Sam had thought it odd that they could tell such sad stories yet laugh and joke so easily, until Granny had counselled that time was a great healer. He was six so he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but when she said it she gave him the smile that came with twinkling eyes and pushed a sweet into his hand so he’d remember it. Mr Grabowski and Mr DiRisio would often fight for the old woman’s attention and even a six-year-old could work out that his granny was as sassy as she was old, as wrinkled Mrs Gillespie always said.
It was his grandmother who encouraged his love of Irish music, sharing with him her taste for the Clancy Brothers, the Chieftains and the Dubliners. Luke Kelly made her cry, but her tears were always accompanied by a smile. She introduced him to all kinds of music – jazz, blues, bluegrass, rock, pop, and the only artist they ever disagreed about: Neil Diamond. She bought him his first guitar, telling him that once he’d learned to play he would never be lonely. She saw it in him first, the singularity that would polarize him for his peers. Normal kids didn’t hang out so willingly with their grandmothers. He was an old soul content to remain friendless. His parents weren’t worried that he wasn’t a great mixer: all kids were different and he’d grow out of it. Teachers felt that he was merely shy and agreed it was most likely a phase. Granny Baskin knew better. Her grandson’s eyes betrayed a certain melancholy which, as an Irish emigrant, she was more than equipped to recognize. He wouldn’t fit in with the crowd and there was a chance he wouldn’t fit in at all.
“Who were you before? A warrior or the wounded, my sweet boy?” She’d ruffle his hair and he would smile as though he knew the answer but dared not share it.
Sam had started out in the world as a gawky creature, too skinny for his large or piercing facial features. The kids at school made fun of his square jaw, often referring to him as “Desperate Sam the Pie-eating Man”. It hadn’t bothered him – at least, not at first. He was too busy locked in his thoughts and playing riffs in his head while others around him talked nonsense just to hear themselves speak. But as the years passed the noise grew louder and their contempt became harder to ignore. He often wondered why they couldn’t just leave him be. But jealous souls demand to be heard, and his ambivalence taunted them as surely as their bullying haunted him. He was in his mid-teens when he began to fill out. His features no longer overtook the rest of him. His blond hair was shaped into a crew-cut by the local barber.
“As handsome as your grandfather in his day,” his granny whispered. He might have had a rocky start but she’d always known he’d be a heartbreaker one day.
The girls in school noticed too and suddenly he was considered deep instead of weird. He instantly recognized the hypocrites for who they were and retreated further into himself, distrustful of his new-found popularity and cursing his appearance for drawing unwanted attention. Instead of hanging with the guys, getting drunk and exploring girls, he hid for hours in his room with his guitar, losing himself in melody, playing from his heart – a heart that was full of all kinds of music. His gran would bring him tea, shaking her hips; he’d grin when she’d twirl around without spilling a drop or letting a biscuit slip from the plate.
“You’ll be a star some day,” she’d say proudly.
He’d shake his head modestly, but deep down he prayed he’d reach the dizzying heights his loving granny dreamed of. Playing guitar was the only time he felt he was honest with the world.
It was just after his sixteenth birthday when his granny keeled over in the kitchen, taking a pot of mercifully cold tomato soup to the floor with her. She woke up a day later, the left side of her face sliding towards her shoulder, her speech impaired, an arm and a leg now useless. He sat with her and talked while she stared blankly at the ceiling, one eye blinking. It was only when he played his guitar and a tear escaped her that he knew she was still with him.
His parents flew into action. First they put a bed downstairs in the unused drawing room. Then they hired a nurse and a physiotherapist, who would call three times a week. But Granny wasn’t improving at home – or not the way the professionals thought she should. After six months Granny Baskin was moved to a hospital that specialized in stroke-victim aftercare. It was Sam who helped his mother to wheel her to the car. She hung on to him loosely while his mother removed the chair from beneath her. His strong arms manoeuvred her into the front seat, where he smoothed her skirt when it rode up her leg. His mother was busy attempting to fit the chair into the trunk, cursing silently when she scratched the paintwork.
