“Spare change for a hostel?”
“No change,” I say, “but here’s two chocolates.”
I hand them to him and he mutters a thanks and examines the box.
I walk up the quays towards O’Connell Bridge, and turn onto O’Connell Street. A bus that will take me some ways home is pulling into a stop, so I get on. We veer left at the top of O’Connell Street, passing the theatre that used to be a cinema and is currently hosting an exhibition of dead bodies in living poses. A man is pissing against the railings between this building and the maternity hospital, possibly in an attempt to destroy the divide between birth and death. We pull into a stop on Parnell Square, opposite the maternity hospital. Two women with huge bellies stand outside the glass doors, sucking on cigarettes as if they’re oxygen tanks. High on the walls above the doors, the remains of unknown words read “ERFTE PLIVET” in huge letters. If I had a baby in this hospital, I’d call it Erfte Plivet. The “T” in “ERFTE” is hanging upside down, which makes it difficult to pronounce, and the capital “I” in “PLIVET” could be a small “I,” but a vowel in third place is easier to pronounce than a consonant. I believe that capital “I” is a confusion of a letter, and should be given a top-dot to differentiate it from its lower-case counterpart, but who is in charge of deciding such things? Do upper-case letters feel superior to lower-case letters? Which would come off best in a game of thumb wrestling? The uppercase letters have pointed edges and size on their side, but their lower-case rivals are bendy with attitude. The bus rounds the Black Church and turns right. The legend requires a person to walk three times anticlockwise around the church at midnight to summon the Devil, but it’s unclear whether a bus semi-circling it once in daylight has the same effect. We pass Devlin Terrace: the street sign is blue-ed out to read “IN TACE,” which sounds like the name of a company that supplies office stationery or slick advertisements. When I get home, I unfurl the map on the kitchen table and run a pencil through my adventures. Today’s routes have more bus journeys than walks, so I leave their mapping to the drivers themselves, and add nothing to the traced shapes lining the kitchen table.
14
THE SKY IS dark with a lump of rain in it; this is good. There will be fewer people in today’s thin places. I’m going to visit the National Botanic Gardens and Glasnevin Cemetery, but “cemetery” sounds too clean and functional—I prefer the vague foggy sound of “graveyard.” I make a flask of coffee and let myself quietly out of the house. I walk through Phibsborough, following the curve of the road around to Glasnevin. When the watchtower looms into view, I look for Rapunzel at its window, a mummified Rapunzel with snakes for hair and rats for eyes, but not even a tormented squint conjures her into being. I pass a woman selling flowers at the entrance to the cemetery. The flowers look so perfect, packed together in their buckets. I consider getting some, but taking just one bunch would be like trying to separate puppy brothers, and buying flowers from a graveyard for personal use could put the hex of death on me. I walk to the old part of the cemetery and look at the headstones. Every dead person is “Dearly Beloved” or “Sadly Missed,” but that can’t be true for all of them; death brings out the worst of lies. I weave through the headstones, imagining what kinds of lives these people really had. Maybe Edward Neary beat his wife and Mrs. Neary doesn’t sadly miss the beatings. Mrs. Honor Cole might have been dearly beloved not only by her husband, but by a stream of other men too. One tombstone holds an upper-case bellow of a prayer: “MERCY JESUS MERCY.” I’d like to know what badness this man did, or thought he did, in his lifetime. I pass the grave of Alphonse Hazard, who, with a name like that, had to have been a stunt double in Hollywood. I write his name in my notebook, along with any other names from tombstones that look like they could form a pattern. Several of the larger graves have iron cages around them; I don’t know if this is to keep the dead in or the living out. Some of the tombstones on a grassy slope are cracked or knocked flat, the aftermath of a violent fight among the dead. Near them, a huddle of tombstones slants backwards and forward, like a chatter of people leaning back in their chairs saying, “Wait till you hear, c’mere till I tell you.”
I walk up the slope towards the fresher graves. The flowers lining the path droop as if they were looking for their dead friends under the soil. The only sounds are the distant vrum of traffic and the rustle of trees in the wind and a bird with a chirp like the creak of a swing. I come upon a muted fuss some ways off the path: a new body is moving in. I sneak up slowly and hide behind a tree. An elderly woman stands at the open-mouthed grave, flanked by two younger women. The priest calls out a drone of words, and the women look at the coffin and cry. I didn’t cry when my father died; I cried while he was alive. I leave the mourners and make a wide skirt around the row where my parents are buried—my sister is the only loving daughter on that tombstone. I walk past the famous dead towards the office to buy my plot. Buying a plot sounds like buying my story: I wish I could buy a story-plot to tell me what action to take next. A black clock with gold numbering above the door tells the wrong time; it’s out by an hour and eighteen minutes. I go up to the woman behind the counter. She smells like a washed version of my great-aunt.
“Excuse me,” I say, “how much does a plot cost?”
“Here,” she says, “have a look at the price list.”
She hands me a page. It costs €2,030 for a double plot.
“Can I borrow a pen?” I ask.
