The Arrival of Fergal Flynn

by Brian Kennedy

  She didn't answer. This wasn't unusual - she slept most of the day - but when he got to the landing, the unmistakable smell of shit nearly made him sick.

  He opened the bedroom door. Noreen's bed was empty and his first thought was that she was dead, but then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something moving beside a pile of old blankets. It was her, squatting by the wall like a filthy plucked turkey, totally naked. As he got closer, Fergal realised the awful smell was due to the fact she had ripped off her nappy and covered herself and the wall with the rank contents. He gagged and vomited into his hand. Noreen didn't seem to notice him. She stared blankly as he got behind her, lifted her up and carried her towards the bed. At least that wasn't too bad, only the top blanket was soiled.

  Father Mac came bounding up the stairs, calling, 'How's my favourite girl?' - that usually got a cackle out of Noreen - but the smell nearly knocked him back down them. When he realised what was happening, he hurried to help Fergal and together they did the best they could.

  She had reverted back to infancy. Fergal tried not to notice while he was wiping her clean that she had no pubic hair. Her skin was as thin as a baby bird's, he could see her veins through it. Father Mac brought basin after basin of water. They stripped the bed, taking it in turns to hold her, although she weighed nothing. When they pulled the bed away from the wall to free some of the sheets, gin bottles rolled everywhere. They found a clean nightdress and managed to settle her back under the covers. Then they turned their attention to cleaning the wall. Fergal scraped around the window of her world with a blunt knife, removing the crusted paint so it would open for the first time in decades and let some air in.

  The tears streamed down Noreen's face. Fergal, trying not to vomit again or cry, automatically sang, 'I'll take you home again, Noreen...' He knew she had given up completely.

  Father Mac went next door, rang the doctor and told him what had happened. The doctor Wasted no time. He arrived, examined Noreen and then called an ambulance to bring her to the Royal Hospital. 'Her kidneys have been weakened over the years,' he explained to Father Mac and Fergal, 'and it was only a matter of time before they would give out completely.' He bent his head. 'I'm sorry there isn't more I can do.'

  Even though he didn't really want to, Father Mac jumped in his car and drove the short distance to Walker Street to find Angela. They got back just in time to see the ambulance men carrying her mother out on a stretcher. Angela screamed, 'Where are youse fucking taking her? Is she dead? Mammy! Mammy, don't die!' The whole street was watching as she jumped into the back of the ambulance, slapping one of the ambulance men for giving her a dirty look.

  Father Mac and Fergal followed in the car. Fergal said, over and over, 'I shouldn't have left her... I should never have left her.'

  For the first time, Father Mac lost his temper with him. 'For God's sake, Fergal! What more could you have done? You're not a doctor or a health visitor. How many times do I have to remind you that she is not your responsibility? Quit beating yourself up about it!'

  'I know, I know, I know... but...'

  'But nothing, Fergal. But nothing.'

  ~

  At three o'clock the following morning, Father Mac was called to the hospital to administer the last rites to Noreen. Fergal went with him, and he held her tiny hand as she took her last breath.

  Angela arrived only minutes too late, with her hair still in rollers. The night nurse gave her a little transparent bag that held her mother's diamondless engagement ring - the precious stone had been lost down a drain years previously in the dirty water of a million scrubbing buckets - and the thread-thin wedding band that Noreen had never taken off from the moment her husband pushed it onto her tiny finger. Angela cried like the lost child she was and Fergal put his arm around her, like the ghost of her father.

  She looked at him through the clouds in her eyes. Then she made him take Noreen's wedding ring. 'She would've wanted you to have it.'

  Fergal studied the fragile circle of old gold. It wouldn't even fit his little finger.

  ~

  The wake was held in Walker Street, where Noreen's coffin was laid out in front of the unlit fireplace. The wreath on the front door attracted unwanted attention from nosy people who hadn't even known Noreen, but who knew they'd get a sandwich, a cup of tea - if not a nip of whiskey - and a good look at Angela's house.

