Notes from a Coma

by Mike McCormack

  “There’s sugar and milk on the table,” he said, handing me the mug. “No biscuits or cake, there’s no sweet tooth in this house.”

  “People are asking for you, JJ,” I said, stirring in the milk. “People are worried. How are you?”

  “Don’t start,” he countered. “I’m never going back. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Never say never, JJ. You’ve had a hard time but never say never. It’s a big decision.”

  “I didn’t make any decision,” he said. “It’s just the way it is.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  The nine o’clock news came on the telly. JJ didn’t turn up the sound.

  “I used to be a news junkie,” he said after a while. “First thing every morning I’d switch on two radios and the television—it used to drive himself daft. The paper as well before I went to school, it was as if I couldn’t fix myself in the world without knowing what was going on in it. At night I used to sit up looking at the twenty-four-hour news channels, CNN, Sky, the whole lot. But now I don’t get a paper or listen to any news. None of it makes sense any more. A revolution in my bedroom is a coup d’état when I reach the kitchen. One nation’s campaign against terrorism is another’s war of liberation. One analyst’s market downturn is another’s necessary correction and so on … Now I come into this room at night and switch on the encrypted channels and sit looking at the blank screen till I fall asleep. Sometimes I tune into the pay-per-view porn. That’s how much sense it all makes to me now; nothing but snow on the screen and voices circling, preparing to fuck each other. Everything I thought I ever knew amounts to the same pile of shite. I know nothing any more. Everything I’ve read, all my ideas, the same pile of shite.”

  I’d often been left gasping in the wake of JJ’s thinking but right then I felt he’d set new levels of incomprehension for me. Not for the first time I struggled to get a grasp.

  “I’m flummoxed. How does all this tie into you not going back to school?”

  “I’m starting work Monday,” he said. “Seamus Mac has a lot of work on and he’s short of hands.”

  “You mean the holiday homes.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re wasting your time. You should be back at school getting your head down. Owen would want you back, you know that.”

  “Owen would want to be alive,” JJ said shortly. “That’s what Owen would want.”

  “JJ, the loss of a friend is no small thing, everyone knows that, everyone sympathises. I’m not going to tell you I know how you feel but I am going to tell you that anger and confusion are common reactions. You’re not the only one to lose a friend, you won’t be the last.”

  He was looking at me like I’d come out with some rare idiocy. For all his brains there was never any arrogance in JJ. He was too impatient for that, too ready to believe he could learn from anyone, from any situation. That was one of the reasons he never pissed anyone off. Annoyed them, yes, but never pissed them off—there’s a big difference. In any debate or argument he’d listen to what you had to say and hear you out. Only then would he dismantle your argument and in as gentle a way as possible. But right then he was looking at me like I was a rare idiot and I knew that little and all as I’d said I’d said too much. It was time to go; I wasn’t going to make any more headway with him.

  “Your mind is made up so. You’re starting when?”

  “Monday morning, I’ll be glad to start something new. A change is as good as a rest as they say.”

  “I wish you luck. So does everyone else.”

  He showed me to the door and put on the light in the backyard. I swung round the car and wound down the window.

  “Remember, if you think of changing your mind …”

  “… I’d have changed it long ago. Goodnight.”

  I wasn’t too upset coming away from that visit—I thought there was some hope. The way I saw it JJ would spend the year labouring with Seamus McNally, up at the crack of dawn grafting away in the cold and rain. I couldn’t see him sticking it, he’d be well sick of it after a year. He’d start missing his friends and his books and at the end of the year he’d come back and put his head down. Maybe he was right, a full year labouring, good physical work, might do him all the good in the world. Maybe it was just what he needed.