She gives me a pen, and I write “2030 ÷ 2 = 1015.” The division sign is so perfect and symmetrical, it’s a joy to write. I write the percentage sign next to the division sign “÷, %,” it looks like its poor slanted cousin.
“Don’t you love it?” I ask.
“Love what?”
She eyes my sums with wary in her voice.
“The division sign,” I say. “It looks like a man trying to give a straight-armed hug to another man. Maybe he has unbendable elbows. What does it look like to you?”
“Like a division sign,” she says, quietly. “Now how can I help you?”
“I’d like to buy a single plot for €1,015.”
“It’s €2,030 for a double, that’s the cheapest.”
Her voice is firm now that we are back on grave soil.
“But I’m going to be buried alone. This is like a single supplement, even when I’m dead.”
She sighs from her belly and hands me a card with a name and phone number on it.
“You can discuss this further with my manager.”
“Okay,” I say.
I point to the price for three plots on the pricelist.
“If it’s €2,030 for two burials and €2,680 for three, that’s half a corpse thrown in for free. Do you think I could ask Penelope and David to be buried with me? I’ve only met David once and Penelope three times.”
The woman’s face slackens a little.
“Have you no family that you’d like to share your final resting place with?”
“I have a sister,” I say, but she won’t want a double Vivian on the tombstone.
I write “Vivian x 2” on the price list. If only I liked the multiplication sign as much as the division sign: “Vivian ÷ 2” eliminates me.
“Is your name Hannah, by any chance?” I ask.
“No,” she says, “it’s Maura, why?”
“I’m hoping for a palindrome of a friend, but she would have to write her name all in capitals like this.”
I write “HANNAH” on the page.
“Or in small letters like this.”
I write “hannah” underneath.
“Only then would she be symmetrical. We could have a picnic in Navan, but we’d have to shout it—NAVAN!—so it would be in capital letters.”
Maura’s top teeth bite down on her bottom lip. She looks like a disgruntled beaver.
“That sounds nice,” she says quietly. Although her voice is kind, there’s no truth in it.
“If I buy my plot now, is it officially my land?”
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“How do you mean?”
“If I want to have a picnic on my plot, can I?”
“That’d probably be fine.”
“Great. And if I haven’t finished my picnic when the cemetery closes, can I stay, if I promise to stay only on my grave?”
“You’ll have to ask my manager,” she says, “if you give me your number, I’ll get him to give you a ring.”
I write it down for her, and say, “I remember the 087 by thinking of an eighty-seven-year-old sighing, Ohhh, because an eighty-seven-year-old has lots of aching joints and dead friends to sigh about.”
“I see.”
I lean over the counter.
“How do you do your sevens?”
“Excuse me?”
Maura looks startled, like she has been pulled out of the sea on a hook.
“When you write the number seven, do you add the slash across the middle, or do you leave it out?”
She looks at the freshly written number.
“I leave it out,” she says, so quietly that I have to strain for the consonants.
“So do I! I fear it looks unfinished without the slash, but it looks too much like a mustachioed man frowning to justify putting it in.”
“How true,” Maura says, in a voice thin and transparent as cling film.
I point to the “Additional Charges” section on the sheet.
“If it’s €395 extra for a Saturday burial, I should probably try to die early in the week.”
Maura examines my face like it’s an especially difficult maths test.
“Is your passing imminent, I mean…all these preparations…”
Her voice dwindles, the question mark forgotten.
“I don’t know how imminent it is, but I’d like to be prepared. Is it possible for me to be buried with a reading light and a book, just in case? It might be a good time to tackle War and Peace.”
“You’ll have to ask the funeral director about that, I’m afraid it’s outside our remit.”
The door opens behind me and someone else comes in, so I say goodbye and fold up the price list and leave the office. Now that Maura has my phone number, she might call and invite me to her house for tea. I feel part giddy with the success of my dealings with Maura: “gid” I’ll call it.
I make for the gate leading into the Botanics at the back of the cemetery, and head straight for the wallflowers, my favourite flower. They smell so sweet, I want to put my whole face in their velvet petals and breathe their pollen into my lungs and cough it back up as sweet-smelling phlegm. I like the depth of their reds and their yellows and their names that sound like Gothic romance novels: “Cloths of Gold, Blood Red, Giant Pink, Tom Thumb, Ruby Gem, Vulcan, Scarlet Bedder, Harlequin Mixed.” The wallflowers are bedded with clumps of myositis, an eye disease of a name but a blue wonder of a flower. Bellis Pomponette sounds like a glossy cheerleader, but looks like fungoid forms or spiny creatures or things going wrong in my cells.
