by Doreen Finn
It feels like I’m emerging from hibernation, a tunnel that has taken an eternity to crawl out of. The light is still too bright for me after all that time underground, but I’ll get used to it eventually. At least I can dig my way out of the buried life. Unlike my brother, who had to leave the world in order to be free. Unlike my mother, who constructed a wall of anger that no one scaled. Unlike my father, who jumped ship and swam to another shore. My soul requires work, but at least I still possess it.
I honk at a woman applying mascara in the car in front of me, holding me up. She gives me the fingers before putting her car in gear and driving on. For all the difference it makes. Five minutes later, another bypassed town, another thousand cars and trucks trying to exit and enter the slip roads. I give up.
A Brazilian girl, all big hair and polished skin, brings me my coffee and sandwich. The small pub is empty, except for the daily clientele of about four men, who probably squander all their days here, checking the horse racing results and making their pints last for hours. Widowers, or bachelors, or maybe men whose wives had run away after they caught them engaged in illicit relations with the neighbouring farmer’s nephew.
A barman polishes glasses, and the Brazilian girl swipes at tabletops with her cloth. A radio plays bad country music, but at least the volume is low.
The girl is in Ireland to work. She stayed in Dublin for a month, hated it, then moved with her friend to the midlands. She loves it, she tells me in accented English. She wants to stay. The climate doesn’t bother her, she says with a graceful shrug. After a lifetime of the tropics and poverty, there is more to be experienced. She teaches samba in the community centre three nights a week, and already she’s booked out.
Samba in the Irish midlands. Motorways, supersized shopping malls, SUVs on every road, and now samba. What a change from my father’s youth, when all that was available was the land or the priesthood, Mass and the GAA at the weekends.
I feel very old and very weary. I’m only 37, but it’s like I’ve lived ten lifetimes. I wish I were more like Maria, the frizzy-haired beauty who still has enough faith in the universe to ignore the rain and the monotony of the flat land, to get excited about teaching Latin dancing to the rhythmless hordes. I can just about muster up the energy to teach literature.
I understand how people snap. The line is so fine, just silk really. My brother slicing his skin was just his way of saying enough. I could order a few whiskeys now, then get behind the wheel of the Mercedes and fall asleep. It would be harder in broad daylight, easier to do it in the quiet of night, with fewer people around to pull me from the oily wreckage, call for ambulances, do some mouth-to-mouth to get me moving.
I pay for the surprisingly good sandwich. Honestly, I expected a slice of orange cheese on cheap white bread, maybe a bit of ham for good measure, not the olive bread I’ve just consumed, with feta, tomatoes and tabouli. I drain my coffee cup and get back into the car.
It should only be a ninety-minute drive from Dublin to the farm; it feels like a drive across the outback. The original road, the one we took that night in the old Hillman Hunter, surely would have been quicker than this traffic-clogged Hades.
I check the map. Not too far now. Two more towns to bypass and then I’ll be there. I pass an unfinished housing estate just off the motorway. The signage proclaims it to be a place where dreams begin. Nightmares, more likely. The grey concrete, the land stripped of all greenery, the road leading nowhere. A ghost estate. A headache dislodges itself and begins to pulse. My nerves prickle. Dread pools in my stomach. I almost wish I’d brought someone with me, but whom could I have asked? Not Maude, not Adam. Not Sean, already settled into his Australian odyssey. My sad social circle. Regardless, I couldn’t have asked anyone. This is one of those journeys that must be made alone.
Finally, the motorway is behind me. I’m back on narrow roads, with verdant hedgerows dividing land, chestnut trees with buds just peeping into bloom. New lambs stagger on spindly legs in fields, beside the woolly contentment of their mothers. The sun skids in and out of cloud cover, the air clear and free of city pollution.
