her, but she shakes her hand minutely.

—Sick of being sick, she says.

*   *   *

The night before she died I slept badly. Sadness finally exhausted me and I dozed. My mind fell in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams, morphine drugging Ruth into death, Ruth calling for our mother, Ruth calling, screaming an animal scream at death. I thought I should take her out of the hospice tomorrow and bring her to Tivoli Road. I thought about getting up now and visiting her. It was nearly three in the morning. I felt her mind awake, felt it moving through me, through the streets, through the houses, felt her breathing a goodbye, each breathing in a heavy triumph and each breathing out a resignation; soon it would be the last breathing out, no more words would be spoken, no more thoughts would form. She would be lucid. Everyone asleep in the hospice, the night nurse listening to the radio in the curtained office. I fell back asleep and in my sleeping, she slipped away. Nothing bit like that single regret.

Whenever I look at her photograph on my desk I freeze and am able to think of nothing, not even her. Eventually, I begin to notice the photograph less and less. The funeral begins to occupy my thoughts. I question my motives. Was I no different from the priest who wanted to save her soul in his fashion when I wanted to celebrate her memory in mine? Perhaps I was looking for attention by dramatically and poignantly making a stand at the funeral with the priest. Perhaps I was no better than the hypocrites who shook my hand in their effort to assuage their guilt. I wasted so many days not writing when I promised her I would write every day. The most horrific truth is forgetting, forgetting and going on. But there is no other choice. The only option is to live a fiercely joyous life knowing full well that misery leans against every street corner.

Ursula

It must be easy for fiction writers—to make it all up. To shape reality and make it conform to some vision of the way it should be. Truth is not easy. I thought it was, that facts made it so. How could Ursula, she who was so vital, be gone? After Ruth's death, I thought life would be easier, that death hardens one against pain. The endless well of naïveté. There is no chronology. I cannot weave them together.

*   *   *

We go for a walk up the hill of Howth. Ursula is coquettish, looking for my hand on the steep rises. It's not like her and I like her more for it. We sit on a boulder and look out to sea. Gulls are squawking over a mass of brown in the blue sea.

—Enough to put you off your lunch.

All I can think of is kissing you. You turn and stare at me, a serious face.

—Kiss me.

I kiss her and her lips are lovely. She kisses back. We kiss and kiss and I burp in the middle of it I'm so nervous.

—Pig.

—It was an accident.

She pushes me on my back. We kiss and find each other. Her buttocks tight against her jeans. I run my hand down her leg. Her leg is hard as rock. Sweet, sweet touches. She raises herself off me and smiles intriguingly. She sits back and pulls her trouser leg up to the knee and knocks on the leg. She nods at my astonishment.

—Where does it start?

She karate chops above the knee.

—And the other one?

—That too. No, the other one is fine.

She shows a white ankle for proof.

—I never guessed.

She shrugs.

—No one knows. Except my family.

—What happened?

—Cancer. Let's eat. It's no big deal. At least not to me.

I open the basket we have brought and I think about telling her about Ruth, about the cancer but decide against it.

—Me neither. Leg? Of chicken.

—Weak.

I knew then I would ask her to marry me.

*   *   *

At work I find the slow constant hiss of the gun comforting. Ursula is getting ready for her job, back at the flat. Wife: how wonderful to have a wife. I imagine her dressing, smile at the pleasure of knowing her routine. I marvel at the work. The paint fanning over the black plastic frame turning it metallic silver. I swivel the jig to paint the next side, arcing the gun to cover the curved edge of the television frame. Love this job. It takes a special kind of concentration to paint television escutcheons five hundred times a day. Set the record last month with 578 in a single shift. Over six hundred if they included defects. Thinking of the defects, my skill wanes. The siren goes and Gerry and I drop the guns with relief.

The other workers scuttle across the factory floor to be first to the vending machines. We make our way to the toilets. We peel off the cotton gloves, the hoods, the face masks, and wash. The paint spray finds its way through to the skin, regardless. I blow my nose and decide not to think about the paint—it's approved by the minister for health himself. Gerry spits into the urinal.

—Want anything?

I shake my head.

—What are you smiling at?

—Nothing.

—Go on.

—Ursula is my wife.

—You're smiling at that? Sap. If that fucker Canning doesn't lay off me I'll knife him.

—Relax. You'll be a manager too one day and then you can be a bollocks.

I sit in the cubicle and stare at the chipboard door. The same coarse talk out of them every day.
Did he drop the hand? I'd fucking kill him if he said that to me. Shut up you. Prick.
Got to get out of this poxy place. I'm about to swear when I stop myself. She warned me about my language. She has a habit of entering my thoughts when I'm on the edge of anger. The morning after the honeymoon. Lying in bed in the hotel. We were shocked with the drabness of the room. The place had seemed so grand, looking out onto the bay. I pretended its loveliness.

—It's old-fashioned without the niceness of old-fashioned.

I delight in her directness; a mixture of bluntness and shyness. It was a still, hot night and we slept with the blankets off us. Her naked body lying on its side, facing me. Raising my fingers to the mouth, afraid to touch her. Her breasts are heavy and happy; full of smiles. So many pleasures with her. I stare at her in the darkness. Are you dreaming of us? Of when we met?

I had just entered sixth year, and swear I will avoid girls until after the exams, not that I've even touched one, acne and shyness deterring me. We meet at the school dance. She is sitting there in a long black dress, watching everything. And I am watching her. A month later she lets me slip a hand under her blouse, and I hope she can't sense the trembling in my fingers. The gentleness of her breast; the nipple, hard as a nut. The consternation inside of me, knowing she is excited. The first time I touch her is in the park. We meet there after school and go to the back of the football pitches near the Basin. How she excites me. Her moaning frightens me but I can't bring myself to stop until her hand tightens about my wrist. A butterfly taking flight. My fingers on her stomach slipping beneath flesh and jeans, down into the wetness between her legs, thrilled by the pulsing of her cunt's heartbeat. Ripples there, minutes later.

I go to bed without having any tea or without studying. Under the blankets, breathing her in on my fingertips: Ursula. Her smell. Happier than the smell of grass after rain. This couldn't be the fishy smell other boys joked about. How little they knew. How little everybody knew. How was it that people could go about their lives after discovering such a smell?

Because I am studying for the exams, it is three torturous days before I see her again. As soon as we are alone in the park I bring my fingers to her lips.

—Smell.

She shoves my hand away and stares at the fingertips suspiciously.

—I'm not messing. Smell.

She lifts my fingertips to the wings of her nostrils and inhales.

—You've been smoking.

—It's not cigarettes. It's you. It's you. Your smell from Monday evening. When we were here.

She grabs my hand and lifts her nose a little as if sniffing herself from the air about us. She bends and kisses my fingernails; the undersides of my fingers; licks my palm. She kisses and licks the palm and bites it and I whisper it's nice and it's lovely and she better stop and she better stop now before it's nicer and she says yes, she will stop kissing this palm all the time and I plead and she says she will stop in one kiss's time and I say no you are to stop now and to marry me please.