Each afternoon, I would go to a charity shop on Bridge Street with another armful of dresses and frocks and cardigans and conservative suits in tweed and wool. The daily bundles were small because each time they were sorted I would change my mind. I would put half the stuff back in the wardrobe, convincing myself that some items were too valuable to let go.
They might be designer stuff
, I argued.
I might find some use for them. Perhaps my wife or daughter would like to have a look at them.
But I forced myself to fill one bag each day until eventually the wardrobes and drawers were empty. Then at night, I lit the fire and the candles and put on the immersion heater and switched on her old transistor radio to hear concerts
from the Wigmore Hall and Budapest on BBC3. And at bedtime, the landing upstairs grew dense with incense and I went to the bathroom and soaked and softened and wept. And afterwards I lay on the bed and covered myself with the sheets and fell asleep, holding the blue nightdress in my arms. And one night I pulled myself into it and let it hang around my body, and lay there feeling its delicate texture all around me, and then sleeping felt like drowning in the place where she first imagined me.
B
UT YES, MAMMY, I was soft, and I am soft, and sentimental. And I’ve always believed in heaven. Ever since I was six and decided to climb trees instead of watching the
Lone Ranger
, which is when the Virgin Mary first appeared to me and enveloped me in her tenderness. I had gone up the main trunk of a chestnut tree, and sat on its lateral branches all afternoon, thinking myself equal to a monkey, when Desmond, my best friend, started pretending he was another monkey at the base of the tree. There was a dead spruce lying against the beech,
which afforded me a path of escape as the other monkey came up the tree towards me. But the spruce was rotten and, as I scampered down, the branches gave way beneath me, like the shells of a thousand eggs, and I fell on my head and damaged my back. I lay on the floor of the wood, in awe of gravity, and terrified of you, because you weren’t soft, Mother, especially when we made mistakes. I knew you would scold me severely for climbing trees. But that thought was swiftly replaced by serenity as I looked at the sky. I think it was the branches whipping my back as I fell that put eggshells in my mind, and the blue of the sky that suggested the Queen of Heaven. My back may have been lacerated by the branches, but, inside, I felt like a bird fallen from its nest, and was certain that Mother would come soon – not scolding, but rather enfolding me in her arms, and reassuring me that I was OK. I didn’t see anything as literal as the porcelain Virgin commonly associated with Catholic apparitions in my moment of ecstasy; it was more a vague feeling of security. Later in life, my therapist explained to me that it was my own unconscious that fabricated a heavenly mother in the blue sky. The point is that it wasn’t you, Mother, who held me then. It wasn’t you.
And of course, it wasn’t just you who was growing old. It was also Oliver, your little brother, now alone, playing the piano and reading old record reviews he had cut from newspapers decades earlier, and dozing by the fire, until tiny cancers finally crept up on him and devoured all his music.
And it was all the other folks in Cavan who you grew up with; the school friends, shop boys, chicken farmers, dressmakers, dancers, singers and hackney drivers, and the young girl friends with whom you shared secrets when they were having their babies; all those mothers walking the roads with prams four deep, proud as punch and not worried about oncoming traffic – they had all turned grey or were already gone before you to Killygarry graveyard.
All over Ireland your generation was fading away; their histories were fading, the buildings they were familiar with, the geography of where they were born, and their own passions and memories, obsessions and fears, their views on world wars or communism or long hair or apparitions of the Virgin Mary; everything that held them was fading into a kind of grey dust.
One generation always gives way to the next. Young people make noise and have the parties and claim the space.
Carpe Diem!
Old people shrink, retreat and dissolve into the bland paintwork of a doctor’s waiting room. And now I see myself dissolving, because I am next in line and young ones are already dancing in spaces where soon I too will not belong.
