This visit – my first in over five years – is not, I am telling myself, the reason for my stress, the explanation for my brain-bending craving for nicotine or for the jittery twitch of my eyelid as I sit waiting. It has nothing to do with it, nothing at all. I’m just a little edgy today. That’s all. I will go to Brooklyn, I will visit with the old man, I will make nice, I will go to the party, I will give him the birthday gift my wife has purchased and wrapped, I will chat to my nieces and nephews, I will stick it out for the requisite number of days – and then I will get the hell out.
I crack open the car door and scream, ‘Where are you? I’m going to miss my lecture,’ into the damp air, then spy a crumpled book of matches in the footwell of the car. I disappear down for it, like a pearl-diver, resurfacing triumphant with it in my hand.
At this moment, my wife yanks open the door and commences strapping the baby into his car seat.
I exhale as I strike a match. If we leave now, we should make it.
Marithe scrambles into her place; the dog squeezes in, then over the seat and into the trunk; the passenger door opens and my wife slides into the car. She is, I notice, wearing a pair of man’s trousers, cinched round the waist with what looks suspiciously like one of my silk neckties. Over the top of this is a coat that I know for a fact once cost more than my monthly salary – a great ugly thing of leather and tweed, straps and loops – and on her head is a rabbit-fur hat with elaborate earflaps. Another gift from Donal? I want to enquire, but don’t because Marithe is in the car.
‘Phew,’ my wife says. ‘It’s filthy out there.’
Into the back seat, she tosses a wicker basket, a burlap sack, something that looks like a brass candelabra and, finally, an ancient, tarnished egg-whisk.
I say nothing.
I slide the car into first gear and let off the brake, with a perverse feeling of accomplishment, as if getting my family to leave ten minutes late is a major achievement, and I draw the first smoke of the day down into my lungs, where it curls up like a cat.
My wife reaches out, plucks the cigarette from my lips and stubs it out.
‘Hey!’ I protest.
‘Not with the children in the car,’ she says, tipping her head towards the back seat.
I am about to pick up the argument and run with it – I have a whole defence that questions the relative dangers to minors of firearms and cigarettes – but my wife turns her face towards mine, fixes me with her jade stare and gives me a smile of such tenderness and intimacy that the words of my prepared speech drain away, like water down a plughole.
She puts her hand on my leg, just within the bounds of decency, and whispers, ‘I’ll miss you.’
As a linguist, it’s a revelation to me the number of ways two adults can find to discuss sex without small children having the faintest idea what is being said. It is a testament to, a celebration of, semantic adaptability. My wife smiling like this and saying, I’ll miss you, translates in essence to: I’m not going to be getting any while you’re away but as soon as you’re back I’m going to lead you into the bedroom and remove all your clothes and get down to it. Me clearing my throat and replying, ‘I’ll miss you too,’ says, yep, I’ll be looking forward to that moment all week.
‘Are you feeling OK about the trip?’
‘To Brooklyn?’ I say, in an attempt to sound casual, but the words come out slightly strangled.
‘To your dad,’ she clarifies.
‘Oh,’ I say, circling my hand in the air. ‘Yeah. It’ll be fine. He’s … er, it’ll be fine. It’s not for long, is it?’
‘Well,’ she begins, ‘I think that he—’
Marithe might be picking up on something because suddenly she shouts, a little louder than necessary, ‘Gate! Gate, Maman!’
I stop the car. My wife snaps off her seatbelt, shoves open her door, steps out and slams the door, exiting the small rhombus of the rain-glazed passenger window. A moment later, she reappears in the panorama of the windscreen: she is walking away from the car. This triggers some pre-verbal synapse in the baby: his neurology tells him that the sight of his mother’s retreating back is bad news, that she may never return, that he will be left here to perish, that the company of his somewhat scatty and only occasionally present father is not sufficient to ensure his survival (he has a point). He lets out a howl of despair, a signal to the mothership: abort mission, request immediate return.
‘Calvin,’ I say, using the time to retrieve my cigarette from the back of the dashboard, ‘have a little faith.’
My wife is unlatching a gate and swinging it open. I ease up on the clutch, down on the gas, and the car slides through the gate, my wife shutting it after us.
There are, I should explain, twelve gates between the house and the road. Twelve. That’s one whole dozen times she’ll have to get out of the car, open and shut the damn things, then get back in again. The road is a half a mile away, as the crow flies, but to get there takes a small age. And if you’re doing it alone, the whole thing is a laborious toil, usually in the rain. There are times when I need something from the village – a pint of milk, toothpaste, the normal run of household requirements – and rise from my chair, only to realise that I’ll have to open no fewer than twenty-four gates, in a round trip, and I sink back down, thinking, hell, who needs to clean their teeth?
The word ‘remote’ doesn’t even come close to describing the house. It’s in one of the least populated valleys of Ireland, at an altitude even the sheep eschew, let alone the people. And my wife chooses to live in the highest, most distant corner of this place, reached only by a track that passes through numerous livestock fences. Hence the gates. To get here, you have to really want to get here.
