The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley (4 page)

“Brigid.”

As soon as we reached the door of the bedroom, the raven-haired woman took control. Like most paramedics, she had an impenetrable calm and a pragmatic bedside manner. Brigid was still seated by her mother's remains.

“Hi, Brigid, is it?” said the raven-haired woman. “I'm Robyn, Brigid. Do you mind if I take a look at your mam?”

“Go ahead,” whispered Brigid, and she got up from the floor and stood back while Robyn leaned down and checked for a pulse.

“Yeah,” Robyn said softly, “she's gone.”

They brought in the stretcher and placed Lucy's remains on it before covering her with a white sheet. Robyn explained that Lucy's remains would be brought to Clondalkin hospital, and then Brigid and I stood by the door and watched them leave with Lucy. The low panic was rising again. I had to get out of there.

“Brigid, this has obviously changed everything for you, and you'll want time to digest it. Is there anyone you'd like me to call for you?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Maybe I could come back later in the afternoon to discuss the funeral. Would that be okay?”

She looked like a little girl lost at a fair, shocked and aware that she'd been left alone, but secure enough in her own skin to be able to deal with it. There was nothing I could do for her.

“That's fine,” she whispered.

And I was gone.

12:25 p.m.

I
pulled up outside the mortuary at Clondalkin hospital, one of the biggest and busiest in Dublin. Because there were no autopsies done on Sundays, there was always a double load waiting after the weekend for Eddie Daly, the man who ran the mortuary and opened up all the bodies for the pathologists to work on. He was standing outside the front doors in his stained white coat, smoking a cigarette when I got out of my Camry. I nodded at him. As always, he wore a jaundiced, suffering smile.

“Eddie, how you getting on?”

“Struggling, and yourself?”

“Keeping busy. Listen, I've just come from a house off Wellington Road where I was making arrangements for a man with his wife, and when she went upstairs to get the clothes, she dropped dead.”

“Lucy Wright.”

“That's her.”

“She's inside.”

“I know you're up to your bollocks here, Eddie, I thought I could save you and the pathologists some time. She had angina, she told me herself before she went upstairs, so no need for a postmortem.”

“She's down to be posted in the morning, Paddy, and that's the end of it. It's not up to you or me anyway, you know that.”

“Who's down to do it?”

“Norman.”

“Is he inside?”

“You don't want to see him, Paddy, he's like a bear with a sore prick.”

“Maybe I can cheer him up,” I said.

Norman Furlong looked like a bully chef. His flopping ginger mane and mustache lent a flamelike effect to his already fiery character, augmented by his pink skin and bulging gray eyes. Most undertakers I knew were intimidated by him to the point of staying well out of his way, but I hadn't a problem with him. And despite the fact that I'd never particularly warmed to the guy, today I simply had to talk to him.

The PM room was off limits to nonstaff. Written in black and red on the door was:
NO ENTRY—RESTRICTED PERSONNEL ONLY
. I pushed the door open and stuck my head in. Norman was standing over a remains cut open from neck to navel.

“Norman,” I said, like we were buddies.

He looked up from the remains and focused on me with fire in his eyes.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Just passing by and thought I could save you some time. Lucy Wright had angina, so no real need for an autopsy.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” he said.

“I'll leave you to it,” I said, and walked out of the room.

When I got back outside, Eddie was still there. “You didn't come up here especially for that, did you?” he said, flicking the butt of his cigarette away.

“No, I've to visit my brother-in-law, he's up in St. Michael's. My jammer all right there?” I said, pointing to my car.

“Work away.”

“What time will she be done in the morning?”

“She'll be clear at lunchtime,” said Eddie, walking back inside. I'd known well before I'd driven up there what I was going to be told, but I'd no choice but to try. With disgrace only a whiff away, I decided to walk around to the petrol station and buy myself a pack of cigarettes. My old reliable: Carrolls Number 1. I hadn't smoked in three years—I'd even managed to stay off them while dealing with Eva's death—but now that I was on the short end of the plank, I'd take whatever mercies I could get my hands on. With my DNA lining Lucy's birth canal, and the postmortem scheduled for less than twenty-four hours away, the awaiting indignity felt more than a little disquieting. I sparked up a smoke and turned my thoughts to what they craved most: shelter.

