The descent was rapid and spectacular, if that’s the right word – she didn’t even think about it any more, what was the point? It had been one last after another: the last day at work, the last time he drove, the last time they made love, the last day he fed himself, the last match he went to, the last time he spoke, the last time he laughed, the last time he went out, the last time he acknowledged her, the last time he smiled. Now there are no more lasts, are there? And won’t be, until the last last.
The last time he smiled was the worst because it was the final expression he ever showed. Now he was trapped in there somewhere, thinking something, feeling something – nobody knew what, nobody could tell them. To herself, she called it his ‘white room’. She imagined him in a room full of white light, so bright that there was nothing else visible – no walls, no ceiling, not even a floor. It didn’t hurt, there was no distress, there was no past, no future, no other people – nothing but the pure white light. She didn’t know where she got the idea from, a film maybe.
They used to have a joke and it was to that joke that he gave her his last few smiles. It was a dirty joke she could only tell him when they were alone, when the kids were gone to bed. One night she wanted a smile out of him so she sat down and told him, as usual:
Two deaf people get married. After several nights of fumbling around and misunderstandings in bed in the dark, the wife decides to find a way for them to communicate. ‘Honey,’ she signs, ‘why don’t we agree on some simple signals? So, at night, if you want to have sex with me, reach over and squeeze my left breast once. If you don’t want to have sex, reach over and squeeze my right breast once.’ The husband thinks this is a great idea and signs back to his wife, ‘Great idea, so if YOU want to have sex with ME, reach over and pull on my penis once. If you don’t want to have sex, reach over and pull on my penis … fifty times!’
She finished the joke with a flourish, but there was no smile. Gerry just looked at the television, looked at her and then turned back to the television. Nothing.
Nothing is the worst; there are no words for nothing.
It was hard on the kids, too, though Caoimhe and Jack escaped the full brunt of it being so young – to them, in a way, their father was like an old beloved family pet with whom they have to be patient and speak to now and again and kiss goodnight. Nuala had seen Caoimhe grow tired of that role, lately, and she would have to say something to her before long.
It was hardest on William, she knew that. At eighteen, he was old enough to remember his father in his prime and all the things they used to do together. Aisling, her eldest, her rock, was a pleaser and just wanted to help as often and as much as she could. She missed her daddy, that was for sure, but shaving him or feeding him brought her close to him and she felt better for having done him some good. For William, those acts were abominable, unnatural, and he hated the idea of them and he hated doing them and then he hated himself for his feelings. The resentment grew and grew until he broke down one night at Christmas the year before last, when she had him to herself, and she drew it out of him and he let it all go.
‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair, I hate it,’ he cried, wiping his eyes, sitting in the seat Nuala always associated with Gerry.
‘It isn’t, love. Not to your dad, not to me, not to you or Aisling, or Caoimhe or Jack. Or his own mother, poor Cassie,’ she said. ‘You know what, William, it’s fucking shit.’
The shock drew him out of his misery and he laughed. So did she.
‘Now,’ she said, glancing at the clock, ‘go out to the fridge and get a can for yourself and get the bottle of Baileys and a glass out of the press. We’ll have a Christmas drink, just you and me. Not a word to the others.’
On that September Sunday, after Mass, she sat down in front of Gerry, but just to the side so he could still see the television. The All-Ireland was coming on. He watched sports for hours at a time, thanks be to God, not that anybody knew how much he could take in.
She combed her fingers though his hair, his lovely sandy-coloured hair that she loved to keep tidy with the sharp scissors she hid in the press and wouldn’t let anybody else use. He watched the television. She looked into his eyes; was there movement there? She could never tell, but she was convinced he still knew her.
She smiled at him and kissed his cheek. Nobody took a blind bit of notice of her, they were all used to her by now. They had a crowd in the room, settling down for the match.
‘Will we win, Gerry? I think we will,’ she said. She thought about matches they had attended together in the early days, when they had just begun going out. Lord God, how her quiet man used to shout and roar at the hurlers and referee and then be all apologies to her afterwards. Sure she didn’t care, as long as she was with him – he never said a cross word to her.
