The Visitors

by Patrick O'Keeffe

  —Sorry. Would it suit you better if I was not interested? I shouted.

  Her windows shuddered when she banged the hall door. I went to her kitchen window to see if I might see her on Drumcondra Road. See her fine arse shifting in those high heels she wore on her days off work. But she had gone up Dorset Street.

  I lay on her bed. The second hand moved on the enamel clock. Life going by. Shit floating down a river. Then the room was dark expect for the lit-up hands and numbers. And I don’t know if I was dozing or watching the face of the clock when the sound of her key in the lock brought me back to them. She switched the light on. I got off of the bed, stood beside her, and asked why she had ripped up the poem and vanished in a huff.

  —You wouldn’t understand, she said.

  Her spiked hair was stiff from the cold. Her face glowed.

  —Look who you are talking to, I said.

  —You don’t understand, she said.

  —I understand, I said.

  —You don’t, and you should go, she said.

  —I’m not going unless you tell me what the fuck it is that I don’t understand.

  —You just don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have to ask, she said.

  —You owe me to tell me what it is I don’t understand—

  —I don’t owe you a thing, and none of what we’re doing is going anyplace. You should go, we are wasting each other’s time—

  —I’m not going anywhere. We should save for that house we like on Valentia Road. Get a loan for that, we should let people know about us, I’d murder a dragon for you!

  —You don’t have that in you. Don’t be fooling yourself. And we are not saving for anything. And we are not going to tell anyone anything. I don’t want to stay here, I don’t want to be a stupid accountant for the rest of my life, I want to get away from here, I hate living here. You don’t see it, you have no idea, you are insecure—

  —I see it. You’re the one who’s insecure, and you’re mad! Utterly and fucking mad!

  —Well, if I’m so insecure and so utterly and fucking mad, why are you here, why don’t you go, why aren’t you gone already!

  A creak on the stairs beyond the door made us stop talking. Footsteps moving to the next floor. She looked toward the door. The spikes in her hair were trembling.

  —I’m sorry, Jim, she said.

  Then the creak on the ceiling, where she now stared, and clenched her fists.

  —But I am sorry, Jim. I am.

  —Sorry for what, Una?

  The sound of a television upstairs and someone telling the evening news. A toilet flushing upstairs. I looked from the ceiling to her. She looked away, her fists still clinched.

  —Fuck you, I said.

  I banged her door and the hall door when I left. Of course I did.

  We did not talk after that, but every night on my way back from work I stood at the hedge for I now forget how many nights and stared up at her two windows and his two above hers. The curtains on the four windows were drawn, and each time her shadow appeared on a curtain a shock galloped through me—like when I was young and I gripped the electric fence wire that kept the cows in. Dare you to grab it, Jimmy, Tess, Hannah, and Stephen shouted and laughed. Dare you! Dare you, Jimmy! Jimmy’s a coward! Jimmy’s a coward! And the waves of electricity flowed through me and the warm piss flowed down the inside of my leg—but I knew which shadow was hers, and which one was his, but not once did I let myself imagine them together. No. I imagined her standing alone at her sink, washing a cup, a plate, putting the eggcups on the rack, shaking the water from her hands, drying her hands and heading to the toilet to change into her nightdress, her underclothes in a pile on the green linoleum floor. And when the light was quenched at her sink window, and the light next to her bed was on, I knew she was in bed. She’d wind the clock the moment she was under the covers. She’d read for half an hour. I stood and stared for exactly fifteen minutes. Then I headed back to my flat and lay on my bed in my underwear and listened to the records I bought on Saturday afternoons at a record shop on Henry Street.

