*
He can’t remember the address. Not the name of the road, not even the number of the door – it just seems to have fallen out of his head.
He can remember everything else though, that the road is long and formed into a loop and that the house is on the far end of the loop. And that the turn for the road is coming up soon. He begins to feel queasy; in his gut, the Aer Lingus breakfast shifts. And he wonders again, as he wondered while eating it, what had possessed him to order it, because it certainly hadn’t been hunger. Nostalgia then? For what? Sunday mornings, bunched up together in the little kitchen, steam running down the walls? Or Saturday nights when Ma and Da would come rolling home from the pub. Ma slapping rashers onto the pan. Da voicing the opinions he hadn’t had the nerve to express in the pub, hammering them out on the formica table. Ma agreeing with each revision, laughing at just the right moment. The waft crawling upstairs into Frank’s half-sleep: black pudding, burnt rashers. Shite talk.
He presses his fingertips into his forehead, rotating the loose flesh against the bone of his skull. The skin on his face feels greasy and thick for the want of a shave, and even though his nose is stuffed from the flight he can tell he doesn’t smell the sweetest. He should really go to the house first, clean himself up a bit. A quick shave, a change of shirt. But he isn’t ready for the family, the neighbours – all that.
‘What time is it there?’ Frank asks the driver, whose finger even manages to look sardonic when it points to the clock on the dashboard. Frank looks down at his own watch, sees that it agrees.
Three minutes to eleven. All he has to do is say, ‘if you wouldn’t mind taking the next right – just up along here.’
He holds the sentence in his head for a moment. But the car skims past the turn and the moment has gone.
*
The taximan speaks, startling Frank with the sudden rasp of his voice
‘Where to?’
‘Oh. Let’s see, you know the church just up the road there? If you could just – .’
‘Right.’
‘Actually, maybe if you could, you know, pull in around the corner down the road a bit and – .’
‘Right.’
‘Or?’
He sees the eyebrows go up in the rear-view mirror.
‘No, that’ll be fine. Down that road there, near the school, grand, that’s grand.’
The car takes the broad corner, passing the slate-grey church. Frank looks down at his feet.
The shock of the taxi fare – he feels like saying, Christ you could travel from one end of India to the other for that. He hands over a note and says nothing. The taximan picks up a pouch and begins pecking at coins. He opens it wider and peers down into it. ‘You home for good or a holiday?’ he mutters as if he’s talking to some little creature in the bottom of it.
‘A fortnight,’ Frank says, holding out his hand for the change.
‘Listen – I do the airport run, so when you’re headin’ back – give us a shout – right? I’m only down the road. And I’ll do you a good deal,’ he pokes a business card at Frank, ‘off the meter like.’
‘Oh thanks,’ Frank says, ‘that’s good of you.’
The taximan shrugs – ‘Yeah, well, business is crap, is all.’
Frank slips the card into his pocket.
He pushes the haversack back into the seat, opens the front zip and edges his hand in. The haversack is bloated; the space is tight. He can feel the taximan watch as he rummages around. He pulls out a black tie, bit by bit, holding it up for a moment like a dead eel between his fingers. Through the mirror their eyes meet. The taximan nods. Frank nods back
On the kerbside he goes to work on his tie, slipping it under his collar, sliding the ends into place, planning the next little tie-making step in his head. He considers his entourage; one large suitcase bandaged in plastic – courtesy of Mumbai airport security – and one bulky brown haversack plonked down beside it. His most recent mistakes scurry like mice through his head. Why hadn’t he replied to Miriam’s email, told her he had decided to come? Okay, if he couldn’t face the house, but why hadn’t he had a shave in the airport? Or, at the very least, why hadn’t he thought to get out at one of the pubs down the road – had a wash, a quick drink to steady the nerves, maybe even asked the barman to hold onto the luggage for a while? Why? Why? Why?