An hour later, while she was washing up in the kitchen, William came in, looking crestfallen.
‘What’s up, love, are we losing?’
‘Yes, and we’ve run out of beer.’
‘Why don’t you pop down to Herlihy’s and get some more?’
‘I’ve had three cans, Mam, and I don’t want to miss the end of the match.’
‘Okay, love, I’ll go down,’ she said and took off her apron.
On the way home from the SuperValu with the beer, Nuala pulled into Meadowfield Terrace, where she had grown up. It looked tatty. Rubbish bins overflowed outside Brennans’ and Dolans’, and their front gardens were a disgrace. She parked at number twenty-one, her family’s old house, where she had first made love to Gerry when she was seventeen and her parents had gone away for the weekend. He thought he was the whole man after that, and she thought she was a full-grown woman too. The world was filled with a new light making everything vivid and clear. It was 1986, the summer of ‘Lady in Red’, and they used to dance to it every Friday night in the Hi-B disco, their bodies moulded into each other’s, French kissing.
She closed her eyes and listened – she could hear the song so clearly.
She pressed her head back against the headrest and felt the pain severing her in two.
‘Oh, God,’ she said, in a whimper. ‘Oh, God.’
She wrenched at the steering wheel and squeezed it and pulled it until her arms hurt. She growled through clenched teeth and shouted: ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ until something bubbled up inside her, making her dizzy and sick. She banged her head against the headrest and it felt good so she did it again, swinging back with more force each time, the thumping sound satisfying her, the pain in her neck satisfying her.
Later, weak and watery, she turned the bend into St Michael’s Park for home. She hummed the little moon lullaby her mother used to sing her as a child. I see the moon, the moon sees me. Her lovely mam. God, she was a pure dote.
Nuala didn’t care as long as she was with them.
‘Every day is a miracle,’ her dad used to say. Every day is a miracle.
As she approached the house and was about to pull in, Caoimhe jumped out onto the road, almost on top of the bonnet. Nuala slammed on the brakes and Caoimhe, red-faced, ran around to her door. She lowered the window to admonish the child but Caoimhe shouted: ‘Dad’s smiling, Dad’s smiling, Mam. Come in, come in.’
When she got out of the car, Jack ran to her. ‘Dad’s smiling, Dad’s smiling. Cork won and Dad’s smiling.’
She took his hand and walked through. Of the nine people in the room, Gerry alone was watching the television – all the others were looking at her or at him. Aisling was crying and William, Nuala could see, was just about keeping it in check.
And there, on her brown-eyed handsome man’s face, was a blissful smile; not just in his lips but in his cheeks and his eyes and his forehead. The joy streamed out of her Gerry, taking years off him. Bringing him back to them.
She gasped and knelt beside him. ‘Oh, Gerry,’ she said, and he turned his face to her, the smile never wavering, and he saw her. He saw her. Then he turned back to the television, which showed grinning young men in r
ed jerseys parade a cup around a huge stadium.
Caoimhe pulled at the sleeve of her blouse. ‘Mam? Mam?’ she said, pulling.
Nuala, unmoving, said: ‘Yes, love?’
‘Will Daddy get better now? Now that Cork won?’
Jolted, Nuala turned to her. ‘Oh, no, love, no he won’t get better, but isn’t it lovely to see him smile again?’
She moved Jack and Caoimhe in front of her, put her arms around them and pressed the side of her face into Caoimhe’s hair. Together they watched Gerry smiling.
His Frank O’Connor Moments
Dinny Young sat in companionable silence with his old friend and comrade-in-arms, Jimmy Mac, in what was pompously known as The Retiring Library. The way that hotels tried to evoke a grandiose home-from-home ambience would infuriate him, if he let it do so, but he didn’t. On seeing that the scattering of books in the small room were of the touristy, Quiet Man type, he hadn’t given them a second glance, but had sat down contentedly in the soft armchair and sipped his whiskey, glad of the morsel of peace.