  About twenty or thirty times I followed them into the city center, on Saturday afternoons, which was the day and the time that she and I used to go. I’d wait at the corner of Grattan Parade. They’d come out from the hedge. She first, then him. He’d latch the gate. I’d duck down Grattan Parade. They’d start walking. Not once did they take the bus, though she and I took it every single time. That, I insisted upon. It was the speeding bus rising like a chariot over the arched canal bridge, charging up Dorset Street, past the spruced-up, mad, brave, violent, funny, cowardly, thieving, big-minded, bitter, foul-mouthed, small-minded fuckers, past the shops, the steel curtains, the shitty bars and chippers, left at North Frederick Street, where at the far corner the paperman’s fingertips were blackened with ink, where a big clock hung above the bar, past Walton’s music shop and the line of red buses parked face-to-arse, then past the Garden of Remembrance and the Ambassador Cinema.

  I walked behind them, on the opposite side, and only once did I run into them. It was on Henry Street. I got waylaid in the shopping crowd. They had stopped at a shop window. She thought it was a coincidence. I know by the way she acted. She was wearing a long and loose khaki coat with straps and buckles. A coat I’d never seen her in before. It didn’t suit her one bit. He would have bought it for her. And she introduced me to him. I shook his hand. He was taller than I was. Four or five years older. I bowed a little. I could do that. Parents and teachers were toppers at teaching you how to bow. He had the blond fringe swept to the side, like the lead singer dude in Spandau Ballet. The pleated slacks, loafers, white socks showing, a sports coat, with three buttons of the shirt open. Yes. I was so polite. And she acted like we were these neighbors from home who happened to meet in the middle of this Saturday shopping crowd, buying their potatoes, their peas, and their pork. Like I had never washed that sticky, hideous hairspray she bought in one of those big shops out of her hair—and his sports coat was checkered, I remember it, the sort wankers might wear to the horse races. He did not strike me as mean. He was dull. Certainly that. And his teeth were crooked, though I suppose he was tall enough that you wouldn’t notice. When she said Hello, Jim, he put his arm across her shoulders and pulled her to him. She fell gamely into him. She had told him nothing about us. I saw that in their faces. And all this love and hate for her made me feel so miserable but so brilliantly alive. The country was in bits: unemployment lines, the North, strikes, riots, bombs, immigration, divorce, women’s rights, gay rights, inflation, and the price of everything—oh, the woeful price of everything.

  The next Saturday evening I was in the flat. I never drank whiskey, but I had bought a half bottle, and I sat cross-legged on the floor, with that bottle within reach, and put on albums and played the songs we liked, though mostly the songs I liked.

  In my solitude you haunt me

  With reveries of days gone by

  Then this urge to write a letter to Tess. I got up from the floor, turned the music up a notch, took out the letter paper, and sat at that table. Beyond the window a streetlight lit up the evergreens and the moss. The well-dressed civil servant bachelor countryman, sixty or more, who had lived in a flat downstairs since he was around my age, knocked loudly on my door and told me to turn down that terrible racket. Who did I think I was! Have some respect! You have no respect! I stood and turned the music down, then opened the door, shouted at him to go and fuck himself. I don’t recall his face, but I do recall the sound of his feet going rapidly down the stairs before I shut the door. He didn’t expect that behavior from me, who, up until then, had been such a polite country boy, like when I ran into him in the hall on Saturday evenings, him drunk, flat out on the floor, his overcoat all over the place, his tie loosened and hanging sideways, and I helped him up, dug my hand into his right pants pocket to fetch his keys, then unlocking his door, my arm around his wa
ist like he were my lover, and he pleading with me to shove my hand back into his pocket and give his balls a thorough fondling this time, for his poor balls got fondled only by himself—so I turned the music up louder and got remarkably into writing the letter. Tess had posted me her letter two weeks before. She wrote that she could not stop thinking about the card games we played as a family when we were children, that the card games were such a happy time.

  My father initiated them. He was dealer and scorekeeper. He placed pennies on Auntie Tess’s tray then put the tray on a stool and we pulled chairs around and played poker. My father stayed in his chair. That chair by the range that was moved only by my mother to sweep up the dust and the gray hairs that fell from her husband’s head. Tess had a long winning streak at the cards. The rest of us detested her. Jealously, of course: Tess going about the house like she was Saint Anthony on top of that television that broke down every second week. Tess sat in the passenger seat of the car on the way to and from Mass. She sat beside my father at Mass and on the nights we did not play cards. But when Tess’s winning streak ended and Anthony got onto one, the card games halted. My mother was thrilled. Those games brought tensions upon her home, and when those arrived, my mother cried, begged, pleaded, but mostly she said prayers for us. My mother never understood why her children didn’t behave exactly like her.