And it’s the cold in an old person’s house that does the damage, when the electricity becomes too expensive and the damp creeps up. It rises from the ground and seeps in through the ridge tiles and runs through hidden webbed crevices in the walls until the entire house is musty and
smells of old age. Glenasmole had been falling apart for two decades, even when you still slept upstairs, working your way up and down the steps on your backside, and the unused rooms were slipping into decline. That’s when I put a commode in the corner of the dining room, beside the china cabinet, because there was no downstairs toilet. For years, you had refused to have one built. Someone even suggested an escalator that might be attached to the stairs – a small chair that would run on railings along the wall from hall to upper landing – but you said you heard of a woman who got on one of those contraptions and broke her hip trying to get off. So you weren’t having any of that.
It was ever so; you had your own peculiar way of doing everything. You slept in a different room from your husband. You said he was a selfish man sometimes. And sometimes you flew into tempers when you were washing the dishes. You didn’t like all his friends. And you said he didn’t appreciate the way you slaved in the kitchen, cleaning and cooking and making ends meet on the meagre cheque he handed you at lunchtime every Friday when you were going into town on a bicycle to do the messages. And you never hugged him. In fact, you avoided touching for so long that eventually you divided the geography of the house between the both of you, each claiming separate spaces: the big bedroom his, the small bedroom yours, the front room his, and the kitchen all yours.
Of course, the nursing home was different. You found
other people again. Sometimes I’d go in and you’d say, ‘Hello, Oliver,’ confusing me with your brother because all of a sudden there were lots of people around and you became tender for one final moment as you were held by all of them; the living and the dead drawing you on to a new level of being in the world, where you let go of all your possessions, except for the handbag, a gaudy red plastic pouch that sat on the floor beside your chair in the day room for two years.
In the end you didn’t even come to the day room any more. You lay in bed, and after another few months, you moved away from us completely in sleep, struggling with each breath on your final journey into silence.
But it was on the day of your departure from Farnham Road, heading for the nursing home, that my heart finally broke. I found it unbearable to sit downstairs in the kitchen, listening to you up there in the bedroom, going through your things, trying to decide what to take. And by accident you discovered some of those old photographs and mementos of long-ago weddings and you cried like a child. I felt ashamed that I was taking you away from your home – because it was your home. In the end, you brought nothing of any importance. Not even the photographs. It was as if you didn’t want to remember anything at all after that, as you were driven away from the wrought-iron gates of Glenasmole for the very last time.
And there was so much I never said in that house and so
much you never told me; so many stories that were hidden, so much resentment that I stored up as I watched you for years putting food into your mouth in slow motion. So much of you in the air and in every room, until death finally claimed you and I could open all the windows and doors, and allow the house to breathe once again.
T
HERE IS MORE to life than just holding hands, and the English dictionary offers a variety of similar verbs – to hold on, to hold up, to hold out and to hold forth. There is a way of being held, and of beholding, which is not just touching or being physical but a way of holding each other that makes us human. In Tibet, the condition of being held is considered to be the ultimate reality of all things. The ultimate truth for Tibetans is not a god or a ground of being, but a dynamic whereby the entire universe is held, and holds itself, and holds us.
Holding each other. Holding everything. It’s the ultimate reality. Everything else is a delusion.
And it’s such a contentment to hold another human being, to abandon self-obsession, leave personal anxieties forgotten in the past, and reach forward towards other beings. It’s the kind of bliss that everyone talks about when they talk about being in love. What the saints talked about when they talked about a union with God, an awareness that, despite the atrocities of life, you are always being held by someone.
It’s like listening to Chopin. It’s like being a child. I see it sometimes on a bus or train when a mother is holding a child. The two individuals melt into each other, and the mother becomes so fluid in her caress that it no longer matters whose body is whose. The mother says all and everything the infant needs to hear. And I think it’s the same with lovers who have reached a certain stage in their lives. Maybe young love is not quite like this because, in the early years, love is passionate and unconscious and clings fiercely, but the assurance that you are held is something that grows stronger through the years. It’s all in the wonder of letting go and trusting to another. It’s the parachute jump without the parachute. It’s even a bit like faith in God, as we understood it in the old days, the sense of letting go completely and trusting that the other person will hold you.
