by Doreen Finn
I remember Kathleen, our previous neighbour. Kathleen, kind and open, who allowed Andrew and me to pick her loganberries each summer and mind her cat when she visited her daughter in London. Early on the morning of Andrew’s funeral I had sat, numb, on the couch in the front room. The cold grate held that faintly depressing look of burned ashes and stray matches, the charred remnants of newspaper twists. Something, a feint tap tap tap on the front door, seeped into the hush of the oyster dawn. Kathleen, tired of crying, had taken a duster and a bottle of Brasso and was polishing the brasses on our front door, readying them for the mourners who would later congregate to eat sandwiches and pass around cups of tea.
That old, familiar crush of oppression gathers like a storm cloud over me. If I had a car and an infinite stretch of open road I would jump behind the wheel and zoom away. But this is Dublin, and there are no open roads, just these tangled streets, snarled and knotted with traffic. I tighten my ponytail and button my cardigan. Already I need to get away. Old habits don’t fade.
Rainwater is pooled everywhere. I step into a puddle and it runs into my canvas trainer, shocking my sockless foot with how cold it is. God, what a climate. Even New York, with its winters that shred you, can’t compete with Ireland for grey skies and rain that spills like paint from upturned cans.
The street is choked with cars. An old man fails to move on time and the traffic lights turn orange. A cyclist sprays me with water. I jump out of the way, but not in time to avoid the dirty water that soaks my legs. A bus rattles by, its windows bleeding condensation, its occupants inert, expressionless.
What has happened to Dublin? I pass a row of shops that, when I was a child, housed the butcher, the newsagent and a dry cleaner. Now there is a coffee house, a shop selling nothing but stationery and a lingerie store. I pause at the window. The display of lace and frills amuses me. I shade my eyes and look in, but a movement behind the glass catches my eye. A girl I was in school with leans against the counter. The shop is empty of customers. I move quickly away. I’m not interested in bland conversation, the vacant chatter of inquisition.
Just like the journey from the cemetery, nothing is familiar to me any more. The vaguely shabby village of my childhood has mutated beyond recognition: with its wine shops, copious eating places and specialist food shops it’s no longer a poor relative of the city centre. Despite some vacant shopfronts and three or four restaurants that have recently closed down, Ranelagh gives off an aura of new money, and like new money it glitters like a rhinestone in platinum.
The rain is sudden when it starts again. It tickles my skin, soaking my clothes; it blurs my vision. It’s like looking at the world through plastic. After the impenetrable heat of a New York summer, the cool that comes off the downpour is more welcome than I would have thought. My wet trainers slap the pavement. I walk on.
In the park the ducks swim in circles, oblivious to the rainfall that silvers their feathers and pockmarks their pond. The sky is dark, too dark for so early in September. The old bakery beyond the walls is gone, replaced by more apartments. They hang their ‘For Sale’ signs out like flags, small flashes of colour in the grey.
My brother and I as children had fed the ducks every chance we got. We fought over the bread and over who would feed the last piece, childish arguments that never lasted.
Andrew. My beautiful, fractured brother. It’s still almost too much to think of him.
That’s where my grief lies, not among spring bulbs and straw hats, but where my brother is, and in that shadowed room there’s no space for mourning my mother, no bed upon which I can drape my tears. Andrew would have grieved for her. He would have known how to arrange the furniture, how to give his sorrow space to breathe. Me? I just locked the door and threw the key in the nearest well, not waiting to hear the splash of black water before it was lost forever.
Drops spill noisily off the leaves, gunmetal in the grey September evening, slicing through my thoughts. I turn away from the ducks and their relentless circling.
I haven’t been in this pub since university, and even then it was never a regular haunt – too close to home for me to reach brute oblivion in peace. I prefer the scruffier version of the Dublin pub, where decades of smoke and spilled porter stain the upholstery and darken the floorboards. No one bothers trying to pick you up or cares what clothes you wear. I cut through the huddle of smokers at the door, wreathed in the brittle cloud of their own addictions.
