The Collected Stories (56 page)

‘The Sergeant takes that personally. In my opinion he’s wrong. What was personal about it? You gave us a great day out, a day out of all of our lives,’ Casey said. ‘And everything was normal then.’

That was the trouble, everything was not normal then, he was about to say, but decided not to speak. Everything was normal now. He had been afraid of his own fear and was spreading the taint everywhere. Now that what he had feared most had happened he was no longer afraid. His own life seemed to be happening as satisfactorily as if he were free again among people.

Do you think people can change, Ned? he felt like asking Casey. Do you think people can change or are they given a set star at birth that they have to follow? What part does luck play in the whole shemozzle?

Casey had taken to arranging the fire again and would plainly welcome any conversation, but he found that he did not want to continue. He felt that he knew already as much as he’d ever come to know about these matters. Discussing them further could only be a form of idleness or Clones in some other light. He liked the guard, but he did not want to draw any closer.

Soon he’d have to ask him for leave to go back to his cell.

After Fonsie Ryan called his brother he sat in his wheelchair and waited with growing impatience for him to appear on the small stairs and then, as soon as Philly came down and sat at the table, Fonsie moved his wheelchair to the far wall to wait for him to finish. This silent pressure exasperated Philly as he ate.

‘Did Mother get up yet?’ he asked abruptly.

‘She didn’t feel like getting up. She went back to sleep after I brought her tea.’

Philly let his level stare rest on his brother but all Fonsie did was to move his wheelchair a few inches out from the wall and then, in the same leaning rocking movement, let it the same few inches back, his huge hands all the time gripping the wheels. With his large head and trunk, he sometimes looked like a circus dwarf. The legless trousers were sewn up below the hips.

Slowly and deliberately Philly buttered the toast, picked at the rashers and egg and sausages, took slow sips from his cup, but his nature was not hard. As quickly as he had grown angry he softened towards his brother.

‘Would you be interested in pushing down to Mulligan’s after a while for a pint?’

‘I have the shopping to do.’

‘Don’t let me hold you up, then,’ Philly responded sharply to the rebuff. ‘I’ll be well able to let myself out.’

‘There’s no hurry. I’ll wait and wash up. It’s nice to come back to a clean house.’

‘I can wash these things up. I do it all the time in Saudi Arabia.’

‘You’re on your holidays now,’ Fonsie said. ‘I’m in no rush but it’s too early in the day for me to drink.’

Three weeks before, Philly had come home in a fever of excitement from the oil fields. He always came home in that high state of fever and it lasted for a few days in the distribution of the presents he always brought home, especially to his mother; his delight
looking at her sparse filigreed hair bent over the rug he had brought her, the bright tassels resting on her fingers; the meetings with old school friends, the meetings with neighbours, the buying of rounds and rounds of drinks; his own fever for company after the months at the oil wells and delight in the rounds of celebration blinding him to the poor fact that it is not generally light but shadow that we cast; and now all that fever had subsided to leave him alone and companionless in just another morning as he left the house without further word to Fonsie and with nothing better to do than walk to Mulligan’s.

Because of the good weather, many of the terrace doors were open and people sat in the doorways, their feet out on the pavement. A young blonde woman was painting her toenails red in the shadow of a pram in a doorway at the end of the terrace, and she did not look up as he passed. Increasingly people had their own lives here and his homecoming broke the monotony for a few days, and then he did not belong.

As soon as the barman in Mulligan’s had pulled his pint he offered Philly the newspaper spread out on the counter that he had been reading.

‘Don’t you want it yourself?’ Philly asked out of a sense of politeness.

‘I must have been through it at least twice. I’ve the complete arse read out of it since the morning.’

There were three other drinkers scattered about the bar nursing their pints at tables.

‘There’s never anything in those newspapers,’ one of the drinkers said.

‘Still, you always think you’ll come on something,’ the barman responded hopefully.

‘That’s how they get your money,’ the drinker said.