Frank stops. From the school across the road comes the flat chant of children’s voices. Choir practice. A phrase is repeated three, then four times. In between a woman’s voice calls out – ‘Again. And again. Now and gooood.’ He imagines her lifting her hands, holding the blend of voices and notes on her palms for one perfect second before letting them slip through her fingers. Frank thinks of his first job in India when, as a young teacher, he was railroaded into taking choir practice even though he hadn’t a note in his head. His hands shaking as he tried to remember the hurried instructions the headmaster had given him. Dozens of keen brown eyes following his every move. Until suddenly he’d just got the hang of it. The pleasure then, in the power of his least little gesture. The music passing back and forwards between himself and the children. Waves of sound on a small ocean. Every child bursting to please. One boy, an awkward child, had frightened him with the intensity of his emotion. His name gone now, but the face still there. The boy had his arm in a sling – he was a child who always had something bruised or broken.
Frank stands listening to the end of the song. His mind settles. He completes the knot in his tie, patting it into place.
*
A few minutes later, he is struggling through the doors of the church; suitcase before him, big brown haversack like a chimpanzee up on his back. Frank keeps the boy in the choir in his head – the gapped front teeth, the flapaway ears, the sling on his broken arm stiff with dirt. He pushes the luggage into a back corner under the balcony floor and then steps into a nearby pew. Dilip – that was the name of the child. One day he just stopped coming to school – vanished. Nobody seemed to know where or why.
The interior of the church settles around him. There’s a chill, musty odour on the air: old incense and decades of sweat. He glances up – the coffin catches his eye. Too small. It seems way too small for Da. Da had been a big bloke, tall with plenty of meat to go with it. Unless he had shrunk?
Frank sits down and begins sidling along the empty pew, moving in fits and starts, as if making room for people behind him. He takes Miriam’s email from his pocket and reads it again.
Frankie, I’m sorry to tell you Da passed away yesterday – a sudden death. He was gone before he hit the ground so at least there was no suffering. I hope this message gets to you Frankie. I got the address through the embassy who got it from the old school where you used to work and they’ve agreed to send it to try to locate you. It’s the only way I have of contacting you. Anyhow I’ll hope for the best. Frankie, Ma is not well at all and it would mean a lot to her if you were here. She’s an old woman now and what happened, well it was a long time ago Frankie. Anyway, I’ll leave it there. It’s been such a time, I really hope you can make it. But try to let me know, Miriam.
Frank folds the email back into his pocket and moves up another space. Maybe all men feel this way in the end, he decides, that the coffin built for their father is built for a lesser man.
Beneath his line of vision he can make out the front-row mourners; banked together, solid and dark. Yet he can’t bring himself to look directly at them, knowing full well that if he does he won’t be able to stop himself from guessing who owns which head on whose shoulders, these people he would have grown up with, these, now, strangers.
He can’t find anywhere to put his hands. He tries clasping them in front, then shoving them into the fold of his arms, then down into his jacket pockets. Finally, he grips them onto the bar of the pew in front.
The priest’s voice drifts into the echo. ‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels …’ And suddenly he thinks he sees Susan. It comes into his head that she’s over
there, on the far side of the church and that if he were to turn and look he would find her: hair tied back in a long black ponytail, dark-green coat on her straight Irish dancer’s back. He feels a bit shook – disabled, almost. As if his legs don’t belong to him. His stomach is bouncing. The breakfast churns. Air. He needs air.
*
Outside in the grey light he loses his bearings – morning or evening? But if it were evening it would have to be dark by now.
In the middle of the churchyard, the hearse is waiting, big square jaw open at the back, ready to suck the coffin in. A long Mercedes car for mourners is parked a little way behind it. Two funeral attendants stand nearby, heads close together, under-breath laughter and a night-before story. They see him and break apart; soft sprung steps taking them off in opposite directions. They remind him of FBI agents: the height, the long black coats, the haircuts, the inscrutable faces. And the broad shoulders of course: coffin ledges. The Mercedes has three rows of seats and Frank wonders why they should need so many. It comes to him then, the whole shape of the family will have changed by now: a husband, a wife maybe; sons, daughter, nieces, nephews; grandchildren.
