‘What does it mean,’ he asks, ‘when people say, “She’s out of her misery”? Why the present tense? Who’s this she we’re speaking of?’
I smile, wanly.
‘I like it,’ he says. ‘I don’t believe there’s anything after, but I like that present tense that makes no sense.’
Harry is in his late fifties, dark-haired. One of his legs is impaired. I’m not sure why, perhaps he had polio. He might be just old enough to have contracted it before it was eradicated here. He walks with a stick. There is something thoughtful and contained about him, but also a sprightliness. He laughs readily. He seems like someone who has learned the hard way that the best means of surviving it all is a sense of humour.
Harry had wanted to be a historian, but he abandoned his Ph.D. He decided, after seeing a programme on the BBC about waves of displacement during the Angolan civil war, that he didn’t want an ivory-tower life. He apprenticed himself to a small NGO and learned everything he could about shelter. He says we met once before, when we were both working for the UN in Kosovo, though I have no memory of it. I thought I knew him only through email, and as a voice emanating from a starfish-shaped box splayed on a table in a conference room. But he insists we were once on the same assessment to a Roma camp outside Mitrovica.
I ask him if he isn’t confusing me with someone else, and he keeps saying, ‘I can’t believe you don’t remember.’
‘Sorry,’ I say.
I’m surprised I don’t remember, partly because Harry feels familiar to me, uncannily so, but also because I remember the mission itself, or at least the mood that hung over it. It was summer. It had rained all morning, heavily, and the air was hot and wet. The sky was still low, and a gulley of grey water ran down the muddy slope that separated the shacks. The camp was near a disused mine, and there was a slag heap visible above the tree line. Children gathered around us, listless and blank-eyed. The atmosphere could hardly have been bleaker.
Harry says he read the report I circulated afterwards, and that it was thorough and detailed. The report, I have no recollection of. From my years in the field, I remember little of all the facts and figures and timelines I assembled, assessed, disseminated. What I remember are impressions, and images, and people who were more interesting as symbols than as individuals. I remember Irish women getting deep-tissue massage and complaining about the help, half in love with the ironies of neo-colonialism. I remember the night a Scottish woman – she’d worked in all the world’s dodgiest places, Colombia and Iraq and Somalia – stepped out of a bar in Mombasa and was killed by a passing car driven by a drunk German. I remember buying roasted chestnuts from a cart in a square in Belgrade one late-October afternoon when you could feel the season turning, winter setting in smoky and cold, and all around me old, old Europe, so burdened and war-weary and rich in loss. And one evening in Batticaloa that I remember more clearly than any other. I was sitting with three colleagues and two local teenagers drinking tea in a cement-floored room open to the warm night, rubber prostheses – arms and below-the-knees and whole legs – dangling around the room’s perimeter like a dozen disassembled mannequins, something vaguely fetishistic about them, when into our midst wandered a big-bellied water monitor, its skin like an oyster shell, looking as old as time itself, and we all went still while, above us, the limbs swayed slightly in the breeze and the five-foot-long lizard oozed across the floor, and though I saw it all for the cheaply surrealist snapshot that it was, I knew that I had witnessed few moments in the world as strangely beautiful as this one.
Sri Lanka had been my first overseas posting, in 1996. I had left Eddie, I’d left our house on the slope of the mountain and fled to Dublin, where I got a job at an architectural trade magazine. One evening I went for drinks with a workmate and her sister, who was home on leave from her job as a protection officer for the UN in Colombo. I had never met anyone who did that sort of work, and I was fascinated. I badgered her with questions. When she asked about my life, I said I was ‘in transition’, bored to tears with my job and wondering what the next step should be. Before the night was out, she was promising to arrange a phone interview for a volunteer post in the information department of the country office in Batticaloa.
I thought it would be a brief interlude, an adventure. But that sort of life can become a habit. It has a way of filling in the blanks. The esprit de corps and the gallows humour and, sometimes, history happening before your eyes: these things tell you that you matter, that your days have a purpose. A form of institutionalization sets in, so that now I have the strange feeling I’ve been released back into the wild. Life on earth, Harry calls it. Meaning a middle-class existence in a developed country where one has no special status and where nothing too obviously atrocious is going on.
‘It’s a bit of a change,’ he says. His tone is wry. Then he looks me in the eye and says kindly, ‘Be careful not to isolate.’
‘I know,’ I say, though I also know that isolating is precisely my impulse when in the thick of grief.
Neither of us moves. We’ve been sitting for almost an hour and have agreed on an outline for my report. The usual sections: shelter, food, health, sanitation. A special section on camp prostitution, another on security issues and, to show it isn’t all doom and gloom, a third on entrepreneurship within the camp. Mostly, though, we’ve talked about things other than the report. Parents, and mourning. How I went abroad to begin with and where I might settle now. The changes Dublin has undergone. We are like any two people who have spent a long time in the same line of work. A lot goes without saying, and my report won’t reinvent the wheel. Harry looks at his watch, and I look at mine.
