Martin Sloane (23 page)

It was beginning now to get dark. Martin lifted his face into the lights and the noise, into the smells of the city, and walked slowly along the grass as the traffic sped by on either side. He’d been down here first in his pram when he was an infant, then probably once or twice a week they’d been down here, walking or going to a restaurant. They’d taken high tea in the Gresham Hotel, here on the left. Expensive, his father had said. Martin kept his eyes open only slightly and let the layers of time and memory swim down into the street. His whole life. His whole life had happened here, against these buildings, against these streets, and he was leaving it. Nelson’s Pillar was here, towering over everything, its massive length lit up by lights in the grass. At the top, Nelson himself gazed down on the rest of the city, perhaps on the statue of Sir John Grey, who would have been jealous to learn he rated a pedestal only twenty feet high. Martin stared up through the trees at the Trafalgar hero and walked backwards around the column, taking nuts from the bag and cracking them in his teeth.

He’d already gone past the Savoy Cinema, and across from it, the Carleton, both with people lining up for the early seatings, their light coats on. There was John Keys, too, Tobacconist, where his father bought his cigarettes and the occasional cigars. Mr. Keys himself had given Martin his cigar box. Some of the street seemed to shimmer, unreal, like it was a memory already, shifting, insubstantial.

In-ep-IN-en!
Read about the London coronation!

When he got to Grafton Street, the shopkeepers were noisily drawing down their gratings. Motorcars drove slowly down the thronged street, and Martin was thrilled to see the horses so close, the carriages with their giant wheels clattering by. Would Galway sound like this? He worried there would be nowhere to go to vanish into the sound and the activity. He was worried you’d always be able to hear the wheat growing in Galway. To be that alone!

He threw the empty, oily paper bag into a bin and sat down on a pub-barrel across from Mitchell’s to catch his breath. There, in the window, a girl poured a long tray of sweets into a bag. He couldn’t imagine anyone would throw out that much confectionery. The girl put the bag down and leaned on the empty countertop, looking out the window. She pushed the inside of her arms forward and yawned. The light mounted in the window turned her skin a bright yellow.

He was getting tired now — usually this walk would take him thirty minutes at the most, but he’d left the house over an hour ago. Stopping and taking everything in, storing it, was tiring him out. But he forced himself up and continued along Grafton, noting only momentarily the For Let sign in the window of Sloane & Son. The shelves behind the sign were still full, though his father’s assistant, Old Morris, wasn’t there.

The crush of pedestrians carried him across the street and he stood on the sidewalk at the northwest corner of the green. He entered there, and quickly the trees absorbed the sounds of the world outside the park and a hush floated down. It was sudden, the silence, and sensuous. The delight of it surrounding him. He heard the clicking of a woman’s heels and the plashing of wings hitting the water in the pond. He slowed, letting the scent of lilac and lavender draw him into the middle of the green. Every time he came here, he saw men and women who looked like they lived in the park. They walked in measured circles, like a dance, the woman’s arm on the man’s, his face tilted down to hers. Martin pictured himself and Nuala ten years from now. He’d come back to Dublin to live, and find her through her parents in Clontarf. Then they’d come here, and walk slowly back and forth along the paths, talking quietly to each other.

He went through the trees, where it got darker, and came out on the other side of the copse, and there, at the top of his plinth, sat King George II on his horse, the iron hoof of the steed rearing up with the king in the saddle on top. King George II, a brave king who almost looked good on a horse. This was all Martin knew about this king. It was all he knew about most kings, but it was enough to inspire him. The first stars were coming out just below George’s finger, pointing out across the river as if to direct his troops onward, into the night. Martin walked closer to the monument.
After tonight,
he thought,
everything here will vanish behind me, and everything that happened here will go with it.
Now he earnestly believed in the reality of the body. Curses always had a kind of logic to them. It was no wonder he’d been resistant to the idea of hearts and spleens and stomachs: they held the key to his fate. Why would he want to know about his own death, lying in wait under his own skin?

