The Letter
Colin Corrigan
James was sitting in front of his computer typing his suicide letter when his mother knocked on his bedroom door and, without waiting for an answer, pushed her way in with a tray loaded with lamb cutlets, mashed potato, mushy peas and a pint glass of milk. He stayed facing the monitor, and she left the tray on his bed.
‘You sure you don’t want to come down and join us?’
‘Absolutely.’
She looked up in surprise. ‘You will?’
‘No. I mean I’m absolutely sure.’
She nodded, but didn’t turn to leave. She kept standing there watching him. ‘How was work today?’
‘Fine, yeah. The same.’
‘It’s good, that you’re keeping busy.’
James smirked. He had spent most of the day sitting in the same seat in the same corner of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, staring into the space between him and a canvas plastered with various shades of teal. He slid the tray onto his lap and began slicing a chop. He felt her still standing there, still watching him. ‘What?’
‘I was talking to Liz at the range this morning. She says she knows a really good doctor, she gave me his number.’
‘A doctor?’
‘A therapist.’
‘Please don’t talk to your friends about me.’
‘I worry.’
‘Don’t.’
She kept standing there. ‘Maybe if I made an appointment for you for next Monday?’ she said.
‘Betty. Your dinner must be getting cold.’
Calling his mother by her given name usually shut her up, and now she turned away and walked down the stairs, leaving the door ajar behind her. He ate as much as he could stomach and went back to work. Seven hours later, just after two in the morning, he typed the last full stop and clicked Print.
‘James?’
James opened his eyes and saw Derek’s face, beard trimmed neatly around moist lips, paisley cravat puffed up under a sloping chin. He remembered he was at work, and that Derek, his mother’s new boyfriend of eleven years, had got him the job.
‘I’m awake,’ said James.
Derek smiled and spun around with gusto to reveal the painting behind him. Rose Nocturne by Philip Taaffe was a tall, rectangular canvas dominated by thin pink lines that seemed to bulge out from the wall like the grooves of an egg slicer.
‘It’s just an incredible pink, isn’t it? And look at those waves,’ said Derek. ‘So psychedelic.’
‘According to the booklet they point to shamanic other-worldism,’ said James.
‘That’s perhaps a little reductive,’ said Derek, ‘but they’re certainly wonderfully transcendental.’
James nodded.
‘We’ve got a directors’ meeting now at three o’clock,’ said Derek. ‘I said I’d pop down and say “Howdy”.’
James nodded.
‘I’ll be driving home at half five, if you want a lift?’ said Derek.
‘I’ll probably have to stay for a while after we close,’ said James. ‘Sweep the floors and that.’
‘That’s fine, I can wait for you.’ Derek nodded at the art. ‘I’m sure I’ll find something to amuse me.’
James nodded. Over Derek’s shoulder, he saw Shannon breeze her way towards them. She was wearing her purple scarf today. She held her arm an inch above Derek’s shoulders and kissed the air next to his face, then turned to James: ‘Can you go down to the Response Room?’
‘Ah,’ said Derek. ‘Duty beckons! I’ll leave you to it.’ He patted Shannon on her elbow and strode off towards the stairs.
‘Ethel needs a hand,’ she said to James.
‘Which one’s Ethel?’
‘Ethel’s the lady who gives the children’s workshops.’
‘And which one’s the Response Room?’
‘How long have you been working here?’
James shrugged, and Shannon sighed. ‘Downstairs, past reception,’ she said.
Shannon had been sighing at his shrugs for almost nine months now. Derek was on the Board and had installed him in his role of general gallery staff member, and James imagined himself a work of performance art, an indictment of nepotism. Shannon and the others, who all knew hosts of unemployed artists who could have done with his job, and who could have done it properly, didn’t try to hide their resentment. Or maybe they resented him for other reasons. He didn’t blame them.
He walked down the stairs and stopped outside the Response Room. Shrieks and screams leaked out through the half-open door, and James imagined himself turn and flee, through the courtyard and out into the mist that had drifted up from the river. But he had nowhere, real or imagined, to run to.
He opened the door and walked into the commotion. The children were experimenting with modern techniques, creating their own art which seemed to James indistinguishable from the junk on display in the galleries. Ethel, dressed and accessorised like a friendly sorceress, was crouched next to three kids in matching dungarees, and he picked his way through the melee towards her. When she saw him she grabbed his arm and hauled him into the next room.
‘Oh thank heaven,’ she said. ‘We’re up to ninety here today. Can you keep an eye on things in here for me? There’s more paints and things in the corner, there, and rags to mop up any spills.’
Ethel was somehow able to avoid stepping on a painting or child without watching her feet, and James only managed to maintain his balance for a few seconds before he stumbled into the back of a woman kneeling on the floor with another gang of kids. She looked up at him.
‘James?’
