No Way to Say Goodbye (7 page)

“I don’t care. Do you hear me, love? It doesn’t matter. You’re not in trouble. Just survive. And when you wake up we’ll take care of this baby together. Don’t you leave me now.” He patted her hand, glad she didn’t have to witness his eyes leaking. “Don’t you leave me now.”

She didn’t wake for three months. Some had given up hope that she would be anything other than an incubator for her baby, but her dad was sure his daughter would return to him, and Penny was sure too, knowing that Mary hadn’t survived merely to sleep. She would come back, and her best friend spent as much time as possible sitting by her side, gossiping and playing her favourite music.

“Music will bring her back,” she had told Mary’s father, having filled the room with CDs. She gave him a schedule of songs for morning, afternoon and evening listening, divided into weekdays and weekends. It was important he adhere to it, she said, as Mary would not stand for a weekday song at the weekend or a morning song in the evening. Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover” was a weekday song, preferably to be played in the morning – afternoon would be pushing it and it was most definitely not to be played in the evening. Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” was another weekday song but this was deemed appropriate for evening, not morning or afternoon. Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” was a weekend evening song, late afternoon would be OK – she’d noted in the margin that it should not be played before four p.m. And so she went on until Mary’s poor dad was fully apprised and entrusted with this weighty task when she was forced to return to school in Dublin to complete her Leaving Cert.

When she was gone Ivan picked up the slack. Every day after school he’d visit and talk or read to Mary so that her father could take a shower or drink a fortifying coffee. Every day her tummy grew under a hospital blanket and Robert’s parents would call to visit the part of their son that wasn’t buried in their family grave. They’d speak in whispers and Robert’s mother would cry and his dad would insist on shaking Mary’s dad’s hand.

She came back one Tuesday on a warm June day. It was around half past five. Ivan was reading aloud from
The Lord of the Rings
while Van Morrison’s “And It Stoned Me” was playing on CD. Her hand had jerked. He ignored it at first as spasms were not unusual. Then it moved again. Her fingers appeared to be searching rather than twitching randomly. Slowly he lowered the book and watched her. Her eyes flickered and blinked and at the same time her mouth opened and breath escaped. He froze and her eyelids peeled apart – slowly, as though they were coming unstuck.

“Mary?”

“Iv… zan,” she responded hoarsely, her mouth and throat like sandpaper.

“Oh, Jesus on a jet-ski! You’re back!” He jumped up and ran out of the room, leaving her to wonder what the hell was going on.

She could hear him screaming, hailing her return in the corridor, and it wasn’t long before a team of doctors, accompanied by her tearful father, revealed how long she had been lost, that Robert had perished, she had missed her Leaving Cert exams, and she was just shy of six months pregnant, soon to be a mother. Lying there surrounded by strange, harried faces, looking down at her swollen self, with her boyfriend dead, her limbs uncooperative, and slurred speech braying in her addled brain… lying there disoriented yet painfully aware that the girl who had got into her boyfriend’s car would never emerge… Through the haze of this new reality, her mind settled on Van Morrison’s familiar beat. He spoke of water and prayed it wouldn’t rain all day.

In contrast to his new neighbour, Sam’s entrance to this world was joyful. He was born to a tired but grateful mother and a proud cigar-toting father, his older brother, then a toddler, inquisitive and keen to stroke his tiny face. His early memories were of train sets, a mother’s perfume, a father’s laughter, a brother’s teasing, but it was his granny who took up most of his head space, she being the one who had raised both boys while their mother worked in her husband’s Manhattan restaurant. Sam’s days were spent accompanying her to the local grocery stores where she’d barter with old friends while catching up on gossip, making the men laugh with her flirtatious wit and the women smile at her kindness. Granny Baskin had moved in with her daughter and son-in-law a year before the birth of her favourite grandchild and just after her own husband had quietly died while sitting on a steel girder thirteen hundred feet from the ground. Granny had often talked of Sam’s grandfather and the day the sky had taken him from her. She wasn’t bitter: he had been in his late sixties, which some considered young, but to Granny Baskin it was long enough for a man such as her husband to be grounded. “He was never meant for this earth,” she’d say. “His head and heart were always skyward.” Then she’d look up towards the heavens and wink as though he was watching.