1:40 p.m.

T
he feeling of the upright oversize coffin around me was comforting. It felt like my own wooden cocoon, tucked away behind a hundred other upright coffins waiting to be lined up in the loft.

Since my father died, Frank Gallagher brought in the boxes, and Jack put the handles on and lined the insides with padding and white silk in between doing funerals and deliveries. I felt closest to my father up there in the loft. I'd spent countless hours with him there over the years. When I was a young boy, I used to sit up on his workbench amidst the tools and sawdust while he made the boxes and engraved the nameplates with a special little hammer and chisel. But everything had changed now. Gallagher's outsourced its boxes; the nameplates were engraved by machine. And my father had long since left the loft, and Dublin, and life, for that matter. And now so had Lucy Wright. If there had been handles on the inside of the lid of the coffin I was sitting in, I would have pulled it shut, and probably wouldn't have heard Christy calling my name from down below in the garage.

“Up here!” I shouted back.

He arrived at the top of the creaking old stairs, wheezing.

“Where are you?”

I walked out from behind the coffins and stopped by the dilapidated wardrobe. Nailed to the front of it was a print of an out-of-shape Grecian female nude, smiling out from the picture like a comely Mona Lisa. It had been there since my childhood, and probably long before it, but today, as I looked at it, I saw Lucy Wright's face in there, beckoning me back to Pembroke Lane.

“What's going on?” I said.

Christy had an arrangement sheet in his hand, and going by the shininess of his bald head, he was flustered. He cut a humorous figure: thick-lensed glasses, pear-shaped trunk, and an endearing overbite.

“This one's coming in from England in the morning and I've never brought one in before. Will you give me a hand?”

“Sure,” I said, and looked over the arrangement sheet. Christy had graduated from the garage as a driver at Frank Gallagher's suggestion and had been straddling both departments for a few months now. His inherent politeness made him eminently suitable for the funeral business, and after an endless stream of compliments about him from families when they paid their bills, sometimes months after the funerals, Frank decided to exploit Christy's charms beyond the atmosphere he created in the limousine.

The remains in question was one Dermot Hayes who'd been living in Manchester, where he got hooked on heroin, ending up overdosing at the age of twenty-seven. As he was originally from Walkinstown, his family, who still lived there, wanted him brought up to Gallagher's Walkinstown funeral home on Tuesday morning after his remains landed in Dublin airport.

“I've talked to the Hayes family but not the undertaker in Manchester,” said Christy.

“Then let's give him a ring,” I said. I looked at the form and recognized his name. I phoned Kershaw's Funeral Directors, and after being put through to the boss, Derek Kershaw, I traded the relevant information with him and ended the call. I ticked the applicable boxes and handed the form back to Christy. “Never as complicated as you think,” I said.

“You're a pal,” said Christy.

I'd known Christy ten years, since his days as a chauffeur, when he drove for the Spanish and Australian embassies whenever they had visiting dignitaries. He used to drive with Gallagher's in a casual capacity when he was in between jobs. After Christy's three years of part-time work, Frank offered him a full-time position, and Christy jumped at it. He was without a doubt the best driver Gallagher's had ever had: conscientious, dependable, polite, and mannerly. He was, as Frank often remarked, cut out for the funeral business like few others before him. Our friendship extended to our free time, too. We'd even organized a betting syndicate with a few of the lads from the yard, Christy and I being the horse-racing lovers in the group. Christy had a niece named Aoife, who was a stable hand in a prominent stud in Kildare, and for a slice of the action, she fed us inside information she gleaned from other stable hands, or grooms, or trainers, or even jockeys. Over a two-year period, we'd worked our seed money from two grand up to twelve. When we'd place a bet at the track, we'd generally lay down between five hundred and a grand, with our horse usually running at short odds, and we'd each take home between four and eight hundred on the day if we were lucky. There were five of us in the group: Christy, Jack and Eamonn from the yard, Aoife down in the stud, and I. Every month we'd have an outing, and more often than not, come away with our pockets lined.

But my mind was far away from horses today; it was focused on the funerals of Michael and Lucy Wright, and Dermot Hayes.

“Overdose or suicide?” I said.

“Suicide by overdose.”

“Did he leave a note?”

“Yeah, apparently he did.”