It was then that his granny leaned forward, almost flopping, with a sideways grin. “Don’t let the bastards get you down!” she managed. It had been the first real sentence she’d spoken since the stroke. With her good arm she ruffled his hair and he could have sworn that, after all those months, the twinkle returned to her eye, if only for a moment and just for him.
His mother drove away, leaving him to sit and rock on the stairs that led to his bedroom and the world his old granny had helped him create. The pain of loss engulfed him, tearing his insides out. The fear of what lay ahead of her burned his chest as surely as a hotplate would a naked hand. Worse, he couldn’t break her out and take her to a better place. He couldn’t tend her. He couldn’t save her. She had given him everything and he had let her down. He cursed himself and his inadequacy. He hurt himself punching his fist against the hard wood banister that didn’t budge, further highlighting his failure. On the day his grandmother was taken into hospital, Sam sat with his head in bleeding hands, sobbing and wondering if he’d survive without her, and if she could without him.
A year later Sam’s granny died and he mourned her a second time, but since she had left his home, life had moved on, and although he missed her he was used to her not being there now – he had really lost her two years before on the day of her stroke. He’d also found a girlfriend. Hilarie was a strange-looking punk with green hair, a pierced nose and cherub tits. Like him, she was an outsider. They had met when he auditioned for a garage band. She was the only girl. The other guys were noncommittal but she had wanted him from the moment he’d walked through the door. Luckily she had the deciding vote. She liked it that he was insular, speaking only when necessary. It made a nice change from the shit she had to listen to from the other guys.
She also liked it that he didn’t come on to her every chance he got, and especially when it became clear that she would have to make the first move. She waited until the night of their first gig when even her solitary new band-mate had reached a level of exhilaration that opened him up a little. She spotted the chink and before he knew it he was leaning against a tiled toilet wall, with a bass player on her knees sucking so hard that his knees threatened to give way. Afterwards, when she kissed him, he could taste himself. He missed his granny, and sometimes still ached for her, but he had a window of opportunity to become a person deemed normal – until the bullying started again. This time it was more menacing. In the end it took just one night to destroy any chance he had of ever being OK.
*
Ivan was a funny fish – at least, that was what his mother always said. He loved the sea, learned to swim as soon as he was dropped into water and spent his childhood and early teens sitting at the end of a fishing-rod, pondering his existence while awaiting a tug at the pole. His older twin brothers, Séamus and Barry, and younger brother Fintan were more interested in GAA – Fintan and Séamus being the footballers and Barry an avid hurler, which ensured that he’d lost most of his teeth by the age of eighteen. His parents paid for caps, while cursing the cost of dentistry, so Barry had what his twin would describe as a movie-star mouth. Throughout their childhood, Ivan’s brothers would win the medals but Ivan would bring home the tea. He was born relaxed and never changed. No terrible twos. No challenging teenage years. He just got on with it, and as long as he could fish for a few hours a day, he was as content as an old man sitting out on a warm day.
He was always popular with the girls, even as a kid when he was supposed to disli
ke the opposite sex. The fact that he was a year older than his cousin Mary never seemed to affect their relationship: from cradle to adulthood they were drawn to one another. He found he had more in common with her than he did with his older brothers. His mother had deliberately left a five-year gap between the twins and her second pregnancy, despite what the Church thought. Unfortunately for her the contraceptive method that had worked so beautifully for the five years preceding Ivan’s birth failed miserably in the months after, and Fintan was conceived all too quickly.
Ivan was the archetypal middle child, happy to blend in with whatever was going on. He experienced his first love at twelve with a fair-haired, blue-eyed whippet of a thing called Noreen. They kissed behind the dressing rooms on the football field, holding their lips together until he had counted to sixty. After that she wouldn’t talk to him, but the memory of her lips against his ensured he wouldn’t be behind-the-door about discovering someone else. He lost his virginity at fifteen, which was young in the 1980s, to a seventeen-year-old at an Irish college. He hadn’t learned much Irish but, as far as he was concerned, the three weeks he spent shagging on an island off Cork was money well spent.