The car door is wrenched open and my wife slides back into the passenger seat. Eleven more to go. The baby bursts into tears of relief. Marithe yells, ‘One! One gate! One, Daddy, that’s one!’ She is alone in her love of the Gates. The dashboard immediately starts up a hysterical bleeping, signalling that my wife needs to fasten her seatbelt. I should warn you that she won’t. The bleeping and flashing will continue until we get to the road. It’s a bone of contention in our marriage: I think the hassle of fastening and unfastening the seatbelt is outweighed by the cessation of that infernal noise; she disagrees.
‘So, your dad,’ my wife continues. She has, among her many other talents, an amazing ability to remember and pick up half-finished conversations. ‘I really think—’
‘Can you not just put the seatbelt on?’ I snap. I can’t help it. I have a low threshold for repetitive electronic noises.
She turns her head with infinite, luxurious slowness to look at me. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she says.
‘The seatbelt. Can’t you just this once—’
I am silenced by another gate, which looms out of the mist. She gets out, she walks towards the gate, the baby cries, Marithe yells out a number, et cetera, et cetera. By the penultimate gate, there is a dull pressure in my temples that threatens to blossom into persistent dents of pain.
As my wife returns to the car, the radio fizzes, subsides, crackles into life. We keep it permanently switched on because reception is mostly a notion in these parts and any snatch of music or dialogue is greeted with cheers.
‘Oh, Brendan! Brendan!’ an actress in a studio somewhere earnestly emotes. ‘Be careful!’ The connection dissolves in a crackle of static.
‘Oh, Brendan, Brendan!’ Marithe shrieks, in delight, drumming her feet into the back of my seat. The baby, quick to catch the general mood, gives a crowing inhale, gripping the edges of his chair, and the sun chooses that moment to make an unexpected appearance. Ireland looks green and pleasant and blessed as we skim along the track, splashing through puddles, towards the final gate.
My wife and Marithe are debating what Brendan may have needed to be careful of, the baby is repeating an n sound and I am thinking it’s early for him to be using his palate in such a way as I idly turn the dial to see what else we can find.
I pull up at the last and final gate. A Glaswegian accent filters through the white noise, filling the car, speaking in the self-consciously serious tones of the newsreader. There is some geographical blip that means we can, on occasion, pick up the Scottish news. Something about an upcoming local election, a politician caught speeding, a school without textbooks. I twirl the dial through waves of nothingness, searching for speech, panning for a human voice.
My wife gets out of the car; she walks towards the gate. I watch the breeze snatch and toy with hanks of her hair, the upright, ballet-dancer’s gait of her, her hand in its half-mitten as she grips the gate lock.
The radio aerial strains and picks up a female voice: calm but hesitant. It’s something about gender and the workplace, one of those issue-led magazine programmes you get in the middle of the morning on the BBC. A West Country octogenarian is speaking about being one of the first women employed as an engineer, and I’m about to turn the dial further, as it’s the kind of thing my wife will be avid to hear and I am really in the mood for some decent music. Then a different voice comes out of the little perforated speakers near my knee: the dipping, vowel-lengthened accent of the educated English.
‘And I thought to myself, my God,’ the woman on the radio says, into my car, into the ears of my children, ‘this must be the glass ceiling I’ve heard so much about. Should it really be so hard to crack it with my cranium?’
These words produce within me a deep chime of recognition. Without warning, my mind is engaged with a series of flashcards: a cobbled pavement indistinct with fog, a bicycle chained to a railing, trees dense with the scent of pine, a giving pelt of fallen needles underfoot, a telephone receiver pressed to the soft cartilage of an ear.
I know that woman, I want to exclaim, I knew her. I almost turn and say this to the kids in the back: I knew that person, once.
I am remembering the black cape thing she used to wear and her penchant for unwalkable shoes, weird, articulated jewellery, outdoor sex, when the voice fades out and the presenter comes on air to tell us that was Nicola Janks, speaking in the mid-1980s.
I slap my palm on the wheel. Nicola Janks, of all people. Never have I otherwise come across that surname. She remains the only Janks I ever knew. She had, I seem to recall, some crazy middle name, something Grecian or Roman that bespoke parents with mythological proclivities. What was it now? I am recalling, ruefully, that it’s no real surprise that things from that time might seem a little hazy, given the amount of—
And then I am thinking nothing.
The presenter is intoning, in the straitened, delicate way that can mean only one thing, that Nicola Janks died not long after the interview was recorded.
My brain performs a series of jolts, like an engine about to stall. I look instinctively for my wife. She has swung the gate open and is waiting for me to drive through.
There is the sensation that a window somewhere has blown open or a single domino has fallen against another, causing a cascade. A tide has rushed forward, then pulled back out, and whatever was beneath it is altered for ever.
I gaze back at my wife. She is holding the gate. She leans her weight against it so that it doesn’t blow back against the car. She is holding it, trusting that I will drive the car through, the car that contains her children, her offspring, her beloveds. Her hair fills with the Irish wind, like a sail. She is searching the windscreen now for my face, wondering why I am not moving forward, but from where she is standing, the glass is opaque with the reflections of clouds. From where she is standing, I might not even be here at all.