“Who’s the king of Ireland?” a man behind him said, and then laughed, clapping Martin on the shoulder with a glove-clad hand.

Soon it was very dark. The world seemed to be concentrated here for him. The statue was a representation of a real person, but it was much larger than that person. However, so far away, on top of its huge pedestal, the king looked as though he could fit into the palm of Martin’s hand.

He went back out onto the street. Instead of waiting for the light to change, he walked up to a policeman and pretended he was lost. Fifteen minutes later, he was dropped at his door and left with his parents, a warning not to let him out after dark offered to them.

His mother’s face was white, but he would not answer her questions, and when his father told him how worried they’d been, he simply said he was sorry and went up to bed. The house was empty of guests and their practical gifts with their sad ribbons lay unopened on the settee. He closed the door to his bedroom and changed into his pyjamas. He could hear Theresa crying in the darkness of her bedroom.

Across the street, the lights were off in the Beatons’, but the whole of the city was lit up beyond Iona Road. He felt as though he had strung those lights himself, and that each one marked a place for him. One light for every day of nine and a half years. He climbed into his bed and pulled the covers up, falling asleep almost instantly, and down in St. Stephen’s Green, a man strapped a bundle of gelignite to the belly of King George’s horse and blew the statue to bits. It was in the papers the next morning. They read about it driving west.

Galway

IX.

SLEEP, 1972. 38" X 25" X 20" GLASS CASE CONSTRUCTION. GLASS AND STEEL WITH FABRIC AND FOUND OBJECTS. ART GALLERY OF SUNY BUFFALO. A DROWNED MERMAID IS OBSCURED BY DARK WATER.

WHO GETS A CHANCE TO BERATE THEIR GHOSTS? ONLY
in dreams, and then we’re apt to vanish down rabbit holes, or our mouths don’t work. I’d dreamt of Martin on almost a daily basis for the first few years, but never directly. I’d be dreaming of something else and he’d walk past in the background, pause to look down at something, and then pick it up and move on. I’d be behind a bus window, or buying a pack of gum, or I’d be arguing with someone from school – and he’d be gone. Or else, I’d be free to move and lose him in a crowd, or catch up with him and it’d turn out to be someone else. I was haunted, but my ghost was unwilling to show its face. Then many years passed and I stopped dreaming of him and I concluded he was out of my consciousness. I was free to meet Daniel, and I did. And yet, I remained reluctant to look at my feelings, even with the perspective of distance. I never so much as mentioned my life before Toronto to Daniel. One night, though, in his apartment, in his bed, I dreamt of Martin again. It was a simple dream. It began and there he was, right in front of me, his face still, his eyes clear, those soft black eyes. He was about to speak. I waited. I waited for what seemed many minutes. And then his lips parted and his eyes closed and I woke up.

“They must have passed all this then,” said Molly, bringing me out of my thoughts. “On their way west.” We were between Dublin and Galway now. The N6, an old pilgrims’ road updated for the use of new centuries, cut through the middle of the country in a drunkard’s line.

“I’m sure they did,” I said.

“And what happened to them when they got there?”

I watched the farms sweeping past. “I’ll tell you more later,” I said.

I had taken the wheel first, but stopped about five miles outside Dublin, unable to resolve my confusion between the gearshift and the door handle. Molly took over, slipping a pair of glasses out of her jacket. Her arm bounced off the door just as mine had. “Don't get it into your head that you need the window open,” I'd said, “or we'll have an accident.” Soon she got used to it, an experienced adjuster, one of evolution’s darlings.

What passed for a late-September heatwave had brought the temperature up into the low twenties – a moist country air made it seem stickier than that. We kept the windows up and let the car’s air conditioning keep things comfortable, but outside it seemed the world was slicked with dewy heat. Signs for unseen villages to the north and south drifted past—Kilcock, Eston, Mayford, Kinnegad—and all around was deep green; it would flash by when the high scrub at roadside suddenly dipped and revealed it, rolling off in all directions like an endless canvas. Molly turned the radio on and we listened to a talk show out of Dublin. Someone said, “He’d spoken nary a word in twenty-five years, but when she came into the room, he stretched out his hand to her and said her name. Can you imagine?”