It begins to rain, sharp little pins on the skin: not heavy but spiteful, he’d forgotten Irish rain could be like that. One of the attendants opens the boot of the car and begins easing out large black umbrellas. The bell tolls; a slow funeral toll. Frank presses the collar of his jacket into his neck and moves around to the side of the church, staying close to the churchyard’s boundary wall. He notices long marks scrolled on the concrete; piss stains or rain stains, he can’t decide which.
In a few minutes’ time Da will be carried out, and he wonders whose shoulders will bear him; Johnny, the uncles, the cousins? Maybe they’ll leave it up to the funeral attendants. Not that it really matters, who takes him out, who sinks him into the clay. In a short time he’ll be gone anyway. Worm meat, as Advi once said.
Out of sight now, Frank steps into the alcove of the porch on this side of the church. A favourite spot when he was a kid; the door always locked – a place to see without being seen, to smoke and slag anyone who passed through the gate. He misses the smokes now, the company of them, the distraction.
He needs to think. But his mind is already blocked up with too many thoughts: his first monsoon in Bombay; Advi’s father’s funeral; the girl in the church with the dark-green coat; Da’s coffin; the worms wiggling in the ground in a knot of greedy anticipation; the green coat again.
He comes back to his first monsoon:
Up on the flat roof with Advi and Gopal. Stoned, of course, which had lit up the details and made everything seem oh so profound. Advi’s father not long dead. Frank not that long in India. The sky one minute a hearth of orange and red, the next splitting like skin on an overripe fruit. In a matter of moments, people on the streets below were wading through water; schoolbags and briefcases over their heads. It was high tide, and across the rooftops they could see the Gateway of India bashed by sea waves. It had looked like a ship out at sea. Youngfellas making a run at the waves, spindly legs and arms frantically waggling. After a while, all visibility was lost to a thick dirty curtain of rain. They squeezed under the shelter, a sort of makeshift construction on the east side of the roof, Frank rolling another joint, the other two telling funeral stories. At first he hadn’t been sure if they were having him on – Advi with his vultures, Gopal with his burning widows – although by then, even just a few short weeks into his first year, nothing would have surprised him about India. Advi told them that when his father died he was laid out on a slab at the top of a tower, under an open sky. Vultures looping overhead. The Tower of Silence, this place was called. The name alone had chimed in Frank’s head. ‘You mean you don’t put him in a coffin?’
‘Oh no, no. Just lay him out naked.’
‘Not a shroud or a blanket or something?’
‘Nope. Total birthday suit, man. Go out as you’ve come in.’
‘And the vultures actually, you know, actually?’
‘Eat him?’ Advi said, ‘they pick the bones clean – yum, they love it. It’s the Parsi way.’
The idea had horrified Frank and he said so.
‘Oh come now really – what difference does it make?’ Advi asked, ‘coffin or not? Above the horizon or below? Worm meat or vulture feed? We’re all fucked by then anyhow.’
It was the funniest thing they’d ever heard – or at least the dope had made it seem so. The three of them fell on the ground laughing. Advi and Gopal had rolled out from under the shelter. Frank had very nearly pissed himself, could hardly move, or even see. Except for the odd glimpse through the beating rain – of a coffee-coloured face, a crescent of gleaming teeth, clothes plastered on two slender bodies, a hand reaching out to touch a blue-black head of glistening hair. And, of course, the first brief crossing of his mind that there may have been something more than friendship between his two new Indian friends.
*
Frank sees a man walking towards him, coming around from the front of the church, huddled into himself, smoking a cigarette. He can feel the man watching him. The step slows, and now he’s standing right in front of him, uttering a cautious ‘Frank?’
A small bloke, legs like two sticks in denim; could be any age from forty to sixty.