Most afternoons she’d collect Sam and his brother Jonah from school and take them to the park so that she could catch up with her old friends playing chess and telling stories, while the birds fed on the scraps they sprinkled about themselves. Jonah would run off with other boys and play football or basketball with any ball they could find, and if they didn’t find one he would run as though he was chasing something invisible. Granny Baskin would laugh and wink at Sam, who preferred to sit by her side and listen to a group of old immigrants reminisce about their homelands, comparing stories of the plight of the old world, each one bettering the last’s tale of woe.

Sam had thought it odd that they could tell such sad stories yet laugh and joke so easily, until Granny had counselled that time was a great healer. He was six so he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but when she said it she gave him the smile that came with twinkling eyes and pushed a sweet into his hand so he’d remember it. Mr Grabowski and Mr DiRisio would often fight for the old woman’s attention and even a six-year-old could work out that his granny was as sassy as she was old, as wrinkled Mrs Gillespie always said.

It was his grandmother who encouraged his love of Irish music, sharing with him her taste for the Clancy Brothers, the Chieftains and the Dubliners. Luke Kelly made her cry, but her tears were always accompanied by a smile. She introduced him to all kinds of music – jazz, blues, bluegrass, rock, pop, and the only artist they ever disagreed about: Neil Diamond. She bought him his first guitar, telling him that once he’d learned to play he would never be lonely. She saw it in him first, the singularity that would polarize him for his peers. Normal kids didn’t hang out so willingly with their grandmothers. He was an old soul content to remain friendless. His parents weren’t worried that he wasn’t a great mixer: all kids were different and he’d grow out of it. Teachers felt that he was merely shy and agreed it was most likely a phase. Granny Baskin knew better. Her grandson’s eyes betrayed a certain melancholy which, as an Irish emigrant, she was more than equipped to recognize. He wouldn’t fit in with the crowd and there was a chance he wouldn’t fit in at all.

“Who were you before? A warrior or the wounded, my sweet boy?” She’d ruffle his hair and he would smile as though he knew the answer but dared not share it.

Sam had started out in the world as a gawky creature, too skinny for his large or piercing facial features. The kids at school made fun of his square jaw, often referring to him as “Desperate Sam the Pie-eating Man”. It hadn’t bothered him – at least, not at first. He was too busy locked in his thoughts and playing riffs in his head while others around him talked nonsense just to hear themselves speak. But as the years passed the noise grew louder and their contempt became harder to ignore. He often wondered why they couldn’t just leave him be. But jealous souls demand to be heard, and his ambivalence taunted them as surely as their bullying haunted him. He was in his mid-teens when he began to fill out. His features no longer overtook the rest of him. His blond hair was shaped into a crew-cut by the local barber.

“As handsome as your grandfather in his day,” his granny whispered. He might have had a rocky start but she’d always known he’d be a heartbreaker one day.

The girls in school noticed too and suddenly he was considered deep instead of weird. He instantly recognized the hypocrites for who they were and retreated further into himself, distrustful of his new-found popularity and cursing his appearance for drawing unwanted attention. Instead of hanging with the guys, getting drunk and exploring girls, he hid for hours in his room with his guitar, losing himself in melody, playing from his heart – a heart that was full of all kinds of music. His gran would bring him tea, shaking her hips; he’d grin when she’d twirl around without spilling a drop or letting a biscuit slip from the plate.

“You’ll be a star some day,” she’d say proudly.

He’d shake his head modestly, but deep down he prayed he’d reach the dizzying heights his loving granny dreamed of. Playing guitar was the only time he felt he was honest with the world.

It was just after his sixteenth birthday when his granny keeled over in the kitchen, taking a pot of mercifully cold tomato soup to the floor with her. She woke up a day later, the left side of her face sliding towards her shoulder, her speech impaired, an arm and a leg now useless. He sat with her and talked while she stared blankly at the ceiling, one eye blinking. It was only when he played his guitar and a tear escaped her that he knew she was still with him.