I'd always loved the soothing rhythms of car trips, the whoosh of traffic passing you in the opposite direction, the view of the sky through the window. When I was a little girl, accompanying my mother on her short drives to neighbouring towns, I'd close my eyes and lean my head against the passenger door. I'd focus on the thrum of the road under us, and feeling the forward motion of the truck, I'd try to convince my body we were driving in the other direction and my body was facing backwards. Threading those sensations against themselves was a strange, private game, but I liked to challenge my reality as a child. I wanted to see if it was anything other than it seemed (for I suspected it was, and that most of my feelings as a child were a product of it). There was the one where I lay in bed and told myself my thoughts were actually being spoken by a being who could control my mind.
You only think you're thinking these thoughts,
I'd say in my head,
but this is the vampire talking, these are my words, not yours.
Eventually, I'd sit bolt upright in the bed and stare out into the darkness, certain the bleak, pitch form of the beast was right in front of me. Funny how we scare ourselves as children with ghoulish visions, I thought — the pulse of this Irish highway tying me to that cold little road that connected Ovid to Cortland — funny, when what usually undoes us as adults is something that's been alongside us the whole time, always familiar and often beloved. We lose the luxury of monsters.

Are you easy to train? Him sitting behind the wheel, looking out over the little stretch of empty highway.

I think you will find me a most eager pupil. Glancing over, waggling his eyebrows, one hand clenched around the gearshift.

Well, ease up a little on your grip. Loosen your hands. You’re not wrestling it, I said. I showed him how the shift felt when it was in neutral. That little extra give between gears.

How many times do you think we’ll wreck your car this year?

Once. The car revved and moaned as he finessed the changes. Full gas in neutral, clutch and brake at the same time. Jerk and shudder. He was most comfortable in third gear, struggling up to it, and then coasting along at twenty miles an hour.

I got it now, he said, the air blowing through the car. He drove with a smile frozen on his face, part delight, part vigilance. Throwing me looks of childish triumph and then swerving his attention back to the road.

We drove a while in silence. He leaned down and switched on the radio. Unseasonal for the Midwest, it said, and he snapped it off.

See how nice it’s going to be down here?

It’ll be nice at home too.

I don’t understand why you don’t move the rest of your stuff down here. Or at least more of it.

He sighed. Why, when we talk about this, do you get to a point where it sounds like you understand why I need things to be this way for now, and then a week later, it’s like you’re back at square one?

(No, this is from later, this is Indiana —)

Because your spell fades, that’s why, I said. It stops making sense. If you love me –

Stop that.

I turned my face to the window. Lost in my own thoughts, continuing the conversation by myself.

(That’s right, I taught him to drive outside Rhinebeck or Tivoli —)

How’s this? he said.

You’re doing fantastic. The signs for the campus came into view. Annandale, three miles.

Can you bring us home?

He nodded, concentrating.

Molly had settled into the rhythm of driving, clutching down when we came up behind the milk trucks or the cattle wagons, then passing and speeding up again. I had by now accepted that the future was empty — I knew nothing; I had surrendered. Not being one who ever willingly gave up control, it was not easy to do. But Molly drove. She drove, and I sat and waited to see what would happen next. News of more towns appeared on green signs every kilometre or so – other lives, other routines. They went on beyond the verges.

“Are you okay?” she asked me.

“Just floating along,” I said.

“Are you anxious?”

“No.”

“It’s not a long drive,” she said.

“I’m fine.”

She drove a while more in silence. Then she said, “Do you remember your life before everything changed?”

“Which time?”

“Before Martin.”

“I guess I do. I’m not blessed with a bad memory.”

“Me neither,” she said. She drove without speaking for a few moments, and then took a sharp breath. “Since you have a good memory,” she said, “you can tell me: what was I like then?” She asked me this straight out. “When we first knew each other?”

“What were you
like
?” She kept her eyes on the road. “God, Molly …”