James had met Annie while they were getting their degrees in St Patrick’s College in Maynooth. She sat beside him in his On Being Christian Together class. They were in the same choir. They went to prayer groups together, mass together. Together they went on retreats and slept in separate beds in old dormitory rooms in monasteries and convents. They confessed one after the other, and they tried their best not to sin, each on their own, and especially not together. Two semesters after they met, they kissed. Four months later he got his hand inside her bra. After a year of sleeping in the same bed, she helped him ejaculate. ‘What a mess,’ she said. They graduated, and he stayed on at Maynooth for a master’s in theology while she signed up for a H.Dip. in education and moved into a small apartment in Drumcondra with two other girls. One Tuesday, he called over for a coffee. ‘Can you sit down for a minute?’ she said. He hadn’t seen her since.
‘James?’ Annie said again. She was wrinklier, saggier; she looked terrible. For the first time in months he almost smiled. ‘How are you? Are you working here!?’
James nodded. Ethel smiled, patted his arm and abandoned him for the other room. He crouched down on his hunkers next to Annie.
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘How’s things yourself?’
‘Well, I’m married! And …’ She reached out and put one hand on each of the two small girls, twins probably, who looked up from their work of smearing paint across squares of cardboard, their own thick hands and arms, and the floor. One was chubby, and a snot trail glistened from her stubby nose down into her open mouth. The other was fatter still and had managed to get chocolate from the bar she was chewing smeared across both her chins. ‘This is Hannah, and Holly. They’re going to be five next week. Girls, this is James, an old friend of Mommy’s.’
The two girls stared at him for a moment then returned to their work, seemingly unimpressed.
‘I can’t believe you’re working here,’ said Annie. ‘Last I heard you were still in Maynooth doing your Ph.D.’
‘Well, after my thesis was rejected I went travelling for a while and came back and did a lot of drinking. Then I had a nervous breakdown. I’m living with my mother now, and her boyfriend. He got me this job.’
‘Oh my God. James!’
There was a long moment where they just looked at each other. Then he said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m fine.’
‘Well, it must be nice, wo
rking here?’
‘Not really.’
‘Oh. So have you any other plans?’
‘I think I’m going to kill myself.’
Nervous laughter blurted from her open mouth. She gaped down at her daughters, back up at James. She did not ask James why he might want to kill himself, nor did she try to talk him out of it, and it was only now that James realised that he had mentioned suicide to her in the hope that she would say something comforting, that her voice would call out to him from that distant chapter of his life when he was content.
‘Do you need any more paint or anything?’ He stood up straight and edged his way out through the room’s back entrance. He grabbed his satchel from the staff lockers, went to the Gents toilets and locked himself in a cubicle. Pen in hand, he pulled his printed-off letter out of his bag and began to give it its final read-through.
‘James?’ Derek hit the steering wheel of his Lexus 400 with the palm of his hand. ‘I’m talking to you.’
James looked up from his reading. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘To have some consideration for your mother’s well-being. She’s very worried about you.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ said James. ‘She’s stronger than you think.’
‘You mightn’t be so sure about that if you were the one she kept awake all night with her tossing and turning.’
‘Please don’t talk to me about being in bed with my mother.’
Derek steered the car into the right lane of the Stillorgan bypass and surged past a lorry. ‘You know she’s smoking again?’
A year before that, James was lying under his bed when he heard, from the far side of his stale Phibsboro bedsit, a key in the door. It felt like someone had stuck the key in his ear, and turned it. He opened his eyes and looked at the slats four inches above his face. What’s happening? he thought. Echoes of his dream came back to him, a nightmare, his mother calling him.
No. His mother was calling him. ‘James? James?’
He heard her flat soles slap on the lino of the kitchenette, thud on the bare carpet of the living area, coming closer, bearing down on him. He heard her sigh, hitch up her skirt and lower herself onto her knees. He heard her heavy, uneven breathing, and he turned his head to the left and into the force of her gaze.
‘What are you doing under the bed?’
He squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them again. She was still there, still watching him. He squeezed his eyes shut. He heard her sigh, stand up and walk away. The door closed. He couldn’t believe she would leave him there like that. He didn’t know her at all. The air thickened with silence.
Then she came back. He heard her boil the kettle, pour herself a mug of tea and sit down on the chair next to his bed. She had just gone to the shop, for milk and teabags. A match was struck, the tip of a cigarette fizzed. As far as James knew, she had quit, years ago. The smell of her Silk Cut Purples dragged his childhood forward into his mangy bedsit, and its hope and wonder sat rotting on the air. When she lit her fourth fag he edged his way out from under the bed and pulled himself up onto the mattress. She was sitting there, smoking, looking at him.
‘Give me one of those,’ he said.
Once James started to write his suicide letter, he was surprised at how much he had to say. He’d spent days, weeks, months sitting in the museum, and lying awake at night, composing sentences in his mind. In the evenings, he would type them up on his iMac and try to arrange them in an order that made sense.