Jimmy – big-boned and crooked from a lifetime of cycling, hurling and foresting in all weathers – nursed a pint of Guinness, which was set before him in patient attendance. He scrolled down through the social media on his phone and tut-tutted.
‘I see Twitter is giving Cillian McMahon a hard time of it. Apparently he sent out some stupid tweet after the game. #choker and #loser are trending,’ he said.
‘None of those fuckers ever did a single thing for their county, you can be sure of that,’ Dinny said.
‘Still, it was amazing how bad he was.’
‘It was. Sean was outstanding and Liam Óg too, but even so.’
‘Do you think he was too cocky?’
‘I don’t know. Some of these fellas have a false kind of confidence. It felt like he was weighed down with expectations and he couldn’t carry the burden. Thank God. There was no pressure on him last year and he just went for it.’
‘Jack did a great job wing-back, too,’ Jimmy said. ‘Jesus, just as well.’
‘Yeah. Dropping Paul S. was the hardest thing I had to do, all year. But I had to be ruthless and put down a marker after Dublin. Shake it up a bit. And Sean was the only man to mark McMahon.’
‘They’d have had a field day if we lost.’
Dinny nodded.
‘Do you really think he’s not up to it?’ Jimmy said.
‘It was something Bill Barrett said when we went to see him. I knew what I had to do the minute he said it. Paul S. minds himself – too fond of himself by half. Finals are about the team, the collective, and not the individual. Anyway,’ Dinny said, stroking the rim of the glass, ‘it’s done and dusted now.’
He let his thoughts drift to the moment he looked at Cillian McMahon in the Clare dressing room after the game and how he reminded him of his brother Michael, something in the blond fringe and the chin maybe. But not in the eyes. The eyes were those of his father at Michael’s funeral, not looking outward but inward and emptied of everything except a scarifying bitterness.
Forty-four years ago, for God’s sake – a lifetime. What kind of a person thinks about things like that at times like these?
But it didn’t surprise him either – there are no revelations to be found – forget that shit. It’s acceptance or nothing. That’s just the way it is.
He still dreamed about Michael’s drowning. When he’d wake up shouting and flailing his arms for dear life, Helen would shush him and put her hand on his cheek and say: ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, Dinny. You were dreaming about poor Michael again.’
Poor Michael, his arm waving above the water, his head having dipped under it as the swirling current of the river carried him away. He’d fallen, his head hitting a branch on the way down, while the two brothers had revelled in the invulnerability of youth. They had been sword-fighting with sticks, playing Robin Hood on the big old oak bough that hung over the Bullworks by the Blackwater river near Mallow. Dinny had been the Sheriff of Nottingham that day, poor Michael was Robin Hood. Poor Michael, who will always be eight now, with his blond mop and his freckles and a smile forever showing a missing front tooth.
He turned to Jimmy.
‘Did I tell you what Darren said to me after the match?’ he said.
‘No. What a great fellow he was, I suppose.’
‘Ha! No. He told me that today was his last hurling match. He is heading off to the States in a couple of weeks, for good.’
‘You’re joking!’ Jimmy said.
‘No. I asked him about Na Piarsaigh and the county and he said he didn’t care. He’s off.’
‘Hmm. Like a thing he’d do, too. What about yourself?’
‘What about me?’
‘You know what I’m talking about. Are you staying or going?’
Dinny rolled the glass in his hand and sipped the last of the whiskey.
‘I honestly don’t know, Jimmy. I’m tired now, but it might be different come January. I’m not going to think about it for a while, that’s for sure. I’ll need to talk to Helen too. I’ve neglected those girls and Lilly has her Leaving Cert next summer.’
‘Fair enough. Well, you know where I stand on the issue. If you’re game, so am I. I wouldn’t say that now for anyone else. Himself is adamant he’ll get two more years out of you.’
‘Ah, well, that’s Seamus.’