His parents flew into action. First they put a bed downstairs in the unused drawing room. Then they hired a nurse and a physiotherapist, who would call three times a week. But Granny wasn’t improving at home – or not the way the professionals thought she should. After six months Granny Baskin was moved to a hospital that specialized in stroke-victim aftercare. It was Sam who helped his mother to wheel her to the car. She hung on to him loosely while his mother removed the chair from beneath her. His strong arms manoeuvred her into the front seat, where he smoothed her skirt when it rode up her leg. His mother was busy attempting to fit the chair into the trunk, cursing silently when she scratched the paintwork.

It was then that his granny leaned forward, almost flopping, with a sideways grin. “Don’t let the bastards get you down!” she managed. It had been the first real sentence she’d spoken since the stroke. With her good arm she ruffled his hair and he could have sworn that, after all those months, the twinkle returned to her eye, if only for a moment and just for him.

His mother drove away, leaving him to sit and rock on the stairs that led to his bedroom and the world his old granny had helped him create. The pain of loss engulfed him, tearing his insides out. The fear of what lay ahead of her burned his chest as surely as a hotplate would a naked hand. Worse, he couldn’t break her out and take her to a better place. He couldn’t tend her. He couldn’t save her. She had given him everything and he had let her down. He cursed himself and his inadequacy. He hurt himself punching his fist against the hard wood banister that didn’t budge, further highlighting his failure. On the day his grandmother was taken into hospital, Sam sat with his head in bleeding hands, sobbing and wondering if he’d survive without her, and if she could without him.

A year later Sam’s granny died and he mourned her a second time, but since she had left his home, life had moved on, and although he missed her he was used to her not being there now – he had really lost her two years before on the day of her stroke. He’d also found a girlfriend. Hilarie was a strange-looking punk with green hair, a pierced nose and cherub tits. Like him, she was an outsider. They had met when he auditioned for a garage band. She was the only girl. The other guys were noncommittal but she had wanted him from the moment he’d walked through the door. Luckily she had the deciding vote. She liked it that he was insular, speaking only when necessary. It made a nice change from the shit she had to listen to from the other guys.

She also liked it that he didn’t come on to her every chance he got, and especially when it became clear that she would have to make the first move. She waited until the night of their first gig when even her solitary new band-mate had reached a level of exhilaration that opened him up a little. She spotted the chink and before he knew it he was leaning against a tiled toilet wall, with a bass player on her knees sucking so hard that his knees threatened to give way. Afterwards, when she kissed him, he could taste himself. He missed his granny, and sometimes still ached for her, but he had a window of opportunity to become a person deemed normal – until the bullying started again. This time it was more menacing. In the end it took just one night to destroy any chance he had of ever being OK.

*

Ivan was a funny fish – at least, that was what his mother always said. He loved the sea, learned to swim as soon as he was dropped into water and spent his childhood and early teens sitting at the end of a fishing-rod, pondering his existence while awaiting a tug at the pole. His older twin brothers, Séamus and Barry, and younger brother Fintan were more interested in GAA – Fintan and Séamus being the footballers and Barry an avid hurler, which ensured that he’d lost most of his teeth by the age of eighteen. His parents paid for caps, while cursing the cost of dentistry, so Barry had what his twin would describe as a movie-star mouth. Throughout their childhood, Ivan’s brothers would win the medals but Ivan would bring home the tea. He was born relaxed and never changed. No terrible twos. No challenging teenage years. He just got on with it, and as long as he could fish for a few hours a day, he was as content as an old man sitting out on a warm day.

He was always popular with the girls, even as a kid when he was supposed to dislike the opposite sex. The fact that he was a year older than his cousin Mary never seemed to affect their relationship: from cradle to adulthood they were drawn to one another. He found he had more in common with her than he did with his older brothers. His mother had deliberately left a five-year gap between the twins and her second pregnancy, despite what the Church thought. Unfortunately for her the contraceptive method that had worked so beautifully for the five years preceding Ivan’s birth failed miserably in the months after, and Fintan was conceived all too quickly.