  But I was wrong and not for the first time either. JJ didn’t miss his friends or his books. And he didn’t sicken of the work either …

  * As if feeling short-changed by the media images and hard-copy representations, the subjects have now become part of the nation’s dreamscape. More than one person has reported them drifting in on their REMs, turning up in those twitchy moments between sleep and wakefulness when we are especially vulnerable. Case histories paint similar scenarios: they come en masse, they are in this together, well-mannered guests careful not to abuse their hosts’ hospitality. But there is an anxiety about them, something imploring in the way they just stand there. It is as if they want to tell us something but are unable to cross the divide between potentiality and action. And while it would be easy to put words in their mouths we should be mindful that, coming as they do from the realm of the undead, their providential message is likely to be pitched at a frequency beyond our hearing and more likely than not in a language we’ve never had a primer for.

  † These screens and monitors, these imaging technologies and recursive information loops—what’s aspired to here is a God’s-eye view of the phenomena, from within and without, with all space-time dimensions comprehended in its view. Cupped in this hold, past, present and future, with all their shadings, have vectored here from all angles, stressing the ongoing present beyond its narrow linearity. The present perfect continuous is unable to encompass the exact parameters of the phenomena. What’s needed here, among other things, is a new tense.

  ANTHONY O’MALLEY

  He wasted those two years after Owen’s death. Going off working like that, drinking himself stupid; he just turned in on himself and gave up on everything. If you ask me JJ’s coma began the day after Owen died, over three years ago now, not three months as everyone thinks.

  He started working for Seamus Mac sometime that October. Seamus had the contract for those holiday homes you see now below the town and he took JJ on as a labourer, navvying, the usual pick-and-shovel stuff. It killed me to see JJ doing that kind of work, all that ability going to waste. Anyone who’s done their share of that graft knows how hard and thankless it is; out all day in wet and cold, coming home at night bone tired and covered in muck, barely able to put a bite to eat on for yourself. There’s a lot of talk about the dignity of the working man but I’ll bet no one with JJ’s brains would have chosen to do what he did if they had the option.

  I’d have the dinner ready for him when he came home in the evening. He’d sit there at the head of the table where you’re sitting now in his socks and working clothes, barely able to lift the fork to his mouth he’d be that tired. In the first months of that job there was a real push on; half the houses had been sold off the plans and the tenants were due to move in the following Easter. Seamus’s men were working long hours, ten hours a day, six days a week and in the beginning JJ wasn’t fit for it—tending two block layers, he just wasn’t strong enough. Sometimes he’d fall asleep at that table and many’s a time I threw a blanket over him there on that chair beside the range. That’s all he did those first few months, work and sleep and eat once in a while. He started to lose weight after a few weeks and his clothes began looking like they were a couple of sizes too big for him. I was worried about him, afraid his health was going to break down. But he got used to it, he got stronger, and as Seamus said to me himself he was as good a worker as ever he’d come across. Seamus thought a lot of him; he even tried to fix him up with an apprenticeship. He wanted JJ to take out his papers and serve time as an electrician or a plumber but JJ wouldn’t hear of it, he preferred the graft, working away without thinking. I was glad JJ turned him down. Seamus meant well but I was a happ
y man when JJ said no. The last thing I wanted was JJ tying himself into a four-year apprenticeship; I still had hopes that he’d give up the work and go back to his books.

  We tried to make the best of that first Christmas, the two of us. Myself and himself went out for a few pints a few nights but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Just to see him standing there in the crowd, looking off into the distance, you could see the loneliness in him. He left Thornton’s New Year’s Night shortly after the new year was rung in. When I got home sometime around two o’clock the house was in darkness. I thought he was asleep but when I went down the hall I heard him crying in his room. I left him to it; what could I say? He was glad when the Christmas was over and he was going back to work. And to tell the truth so was I.

