The next day they drove back across the city to the cemetery. Matt put his hands in his pockets and circled the grave and looked up at the sky. She tossed little pools of rainwater from the flower wrappings. As they walked away she put her arm through his. The next day he would not go back with her. She pleaded with him. She began to visit alone. She could scarcely conceive of Charlie down there, and when she did she grew afraid. She forced her mind onto other things—the clouds racing across the sky above her, the smooth round stones on the beach near her childhood home, her parents eating breakfast at their kitchen table that morning.
One evening, a few weeks later, Matt came into the kitchen. Her mother and sister had just left and she was standing at the sink washing mugs.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She turned and looked at him. ‘I just want us to go over there together sometimes. Is that too much to ask?’
‘No. I mean, I’m sorry it happened. I’m sorry I let go of his hand.’
She turned back to the sink. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
A huge bubble formed on the shoulder of her thumb. The face reflected in it was large and distorted. Before it bursts, she thought, he will have left the kitchen.
‘It was both our faults,’ she said then. ‘We never should have had him. I always knew something like this would happen.’
Slowly, with time, people told her, they would recover. Yes, she thought. Matt would come in some evening and she would look up from her book and he would tell her a story from work, and for a few minutes they would return to what they had once been, before he existed. They would not say much at first but by degrees they would start to mention his name. They would survive.
‘They should have gone out there to bring him home,’ David said. ‘If he were my brother, I’d have gone.’ He sat on the couch beside her and switched TV channels. She had lain awake the night before, thinking: We have abandoned you, Matt, we have left you locked in a cold drawer in a foreign land.
‘What time is the flight due?’ David asked.
‘It’s the last Aer Lingus one from Heathrow.’
He brought the Teletext page up on the TV screen and they scanned in silence.
‘Due 10pm and it’s running forty minutes late already,’ he said. ‘Jesus, it’ll be all hours when they get to Mayo.’ He looked at her. ‘We can drop Emily off at my mother’s on our way.’
She frowned and shook her head. ‘You don’t need to come.’
She did not want any part of this new life, this second life, touching the first. ‘Please, I’m asking you,’ she said.
‘Why do you have to go at all? What good will it do?’
He turned away, hurt. The nine o’clock news ended. The weather came on. The next day would be dry and sunny, with heavy rain moving eastwards in the evening. She looked at the map of Ireland on the screen. The damp Mayo soil was already piled up beside the open grave.
‘I’ll make us tea,’ David said.
They sat on the couch with tea and biscuits. David tracked the flight obsessively. Finally, at 11.48pm, it landed.
‘Go to bed now,’ he said softly.
The year after Charlie’s death they had rented a cottage on an island off Mayo. It was March and they slept late and woke to the sound of the sea and the white light in the bedroom. By day they walked around the island, over sand dunes, in and out of little inlets and across tiny pristine beaches, as if they were the first humans to set foot on those sands. On the mainland they climbed Croagh Patrick and the clouds parted and he pointed out their island in Clew Bay. That evening a fisherman took their photograph on the pier. Matt had his arm around her shoulder and her hair was blown back by the wind. Minutes later he stripped off his clothes and swam out with the tide. Her eyes never left him. She remembered a hike he’d taken her on, years before, on the Wicklow Mountains. They had walked all day and he had held her hand crossing streams. When they got to the highest peak he stood behind her with his breath on her cheek and stretched out his arm as if he had conjured up the whole view, the whole mountain range, especially for her. As if to say, See, you might have your books, but look, look at what I can give you.
She stood on the pier until he swam back in. That night in the cottage, with the lamps lit and the radio on, they cooked a long slow meal and drank wine and listened to the waves crashing on the rocks. She had not thought of the child for hours. She closed her eyes for a second. We are here, now, she thought. We have come through it.
Emily woke that night, crying. David lifted her into their bed. Water dripped from the ceiling into a bucket. It was 3am, the dead of night. The hearse was moving across the country, its headlights cutting a tunnel through the dark. Soon it would round a bend and the dark bulk of Croagh Patrick would loom over it.