I surprise myself by knowing the farm when I get to it. The road is narrower than I remember, but it’s the same. The wide red metal gate for keeping the cows in the field is now black, and in better shape than it had been when I was a child. I recall picking the bubbling paint off it, digging up the rust with my fingernails, then spending ages washing my hands to get the smell of rust off my skin. That metallic taste. I can still feel it on my tongue.
The Mercedes barely fits in the driveway. Blackberry bushes scrape their limbs against the paintwork, the overgrown grass on a level with my eyes as I drive. Two thrushes fly out of the bush, their squawks of fright ringing loud in the empty country air. No one has disturbed this path for a long time.
Doubtless some developer must have investigated the house and land. Charles Bergin said the fields had been tilled until last year, but a thousand houses could have sprung up if the farmhouse had been bulldozed. They built everywhere else, why not here? I could sell it all, and never again have to worry about an income. No more academia. I could pack up and leave. Maude is safe and independent. With a bag on my back I’d be able to go wherever I want, stay as long or as little as I desire. I could keep running, as I’ve been doing since my brother died, and maybe if I stop thinking, even for a minute, I might just be able to forget it all. Reality has worn me out. One way has led me to another, and I’m further from the starting point than I’ve ever been, too far even to contemplate returning to zero, if I could even remember what that was.
I kill the engine outside the back door. We never used the front door, from what I recall. The old boot scraper is still there, smaller than in my memory, rusted down to a brittle skeleton. The chicken coop has rotted away, the wire netting oxidised, the wood almost gone. A crow flies out of the cowshed.
The silence is overpowering, deafening in the sounds that are no longer heard. The cows lowing, the hens fighting for grain, the hiss of the cats as they fought over mice, the crunch of gravel under work-heavy boots, all extinguished.
The car door groans when I open it. I palm the house key and step out into the hush of the early afternoon. The last time I crossed this gravel I’d been barefoot, sharp bits making me hop, my mother’s hand on my pyjamaed shoulder urging me into the car, her impatience gleaming, transparent in the late June night. Even then I’d aggravated her, my gaping need, her cold failure to fill it. But it was my brother’s need that eclipsed all else, and she hadn’t had the courage to face it. Far easier to dwell on me, cut off from my father. Impatience with a dispossessed child was an easier repository than the bewilderment of an unhappy boy, whose sadness, left unchecked, grew into the demon that swallowed him whole. His rage and self-abasement sneaked through his cells like the deadliest tumour, gaining momentum from the fear it evoked in others.
Simpler by far to focus on the soft target. That was my mother’s knack. That way at least she could be seen to be doing something.
The sky had darkened as I drove the last few miles. Rainclouds now meet and meld, obliterating the spring brilliance. A breeze whips my hair across my face. Dust blows up from the gravel. It mustn’t have rained in weeks. A half-inch of water reposes at the bottom of an ancient barrel near the back door.
The dithering has to stop. There is no reason to stay outside.
The key fits perfectly in the rusty lock. The door swings inwards with a creak that speaks of years of neglect, a longing for oil. Gathering my apprehension in a tight grip, I step inside.
CHAPTER 31
Like anything from childhood that hasn’t been visited in years, reality never matches the memory of things. As a small child, my experience of the world beyond home had been limited. The farm was infinite, the fields stretching to disappearing point on the horizon. The house, with its stone floors and big rooms, had pro
vided untold space for my brother and me to run around in, play our imaginary games on the grand stage they required, with no wish for a bigger house or more room in which to let our young lives unfold.
The house is small. Very small. Even in the murky light, not aided by the filthy kitchen windows, I can make out the proportions. Modest at best. I flick the light switch, but even if the electricity was turned on, the single bulb that hangs suspended from a frayed cord is long expired. Back outside, I knock the debris from the windowpanes as best I can, three decades of dirt, dust, moss, and whatever else travels the currents of air before coming to rest on a solid surface. I then retrieve the torch I’d had the foresight to bring with me. I’d had no idea what awaited me. Possibly a crumbling heap of bricks, or a burned-out shell. Vandals exist everywhere, not just in the marginalised suburban estates. Apathy finds willing hosts in every environment. I can’t believe the house hasn’t been burnt, or at least used by local teenagers for drinking cider and indulging their clumsy fumblings.