  You have to remember JJ lost more than a friend when Owen died. He lost his second family as well and the nearest thing he’s ever had to a mother. No one ever thinks of that, no one really has an idea of just how much he lost. Things were never the same between himself and Maureen after Owen died. How could they be? Not that she blamed him for it or anything, not in so many words anyway, but there was an uneasiness between them which has never been talked through. I know Maureen feels the loss—not just the loss of her son but the loss of everything he brought with him into her life. And one of the things he brought with him was JJ. He was in their house every other day, he’d been there almost every day since his first day in this village. And sure when he was growing up he would walk in and out of the house and sit into the table like it was his own. But that all ended when Owen died. It was just too awkward, both for JJ and for Maureen. It was Frank who told me all this. Not a day goes by he said but Maureen goes over to the grave and speaks to Owen. And every day she sees JJ passing up the road on his way to and from work. Can you imagine how that must make her feel, that reminder going by her window day after day? It’s no wonder you can’t get her to talk about any of this. Frank says she’ll hardly talk to himself much less a stranger like yourself. And I could be wrong but I don’t think JJ has stood on the floor of that house since the day he gave her the news. What would he have to say to her, what words would he use? Frank is different though, always has been. It’s not that he doesn’t have his feelings or his loneliness but he’s one of the few people who doesn’t believe that JJ was in some way responsible for what happened. He said to me once, Anthony, he said, these things happen, they’re laid out for us and there is not a damn thing you or I or anyone else can do about them. It doesn’t make it easier or better but that’s the way it is. We have to get on with it, you and me and Maureen and JJ. We have to get on with it and make the best of it. I told that to JJ one evening after he came in from work.

  “Was he over?” He was sitting at the table in his socks, still in his working clothes.

  “He helped me pen up those few cattle. I’m shipping them off tomorrow morning. He was asking for you, he hasn’t seen you in a while.”

  “Did he say how Maureen was?”

  “She’s very lonely, she found Christmas very hard. They’re glad it’s over, they’re both glad.”

  “I met her last week; she was coming out of Durkan’s. I hadn’t seen her in months. We stood in the doorway looking at each other and we didn’t have a word to say between us. It was hard.”

  “No word at all?”

  “We spoke for a few minutes, the weather and whatnot. Then we ran out of words and she started to cry. She told me to look after myself and moved off.”

  “That was something.”

  “I didn’t expect it. I just stood there watching her walk away and I didn’t have a thing to say to her.”

  “She knows how you feel.”

  “She knows more than me so.”

  “That’s too deep for me, JJ. All I know is that if anyone understands it’s Maureen Lally. You were lucky to have her in your life.”

  “That’s not what I am saying.”

  “You should visit her.”

  “I’d like to but I don’t know.” He pushed his empty plate into the center of the table. It always made me feel better to see him eating.

  “How is the work going?”

  “Not too bad, I don’t feel it so much now.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “We’re not going to go into this again, are we?”

  “Would there be any point?”

  “No point at all.”

  “Those houses should be ready soon; Easter is coming in late this year. How many of them are rented out?”

  “Six of them, most of them have been rented out since they were chalk marks on the ground.”

  “The last time I was down there they looked a long way from finished. No paving or kerbing or anything.”

  “That’ll be the last to go in. They’ll landscape it around the end of March. The first tenants will be here in the first weeks of April.”

  You see, in spite of what people think we got on well together. JJ wasn’t always difficult. Sometimes talking to him like that it used to stop me in my tracks to think that this young man sitting opposite me was my son. Often I’d find myself thinking back to those years I spent working in London, working and drinking and having the craic but never with any serious prospects of settling down with a woman or having a family. Then I’d look across at JJ and see how he’d turned out, what a fine young fella he’d grown into and I could hardly believe it. I’d say people find it hard to believe that moments like this ever took place between us. It’s not the kind of thing you see written in the papers. All that nonsense about him being confused and guilt-ridden—that’s only half the story and I suppose it’s the half people want to read about. But it’s not the full story and don’t go thinking it is. There’s a lot more to JJ than anyone has ever come near. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk about him, to show this other side of him. People know one side of him, or think they do, but this is the side I knew.*

  * No less here than there but like the Divine equally present everywhere, the subjects have now taken their place in the weak polytheism of contemporary celebrity. However, empty of all significance and contingent on silence and mindlessness, their fame is of an unusually pure sort. Lying beyond sin and atonement theirs is the apotheosis, the end refinement of that condition which is famous for being famous.