The train pulls over the border, in an easterly direction, in and out of rain showers. I sit with the newspaper my wife bought me rolled in my hand like a baton, as if I am on the brink of guiding an invisible orchestra through a symphony.
It’s been ten years since I did the reverse journey, on a pilgrimage of sorts. I’d never been to Ireland then: it had simply never occurred to me to come. I am not one of those Irish-Americans coshed by a sense of Eiresatz nostalgia, filled with backwards-looking whimsy about a country that our great-grandparents were forced out of in order to survive. Within my family I was alone in this: my sisters all wore Claddagh rings, went to St Patrick’s Day parades and gave their children names with tricky clusters of ds and bs.
I was working at Berkeley, somewhat uncomfortably, as part of the cognitive sciences department. My marriage had just ground to a halt: my wife had been having an affair with a colleague for years, it had transpired. This revelation had pushed me into a minor dalliance, which had in turn prompted my wife to sue for divorce. I was living in the apartment of a friend who was in Japan on a sabbatical; the cuckolding colleague had moved into the house from which I had so recently been ejected. My soon-to-be ex-wife had morphed into a vengeful harpy who had decided I should pay her astronomic amounts of alimony in return for minimal contact with my kids. Week after week, she refused to honour the custody arrangement our lawyers had thrashed out. I was pouring my entire salary into fighting this; I was having ill advised affairs with two different women and preventing their discovery of each other was causing me undue complications and evasions.
In the middle of this brew, my grandmother died and, according to the surprising instructions in her will, was cremated. The usual familial disagreements ensued as to what we should do with her ashes. My aunt favoured an urn, in particular an antique Chinese ginger jar she’d seen on sale; my father wanted to go ahead with a burial. An uncle put out the suggestion of a family plot; another was keen to go the way of some kind of woodland, tree-planting deal. It was a cousin who said, shouldn’t we put her with Grandpa?
We all looked at each other. It was the end of the wake: the priest had left, the guests were dwindling, the room was filled with crumpled napkins, crumbled cake and wreaths of cigarette smoke. My dad and his siblings lowered their eyes.
The truth came out, as truths are meant to do at funerals: no one quite knew where Grandpa’s remains were. The story was that, years ago, he and Grandma had taken what everyone agreed was their first vacation, to Ireland. Grandpa had retired from the business and they had never seen the country of their grandparents, all their friends had been, they had a little bit put by, and so on and so forth. Fill in for yourselves the usual reasons why people go on vacation.
They flew to Dublin. They saw the Ring of Kerry, then looked around Cork, the Dingle Peninsula. They saw the famous dolphin. For some reason – no one knew why – they ended up in Donegal, the forehead of the dog, that slice of country squeezed in next to the British annex. Did one of their ancestors come from Donegal, I wanted to know, or perhaps the Protestant North? This latter suggestion was shouted down. They, and we, were 100 per cent Catholic Irish, my uncle insisted. To suggest otherwise was a dire insult.
Whatever their ancestry, my grandparents were staying, for a reason that will never be known, at a B-and-B in Buncrana. My grandmother was filing her nails at what she would later always refer to as an ‘armoire’ – my father was very clear on that point – when my grandfather turned from the window and said, ‘I have the strangest feeling in my legs.’
She didn’t look up. She would regret this. Daniel, she would say to me later, always look up, if someone says that to you, always. I can confidently report that no one ever has. In the event, she did not look up. She kept on with the nail filing and said, ‘So sit down.’
He didn’t sit down. He fell down, right across the carpet, knocking over the nightstand and an ornamental bowl that my grandmother had to pay for before checking out. A brain haemorrhage. Dead in an instant. Aged sixty-six.
I have the strangest feeling in my legs. How’s that for your last words?
Long story short: my grandmother was of the generation that didn’t make a fuss. Didn’t create waves. They just swallowed whatever bitter pill life dealt them and got on with it. It would never have occurred to her to have her husband’s body flown back to the States, to be honoured by his numerous offspring. No, she didn
’t want to put anyone to any trouble so she had him cremated the very next day, with the local priest in attendance. She did the deed, she checked out and she came home. She had to pay an excess baggage fee to bring home his suitcase, a detail that always sent my father overboard with rage (he never did cope well with financial outlay of any sort). But what had happened to the ashes, nobody quite knew.
The plight of my long-deceased grandfather touched a raw nerve in me. I left the wake in a frenzy of disgust: it was somehow very typical of my family to go to the trouble of lugging home the clothes of a dead man but overlook his actual ashes. To have never asked my grandmother for the specific location of his final immolation. How could his remains have been forgotten, consigned to some lonely Purgatory in a country where none of us had ever lived, alone, abandoned? No doubt I was imagining my own ashes being left to moulder in some faraway place, my children never collecting them because they were permitted to see me only once a week, between the hours of three and five p.m., at a place of their mother’s choosing. Because whenever this paltry, unjust amount of time came around, their mother left a message with their father’s secretary to say the children were ill/on a school trip/had a test/couldn’t make it that day. Because the legal system is irrevocably tilted towards the female parent, no matter how unfaithful or vindictive she is. Because, however hard the father tries—
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