‘Frankie, is that you? Jaysus it is.’ The man smiles, showing a bar of brown teeth. ‘Ah it’s great to see you it is, great you could come man, you look bleedin’ great you do, like a – I don’t know – banker or a politician or some big bleedin’ shot inanyway. How’ve you been? Where’ve you been even? Like everyone thought you were – you know – dead.’
The man’s handshake is weak, his voice has a womanish whine to it. Frank tries to find a place for him in his memory. A neighbour? A friend of Johnny’s? A relative then? Whoever he is, he stinks of last night’s beer.
‘Sorry, to hear about the Da, Frankie, and that. I know now, we had our differences but, like, he wasn’t the worst.’
‘Thanks,’ Frank says.
‘I wouldn’t mind but I only seen him the other day. Ah yeah. We passed each other on the road like. I didn’t speak to him or nothin’ but he looked great, he did Frankie.’
Over the man’s shoulder Frank sees the churchyard filling: legs, elbows, a bloom of black umbrellas. There’s a smell of cigarettes, little hums of reverent chatter. He is struck by how big everything is: the cars, the people – especially the people.
The man squints up at the rain then edges in under the lip of the roof. He starts talking again. ‘Here, Miriam was only sayin’ about you last night at the removal and that the way she didn’t know what to do about finding you and all and she’d sent a whatyoucallit email and was –.
‘I’ve only just arrived, haven’t had a chance yet to – how is she anyway?’
‘Well, like I wasn’t actually talkin’ to her meself, I sort of more overheard her like. She was a bit upset about poor old Susan and that. Brings it all back doesn’t it – a funeral?’
‘Yes, yes, it does.’
‘Ah, she was a lovely girl Susan. A bit wild, but sure so fuckin’ wha’? Here, where is it you are now inanyway – Australia or somewhere is it?’
‘India.’
‘India! Jaysus, what the fuck are you doin’ there? India! Ah, don’t tell me Frank – smoker’s paradise, eh? I mighta bleedin’ known. Ghanji on the Ganges and all that – wha’?’
‘Ah, I gave that up a long time ago. I live there now.’
‘Oh. And what do you do there, like, how do you spend your time?’
‘I work.’
‘Oh right, yeah.’
‘I’m in education.’
‘Ah, you always had it up there Frankie,’ he tips the side of his head, ‘so what are you, like a teacher and that?’
‘I used to be a teacher. It’s more administration now. For a charity.’
‘What like, you work for nothin’?’
‘No. It’s, it’s difficult to explain.’
/>
‘Oh,’ the man looks away, disappointed or embarrassed, Frank can’t tell which.
He can’t find the hearse – the crowd, the brollies, have blotted it out. He’s beginning to think he’s missed Da’s exit when the murmuring voices suddenly stop, and, although he can’t see the church door from here, he can tell the coffin is coming out. The crowd parts; a space is made around the hearse, and he sees the high-gloss finish of coffin wood. There’s a funeral attendant at each side; shoulders of experience keeping everything steady. The rest of the pallbearers are of uneven height. Something familiar about one man: the shape of the profile, the dip of the head. The coffin is hoisted then lowered towards the opened back of the hearse. It still looks too small.
The funeral attendants stand aside, and he can see now the man who had looked familiar is Johnny. He watches his brother pass through the crowd to the far side of the churchyard joining two men by the railings. He looks old – older than he should do anyhow. Hands in the trouser pockets of a suit that is way too big for him. He doesn’t seem to notice the rain. He reminds Frank of a chicken, the way he stands, half talking to his mates, half looking around with a hungry, twitchy eye.
‘For how long were you there inanyway, Frankie?’ the man says then.
‘In India? About twelve years.’
‘I thought you went, you know, after Susan?’
‘Well, yeah, I went to London first, then India.’
‘And you never went back to the old house after – you don’t mind me askin’?’
‘No, and no I didn’t.’
‘Ah they done it up lovely after, Frankie. Brand new. Not a mark on it. Your Ma does keep it like a little palace, she does. Ah look – there’s Miriam now. Looks great, doesn’t she Frankie?’
New Irish Short Stories Page 9