  My father took walks with Michael. But this was also the time that Auntie Tess died in Dublin. And I was the one who handed them that news.

  The postman’s green van turned in from the road. Out along the path I skipped. The van stopped. The postman rolled the window down and rested his hand on the door. A withered, twisted, gray hand that I’d never noticed before, though I’d taken letters and bills from him many times. And then the postman’s head popped out and said he had a thing of great issue for my father and mother. The head and the hand slipped back in. And when the hand came out again a small brown envelope was pressed between the bent thumb and the joined and twisted fingers.

  —Run in and hand this to them, young fella. Great issue. It’s from Dublin.

  I took the envelope. The hand rubbed my hair and the cold rushed into my fingertips and flowed into my balls before landing in my toes. The window rolled back up and the van reversed at an impressive speed.

  I saw that hand again, not long after Sarah and I split up. I was with someone. We had left a party a few hours before and were wandering the bank of the Huron River. An early spring morning. Lilacs were blooming. We came upon a fuchsia bush and plucked fistfuls of blossoms and flung them on either side of the path like we were sowing seeds. Then the snapping turtle, right in the middle of our path. Its shell was coated with dried orange mud, and we said nice things to the turtle, encouraged it to move, but it didn’t. So I reached down and picked it up. Held it on either side. The head slipped out; and there it was, the postman’s hand, the head swiveling left and right, trying to snap at my fingers. River grass and slime dripped from jaws that opened and clamped shut like that contraption on the back of a garbage lorry. And I tottered on the riverbank when I flung that turtle high, with all my might, and before it hit the water, its body spun and its short legs clawed at the air like the arms of a baby. I laughed out loud when I did it. The person I was with screamed at me not to do it. The water bubbled around the turtle before it sank.

  I ran back along the path, waving that envelope high in the air. Waving it like I was carrying the Olympic torch! The dogs barking when I got closer to the house. I told them to shut up and I opened the hall door and ran to the kitchen door and opened it. Only the two of them in the kitchen. My father didn’t look up from the newspaper. My mother was wiping the table with a rag. Dishes and cups piled high on the rack behind her. The window clouded with steam so that you could not see the mountains. A pot of tea brewing on the range. My father’s mug sitting on the edge of the range. My mother didn’t look up from wiping.

  —You want to be heard outside on the road, she said.

  —Jack the postman gave me something of great issue. From Dublin, I said.

  I was winded. All excitement. Looking up at my mother.

  —Too lazy to drive in as far as the door, that fella is, my father said.

  He put the paper aside. I held the envelope out to my mother, and when she saw it, she dropped the rag onto the table and took a step back.

  —Hand it to your father and go outside immediately.

  —Fine, I said.

  My mother folded her arms. My father held his hand out. I walked over and handed him the envelope.

  —Close them two doors after you. And keep that trap of yours shut. Are you listening to me, my father said.

  —Of course I’m listening, I said.

  I finished my letter to Tess. I wrote that she was the best that the two of them threw up. She was the shining one. And I wrote that every experience is a gift. Can’t mess with what transpires. Ride the fucking wave. Ride it to wherever it lands you. Where it lands you is where you are meant to be—I must have been reading people who wrote things like this—and I concluded my letter by saying that the Lord above knew I needed her to keep going, and the Lord above knew that Hannah needed her to keep going, and Stephen needed her to keep going, and even Anthony needed her to keep going. And of course the Lord above knew her dear father needed her to keep going. Tess also wrote that she couldn’t sleep at night, from worrying over him. She wanted to go back home, sit beside him, comfort him with mugs of tea and bread and soup, until those fourteen cows came home.