  SARAH NEVIN

  That old cliché, time passes so quickly. It was hard to believe two whole years had gone by since Owen’s death. One minute you’re standing over an open grave with a wreath in your hand, the next you’re two years older and walking into an anniversary mass.

  Normally there wouldn’t be that many at morning mass in the middle of the week but people had remembered so there was about thirty or forty people in the church when we got there—a good crowd. JJ and I took our place near the back and just as we were sitting down Anthony came in and sat a few seats up from us. Owen’s mother and father were over on the left. When the priest came out he said a few words and then offered up the mass for the memory of Owen Lally. That’s when it happened. JJ told me when he heard those words—the memory of Owen Lally—it felt as if someone had reached in and pulled out his spine. The pain, he said, the sense of himself collapsing. It was the strangest thing, I actually felt him collapse beside me like some big stringed instrument coming undone. He leaned out over the seat in front of him, bracing himself with both hands, as pale as a sheet and breathing like he’d sprinted all the way from the house. He straightened up and pushed past me into the aisle.

  Outside in the church grounds he lay over the wall and got sick, puking and puking and sobbing as he puked. I stood over him holding his shoulders, urging him to get it all up whatever it was. When he stopped puking he hunkered down beside the wall with his hand over his mouth. He was green in the face and shivering.

  Old Jimmy McNeely came across to us. He put his hand on the wall.

  “Is that lad all right, Soracha?”

  “Jimmy. Yes, I think, just a bit off colour.”

&n
bsp; JJ stood up and drew his sleeve across his forehead. “I’m freezing,” he said. “Hello, Jimmy.”

  “How’re you feeling, JJ? You want to get that lad home to his bed, Soracha. I’ve seen ghosts with more colour than that.”

  “You’re late, Jimmy; the priest is on the altar.”

  Jimmy laughed. “It makes no odds at my age. Can you manage, Soracha?”

  “Thanks, Jimmy, I’m going to take him home.”

  I drove to our house and put him sitting at the table. JJ was still shivering in the heat of the kitchen and he needed both hands to bring the mug of tea to his mouth.

  “You don’t look good.”

  “I don’t feel good; can I use your bed?”

  He slept about an hour and when I went in to see him he was sitting up pulling on his T-shirt. Some of the colour had returned to his face.

  “Lie in for a while, I’m still tired.’*

  He reached up and drew me down to his chest, put his arm around me and his hand up behind my head. That was always his way of holding me. It was a long time before he spoke.

  “That man must be over eighty years old.”

  “Who?”

  “Jimmy, Jimmy McNeely. You wouldn’t think it to look at him. Eighty years old and he still cycles into town for his plug of tobacco and few pints.”

  “He’s such a gentle soul. A pint of your finest red beer, Soracha, and a small Jameson. That’s what he says whenever he comes in. Sits at the end of the bar and when he starts singing ‘Paddies Green Shamrock Shore’ you know then he’s had enough.”

  “He told me once that he’s cycled all the way to the moon and back. Forty years as a postman in this parish. Thirty-seven miles a day fifty weeks of the year. All the way to the moon and back as the crow flies he reckoned.”

  He was quiet for a long while and then he turned on his back.

  “I never knew he was dead, Sarah. A full two years and I never knew. Can you believe that? How could I be so clueless, so stupid. If anyone had asked me I would have said yes, Owen is dead, my best friend, my brother, is dead and he’s never coming back, I know that. But I didn’t know it, Sarah, I didn’t really know. It was only when the priest said those words, the memory of Owen Lally, that’s when I knew. The memory of Owen Lally.”