‘Sleep,’ David whispered. ‘Sleep… It will all be over tomorrow.’
She listened for the plop of each drop in the bucket. She knew now that Matt’s stamp on her was permanent. She dozed off and fell into a dream. A phone was ringing in an empty house. It rang for a long time and when she picked up, it was Matt, calling from abroad. There was static on the line, followed by little blips, like Morse code. Then his voice broke through. ‘Guess who died?’ he said.
The weather held all day. In the church the priest said Matt’s name over and over. Paul read from the Scriptures and a fiddler played a slow air. In the front pew his mother and sisters sat still and upright. Behind them Paul, with a back like Matt’s, sat next to his wife Anna and their teenage sons. The coffin of Lebanese cedar was ten feet away. She could feel his closed eyes watching her. A shaft of sunlight fell through a high window and hit the head of the priest, and dust particles floated down from the raised Host. She tilted her head, and followed the slanting ray of sun, and a memory rushed in of a day—an evening—in autumn, eighteen months after Charlie’s death. Some instinct had prompted her to take a walk, and down the street, the sun disappeared and she felt drops of rain on her head, but forced herself on, because every small triumph counted in those days. But then the drops came heavier and she turned and hurried back to the house. At the front window she stood for a moment and looked in. He was sitting on the couch talking on the phone, and just the sight of him restored her. Then she tapped the glass with her fingernail to startle him—no, surprise him—with her unexpected return. He jumped up in panic and dropped the phone into its cradle. She stepped back onto the grass and crushed a snail underfoot.
‘Who were you calling?’
‘No one. I wasn’t calling anyone.’ She saw the gold flecks in his eyes and they were jumping.
When he went out she pressed the redial button. A woman answered, ‘Hello.’ And again, ‘Hello.’ In the background there were children, a TV, a kitchen maybe. Ruth hung up and redialled and the woman on the other end was silent.
There were other signs too, that made her insides quicken, and eventually she knew he wanted to be found out. He showed no remorse. She, Ruth, had grown distant. He had felt her silent blame every day—with her dead eyes she had accused him. For months she did nothing—she could not countenance being without him. Then, when the woman in the kitchen began to call and calmly ask for him by name, Ruth left.
The congregation stood and there was a rattle of chains, and a cloud of incense rose to the roof. The coffin was wheeled outside and they walked behind it down the hill to the graveyard. Was it Solomon’s chariot that was fashioned from cedar wood? Was it the cedars of Lebanon that wept? She pictured his house back in the city—bills on the table, dishes in the sink, his bike in the hall. She thought his death had imperilled her, too. She thought how its timing had hovered over him, hidden from him. How he had risen each morning for weeks, months, years and moved through each day and lain down each night, but the countdown had begun—he was already hurtling towards this moment, as she was towards hers.
Flocks of seagulls circled and shrieked above the grave as the mourners gathered close. The waves lapped on the shore and the murmur of t
he Rosary rose and fell and enclosed her. Across the open grave Paul’s head was bowed, a son on either side of him. She closed her eyes. She should not have come. She should not have listened out for Matt’s echo, or let him summon her here like this.
In the distance the church bell rang and she looked up and saw Anna with tears slipping down her face, and she was thrown. Their eyes met and lingered for a second, and Ruth, feeling herself weaken, searched Anna’s face for a moment and then the face of the woman next to her, and then slowly, abstractedly, face by face, other random women in the crowd. She might be here, she thought, the woman in the kitchen with the TV on, might be here. I might have always known her. I might have walked down the hill beside her now. She peered at each woman’s face. Is it you? she mouthed across the grave. Or you? Or you?