The Rubus have funeral Mass names: odoratus, inapertus, plicatus, inominatus, so I head toward the tulips which are in flower and make me think that good things are possible. Tulip Daydream is an orange and yellow open-petalled belly laugh of a flower that reminds me of a fire in a hearth, but I wish it had a more original name. I walk through the overgrown part of the gardens, to a tree with strips of cloth and ribbons tied to its branches. It must be a wishing tree, maybe a hawthorn. There’s no spare cloth in my bag, so I use my pen to poke a hole in my vest, which is old and frayed. Then I tear a strip up the cloth, across and back down, and tie it to the tree. I circle the tree three times clockwise, then three times anticlockwise. I would like to incant a spell but I don’t know the words, or how to speak them. I walk on, a draught running up the bare strip of my belly, to the path through the peony flowers. Their names might be heroines from fairytales and poems, and I’m a small part glad they aren’t in flower because their appearance might not live up to the name. I write them in my notebook: “The Moor, Beatrice, Marie Crousse, Victoria, Ducesse De Nemours, Surprise, Edulis Superba, Kelway’s Queen, Asa Gray, Bowl of Beauty, Pink Hawaiian Coral, Gertrude, Grisselle, Fair Rosamund, Venus, Purpurea, Dorothy, Reevesiana, Graziella, Marie Jacquin Paeonia Paradoxa, Blanda, Sabinei, Anemoniflora, Northern Glory, Obovata, Chinese Dragon, Banquet, Harvest, Leda, Marchioness, Vesuvian, Roman Gold, Zephirus, Splendens, Peregrine, Dreadnaught.”
I write “Dreadnaught” on the inside of my notebook, because I think it’s a word to live by: I would like to dread naught. I would also like a flower named after me; when I find out my true name, I will befriend a botanist and ask him such things. I follow the curve of the path to the trees and step onto the grass, looking for a circle of trees that could be a fairy ring, or a tree with a door to a whole other world. I pass a gnarled yew that could be the Magic Faraway Tree, and a weeping beech with coins for leaves, probably used as currency by the pixies living in the tree hollow. I sit at the base of the trunk, which is separated like a giant’s toes, and sup from my flask of coffee. A man drives by in a buggy. He parks near me and heads for the trees.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning,” I say, “I like trees.”
“Well, you’re in the right place, then.”
I try for a casual chuckle, but it comes out too high-pitched and keen. The man nods toward my notebook.
“Studying the trees?”
“No, I’m looking for a specific tree.”
“Oh,” he says, “what kind?”
“I don’t know exactly, but I’ll know when I find it.”
“Oh?”
“It will have a doorway in the trunk large enough for me to enter but small enough that nobody else can see it.”
He clears his throat.
“Right, well I’d better get on with it, no rest for—”
“The Wicked!” I shout, but the man takes fright and gives a little jump backward before walking away. He has left quite abruptly, but he has given me six sentences, if I count “Morning” and “Oh” as full sentences. I walk over to the buggy and write on a blank page of my notebook: “GUESS WHO? HINT: I LIKE TREES.”
Then I tucked the note into the windscreen wiper and hurry off before he sees me. I head for the rose garden and read the rose captions; some of the names might be racehorses or cocktails or the answers to bad jokes: Lovely Lady, Just Joey, Disco Dancer, Simply the Best, Dusky Maiden, Absent Friends, Tequila Sunrise.
I only write the fictional heroines or delicious food names in my notebook: “Ice Cream, Zépherine Drouhin, Dawn Chorus, Peamight, Robin Redbreast, Honeywood, Gertrude Jekyll, Constance Spry, Sweet Juliet Aussleep, Spinossissima Fruhlingsgold, Ausblush, Othello, Anna Livia, Frylucy, Oranges + Lemons, Iceberg, Peer Gynt, Starlight Express, Lady Macrobert, Clarissa, Mary Rose.”
I cross the little bridge over the stream, climb up Pond Walk, and sniff the rhododendrons. Boddaertianium smells like edible perfume, but Sheltonae smells like a wet bed. Near the water, a clutch of bamboo stands tightly bundled. I squeeze into the middle; it feels like I’m in a wigwam. This could be my portal, a still-growing wardrobe door to Narnia. I feel around, but the bamboo doesn’t part, and it’s too tightly packed to go any further. I walk on toward the glasshouses with their bulging roof-bellies, and go into the hothouse. There are banana trees and huge jungle palms and it smells of warm, damp earth. I feel like a midget in a primeval forest. A woman is watering the plants with a yellow hose—this seems like cheating somehow. A sign on the step reads: “Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Viennese Philospher. Stayed in Dublin in the winter 1948–1949 and liked to sit and write at these steps.”
I sit on the steps, but the only grand philosophical thought I have is whether Ludwig got piles from sitting on damp concrete for so long. I look through the lists of flower names in my notebook, but I can’t see a pattern or a code or a hidden anagram so I walk home. The house feels empty, as if there is too much air and not enough substance. I tuck my head under my jumper and sniff. I smell like ov
erripe meat—this must be what my coffin will smell like. The chairs in the living room seem a little hostile: eleven chairs heaped together all facing the same way, like a particularly ineffectual firing squad or an interview panel of invisible mutes. I pull the two nearest chairs towards me and turn them around. Then I squeeze through the rest of them and turn them to face in different directions; now they look less accusatory. I go to the kitchen and trace the route from my house to the cemetery and back through the Botanics. I don’t know how to map my routes within the cemetery, or the gardens, or how to draw maps within maps, so I draw symbols to mark those minor walks. Today I walked a winter-bare tree that was knocked to its knees in a storm, with a coffin and a flower suspended between the branches.
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