‘You’ll be all right?’ He gives me a little smile, so his worry doesn’t worry me, I guess.
‘Of course,’ I say.
‘We’ll meet next week?’
‘Next week?’
‘Lunch,’ he says happily.
I know what he’s doing. He thinks I need keeping an eye on.
‘You don’t have to,’ I say.
‘I know I don’t.’
For a moment, I have to look away. In my current state, kindness slays me. When I’ve pulled myself together, I say, ‘Whatever day suits you.’
We agree on Friday. Then he pays for our coffees and we step out on to Stephen’s Green and say goodbye.
During the year between our engagement and the wedding, I had flashes of doubt about what we were doing, which I felt guilty for harbouring and didn’t mention to Eddie. I was in love with him, and wanted badly to rise to the occasion of his offer of his life and his love, but there were things about him that I needed to come to terms with – or not – on my own. I needed to accept that I was leaving my country for ever, because it seemed unlikely that Eddie would ever leave his. I also needed to accept that Eddie was never going to be a man who spoke easily, if at all, of his inner world; that he was a man of doing, not dwelling upon, and that though this might at times inspire a certain confidence – the proof of his love visible in his actions – it might also mean that there was a limit on how deeply I could ever know him, and I felt a stab of loneliness when I thought of this. I felt it keenly not long after our engagement. His mother’s oldest and dearest friend had died, a woman Eddie had known since childhood and for whom he’d had great affection. I had gone with him to the funeral, and afterwards to the gathering at her daughter’s house, and I had watched Eddie and hadn’t known whether to be impressed or disconcerted by his self-possession. The following day I had tried to talk to him about this woman and what she’d meant to him, and I could feel him closing up, shrugging off my attempt. I said it seemed important to talk about these losses, and he said that sometimes silence was a form of respect. I told him that I understood that – but actually I didn’t. I thought it was fear, a refusal to allow himself to feel uncomfortable, to lose control even for an instant, and I couldn’t help resenting it, that refusal that seemed somehow directed at me – or at life. And yet I knew that he had ferried h
is mother back and forth to visit this woman in the hospital, that he had visited her himself throughout her illness, and offered practical help to her daughter. I knew that he’d been solid and present, and that, when his mother became disoriented with grief, he had steadied her. But still he wouldn’t speak about it all, and I wasn’t sure I could live with such silences.
And then, one night, I had what felt like a conversion experience. I allowed myself to accept, with what seemed my whole heart, a future with Eddie. It wasn’t a decision (even ‘allowed’ isn’t the right word), and that was why it felt like something I could trust.
It was a spring evening, and I had returned to town from a particularly unpleasant encounter with a man I was interviewing near Donegal town. I had been freelancing for two papers in Dublin, and I occasionally wrote pieces for the horrendous local weekly. The work gave me some sense of having a life – a self – that existed outside Eddie’s orbit, though it was piecemeal enough, and my subjects sufficiently trivial, that it also left me feeling more like a Sunday painter than a journalist. The man I met that day had been accused by neighbours of building on land that wasn’t his own, and the episode had escalated into news because the man had grown belligerent and begun obstructing a nearby access road with his tractors, and was now receiving anonymous threats to both his property and his person. The whole thing struck me as silly, and I suspect my attitude betrayed this, because we weren’t talking three minutes when the man, who was sitting on a bench in a café with his head thrust towards me and his two hands planted on his spread-open thighs, began haranguing me, to the point where I eventually left the interview shaking, ashamed of myself for letting him reduce me to such a state. Heading home in a downpour, I narrowly avoided ploughing into the back of another car as I rounded a bend on the main Donegal road. It had only one dim tail light and was travelling at a crawl in a 100kph zone. I swerved to avoid it and fishtailed on the wet road before regaining control.
The minute I walked through the door of his flat, Eddie could see that I was upset. He sat me down and made me a drink, and I told him first about the near-miss on the road, and then about the Donegal man. He put his arm around me and smoothed my hair. It was pitch black out and I could hear the rain drumming on the windows. I kept replaying in my mind the scene on the road, feeling the car lurching beneath me, the terrifying realization that I was not in control. I buried my face in Eddie’s neck, feeling as safe as I could ever recall having felt, and pressed closer to him on the sofa. His hand tensed on my skull, and the moment turned abruptly sexual, and we wound up making love on the floor.
It was afterwards, as we lay there, tangled in our own clothes and still lazily aroused by that unexpected onrush of desire, that I surrendered to our future. Yes, I thought, we can make a life together.