It’s busy inside. Office workers celebrate the end of the working day, commuters from the dreary new suburbs seek refuge from the weather and the traffic and their negative equity. I slink to the bar, avoiding eye contact with strangers. I shed my drenched cardigan, drop it on a stool. My hair is stuck to my shoulders like tar, and my skin is visible through my saturated shirt. Not my finest moment.
A guy polishes glasses behind the beer taps. He raises his eyebrows.
I pull a high stool close to the bar. ‘Jameson, no ice. A double.’ I touch an old water stain on the polished wood.
‘Would you like a towel with that?’ A brief smile, as sudden as starlight.
‘I might just say yes.’
He slides the glass to me.
The smoky warmth of the drink is like crushed velvet on my tongue. I want to spin it out, make it last, enjoy it, but it’s impossible. I sip and sip until it is gone, some feeling finally edging back into my cold limbs. I signal for another. It disappears in the same way. A dish of olives sits on the polished bar in front of me, Greek, all wrinkles and shiny black skin. Another change I missed. I wonder what the seasoned drinkers, the hardened alcoholics, make of this, the provision of olives in their pubs? It must seem as foreign as shops dedicated to selling only lingerie. Dublin has been nudged further along the scale of capital cities. Despite the collapse, it plays its part well.
The barman picks up my glass. ‘Another one?’
‘No thanks.’ I put my money on the bar. A shout goes up behind me. A group of males wearing football shirts with the logo of some multinational enlarged across the chest slop pints over each other in congratulations at points scored. A mute television beams a rugby match into this corner of Dublin. It flickers distractedly on the wall.
‘It’s on me.’
I pop an olive in my mouth. ‘Why?’
He shrugs one shoulder. ‘No why. Just thought you’d like one.’ He winks, and somehow he manages to make it look cool. ‘Given the state you’re in, and all that.’
I laugh. ‘All right. I’ll have another.’
As he pours the drink the barman holds my attention for a second longer than is necessary. I blink and focus on my glass. A soapy bubble of excitement bursts somewhere in my stomach. I swallow more whiskey, glance at him, smile when I see he hasn’t yet looked away. I catch myself, sort out some money and place it on the bar. The notes of this unfamiliar currency are wet and flattened from being in my pocket.
‘Another?’
I cover the glass with my hand, hiding the remaining whiskey from view. ‘Thanks, but no.’ Not having eaten all day, I can feel the effect of the booze in the languid stillness that has crept into my head. ‘Not unless you want to carry me home.’
He laughs. ‘Mightn’t be the worst thing I’ve done today.’
He has longish hair and it falls over one eye in a way that is absurdly appealing. I think his eyes are green, but I’m afraid to look too closely. He’s out of place here. He should be waxing a surfboard on a beach in Malibu or leading hikes up high-altitude mountain trails. He’s probably fifteen years younger than I am, but it’s hard to ignore the smile and the way his hair falls. I place my palms flat on the bar. My wet jeans are cold and stiff against my skin, but the Jameson is working its magic and the world is starting to look less sharp around the edges. I loosen my hair, which is drying in a clump on my shoulders, and smoothe my T-shirt. That warm feeling, the high I get f
rom alcohol right before I’m drunk, intoxicates me. I straighten up on the stool. My sodden jeans no longer bother me. I sip at what remains in the glass. The desperation has passed, that need I have to drink, drink, drink. It’s like swimming against waves, pushing back a heavy wall, and then the relief of breaking through into clean air, bright light. It covers me, and I’m filled with benevolence towards the world.
The barman pushes a fresh dish of olives towards me. ‘So, your first time in here?’
I shrug. First time in a long time. I don’t bother mentioning the underage drinking I did here in my teens, or how easy it was to get served with a slick of red lipstick and a bit of hairspray. Age limits were optional back then, or so it seemed. ‘More or less.’
‘I’d have noticed you if you’d been here.’