I make my way from the small square hall to the kitchen. The air sags under its heavy smell of decay. Rotting wood, damp stone, powdered plaster, mildewed fabric. In the fireplace a huge pile of twigs has gathered, the detritus of years of nest-building. Old feathers stick to the stone hearth, and two bird skeletons bare their bony breasts where the coal scuttle had been. Had they fallen, dead, into the room, or had they given up hope of ever escaping the cobwebbed gloom?
The muffled squawk of a crow sounds deep in the chimney, the only sound in the bruised silence.
So many years, but I remember some of it as it was. On the table an abandoned cup sits on its saucer. A cracked teapot with a matching jug keep it company. Dust and grime have smothered their pattern, but I can see that they are part of a set. A wedding present, most likely, from a kind well-wisher, a person who could never have dreamed of the turmoil that raged inside the small stone house. My parents’ wedding had been a small affair, my mother ashamed of her age and how long it had taken her to find a husband. The guest list had comprised Maude and her husband, girls from the office where my mother worked, and some neighbours from the townland. It had taken place on a Tuesday morning, and lunch had been served in a hotel. It was the first time my father had been in a hotel, and I imagine him, nervous and self-conscious in his new suit, running a finger inside his collar to loosen the shirt. Where had Peter been? Sulking while doing the milking, raking hay with all the ferocity of suppressed temper, pounding the narrow lanes, anything to keep him occupied? My mother had had no idea. Of course she hadn’t. She’d probably never imagined that such things between two men were possible.
I open the cupboards. Mice have obliterated anything that had been left, nibbled mounds of what must have been cardboard boxes into small heaps on the shelves. A glass jar with a label faded beyond legibility contains something fossilised, and two tins of cocoa, one without its lid, sit side by side. A spoon lies on the countertop beside a tea caddy. The kettle is on the stove.
My father had been about to make a cup of tea. He was alone. Then poof. He vanished. What had happened?
Had Peter arrived one evening after dinner, announcing that he was returning to the States? Sweating, good-looking, maybe with straw still in his blond hair. His hands washed clean of the day’s labours, but splashes of milk from the two cows still on his forearms. Fed by his aunt, probably a stew, followed by cups of tea and some soda bread.
Had the June evening still been bright, the sky not yet stained red by the imminent gloaming, shadows just beginning to lengthen, the day’s work done? Had my father just put the kettle on to boil for his nightly cup of tea, then stood at the window, watching the fields, his fields, stretch to the horizon, layered in every shade of green? Maybe he thought of Andrew and me, wondered what we were up to now that the school year had ended. Did he plan a visit to us, or want our mother to put us on the train to come and stay with him? Then maybe Peter came in the kitchen door, as every visitor to the farm did, interrupting the reel of thought. Without my mother present, Peter didn’t have to scrape his boots. The hens pecked at each other in the yard, their scratching noises puncturing the post-work hush.
Did Peter announce his departure? Say he could no longer suffer the claustrophobia of the two-cow farm and his unspeaking relatives? He was sure of who he was, what he was, even in those despair-edged days of repression and ignorance. He was leaving the following day, and my father could either go with him, begin again in a city that didn’t care who or what he loved, or he could stay, chained to the land he owned through an accident of birth rather than any real belief in it. So my father phoned my mother to tell her he was leaving, moving to New York with the person who loved him. She, glacial, informed him that as far as her children were concerned he was dead. He was dead to her regardless, and it would be easier for everyone if he simply expired. So he did. An unremembered illness, an unfound grave, a vague story. It was the perfect plot: simple, unfussy, totally believable.
