My Buried Life

by Doreen Finn

  The morning is warm as I walk. I pick up the first chestnut of the new season. It is shiny and new and I stuff it into my bag. Leaves are gathering along the footpaths, waiting to be scattered by children and crunched underfoot. If I were still writing I would love this day. New York in autumn is the best place to be. Manhattan empties itself of summer tourists, the chill on the morning air is a sharp sting after the sullen heat of August, and every photographer, painter and writer in the city is out trying to capture the colours, the scents, the flavours of the new season. I have all the words in my head, it’s getting them down on paper that is the problem. I can compose poetry in my mind, twisting cadences and blank verse into double helices, winding metaphors into knots, but once I try to pin the phrases down in ink, they vanish.

  I’m afraid even to pick up my pen.

  The school is quiet, a rushed sort of silence that descends after the maelstrom of morning break. The door swings shut behind me. I almost expect to see mice scuttling across the worn maple floor, tiny feet sounding cacophonous in the empty silence. Nothing. A statue of Mary takes centre stage in the entrance hall, her hand raised. All the fingers are missing. Beside her, Jesus has two fingers remaining on his hand, a peace sign for all who pass by. Charts for match fixtures, chess club results and league tables for every kind of sport are pinned to the walls. Science competition results, woodwork contest rules. And the names! All the names, all those Daniels and Stephens, the Pauls and the Peters, spilling off the lists on the walls, filling the corridors with testosterone and the barely contained noise that I know pulses behind the closed classroom doors. The maleness of the establishment threatens to explode the building at its seams.

  Mr Collins is seated behind his desk. If the school is male, he is its alpha. His own trophies line row after row of shelving, framed newspaper clippings jostle each other for space on the crowded walls, and a heavily autographed rugby ball resides in a glass case behind his head. I squint to read it, but I have no sporting references whatsoever, so I give up before I’ve made out one name. I imagine the man in a tight scrum in a bar, downing post-match pints and ruminating on points missed, bad referees, someone’s hamstring injury.

  We talk inconsequentially about New York, the weather, Ireland’s chances in the rugby this season. I lie sincerely and convincingly, keeping my appalling ignorance of sport hidden from view. When we eventually meander into talk of the job, Mr Collins pushes his sleeves back and leans towards me.

  ‘It’s only till Christmas, but at this stage I’d hire anyone. Those bloody parents are killing me.’ The same parents he stands with on sidelines, no doubt.

  I slide my CV across the desk towards him. He waves his hand in its general direction but does not open it. His glance falls briefly on the cover page but returns to me immediately. A mug at his elbow has ‘The Boss’ picked out in red letters. A plate bears traces of biscuits recently consumed.

  ‘So?’ Mr Collins’ expectation is almost luminous. His sleeves are like skins, keeping his sausage arms restrained. His neck is squeezed by his shirt collar. Never trust a man whose neck is wider than his head, my brother used to say.

  I rest my hands on my lap. ‘Why not?’ Why not indeed. I need money, I must be occupied to keep me away from drinking, I must move forward. It’s only till Christmas. Possibility lifts its head, expands inside my chest.

  ‘Excellent, Eva. Excellent. I’m delighted to have you on the team.’ He winks. ‘The lads’ll be delighted too.’ He half-rises from his desk and extends his sporty hand. We shake. I am compelled to smile at him. He is so very sincere in his need.

  I will start on Monday. Three days to gather myself. Three days. It’s nothing. I must not be nervous. It’s nothing that I can’t do, guide boys through Jane Austen and Shakespeare.

  As I turn to close the office door behind me, Mr Collins calls my name. I turn.

  ‘Do we address you as Doctor Perry?’

  I laugh.

  ‘I’m serious. This is important stuff.’ He coughs. ‘And the parents love it. Keeps them in their place, if you know what I mean. Less likely to complain.’

  ‘There’s no need.’ It’s one thing in the university, among the undergraduates, but here in Dublin it feels, I don’t know, fake, forced. I can only imagine the eye-rolling among the other teachers, the knowing looks as the biscuits are handed around.