‘Your bar, is it?’ I swirl the last of my drink in the glass.
He flicks a tea towel over his shoulder. ‘Not a chance. Belongs to my parents, but I help out.’
I smile at him. I can’t help it.
He raises his brows. ‘What?’
I shake my head. ‘Nothing. Can a girl not smile?’
He leans on his forearms. They are burnished from being outdoors and the good summer. His white shirt is rolled to the elbows. I think about touching him, accidently, with my hands, and how his skin would feel beneath my fingers, but the thought is too much. I tip over that ledge, the one that changes everything in an instant. It’s always the same with alcohol: one minute I’m bright and shiny, the next the claw of dread reaches up and grabs me, dragging me down to the depths again. He says something, but I don’t hear. I look at him, but I can’t really see him any more. My damp jeans suck at my skin. My feet are freezing. I push away from the bar.
‘What, off so soon?’
‘Afraid so.’ I slide the coloured money towards him. ‘Maybe I’ll see you around?’ I hope my speech isn’t slurred.
He goes back to polishing glasses. A smile is aimed at his towel. ‘Maybe.’
Something is sticking into me. I blink. What happened? I’m face down on the living room floor. Chet Baker unspools on the stereo. I left him on replay, and his heartbroken voice swims in the empty night. The street lights glimmer through the unshuttered window, throwing bloated shadows across my thighs. Moving hurts me. Pain rolls through my head. I pull out what I’m lying on. The empty whiskey bottle. It’s only a half bottle, but so what? I bought it as a present for Maude. I don’t even like bourbon.
Waves of nausea crash at the back of my throat. I’m afraid to stir. In the end I have to, stumbling through the darkened downstairs, out the front door, down the granite steps until I’m kneeling over my mother’s cosmos, retching. Eventually it subsides and I come to a trembling standstill.
The smell of drenched earth is somehow soothing. At least it’s stopped raining. I rub my face against the spiky grass. The wet ground soaks through my clothes and I drag myself into a seated position.
I wipe my face with the edge of my sleeve. I’m still wearing the clothes from earlier. They’ve dried into me. I pull at the thin fabric, feeling it peel from my skin. The African drums in my head have retreated to a tedious pulse, and I rest my forehead on my forearms. It’s quiet, the traffic all but gone save for the odd taxi swishing alone through the empty night. The house is dark and silent, still towering above me in its imposing Edwardian manner. The red bricks of the terrace are dulled in the non-light. The long sash windows are shuttered eyes, keeping secrets hidden. It’s a beautiful sweep of architecture, the uniformity of the houses, the exact precision of red bricks, twin pillars flanking each door, the fanlight, curved like an orange slice, illuminating each hall. Dublin is full of beautiful houses, their periods of construction bookmarking the city’s history. They crop up everywhere, surprising the onlooker, elevating the town.
Maude’s room in the garden flat is without illumination. For that at least I’m grateful. I don’t want her seeing me like this, thinking that in all these years nothing has changed. I suppose nothing has, but I like to think I’m different too, in some ways.
I almost envy her grief. I’m like a fraud in comparison. It’s so easy for her to be sad. Thinking of my mother leaves me with the thin, bleak feeling of lingering regret. There had been so much to say, countless questions that I had sidestepped all my life instead of just asking her. I never even knew why she left my father, and by the time I’d got around to wondering he was long dead, buried in some traceless grave in the bleak midlands, another farmer succumbed to the land that bound him.
Grief is an abstract painting. Nothing is ever as it seems, and the shapes shift constantly. Mine is so old, so deeply buried, that I’m afraid to take it out. There are too many facets to it, too many ingredients that have gone into its making. I am afraid of it. It scares me to think too much because I don’t know how to approach it, never having dealt properly with it from the start. Andrew’s death I barricaded myself from, building walls from bottles of booze, submerging myself in writing, studying and drinking until I was finally able to leave. It was easy being in New York, refusing to come back to Dublin. But now I am here, and this infelicity, this wretched sadness, hangs itself over me once again, like cobwebs gathering around me. My brother’s ghost dwells everywhere in this damned house, chased out of corners each time a light is switched on, persistent as a migraine. I’ve never knowingly wished for solitude, but it’s all that seems to come to me, iron filings to my magnet, and now it is all I know.