‘He won’t make it easy for you, if you do want to go, that’s for sure. Same again?’
‘It’s my shout, I’ll go.’
‘You will not. If you go down there, they won’t let you back up again.’ Jimmy put away the phone in his jacket pocket, eased himself out of his armchair, tried to straighten up and shuffled out.
Dinny immediately closed his eyes and thought about his father, and what he would say to him tonight, if he had the chance. He wondered what his father would say back.
He relived the players’ joy after the match, Sean Culloty’s tearful speech in the dressing room. He thought about the knee ligament ruptures that ended his own career, the first one at twenty-eight, when he was at his peak. He wouldn’t admit it for years, but he was never the same hurler again. He’d struggled on and on until Father Tom had to break the news one soft March evening that he was dropping him off the panel, that he just wasn’t up to it any more.
He called them his Frank O’Connor moments. From the story ‘Guests of the Nation’ that Brother Hannon taught him in Farranferris all those years ago, and that he teaches now to his Junior Certs. When the main character, an IRA man, after he had to take part in the senseless killing of a British soldier, says: And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.
We all have them, even if we’re not aware of them. At least that’s what Dinny believed. Those existential moments in our lives, when we meet someone special, or when a beloved person dies on us, or goes away for good; when we witness something ineffable; when a child is born, or when everything we know is turned upside down by some titanic action or inaction – either through our own doing, or by fate’s immutable hand. And afterwards nothing is ever the same again. We divide our whole lives into what we did and who we were before that moment and after it. Like a pivot, on which the stages of our lives hinge and turn, that moment when our understanding of ourselves and everything else on this God-forsaken planet is shot through with a kind of searing light so bright and penetrating that we can see right into it.
Was today one of those moments? He wasn’t sure. He knew the previous ones – he thought about them often enough – but perhaps it was too soon to pass judgement on today’s significance. Coaching Cork to an All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship – the first for almost a decade – would surely rank high enough for most men, Dinny thought; but he was not most men, unfortunately. He accepted that, too.
The door burst open and six or seven of his team charged in, the captain Sean Culloty among them.
‘Come quietly now, Coach, and there won’t be any trouble. We�
�re not taking no for an answer,’ Sean said, with a pronounced slur. They were angling to carry him down the stairs, Dinny realised. Couldn’t have that.
‘Alright, alright, at least I’ve had an hour’s break from ye. Jesus, what do ye want with me, anyway? Haven’t ye anything better to be doing?’
A cheer rose up from the milling crowd when he appeared with the players at the top of the stairs. It took him an age to make his way through the well-wishers and back-slappers. He knew many of them. The selfies drove him cracked.
The foyer outside the Banquet Room was chock-full of people too, and the players dispersed among them. Dinny saw Helen’s parents near the door. He wriggled his way to them.
‘Jim, Betty,’ he said. ‘Great to see ye.’
Betty kissed him and patted his cheeks. She had vivid red lipstick on her teeth. Jim, his face flushed, gripped Dinny’s hand in a vice and, weeping – he looked like he’d had a few – he said, ‘We’re so proud of you, Dinny, God we’re so proud, boy.’
‘Thanks, Jim, thanks very much. Why aren’t ye inside?’
‘We couldn’t get in,’ Betty said.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Dinny said, and they went inside past the County Board bouncers. Lilly, who was on the dance floor with Helen, ran to Jim and Betty to hug them. Holly, who was thirteen, was being minded by the parents of a friend, much to her chagrin.
‘You escaped for a while with Jimmy,’ Helen said, minutes later, as they danced to a slow Roy Orbison song.
‘Not for long enough,’ Dinny said. ‘You’d want to see it out there – total mayhem. Some of the players dragged me back.’
‘You’re terrible, Dinny,’ Helen said. ‘Sure all people want to do is congratulate you.’
‘I know, I know. I just wanted a few minutes of peace, to take it all in.’
She leaned up and kissed him on the lips.
The First Sunday in September Page 12