What did my father know of Andrew and me? Had my mother replied to any of those monthly envelopes, telling him of my brother’s death, my disappearance into exile? Andrew’s death he must have known about, because he left the land to me alone. Did he learn about my books, my awards? As much as my mother didn’t want me, she desired even less that my father would have me. How difficult had it been for him to let us go, just to disappear into the dark with his suitcase of essentials and nothing tying him down? The house had been abandoned, the teacup unused, the spoon beside the caddy, the son and daughter grieving in their childish way for the father who chose death as his alibi.
Death is so easy, the cleanest of breaks. There’s no arguing with it, no bargaining or beguiling. It simply removes. Did my father come to believe in his own death eventually? Did he drop all the layers of his life as a father, like discarded garments that no longer fit? Like foolish movie stars believing in their own hype, did Tom Perry pause in his Manhattan life, maybe while chopping vegetables for dinner, or while dodging cars crossing the road, to reflect that the story he told himself about himself was not entirely true? Possibly he’d been relieved to get away, anything to put space between him and the children he’d let down. Did we haunt him, his forgotten children? When he slept, did we visit him in dreams, remind him? He replaced us, found people, work, to occupy the empty spaces in his head, but he must have circled back in unguarded moments, found himself in the chair by the hearth, me on his lap, unhappiness weighing his heart down like a stone. Deception is an easy thing to discard at first, but it never fully goes away. Over time, it grows in size and importance, blanking out whatever gains were made by it in the first place. I don’t like to think of my father pretending to be someone other than himself. We were out there, Andrew and I, his children, one of us wanting to forget and be happy, the other wanting to be dead. Andrew got his wish, but I kept on. I suppose I believed that things would turn out all right in the end, even if the end took a damn long time coming. If I hadn’t believed it, who knows? Maybe I’d have joined my brother. The thing is, my father was who he was, but he ran from it. Running runs through my veins, just another part of my botched DNA. I find myself wishing again that he’d stayed. Even though it was Ireland, even though it was the horrible eighties and no one understood anything, we could have got through it. He was our father. He should have stayed. No use wishing that now, of course, and I’m not going to waste another minute regretting things that cannot be changed. But if he could have known how much we missed him, how much we needed him, maybe he would have changed his mind.
The cracked windowpane rattles in the rotten wooden frame. A mouse scratches behind a cupboard door. The whole place has a subterranean feel to it. Dark. Damp. Just being there makes me shaky and slightly sick. I want a drink.
In the living room, the ancient couch has sunk in on itself. Stuffing spills from gaps chewed through by mice, the fabric decayed and stinking. My father left without the old suit
case record player, but not without his records, his modest collection of jazz and big band. I lift the lid of the record player. It is perfect inside, protected from thirty-three years of damp and neglect by its case. I touch the three settings, the volume control, even the needle. This could fetch quite a bit of money on an internet auction. Everyone seeks out retro now, some bit of nostalgia to balance the rampant greed of modern life. The television can go too, the old black-and-white with its two channels and the dial that clicked when we turned it. The two-pronged antenna still squats on top. It was Andrew’s job to manoeuvre them when bad reception ruined the cartoons on Saturday mornings. Two photographs, faded now, are propped behind my grandmother’s clock on the mantelpiece. One is of my father’s parents on their wedding day, my grandmother seated, wearing a hat, my grandfather frowning behind her, his hand stiffly on her shoulder, their sepia world better preserved than the one taken on what must have been my christening, my father holding me outside the church, my mother looking away, Andrew’s eyes screwed up against the brightness. What photo did he pack of us?
Sadness gathers and collects in distant parts of me. No one forgets children, or replaces them. I must be kinder about my father. Regardless of what he did, what choices he made, leaving children is an impossible option. No one wins. I don’t want to think of him, childless, and so far away, wondering if we thought of him, grieved for him, loved him. The sadness is heavy, and it pulls at me, draws me again to think of him as I have always thought of him. Sweet, gentle, kind. He was such a good man.