I pulled out my cigarettes and lit one. I could see Christy's disappointment even though he tried to conceal it. When I'd given them up three years ago, I convinced him to do it with me and had made him feel we were in it together. Now that I'd broken the arrangement, I could sense he felt betrayed.

“You're smoking,” he eventually said.

I nodded, blowing smoke out through my nostrils, feeling like a defector.

“You know they'll kill you.”

“And get out of this kip sooner?”

Christy shrugged like it meant nothing. “Fuck it,” he said.

“Fuck it,” I said, letting a smile sink in.

“What happened in Pembroke Lane?”

“She went upstairs to get the clothes and dropped dead while she was up there.”

“And where were you?”

There were secrets to tell good friends and secrets to keep to yourself. The Lucy Wright situation fell into the latter category. Neither Christy nor I had anything to gain from his knowing, and beyond that, considering what could be coming down the pike, I didn't want to involve him or put him under suspicion of collusion.

“Downstairs in the kitchen writing down the details. I hear a bump upstairs, a loud one, so I go up to the bedroom just at the top of the stairs and see her legs sticking out from the bedroom. I go into the room and there she is on the floor beside the wardrobe, the life gone out of her.”

“Good Jaysus,” said Christy. “And no other family there?”

“The daughter arrived after, so I told her.”

“How'd she take it?”

“She thought it was romantic.”

Christy shook his head a little. “Like the McKinleys. Remember?”

“Yeah,” I said, “the McKinleys.”

2:30 p.m.

B
rigid Wright was crouched on the draining board beside the kitchen sink, cleaning the windows. She'd already ironed her mother's shirts and blouses that were piled up beside the ironing board, and she'd swept the yard outside. She was doing all this to keep her mind occupied. She knew the shirts and blouses were never going to be worn by her mother again, but this, along with cleaning the windows, was helping her to process her grieving and think.

Even though Brigid had lived most of her teenage years in Dublin, the only time she'd spent there recently had been when visiting her parents. She'd been dealing with her father's imminent departure for the last few years of his life, particularly since his cancer diagnosis, so she'd less grieving to do there. But her mother, her darling mother—her friend, her guide, her fairy godmother, and countless other things—her passing was a different matter, and the loss she felt was massive. She hadn't expected her to die for another twenty or thirty years, much less fifteen hours after her father's death. But this was the path, and if it was to be her path, then she'd walk it with her chin up and her heart open, just like her mother always had.

It was her mother who'd counseled her through the breakup of her marriage. It was her mother who'd advised her on what paintings to include in her shows, just as it was her mother who'd taught her to always take life in stride and who'd encouraged her to be as free and independent and strong as she was.

“Nothing is forever,” Lucy had always told her. And now, hours after her death, Lucy's words echoed in her daughter's ears as she continued to wipe the windows clean. Brigid was glad she'd been in Dublin for the deaths; she could soak in the freshness of their passing where it had happened, rather than traveling from London and arriving after everything had been moved and set up and organized. For once, she could plan and organize something for her mother and father, and put everything in its right place before heading back to Hampstead to collapse in a heap to wail away her lament and pour it into her pictures.

The prospect of both her parents' bodies coming back to their house to be waked rather than staying in the hospital mortuary was a heartening one for Brigid. But it was the romantic element of their dual passing she found most comforting.

Both Brigid's parents had been artists all their lives. After their funerals, she'd have to decide what to do with all the paintings in the house, both theirs and the few dozen painted by their friends and contemporaries. She hopped down from the draining board and washed her hands while thinking of her own paintings and what would be next for her now that she had a new well of pain to draw from.

Her last show had consisted of what she called her Blight Paintings, a series of oils illustrating what had actually happened in Ireland in the nineteenth century during the Famine, focusing on scenes of the food that wasn't potatoes being transported out of the country under armed guard to England, and all the Irish people being beaten away and dying because they were allowed nothing to eat other than the blighted potatoes. She'd been surprised at how well her work had gone down in London. It seemed the slight controversy the show courted during its time did her finances no harm at all. Her show sold out and managed to get the attention of the art world at large, bolstering her profile and earning power.

For her next series of paintings, death would probably be the theme. And impermanence. And maybe the state of being solitary. But not loneliness. Brigid knew her parents would always be with her now, in her heart.