I used to have a poster on the wall of my student bedroom
many years ago. It was of an elephant clinging to a single daisy on the edge of a cliff. ‘Hold me,’ the elephant cried out. ‘I will,’ a voice replied from the clouds. ‘Just let go.’
It was a nice, cosy little poster that didn’t ring true to me at the time since history was full of people who hung over cliffs and let go and then fell into hell. And yet that image remained with me.
‘Live your life with risks,’ my old friend the General would say. ‘Don’t just walk over the cliff. Go over blindfolded and with the confidence that you can fly.’
You will be held.
When I first met the beloved I sang, ‘Hold me close, and never let me go.’ It was a song we hummed together in far-off countries, walking down unknown streets where other couples were leaning on balconies under blue skies. And when I was away from her, in distant cities, I always ended up on a balcony on Sunday morning, looking out at the other apartment blocks around me and thinking to myself that the world was full of people holding each other. I would drink mint tea with lemon juice, and imagine them feeling happy and safe and sleepy, all in their private little apartments around me, and I too would long for my beloved to hold me again.
Sometimes I say it when we are lying in bed. Sometimes when we are standing on the edge of the earth in Donegal where the waves fall onto the sand. Hold me. And I used to think it was risky.
She might reject me
, I thought. One
of these days she might say, ‘No, I won’t hold you any more. I’m fed up holding you like you were some helpless imbecile.’ And then where would I be?
I have said it on warm afternoons in July. And in the kitchen after midnight on Christmas Eve, when everyone had gone to bed. Hold me. It’s like a prayer.
And we have held each other all over the place – on balconies, in trains and somewhere on the north side of Mumbai. I said it to her once on the roof of one of the Twin Towers, and on the back of a lorry as we were driven with other tourists through the Grand Canyon in Arizona. No matter how much I have been overwhelmed by exciting holidays, history, archaeology, or the size of the universe, or the amount of tequila left in the bottle, I could always rely on her. I could always say, ‘Hold me.’
When we were first married, we bought an enormous bed in Boyle that took up the entire bedroom of our small cottage in the hills, and though we could do very little else in that space, at least we were able to lie quietly on Sunday mornings holding each other for the entire length of
Sunday Miscellany
.
I would lie there imagining people all over the world doing the same thing. Holding each other; in cities and remote villages, in apartment blocks, small cottages and under canvas roofs, or under straw roofs, or under no roof at all.
And you don’t actually have to say the words. Sometimes
it’s just a gesture. A woman on a Ryanair flight nudging closer to her husband, a man looking across the Formica table of a cheap restaurant at his partner as he seeks her approval before tucking into a large steak, or a young girl dropping her head onto her boyfriend’s shoulder on the bus to Cavan. They’re all saying the same thing in their own way; they’re all reaching out to hold each other.
Some years ago, there was a homeless couple who died in each other’s arms as they slept in a doorway off Capel Street in Dublin. They were frozen to death in a cardboard box one frosty night. They hugged each other until the state pathologist parted them. Their intimacy was frozen stiff on an ice-covered street. The milkman found them the next day in the doorway, their bodies entwined by a mix of hunger, pain and love. They were old, alcoholic and homeless, and their minds too were probably twisted with psychic wounds and trans-generational traumas that never saw the light of day. But they held. They held each other tenderly as they fell into the silence of the night.
And sometimes I think about young people in their intimate moments after orgasm. I imagine soft, sleepy males on the flat of their backs, like beasts of prey when there is nothing more to achieve, and I imagine their mates beside them in silence as they hold each other.
Their embrace is the sanctuary of the modern world. Just like the monks of ancient days who found the presence of their god in the breaking of bread, so people now find it
in that exquisite aftertaste of love-making, when they hold each other quietly. I suppose that’s what the ancient monks meant about Christ being ‘behind, before, above and in everything we do’.