Orphaned at 37.
And love, in all its manifestations, has galloped away.
CHAPTER 3
An Indian summer has suddenly replaced the rain. The blackberries at the end of the garden finally ripen with the combination of sun and showers. I lie in the old string hammock and watch the wasps gather and disperse among the berries. The garden appears stunned by the unexpected onslaught of heat. The birds, barely vocal, prefer to sit in the trees and preen in the shelter of the leaves. My mother’s late-summer roses, heat-starved, climb the trellising on the crumbling cinder walls, competing for space and heat. The herb garden Maude planted two decades ago struggles to escape its boundary of uneven rocks. Lavender, rosemary and mint sting the still, hot air. I’d forgotten the smell of home until this moment, and I inhale, the fragrances peeling back time.
Using my foot as a lever I rock myself back and forth, hoping for sleep. I’ve barely slept since my arrival, and even then, only when it’s been alcohol-induced. Exhaustion scratches my eyes and weighs down my limbs, lies like a wet rag over my brain. Leaving my bed in the mornings is an effort I do my best to avoid. Maude likes to talk, and with my head stuffed with a hangover and no safe topics of conversation it is easier just to drift around the house.
Maybe I shouldn’t have left New York so quickly. I grabbed at the first decent excuse to run. I mean, who could argue with a mother’s passing, or deny me the chance to bury my dead? Yet I miss it, that injured city, miss being surrounded by a thousand buildings that are surrounded by another thousand, and so on, almost into infinity. Lying on the grass in a park, I always felt my insignificance in comparison with all that architecture, instead of being bigger than everything else, which is how I normally feel. Too much inside my head, no getting away from the darkness that sleeps within me.
I plan to return to Manhattan. Dublin is only temporary, a holding place until I sort out my mother’s things, deal with the house, put my ghosts to rest. I miss New York. Maybe what I really miss is how it used to be, how I used to be in the city. I can live without the pounding of salsa from my neighbours’ apartment, the shouting in Spanish at three in the morning, the bantams crowing at dawn on the neighbouring roof. This year has been so difficult, and once again I’ve found myself wandering in my head, a fish out of water in the city I want to see as home. Everything changed. It started to become difficult to get out of bed in the mornings. The gloss turned d
ull; the excitement drained away. My usual bottle of California red and tostones at the Dominican bodega in the Bowery suddenly cost twice what I used to pay. Rising rents, Pepe the owner explained. Is all about the gentrification these days. They don’t care about no neighbourhood no more. All about the money. Man, they forcing us out soon. Isaac had wanted me to move further uptown, closer to NYU, closer to him, but after so much time in the East Village I wanted to stay, put down roots, be at home. Have somewhere to call my own. Even amid the clamour, the noise, the vortex of New York, I’ve sought out a sense of place, of belonging. It has never been quite within my grasp, but I’ve reached for it, and kept on reaching. Until everything fell apart, I was getting there. My sooty corner of the East Village, with its tricky layout of one-way streets and cul-de-sacs, where I no longer get lost. It may be still shabby, but it’s mostly residential, and I have finally started to settle, for the first time in my life. Tony, the Chinese mailman, knows my name. I am on nodding terms with the woman who runs the bagel place across the street from my building. The Australian barista knows I like my espressos double, long and hot. It takes time, all of it. I’ve invested my time, and for what?
My mother’s voice doesn’t help. Even in death, I hear her. She barely needs to speak: just one lift of an eyebrow, one brief flare of her nostrils, and I am put in my place. I could cover my ears, tell her to leave me alone, but it wouldn’t work. It never has.
A shadow blocks the light from my face. I shade my eyes and look up. Maude stands over me.