There were several pages on his father’s death, when James was twelve, and his mother’s subsequent melancholy. There was a long section on the helpless love he had felt for Annie, and the seeping, scabrous wound in his soul that love left behind when she dumped him. He discussed God, the hand at the small of his back that had guided him through his adolescence and on into his college years, and the anxiety he felt when he began to question his faith even as he was reading for his Ph.D. and his terror when, defending his thesis, the external examiner had asked him questions he wasn’t prepared for and he realised he no longer believed what he himself had been preaching. Finally, an extensive treatise on the meaninglessness of human existence, with quotes from Nietzsche, E. M. Cioran and Raymond Carver.
It was almost midnight when James finished reading it through and put the pages, all one hundred and seventy-nine of them, in the bin under his desk. In his years in academia he had encountered some pretty solipsistic, obnoxious writing, but this was the worst thing he’d ever read. He knelt on the floor, then lay down. What had he been trying to do? Impress people with his ideas? Get them to pity him? Was he so pathetic he needed others to admire him, or feel sorry for him, even after he was dead? It was hard to believe he had written something so rank with self-importance when the whole point was that nothing was important, least of all his own self.
He crawled up onto his chair, opened the file, selected all and hit delete. Then he typed: Betty, I know this will hurt you. But what’s new? All I can do, alive or dead, is bring misery. At least, this way, there will be an end to it, you will get over it. It’s harder to get over things that go on living. James.
‘James?’ Betty knocked again on the door she’d already opened. ‘Are you not going to work?’
‘I don’t feel well.’
She walked into the room and put her hand on his forehead.
‘Get off, will you? Let me sleep.’
‘I’m going to Superquinn,’ she said. ‘Can I get you anything?’
He pulled the duvet up over his head. When he heard the front door bang he got up, printed the note, sat down and stared at it. The short paragraph was stranded on the broad A4 sheet. The paper felt cheap in his hand, thin and crinkling beneath the grip of his thumb and finger. The ink was smudged, and the default font of his Mac’s word processor seemed trivial. He crumpled it up and threw it in the bin.
He showered and dressed, got the bus into town and spent an hour touring the stationery and art-supply shops on Thomas Street. He bought an elegant, unlined letter pad of thick, watermarked notepaper and spent a week’s wages on a Cross fountain pen with a fourteen-carat gold nib and rich, dark-blue ink. He caught another bus back to his mother’s house, cleared his desk of the keyboard and other clutter, wiped it clean, washed his hands and tried out his new purchases.
He found it difficult to keep his lines horizontal and evenly spaced; they kept veering up or down as they approached the right-hand margin. His handwriting was sprawling and lopsided and, he realised, largely illegible. He tried to write slower, taking more care to form the correct shape of each letter. He tried again, and again. Then he threw the pen onto the pile of balled-up paper in his bin.
‘James?’
His mother and Derek were sitting on either end of the couch, reading to Schubert’s Wintereisse. James paused in the doorway, a new top-of-the-range Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer and a ream of A5, one hundred grams per square metre, Premium Matte Coated paper stacked in his arms.
Betty sat forward on the cushion. ‘Don’t get mad, sweetheart.’
‘What?’
‘I called that therapist and made an appointment for you for Tuesday week. Derek says you have that day off.’
James turned away from her and leaned his forehead against the doorframe and closed his eyes. Actually, he thought, that’s fine. He opened them and turned back to his mother.
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘You’ll go?’
‘Sure. What time is it for?’
‘Four o’clock,’ said his mother.
‘I’ll drive you, if you like,’ said Derek.
‘Great,’ said James.
His mother stood and walked across the rug towards him, opening her arms for a hug.
‘No need for that, now,’ said James.
She stopped and smiled the gentlest, most gormless smile James had ever seen. Standing in the middle of the floor, in her pastel cardigan and wool skirt, her hair caught up in a bun at the top of her head, she looked like an o
ld woman.
‘Did you get your hair done?’ said James.
She nodded and cupped her bun in her palm. ‘Our golf classic is on tomorrow, if you fancy a round? The forecast isn’t bad at all.’
‘I have to work.’
‘Is that a new printer? Did something happen your old one?’
‘I needed this for a project I’m working on.’
‘That sounds interesting. What sort of project?’
‘I should have something to show you soon,’ said James.
At three in the morning, James was still experimenting with fonts. Times New Roman was perfectly respectable but seemed a little too formal, too sterile? Garamond had more style, was more bookish than businesslike, but maybe came across as pretentious? Courier was too old-fashioned. Arial was a bore. Helvetica wanted to be cool. Verdana thought it was fun.
He laid copies printed in a range of options out on his bed and stood staring at them.
Betty,
I know this will hurt you. But what’s new? All I can do, alive or dead, is bring misery. At least, this way, there will be an end to it, you will get over it. It’s harder to get over things that go on living.
James.
Betty,
I know this will hurt you. But what’s new? All I can do, alive or dead, is bring misery. At least, this way, there will be an end to it, you will get over it. It’s harder to get over things that go on living.
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