  Fergal almost talked himself out of going. His brothers would be there and his da hadn't lifted his banishment. Finally Father Mac offered to go with him, and assured him that they would leave at the first hint of trouble. 'But you know they won't misbehave in front of other people - especially not if I'm there.'

  The front door was ajar and they could see the gathering through the bubbled glass. Fergal took a deep breath and they walked in. Most of the mourners bowed their heads when they saw that the Church had arrived, but Fergal could feel his brothers and his father staring at him.

  He went straight to the coffin. He was startled by how peaceful Noreen looked. Her body was almost entirely covered in mass cards, and her shiny face floated like a little island in its rough ocean of folded paper. He thought of the icons in the Sligo chapel. Her hands made the shape of a prayer and her fingers, threaded with rosary beads, looked like they were carved from wax. Fergal bent forward and kissed the side of her face, but the coldness of her skin only reminded him that she had long abandoned her exhausted body.

  'Where is Mrs Flynn?' Father Mac asked the room.

  After a moment, a neighbour answered, 'She's round at her sister Concepta's lying down. She hasn't slept since the death.'

  Father Mac looked at Fergal. 'Let's go,' Fergal said.

  They drove to Concepta's, but she said she had given Angela something to make her sleep - it was the only way she could stop crying - and she wasn't going to wake her. As they were leaving, she said, 'God save us, Fergal, but haven't you got tall all of a sudden? You're like a big man, so you are.'

  Fergal didn't know how to take that. 'Don't forget, will you?' he said. 'Tell Ma we called to the wake.' They left Concepta with a hallway full of oblivious children pulling at her skirt for more jam sandwiches.

  St Bridget's House was quiet when they got back and Fergal went to sit in the chapel. The cleaners all knew him by now, some of them had even known Noreen when she was a girl and they came over to tell him they were sorry for his trouble. They rambled and rubbed his shoulders, and Fergal stared numbly at the altar, wondering if Noreen was watching him.

  When Father Mac came to tell him dinner was ready, he followed mutely to the carefully laid table. His appetite had vanished and he picked distractedly at the plate, hearing Father Mac's voice talking away somewhere in the distance. He headed upstairs to the spare room early, defeated by grief.

  He undressed and lay under the covers in the dark, but it was impossible to get comfortable. Finally he got up, turned the light back on and looked through the bookshelf for something to read. He took down a big book about films but as he opened it up, a tiny book fell out of the jacket. It was a volume of poems called Secret Love. Inside, there was an inscription: 'To Dermot, with love and understanding, from your sister Dympna x.'

  In the table of contents, the same hand had drawn a star next to a poem called, 'I'm in Love with a Man'. Fergal turned the pages and read the lines half a loud.

  I'm in love with a man -

  I've tried to deny it as much as I can,

  But I woke to find him cleaning my windows and

  I'm in love with a man.

  I'm in love with a voice -

  It's the way that he talks that really leaves me no choice.

  You won't find him trying to impress me with Wilde or Joyce;

  I'm in love with his voice.

  I'm in love with a look,

  The one that he gave me when I offered to cook;

  I've checked in my diary, I'd considered no plan -

  I'm in love with a man - I am!

  I'm in love with a man.

/>   The door opened softly and Father Mac peeped in. Fergal jumped.

  'Oh, sorry, fella - I didn't mean to startle you, I just saw your light on and wondered if you were all right.' Then he noticed the book of poems in Fergal's hand. 'Where did you find this? I haven't seen it for years - I thought I'd lost it in Africa.'

  'It was here.' Fergal showed him where he'd found it.

  'I wonder how it ended up there.' Father Mac sat on the edge of the bed. 'My sister gave that to me, the day I was ordained, and warned me not to open it until I was on my own. It's a collection of love poems written by men for men, from as far back as two hundred years ago right up to recent times. Most of the authors' names are unknown.'

  Fergal said nothing. Father Mac's heart nearly cracked as he looked at him. He knew that no one and nothing but time could bring Fergal any comfort so he stood up and leaned over to kiss him. 'Good night, fella. Do you need anything?'