Feet passed the open doorway. When it was empty the concrete gave back its own grey dull light. Philly turned the pages slowly and sipped at the pint. The waiting silence of the bar became too close an echo of the emptiness he felt all around his life. As he sipped and turned the pages he resolved to drink no more. The day would be too hard to get through if he had more. He’d go back to the house and tell his mother he was returning early to the oil fields. There were other places he could kill time in. London and Naples were on the way to Bahrain.

‘He made a great splash when he came home first,’ one of the drinkers said to the empty bar as soon as Philly left. ‘He bought rings round him. Now the brother in the wheelchair isn’t with him anymore.’

‘Too much. Too much,’ a second drinker added forcefully though it wasn’t clear at all to what he referred.

‘It must be bad when that brother throws in the towel, because he’s a tank for drink. You’d think there was no bottom in that wheelchair.’

The barman stared in silent disapproval at his three customers. There were few things he disliked more than this ‘behind-backs’ criticism of a customer as soon as he left. He opened the newspaper loudly, staring pointedly out at the three drinkers until they were silent, and then bent his head to travel slowly through the pages again.

‘I heard a good one the other day,’ one of the drinkers cackled rebelliously. ‘The only chance of travel that ever comes to the poor is when they get sick. They go from one state to the other state and back again to base if they’re lucky.’

The other two thought this hilarious and one pounded the table with his glass in appreciation. Then they looked towards the barman for approval but he just raised his eyes to stare absently out on the grey strip of concrete until the little insurrection died and he was able to continue travelling through the newspaper again.

Philly came slowly back up the street. The blonde had finished painting her toenails – a loud vermilion – and she leaned the back of her head against a door jamb, her eyes closing as she gave her face and throat completely to the sun. The hooded pram above her outstretched legs was silent. Away, behind the area railings, old men wearing berets were playing bowls, a miniature French flag flying on the railings.

Philly expected to enter an empty room but as soon as he put his key in the door he heard the raised voices. He held the key still. His mother was downstairs. She and Fonsie were arguing. With a welcome little rush of expectancy, he turned the key. The two were so engaged with one another that they did not notice him enter. His mother was in her blue dressing gown. She stood remarkably erect.

‘What’s going on?’ They were so involved with one another that they looked towards him as if he were a burglar.

‘Your Uncle Peter died last night, in Gloria. The Cullens just phoned,’ his mother said, and it was Philly’s turn to look at his mother and brother as if he couldn’t quite grasp why they were in the room.

‘You’ll all have to go,’ his mother said.

‘I don’t see why we should have to go. We haven’t seen the man in twenty years. He never even liked us.’ Fonsie said heatedly, turning the wheelchair to face Philly.

‘Of course we’ll go. We are all he has now. It wouldn’t look right if we didn’t go down.’ Philly would have grasped at any diversion, but the pictures of Gloria Bog that flooded his mind shut out the day and the room with amazing brightness and calm.

‘That doesn’t mean I have to go,’ Fonsie said.

‘Of course you have to go. He was your uncle as well as mine,’ Philly said.

‘If nobody went to poor Peter’s funeral, God rest him, we’d be the talk of the countryside for years,’ their mother said. ‘If I know nothing else in the world I know what they’re like down there.’

‘Anyhow, there’s no way I can go in this.’ Fonsie gestured contemptuously to his wheelchair.

‘That’s no problem. I’ll hire a Mercedes. With a jalopy like that you wouldn’t think of coming yourself, Mother?’ Philly asked suddenly with the humour and malice of deep knowledge, and the silence that met the suggestion was as great as if some gross obscenity had been uttered.

‘I’d look a nice speck in Gloria when I haven’t been out of my own house in years. There wouldn’t be much point in going to poor Peter’s funeral, God rest him, and turning up at my own,’ she said in a voice in which a sudden frailty only served to point up the different shades of its steel.

‘He never even liked us. There were times I felt if he got a chance he’d throw me into a bog hole the way he drowned the black whippet that started eating the eggs,’ Philly said.

‘He’s gone now,’ the mother said. ‘He stood to us when he was needed. It made no difference whether he liked us or not.’

‘How will you manage on your own?’ Fonsie asked as if he had accepted he’d have to go.