And then something on the edge of Anna moved. Her son’s arm dropped by his side. Ruth shifted her gaze to his face. Paul Junior, the second son. He had been a small boy when she knew him, seven or eight, no more. Now he had the thin face and raw features of a mid-teen, before the bones are properly scored or perfected. He is still in the making, she thought—and she began to study his face and eyes and body for some resemblance to Matt, or for how the child might one day have looked, or borne himself. The boy was staring straight ahead. Then his eyelids flickered and his eyes rolled back, and a damp patch appeared and spread down the front of his trousers. He fell to the ground heavily and his head hit the edge of the grave. Paul and Anna dropped to their knees beside him and the priest stumbled in his prayer and paused. And then the boy’s limbs stiffened and jerked and his whole body began to vibrate. His teeth clenched and his face beat against the clay. Paul half-stood and signalled to the priest—a look of reassurance and a plea to continue. Then he bent and laid a hand on his son’s convulsing back, and waited. A hush descended on the mourners and the priest’s words were barely audible. The boy’s body shook and thrashed and Ruth stood paralysed, caught in its hazard, as if wired to the boy and his tender taut brain, as if the neurons that misfired and hurled through him were escaping and crossing and alighting on her and she, too, would be felled in this neurological strike.
Then the storm passed. The thrashing eased and his limbs slowly stilled. Ruth held her breath. For a few seconds all was quiet and she felt a part of her shift, lighten, enter a new dimension. She had a vague sensation of Matt’s nearness. She saw the boy, foetal, on the ground. His completion had been interrupted, logic and memory momentarily wiped out. Scorch marks left on a delicate cerebral membrane. He opened his eyes and raised his head and Paul and Anna lifted him up and he stood pale, dazed, resurrected. The crowd stepped back and the three of them, stooped and leaning into each other like one body, sleepwalked away.
The mourners closed in and the priest started up again. Out on the road she glimpsed Paul open a car door. She imagined the three of them in the back seat, Paul Junior in the middle, a hand from each side touching him, earthing him again. His absence now left her more deeply alone. The priest intoned the prayers and the mourners responded louder and harder than ever, and the coffin was lowered into the grave. She watched it disappear. Her only link to the child was going too. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. The volume shocked her. Now and at the hour. A day would come when there would be no trace of Matt left, either. Clods of earth fell on the lid and she looked up at the sky and became, suddenly, bereft. Once, their eyes had ached for each other. Their hearts had chimed. In one another’s silence they had known joy and loneliness, in equal measure. In the end he had accelerated away from the reach of grief, and from his own unfathomable self. What he had done, his betrayal, was not unforgiveable. She knew then it was easier to be the one hurt, than the hurter.
Strangers reached out and embraced her and strong hands gripped hers, and there was no escape. She wished the heavens would open and drive the mourners back to their cars. She wanted to flee the graveyard and find their island out in the bay and run all day over the long grass and the dunes until she reached the pristine beach with the immaculate sands. There she would lie down in the dark. She would whisper his name to the sands; she would tell him there is no giving like the first giving, that what is given first cannot be regiven, what is first taken cannot be retaken. She would tell him she would never be the same again, or give the same or receive the same or love the same, that it was in him that all possibilities were first encountered, all beauty, all hope concentrated, that he had gone now and taken something and it could not be recovered and she was left here, now, impaired, diminished, she was left wanting.
In the evening rain swept in from the Atlantic. She left Mayo and drove east through the dark. The lights of oncoming cars began to dazzle. She pulled over onto the hard shoulder and stared out the window. She would see him everywhere falling. The wipers thumped back and forth. They are all dying, she thought, the males are all dying around me.
She edged back out into the traffic. It does not matter, she thought, what can one do? She imagined the car as a tiny dot on the map of Ireland, crawling across its centre, and behind, moving further and further away, Mayo, the black night and the rain seeping down, dampening and darkening the clay, the stones, the grain of the wood.
SLEEPING WITH A STRANGER
He left behind the warm waters of the bay, the seaweed, the blue of the Burren. He swam in a current of his own and hovered, like a skydiver in the dark. He would swim out far, underwater, to the Continental Shelf. He no longer felt man, but marine. He had a need to reach the depths, to glide to the silent darkness and feel the cold brush of luminous sea creatures.
When he came up for air he was blinded by the sun. He turned his head and saw the yellow diving platform and the concrete roof of the changing shelter, saw that he had barely moved beyond the rocks. In the distance the sun glinted on a car roof moving along the Prom. He swam back in and hoisted himself up onto the path, dripping seawater, his body tight and sinewy and vigorous again.