  'Will you hold me for a while, Dermot? You don't have to if you don't want to.'

  Father Mac kicked off his polished brogues and lay down on top of the blankets. He reached for Fergal, pulling him as close as he could, and held Fergal's back against his chest.

  They must have slipped into a deep sleep, because the next thing Fergal remembered was waking up in an asthmatic sweat, coiled around Father Mac, who was snoring lightly. He carefully released himself to go and find his inhaler.

  Once out of the bed, he was suddenly cold. He pulled on his clothes and went downstairs. When he found Noreen's key in his coat pocket, along with his blue inhaler, he put the coat on and sneaked out the front door.

  It was pitch-dark - not many of the street lamps had survived the most recent riot. He sucked a few puffs from his inhaler and felt his lungs open. As he passed the off-licence he thought that, if anyone was mourning Noreen more than he was, it would be the owner of that fucking place. Now who would buy all that liquid grief?

  He found himself walking up Walker Street, and he stopped outside the house where he'd grown up. An uncontrollable urge to smash every one of its windows rose inside him, so he moved on before it got the better of him. The streets' silence was almost more frightening than any noise.

  Suddenly, a woman's voice pleaded, 'Freedom! Freedom! Where are you?' She was wearing her dressing gown, slippers and a full head of rollers. She continued calling, seemingly to the clouds coming home late across the sky, until a little mongrel dog appeared out of a dark entry and ran towards her, wagging the tail off itself.

  She bent down to kiss its nose. 'Freedom, love, where in the name of God were you? You know I can't go to my bed till you're in. Now come on with me - them there oul' soldiers are creeping about.' She scooped the animal up into her arms as if it were a tired child and hummed to it as she headed back to her house.

  An army patrol up the next entry stopped Fergal, asking him where he was headed so late at night. He told them that his granny had died and he was on his way to her house, but they made him wait while they radioed in his details. Then all of a sudden someone's headset spat a distorted message and they ran off, leaving him without another word.

  Outside Noreen's house, he looked up at the little dark window that had provided her entire world view for so long. When he put the key in the lock, he half-expected to hear her calling him, but there wasn't a sound.

  He closed the hall door and flicked on the light. From the look of things, the vultures had already started picking at the bones of her few possessions, and he was afraid that somebody might still be there, guarding the house. He called out, 'It's Fergal', but his name echoed in the empty mourning stillness that only a death can make. He climbed the stairs and stood at the bedroom door, listening for Noreen's familiar breathing, but the wind dancing around the back yard started to scare him, so he pushed open the door.

  Her bed had been cleaned and roughly made, and Fergal suddenly felt that he would fall over from tiredness if he didn't lie down right there and then. He climbed in amongst her freezing blankets with all his clothes on and rolled into the middle of the bed where her bedridden shape had moulded itself into the old horsehair mattress.

  He heard her voice in his head, saying his name over and over again and telling him to go on a wee message for her. He remembered how she had loved weak milky tea with two sugars and toast with piles of butter when she was well enough to eat it. He remembered how her blue-tinted National Health glasses had constantly slipped down her nose and how she had cursed them to high heaven as she tried to read the paper, propped up in this bed. Sometimes when he hadn't wanted to go to school, he had thought it must be brilliant to be able to stay in bed all day, but now he knew how miserable Noreen had been and how much she would have given to be healthy and mobile. He thought about Angela, growing up in this very house. He tried to picture her as a little girl running around downstairs with all her brothers and sisters, his mystery aunts and uncles, driving Noreen and her husband nuts with their noise and their nursery rhymes and their fighting. He whispered questions to the cold, empty history in the room as if the answers might be written under the thick layers of wallpaper. 'Why do people have to change? Why do people have to get angry, or old and... and sick and lonely and tired and... die?'

  The smell of gin on the pillow suddenly brought tears to his eyes. He lay there, shuddering with sobs, until he was too exhausted to stay awake any longer.