When he wasn’t breaking hearts, he was hanging out with Mary. She was the only girl he ever shared his thoughts with. She felt like part of him and he could never accept that he’d experienced something unless he’d shared it with her. Luckily for her, she wasn’t one for embarrassment so when he described his first sexual experience it was without reservation and Mary, mesmerized, made mental notes for when she dared adventure as her cousin had.
When Ivan nearly lost his best friend and confidante he re-evaluated the world around him. He didn’t bother with his Leaving Cert, which, despite the year he had on Mary, he was due to take at the same time. He didn’t need it anyway, not for what he wanted to do with his life. His parents put up a battle but, with their niece in a coma and their son as stubborn as he was calm, they were forced to surrender. While the rest of his classmates studied, Ivan sat by his cousin’s bed day and night, sharing sentry duty with his broken uncle. He philosophized and recited her favourite song lyrics into her ear. He also read to her the books he thought she’d like and that he’d researched during the few hours he was apart from her. Her pregnancy came as a horrible surprise and he blamed himself for it – perhaps his confidences had led her to follow in his footsteps. He wondered if the baby that had survived tumbling down a mountain would suck the life out of its mother. If so, he would despise that child for stealing his best friend.
The baby surviving had been the first miracle. Mary waking had been the second. That she’d survived without brain damage, the third and final. Her skull was weakened and headaches would haunt her, but medication would keep them mostly at bay and she would be back to herself soon enough. There would be a wheelchair and physiotherapy, a wig to hide the hair loss as a consequence of the operation she had undergone to insert a metal plate into her skull. The baby would grow inside her and Ivan would be at her side through it all, yet they would never speak of her boyfriend’s death or her miracle child. That part of her was closed. But Ivan knew she’d come back to them and every time he made her laugh he knew he was a step closer.
It was during this time that he first fell in love with Norma. She was a quiet town girl, bookish and pretty. She would ask after his cousin and talk about treatments she’d read about. She planned to study medicine and he was falling in love with her. Mary had been out of the rehabilitation hospital a month when they announced their engagement and Norma’s pregnancy. Their child was less than a year old when Ivan first left his home town for a faraway oil rig that would earn him enough money to support his family, leaving his new wife behind with a baby. She never did become a doctor and it would be too late by the time her husband realized that she felt desperately cheated.
*
And then there was Penny – poor Penny – daughter to two solicitors and an only child. Her conception was deemed a mistake as children had never been on her parents’ agenda. They weren’t bad people – at least, not as far as she knew. They weren’t around much and their house was a base rather than a home. Both parents worked mostly in Cork, staying in their apartment there, only popping back at weekends. Their child was cared for by a series of live-in nannies until she was old enough to be sent to boarding-school.
“If it’s good enough for royalty, it’s good enough for you, darling!” her mother would say, smiling.
Mary had plonked herself beside Penny on that first train journey, taking them towards their new life in Dublin. They didn’t really know each other as they had attended different primary schools but Penny’s face was familiar – they had grown up in the same small town. Penny had been sad but Mary was excited at the prospect of a new school and a new world, and by the time they had reached Dublin she had managed to infuse that excitement into her new best friend. Penny and Mary were kindred spirits from the start. Mary might have been the child that the townspeople pitied – she was the one they whispered about as she passed, her dead mother never far behind – but Penny suffered from her parents’ rejection and Mary understood that. She had no mother but she did have a father, which was more than Penny had. From the day she sat down beside Penny, Mary would do everything to guarantee that she wouldn’t feel lonely again, including introducing her to one of Ivan’s best friends, Adam. Mary swore he was perfect for her. She was right: Adam and Penny were inseparable from the start.