‘Won’t Mrs O’Brien next door look in if you ask her and can’t I call her myself on the phone? It’ll be good for you to get out of the
city for a change. None of the rest can be trusted to bring me back a word of anything that goes on,’ she flattered.

‘Was John told yet?’ Philly interrupted, asking about their eldest brother.

‘No. There’d be no use ringing him at home now. You’d have to ring him at the school,’ their mother said.

The school’s number was written in a notebook. Philly had to wait a long time on the phone after he explained the urgency of the call while the school secretary got John from the classroom.

‘John won’t take time off school to go to any funeral,’ Fonsie said confidently as they waited.

To Fonsie’s final disgust John agreed to go to the funeral at once. He’d be waiting for them at whatever time they thought they’d be ready to travel.

Philly hired the Mercedes. The wheelchair folded easily into its cavern-like boot. ‘You’ll all be careful,’ their mother counselled as she kissed them goodbye. ‘Everything you do down there will be watched and gone over. I’ll be following poor Peter in my mind until you rest him with Father and Mother in Killeelan.’

John was waiting for them outside his front door, a brown hat in his hand, a gabardine raincoat folded on his arm, when the Mercedes pulled up at the low double gate. Before Philly had time to touch the horn John raised the hat and hurried down the concrete path. On both sides of the path the postage-stamp lawns showed the silver tracks of a mower, and roses were stacked and tied along the earthen borders.

‘The wife doesn’t seem to appear at all these days?’ Philly asked, the vibrations of the engine shaking the car as they waited while John closed the gate.

‘Herself and Mother never pulled,’ Fonsie offered.

There was dull peace between the two brothers now. Fonsie knew he was more or less in Philly’s hands for the next two days. He did not like it but the stupid death had moved the next two days out of his control.

‘What’s she like now?’

‘I suppose she’s much like the rest of us. She was always nippy.’

‘I’m sorry for keeping you,’ John said as he got into the back of the car.

‘You didn’t keep us at all,’ Philly answered.

‘It’s great to get a sudden break like this. You can’t imagine what it is to get out of the school and city for two or three whole days,’ John said before he settled and was silent. The big Mercedes grew silent as it gathered speed through Fairview and the North Strand, crossing the Liffey at the Custom House, and turned into the oneway flow of traffic out along the south bank of the river. Not until they got past Leixlip, and fields and trees and hedges started to be scattered between the new raw estates, did they begin to talk, and all their talk circled about the man they were going to bury, their mother’s brother, their Uncle Peter McDermott.

He had been the only one in the family to stay behind with his parents on Gloria Bog where he’d been born. All the rest had scattered. Their Aunt Mary had died young in Walthamstow, London; Martin died in Milton, Massachusetts; Katie, the eldest, had died only the year before in Oneida, New York. With Peter’s death they were all gone now, except their mother. She had been the last to leave the house. She first served her time in a shop in Carrick-on-Shannon and then moved to a greengrocer’s-cumconfectioner’s on the North Circular Road where she met their unreliable father, a traveller for Lemons Sweets.

While the powerful car slowed through Enfield they began to recall how their mother had taken them back to Gloria at the beginning of every summer, leaving their father to his own devices in the city. They spent every summer there on the bog from the end of June until early September. Their mother had always believed that only for the clean air of the bog and the plain wholesome food they would never have made it through the makeshifts of the city winter. Without the air and the plain food they’d never, never have got through, she used to proclaim like a thanksgiving.

As long as her own mother lived it was like a holiday to go there every summer – the toothless grandmother who sat all day in her rocking chair, her shoulders shawled, the grey hair drawn severely back into a bun, only rising to gather crumbs and potato skins into her black apron, and holding it like a great cloth bowl, she would shuffle out on to the street. She’d wait until all her brown hens had started to beat and clamour around her and then with a quick laugh she’d scatter everything that the apron held. Often before she came in she’d look across the wide acres of the bog, the stunted birch trees, the faint blue of the heather, the white puffs of bog cotton
trembling in every wind to the green slopes of Killeelan and walled evergreens high on the hill and say, ‘I suppose it won’t be long till I’m with the rest of them there.’