  ~

  Father Mac woke up with a start and was surprised to find Fergal gone. He dressed slowly, expecting to see him at any moment, but when he descended the stairs and saw Fergal's coat was missing, panic rose in him. He heard a key in the front door, but it was only Mrs Mooney with an armful of fresh bread, giving out about the queue at the baker's. He ignored her questions about breakfast telling her he'd been called out and didn't know how long he'd be.

  He drove to Noreen's house at top speed. He rapped on the door and Fergal eventually came to the window before staggering down the stairs, half asleep, to let him in. Father Mac could see that he'd been crying.

  'Fergal, are you all right? I panicked a wee bit when I realised you were gone this morning. If you hadn't been here, I wouldn't have known where to look.'

  'Sorry, Dermot. I just... I woke up and put my coat on and kept walking till I got here. I didn't plan it or anything.'

  Father Mac put his chin on Fergal's head and hugged him hard.

  'I want to make her bed before we leave,' Fergal said, so Father Mac followed him upstairs. As they were shaking the sheets, they found a holy medal of Saint Christopher on a silver chain. Fergal kissed it and put it around his neck.

  As Fergal finished folding the last blanket, Father Mac said, 'What will happen to Noreen's house, now that she's gone?'

  Fergal hadn't really thought much about it, but he knew only too well that she had been behind in her rent for years. 'I don't know. It's just so weird to think that I'll never see her again.'

  Then he remembered the box of photos that she had shown him and he dropped to his knees to see if they were still under the bed. He pulled out plastic bags full of rubbish and bottle after empty gin bottle, but there was no sign of the box. Fergal realised his mother must have taken it.

  Father Mac was amazed at how many bottles there were. 'What should we do with all these? We can't leave them here.'

  They started carrying them, four each at a time, out to the yard, but Fergal stopped. 'We can't stack them out there. It's too dangerous.'

  'What do you mean?'

  Fergal suddenly remembered a game that the children on his road used to play when he was a tiny boy. As they carried the bottles to Noreen's dented old bin, he told Father Mac about it.

  'When I was wee, there was this game called Colour Water Bottle Shop that everybody played. We all collected old milk bottles filled with water stained different colours - we kept them in our back yards. The challenge was to come up with the most unusual, beautiful colour. We used the maddest combinations of ingredients - markers we nicked from school, disinfecta
nt, tea leaves, medicine, clay from the brick factory that had closed down... Then you stood at your back yard door and chanted, "Shop open, soon be closing, first here gets very good value!" and everyone went round the yard doors and bartered colours -there were all kinds of complicated, drawn-out deals. Everyone wanted the best collection, the one that everybody else would envy. Some kids even raided other people's colour water bottle shops during the night and then swore on their mothers' lives that they had discovered the colour themselves. Seeing as the ingredients were such a secret, you had to just bite your lip or steal it back the next night or pour the other kid's bottle down the drain and deny that.'

  There were some scenes that Fergal had edited out. Angela had hated the game. She was sick of knocking over the treasured bottles in her panic to grab washing off the line before the rain ruined her efforts. She would yell, 'Fergal Flynn, I don't know why I even bother getting these sheets dry, when you soak them with piss every fucking week that God sends us! Come out here and pick up these fucking bottles before I kill you stone-dead, you wee cunt!'

  Sadly, like a lot of innocent things, the game had come to a disastrous end. Without warning, a new colour filled bottles in the area - the dull, oily pink of petrol. Topped with lit rags, it flew through the air and struck the green-grey army tanks in mini explosions of orange and blue flowered flames. Foot patrols descended like locusts, snatching anyone who looked like he might be over sixteen. If they had raided a house and found a collection of empty bottles, they would have assumed that they'd uncovered a petrol-bomb factory. The men of the house would have been arrested and taken away to an unknown location with no guarantee that they would return in the same condition, if at all.

  Fergal could still see the twins and his da smashing every last one of his bottles with their hurling sticks. He'd watched through the back window heartbroken as all his hard-won colours of the rainbow were reunited down the drain. 'I was devastated. I thought they were the most beautiful colours in the world.'