  I thought my letter was good. I was slightly proud of it. I was drunk. It was this beautiful, melancholic state. I was outside of me. I was someone else. The foolhardy hero wronged by Una and the tall New Romantic Englishman. Yes. The letter was good. No. It was pure rubbish. Too emotional. More about me than Tess. But Tess would not see it like that. Tess would recognize it as a fortress. At the end of the letter I wrote: Love. Endure. Love. Endure. A full stop at the end of each word. I licked the envelope shut, thumbed the stamp in the corner. I had a good supply of stamps, envelopes, and writing paper left over from all those letters I wrote to my mother. A task I didn’t have to do anymore. All the miserable lies I wrote her regarding Una. Never see Una. Have tried ringing her bell many times but no answer. Maybe the bell is banjaxed. My mother’s letters were folded up neatly in a shoebox, at the bottom of my wardrobe. And Una and I wrote each other a letter once a week, but I threw them out the day after she tore up her poem and I said Fuck you to her.

  —The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure, she once wrote to me.

  —Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead, I once wrote to her.

  I reckoned I should post my letter to Tess, for if I didn’t I’d second-guess what I had written, and the letter would sit on the table for days, and I’d come home one night, brooding after standing at that hedge, and I’d fling the letter into the bin.

  The post box was on Drumcondra Road, halfway between my place and Una’s. I passed that green box every day, walking to and from work, for as long as I lived in that city. Every letter I wrote to my mother was dropped into that green box. And every letter I dropped in I’d wait to hear fall on top of the other letters. It was a tiny, consoling sound. All those people writing to someone. Lies or not, what the fuck did it matter. People paying their bills. Sending money to political parties, to Rome, the African missions, pleading for prayers, like my father, who posted five pounds every six months to the Society of the Little Flower.

  You knew very well

  What was coming next

  I took a final belt of whiskey and put on my jacket and stuck the letter in my pocket. I walked down the stairs and out onto the street. It was very cold. I zipped the jacket up and shoved my hands deep into my pants pockets. The sycamore leaves brightened by streetlights and hardened by frost coated the footpath on Drumcondra Road. I pressed my ear to t
he freezing post box, shoved the letter through the slot, listened to its soft fall, then headed on up Drumcondra Road.

  I stood at the hedge and watched up at the two darkened windows of her flat. Both windows of his flat were boldly lit. Her shadow appeared twice on the curtain of his right window. I bent over, my hands on my knees, straightened up, took one breath, then another. I opened the gate back and broke a sprig from the hedge and brought it to my nose. It smelled like burned car oil. I threw the sprig down, shut the gate behind me, and walked across the cement slab that looked like an icy pond because of frost and moonlight and rays from the streetlamp falling across the hedge. I had my key, and I quietly unlocked the door and entered the hall. The lights were on. I crossed the hall and sat on the bottom step and stared at the shut hall door and the big white letterbox on the back of it. There were the smells of suppers and the lonely hum of televisions. The black coin-box phone across from me rang four times. No one came through a door to answer it.

  Then my ear was pressed to her door. I was sure I could hear Michael’s ticking clock. Dust was settling on my book underneath it. Chief Spotted Elk’s dead and twisted body was frozen in a snow-covered field in South Dakota. And I felt sure I could smell that hairspray.

  Then I was standing outside his door. I pressed my ear to it and heard him say something about a weekend in Manchester, a friend of his mother’s owned a B&B there. I didn’t hear what she said back. I knocked hard on the door. I had to be forceful about this. Acting like Saint Francis, like Brother Ass, was not going to do the trick. The sound of running water, the smell of roasting lamb, and their merry voices poured out the opening door, and as I watched it open, I had this urge to run back down the stairs, across the slick cement slab, out the gate, and through the streets until that city and all of them were behind me. But what do you do when you are standing at the edge of the sea in the dark, panting like a fool in the wind, staring up at the bright stars? Where the fuck do you go then?