  ‘Right so. See you on Monday.’

  I make it out of the building just before the bell rings and the school heaves with noise and a further surge of testosterone. Outside, the sunlight on the rugby pitch softens and grows warmer. I wonder about my decision to take this job, to stay in the place I left. It doesn’t have to be New York that claims me. Plenty of good universities in other cities would do. But something tugs at me, some desire to uncover stones left buried for too long. I walk away.

  CHAPTER 8

  So I am ‘Doctor Perry’ in school. I don’t know, maybe it gives him something to boast about, a name to drop among the ranks of the ordinary teachers. That sort of thing divides people, but I don’t care. I’m not out for friends or a place to fall into.

  My mother knew what she was doing. I can’t be in the house without an income, and she knew I’d have to work, which would keep me here. It’s as though I’ve simply inherited her life, living in the house of shadows, the place I ran from. I feel small and mean when I think of leaving Maude on her own eventually, but I feel the creeping dread of old at the prospect of Dublin for the rest of my life. Whatever good may have happened here in my absence has evaporated. I’m tired of the bad news, all the closures, the depressing statistics, the IMF moving in, taking over. The ballooning politicians’ pay. Cuts in all the important sectors. What a mess.

  Damn Isaac. I miss New York. If I told anyone how much I longed for the place they’d say I was crazy. How can you miss such a city, they would ask. A labyrinth of lost souls, so much poison and fury, noise and sorrow twisted into a giant clanging mass of upheaval. Yet if I close my eyes for one second too long I can hear its sound, a frenzied mix of Spanish and hard-edged jazz, of steam hissing from a manhole and the subway juddering to a halt deep beneath the city streets. What I love about New York most of all is that it’s mine. My mother has no association with it, or my brother. I walked its streets without ever seeing something that Andrew had touched, liked, commented upon. Dublin is full of him, even though he disappeared from life long before he died.

  The first time he tried to leave us was the biggest shock. After that it seemed that we just waited, suspended in the brine of our own disbelief, for the time when it happened for real. That first attempt was when he was 16. Sleeping pills and a bottle of vodka that he took to bed. Very rock ’n’ roll. He had already read of all the famous suicides, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Ian Curtis, so many others, and he decided to join them, add his name to the infamy. He hadn’t expected a stomach pump and two months in hospital during his dreams of obliteration. There is no mercy in the unsuccessful leap towards death, no fingers to stroke your skin and assure you that all will work out fine. What’s left is a gaping chasm where oblivion should have been, the cold faces of judgement surrounding the bed, the next world missing a new soul.

  The second time, I was away, on a school trip that I hadn’t even wanted to go on. Maude had persuaded me to go, insisting it would be good for me. Halfway through the second day my mother rang the hostel, her panic electric down the phone line. I raced home, the provincial bus service taking ten times longer that it should have. Andrew was in hospital, his wrists bandaged, medication keeping him in some kind of otherworld. After that he started to back away from us. No joy at being Lazarus, back from the dead. Piece by tiny piece, I watched him slip away from me. I couldn’t stop him. It was as though my hands had turned to netting and he simply slipped through the spaces. I touched his face, but he couldn’t feel me. I called his name, but he rarely heard. He stayed
in bed all day, or in the armchair in the front room, the one by the window, just looking out at the main road. He barely ate, unless it was placed in front of him. My mother hovered constantly, like a fly I wanted to swat away. Her nervousness drove me mad. We competed for Andrew’s attention, but all his focus was on the road outside, on the rain that smacked off the windows, the cars that edged along the busy street, the glare blinding us on warm days.

  I envied other people, the girls in my school, even the teachers. I coveted their ease, their normal families, the way they could go home in the evenings and slip into that other life. I dreaded going home, back to that house of shadows, my brother already a corpse, my mother a wittering wreck. I tried to stay on in school each day for as long as I could, participating in supervised study, the book club, the school magazine, anything that kept me out and absorbed, and prevented me from being drawn like a magnet to the chair by the living room window.