When Mary nearly died, Penny thought she might just die with her. She returned to an empty house and spoke with Adam on the phone. He told her that her best friend might not live through the night. He was desperate to be with her but his parents wouldn’t let him leave the house, not after his friend had plunged to his death leaving his half-dead girlfriend with child. That night, alone in her big empty house, she opened her parents’ drinks cabinet and poured herself a whiskey. When she’d finished it, she poured herself a second and a third. After the fourth she passed out on the sofa, waking up the next afternoon, still alone.
The first time she’d seen Mary in hospital, she waited until they were alone before she stroked her bandaged head. “You’d better not leave me!”
She wasn’t allowed stay away from school, it being her Leaving Cert year, so she went back to study for a college place she didn’t want. Luckily for her she was clever, and even though she had spent four months without opening a book, she breezed through the exams, as her parents had before her. She wasn’t there on the day that Mary woke, but Adam called to let her know and she cried down the phone. She wasn’t allowed home until the weekend, four days after her best friend had come back to the living. When Penny entered the room Mary burst into tears and Penny’s heart soared because she was so happy to be recognized. That night, to celebrate, she and Adam drank three bottles of her mother’s Christmas wine stash. Penny knew emptiness, but no matter how hard she tried she could never fill it.
Adam was the kind of kid who would never set the intellectual world on fire, but if you put him in a field with a ball or a stick it was like watching genius. He loved his sports and would have been a much more suitable friend for Ivan’s brothers than the sport-shunning Ivan. But there was something about Ivan that drew Adam to him from the first time they met. He liked his calmness and admired his simplicity. Ivan didn’t care about appearances and Adam enjoyed his friend’s lack of ego – his easy ways relaxed him. If Ivan was the easygoing one and Robert the adventurous one, Adam was the funny one. He could make anyone laugh, even the sternest of his teachers, so he often talked his way out of trouble. Of course, his abilities on the field got him a place on the Kerry youth team and with this came a hint of celebrity – his capacity to pick up a cup and make a joke to a local TV crew had further endeared him to the inhabitants of his small town. But his heart belonged only to Penny.
A long time before his friend had introduced them, he had watched a young girl with the prettiest blue shoes sit on the wall that separated the p
rimary school from the road. The school was empty, the bell having rung long before, but there she sat, alone, staring at her pretty blue shoes. He hid behind a bush that separated his friend’s father’s land from the road that lay between him and the girl. He was eleven and had been making his way home across the fields when he’d caught sight of her. Her pretty blonde hair shone in the evening sun, and when she eventually raised her cherubic face, he was reminded of an angel in the prayer book his mother had often made him read. He scrambled to hide in the undergrowth in case she caught sight of him.
The teacher came out, looking at her watch. “Well, Penny, there’s no answer at home,” she said, failing to disguise her annoyance.
“I’ll be OK,” Penny said. “I’m sure someone will be here soon.” Her voice was full of the kind of sadness that only kids can convey. Adam heard it, but her teacher didn’t.
“This is the second time this week, not to mention three times last week,” the teacher said. “This is not a baby-sitting service.”
“I’ll be fine,” Penny said.
“I can’t leave you here,” the teacher said. “I’ll try your neighbour.”
Adam watched the woman leave the girl called Penny on her own and he watched the fat tears roll from Penny’s eyes. Don’t cry, he thought. Please don’t cry. Every minute she sat there alone and in tears seemed like an eternity and each moment a lifetime. He was too scared to move, although he wanted to place his arm around her shoulders, so he just sat in the grass pretending he was beside her and willing her to be all right. Penny dried her eyes before her teacher returned to tell her that the neighbour was on her way. Twenty minutes later a car pulled up beside Penny, who jumped from the wall and silently slid into it. The teacher spoke with the woman in hushed tones as Penny stared straight ahead. Adam wondered what she was thinking and if he’d see her again.
No Way to Say Goodbye Page 6