It was October. The morning was bright, cold. In the shelter he dressed and wrung out his swimming trunks. He combed his hair and felt himself coming back to the world. Mona would be in the kitchen at that moment, clearing away the breakfast things. In a while she would leave the house and take the Knocknacarra bus into town for her Saturday morning coffee and then, later, lunch with friends. He took his bag and began the walk to his car. He felt a slight uncertainty since leaving the water, as if the day was not to be trusted. A woman in dark clothes and long hair walked ahead of him, looking out to sea. He turned his head to the same angle and followed a wave until it merged with the grey water in the bay. As he drew close to the woman he felt a faint quickening. He came level and turned his face to hers. Their eyes met and she looked away quickly. She was not who he thought she was.
Mona had left a note on the counter to say she’d be gone all day. She and her friends—all teachers—would linger over lunch and wine and talk of school and family, and the longing for retirement. Mona kept herself well and looked a decade younger than her sixty years. She read novels and played bridge and together they went to the theatre and concerts and occasionally had friends over for dinner. He poured a glass of water and sat at the table, the house silent around him. He licked his forearm and tasted salt and remembered when he was a child how his father placed mineral licks in fields and sheds to ease the craving in calves. They might dement themselves licking the rungs of gates otherwise. He looked around the kitchen, delaying the moment when he would go upstairs to his desk and sift through notes and begin his report on a whole-school evaluation he’d completed that week. He no longer cared for his work. He would like to be devoted to one thing but had never found that thing. He looked out the window. They had lived in this house for twenty-eight years. Mona was a twin and one night in bed she spoke into the dark. ‘If I ever die, you must marry my sister,’ and he swore that he would, that he would seek out only those bearing the greatest likeness to her. It had felt like a pact. But she did not die and her sister went to
Australia. One morning, soon after, she walked into the kitchen and stood in a pool of light under the yellow cabinets and told him she was pregnant. They had children because they could not be childless; childlessness would have magnified the loneliness of marriage.
In mid-morning the nursing home in Athlone called to report on his mother’s condition. She had Alzheimer’s and had been winding down for years and now there was cause for concern. He drove east out of the city on the new motorway. He had driven the roads of the county for twenty-five years as a primary schools’ inspector, heading deep into the countryside each morning, past fields with stone walls, and cows being driven home for milking, through sleepy villages an hour before anyone rose. In late spring sheep huddled behind walls, bleating for their lambs, and the lambs, newly weaned, cried out their own terrible lament from nearby sheds. Once, he stopped and stood on the raised verge of the roadside looking over a wall at them, listening to their plaintive bleating. He sat into his car and drove on. How long, he wondered, before the ache of a ewe disappears?
He looked at the land beyond the motorway, at a tree on a hill, a cow, the dome of the sky. He wondered about the existence of these things—a tree, an animal, an insect. He wondered if theirs was any greater, any happier, than his own. He would have liked to talk about these things but it was too late now. He could not broach such things with Mona. They had not made love in a year. He remembered the woman on the Prom earlier, gazing out to sea like the woman at the end of a pier in a film he’d once seen. He saw lone women everywhere. One morning over twenty years ago he had passed a helmeted girl on the roadside. Her motor bike was parked and she was leaning over a dead fox. A few miles further on he arrived at the local school and as he walked up the path with the principal, the girl arrived and he turned and saw her unzip her jacket and remove the helmet and shake her hair free. Her name was Grace. He sat under a map of Ireland at the back of the classroom, observing her. He listened as she told the children that she had passed a dead body on the road. She had touched it, she said, and it was warm. A family of cubs would go hungry that day. All morning she moved among the children and bent her head close to theirs and whispered in their ears. Sometimes she smiled at him and they exchanged little knowing looks. She wore jeans and a white shirt. Her limbs were young, strong, unscarred, her body with its whole sensual life before it. He said her name in Irish, Gráinne, and at the end of the lesson he asked, What did you want to be when you were small? I wanted to be everything, she said.
The China Factory Page 6