  It dragged on for over a year. My brother lost himself in that chair at that window. He looked like something left out in the sun for too long, faded, all his colour evaporated. There was little to hint at his former self, that bright, beautiful boy, athlete, guitarist, artist. He took his pills dutifully, and was polite to the counsellor he visited once a week. As the year progressed, the visits fell away. He seemed to possess neither the energy nor the interest to keep going. I knew it. We all knew it. He had lost hope. He stopped his banter with me, began to look at me through eyes that were opaque with an exhaustion I could not name. Our old childish references slid by him. He no longer wanted to read my poems, let alone critique them. This pallid, limp creature had replaced my gorgeous brother, and he inhabited the land of thwarted death, all the while plotting his next attempt.

  I, in turn, stopped trying with him. I left him in his chair, drowning in the black airlessness of his mind. I took up running after my school activities, one more thing to keep me away from that shuttered house. I spent most of my time at home in my room, honing my poems, typing them up on Maude’s heavy old Olivetti, each line pushing me a step further from the madness among which I lived.

  The school is fine. I think I’m actually enjoying it. The boys are so young, so bewildered almost, that I’m amused by them. The older ones think they’re men, but despite their shaven cheeks and the swagger most of them carry around with them, their boyishness, their downright youth, shines through. I have to teach them literature, help them unravel the beauty of language. I may as well absent myself from the room for all the attention most of them pay me. They’re too focused on their exams, on what might come up on the papers. I try to steer them from such a bleak endpoint, but it doesn’t work. It’s so different from my lectureship in the university. American students demand more from their education than Irish ones seem to do, or maybe it’s just that they’re older than these children I observe crashing through lines of poetry, flailing around novels that they should be able to dismantle in one reading. There’s so little focus demanded of them, just rote regurgitation of pre-learned notes. They’re just kids. I want more for them.

  It was the same when I was at university. Anything was deemed acceptable once some effort was made. I’d never survive if I were to do this for a long time. I listen to them, to their manly voices, picking their way through Austen, through Montague, butchering beauty with their mid-Atlantic drawls and imported American grammar.

  Andrew read poetry, deciphered its mysteries, wrote music. He demanded something out of life, was never a passive recipient, not until his illness leached away his spirit. He fades sometimes in my mind and I can’t see him clearly. I see a curl of brown hair, a hint of a smile, the thumbprint bruises under his eyes when his insomnia kept him wandering at night. But it’s become difficult to see him properly as he flits in and out of memory, his shadow falling across my eyes. I try to see past it, but it’s almost as though he deliberately stays just out of reach, a silhouette on the grass. Move on, Eva, I know he’d say if he could. But I can’t. I am at home in the darkness.

  School at least keeps me focused, stops my hands from reaching for the sticky contents of the drinks tray in the front room. I would hate for anyone in the staff room to notice the smell of booze on me. Ireland, despite its legacy of alcoholism and its legendary relationship with drink, is still not a place where addictions are freely discussed. Americans announce their habits with shocking candour, dissect their recovery with an honesty that I cannot share, only envy. And so in spite of my students’ lack of obvious enthusiasm for English literature they keep me busy, and the fear of being found out is enough to stop me from drinking too much, on weeknights at least.

  On my third morning a boy staggers across my path as I navigate my way through the corridors. Break time is over and the hallways are jammed with boys jostling each other, tripping each other up, throwing things. I drop my bag of books onto a chair outside a classroom.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I recognise the boy, a third year. A messer. Zippy, one of the teachers calls him. Zip the lip, Zippy. Something like that. There’s a Zippy in every class in every school.

  I search for an adult among the moving ocean of grey uniforms. My hand rests on the boy’s shoulder. Something, a sound from him, stops me. I peer at him. ‘Are you sick?’

  Someone nudges me in the back. ‘Nah, miss, he’s just looking for the doctor.’

  The boy laughs and high-fives his friend, who disappears into the throng. I stand, shoulder my bag, straighten my skirt. ‘Go to class, Zippy,’ I say, wishing immediately that I had a long list of witty putdowns for moments such as this.

  ‘Here, what did you call me?’ Affronted now, his humour fades.

  A yelp of laughter from behind me. ‘Zippy, she got you.’ A slap to his back. ‘Scarlet!’

  Mostly I avoid the staff room, with its green walls, designated work spaces and lack of welcome. Maybe the Doctor in my title has made the staff suspicious of me. Possibly they envisage my conquering the place, capturing their tenure, slaying them. I don’t really care. Jim Collins invariably greets me with smiles and comments on the week’s sports. I nod my agreement, thankful never to be asked for reciprocation.

  ‘Great game last night, Eva! Were you watching?’

  I murmur that I was, sadly, busy.

  ‘You missed a good one. They were on top form. The pack really did us proud, but when the last try was converted, well, I nearly met my maker.’ Jim rubs his hands together, thrilled at the prospect of his life ending on such a high note. ‘My poor wife was convinced they’d be stretchering me out. Great game. Great game.’

  I vow to find out what a try is.

  As I leave school at the end of my second week, a car hoots then slows alongside me. One of the teachers calls out from the driver’s seat.

  ‘Hey, it’s Eva, right?’

  I adjust the bag on my shoulder. The car stops, forcing me to stop too.

  ‘Adam.’ He jerks a thumb at his chest. ‘History and English. We share some classes.’

  A road digger starts up at that moment and the rest of his words are drowned. He keeps talking, however. I observe his mouth. He’s asking me to join some of them for a drink. I shake my head. I have things to do. The library, a bookshop farther up Rathmines, some groceries to buy. No drinking this early. At least, not in company.

  ‘Come on, it’s only for a quick one.’

  Two boys on bikes shout at Adam as they pass. He honks the horn in reply.

  ‘I’m sorry, not today.’

  ‘Oh go on. we won’t eat you!’

  ‘Another day I will, I just can’t today.’

  Adam’s car is ancient, a Merc, all dents and patches of rust. Adam is someone I could have found attractive in another lifetime. Reddish hair, quite long for such a conservative school, hazel eyes, black frames to his glasses. Face still tawny from the warm summer. His clothes are a study in academic chic.

&nbs
p; He catches me looking the car over. ‘Runs on vegetable oil.’ He pats the steering wheel as though it were alive, an overachieving child making its father proud. ‘You’ll have to come out in it with me. Quietest engine ever.’ He pauses to shout at another coterie of boys, then turns back to me. ‘Well, if you change your mind you know where we’ll be.’

  If he had suggested coffee, I would have said yes, and would have quite enjoyed the company of my temporary colleagues, but I cannot sit in a pub with strangers surrounded by the fizz and clink of booze splashing over ice, unable to drink everything around me. My mouth burns for a drink, but it will be a solitary one, later. I dig my nails into my palms, a trick taught to me by my first sponsor to stifle the urge. For now, at least, it works. ‘Another time, okay?’ I smile at him. He is so very attractive.

  Adam waves out the window at me and drives off. I duck down a back street so he can’t pass me again. The digger resumes its destruction of the concrete, the dust it throws up making me cough. A siren out on the main road splits the afternoon in two. For a second I think I see my brother running, just another boy in grey school clothes, running and laughing. But it’s a trick of the light, this autumnal sunshine that inexplicably has appeared almost every day. And Andrew hasn’t been a boy in a uniform for many years.

  There is solace in the hush of the bookshop, the sweep of pages, the wash of ink. The smell of paper hangs on the quiet air. Picking up two books I want to read, I meander to the poetry section. I still check to see if my own books are available. They rarely are; the print runs ended, and because I failed to produce anything else my publisher just let me go. On occasion I’ve been known to search online for copies, and usually someone is selling, but the price of one penny isn’t good for my ego, and they hardly ever go for more than that.