We married in Sligo Cathedral on a fresh September day. The reception was at the family home, in a marquee set up on the lawn. The sun shone and a jazz quartet played, and even Eddie’s father seemed cheerful. Camille and Jane were my bridesmaids. Two weeks before the wedding, they had insisted on a night out. Jane, who had graduated from the local tech with a degree in environmental science and now had a job monitoring water quality, rounded up three other women, extras whose names I hardly knew, and we went out on the town. None of us was the hen-party type and none of us, at least that we admitted, regarded marriage as a deliverance from the perilous state of being unmarried. But I went along with it, out of what felt like superstition. Camille had gotten herself a job in a Celtic jewellery shop in town and the women had bought me a pendant with one of those triple swirls, which I wore all night and never again. At 2 a.m. they walked me down to Eddie’s flat, all of us arm in arm and in an out-of-season singsong of – I’m embarrassed to say – ‘Fairytale of New York’. When we got to Eddie’s we shouted up to his window until, finally, the sash was raised and Eddie leaned out, like an imprisoned princess, which caused my companions to howl lewdly but reduced me to a besotted silence. He came down and unlocked the door. ‘You survived,’ he said, smiling sleepily, and I wrapped my arms around him and felt delivered, like a baby, into his care.
My mother travelled over from Portland with Stan. She took to Eddie immediately, which was both a relief and a surprise. My mother had disapproved of every boyfriend I’d ever had, up to and including the impatient columnist. She feared that I would fall for a man of inconstant character and find myself disappointed, and saddled with a future I hadn’t bargained for. By then I knew that that wasn’t quite how she saw her story with my father, or the task of raising me, but I also knew that her apprehensiveness about my choices was informed by her own life.
She and my father had dated during the semester he was in Portland, a romance that hadn’t evolved into something serious. ‘We wouldn’t have made each other happy,’ my mother said, when I was old enough to press for details. When my mother became pregnant towards the end of that spring – a surprise to both of them – she didn’t try to persuade my father to stay in Portland, nor did she ask him to take her to Maine with him. It was brave of her, really, to go it alone, but my mother was in some respects ahead of her time. They said their goodbyes and went their very separate ways. At some point during my childhood I became aware that he sent a sum of money every month towards my care.
I didn’t meet my father until I was eleven years old. He had sent a letter to my mother, asking her to share it with me if she thought it best. He’d got married a couple years previously. He and his wife did not plan to have children. His wife, however, had known about me since they’d met, and it was at her behest – rightly, he said, for the lack of contact with his daughter had sat uneasily with him for years – that he was writing. He said that he didn’t know if he knew how to be a father, or to what extent my mother, or I, wanted him to be. The last thing he wanted, he said, was to upset our domestic harmony. He used that phrase – domestic harmony; his tone throughout, in fact, was of such formality that I imagined him ashen and bespectacled, standing at a lectern. He didn’t sound like much fun, which didn’t mean I wasn’t breathless with excitement at the thought of him. I hoped that I would learn something about him that would enable me to understand his capacity to absent himself as he had, something that would cast him in a noble light and relieve me of the suspicion that some deficiency of mine had made it easy, or necessary, for him to stay away. And so began our tentative and, as it turned out, short-lived relationship, an exchange of letters that led to his visiting Portland, on his own, a few months later.
We did well, I think, that weekend, for two people so stunned by the sudden, unfamiliar reality of the other. He was staying at a nearby hotel, and on the Saturday he picked me up at our house and we went for lunch down on the waterfront and took a boat tour up the river. On the Sunday we went to Multnomah Falls for a gentle hike, which offered a context for togetherness without the necessity of constant conversation. In the evenings we had dinner with my mother, which presented its own strain but at least relieved us of the intensity of being alone together. My parents didn’t seem overly uncomfortable with each other, and I imagined – what child wouldn’t, in such a situation? – what a perfectly nice family the three of us might someday make.
All that weekend there was a palpable restraint in my father, which I decided was due to nothing more than our newness to each other and which I quickly made it my life’s great cause to overcome. (The minute he left I wrote him a letter, and I can still recall its effusiveness, a kind of courage I can’t but admire.) This project of mine filled me with hope, a hope suffused, as perhaps all hope is, with anxiety, for I believed that somewhere in my repertoire of being existed the equivalent of a magic word – a fact about me as yet unknown to him, a side of me he hadn’t seen, the sheer hidden wonder of me – and that I must locate it, so that with it I could perforate that reserve of his, enabling his love for me to break helplessly through.
Oh, what power absence wields. I would’ve tied myself in knots for him if only I’d known how,
and my poor, devoted mother witness to it all. Of all the boys I would pine for in the years to come, I don’t think anything compared with the near-slavishness of my desire for my father’s affection.
I saw him again a few months after the first visit. He had attended a conference in Seattle, then driven down to spend a day and an evening with us. It was during that weekend that it was agreed I would visit him and his wife during the upcoming summer vacation. This visit never happened, for three months later my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
I had the feeling my mother was angry with him for becoming ill, which hardly made sense. Later I wondered if she’d suspected him of knowing all along that he was ill and that being the reason he’d finally sought me out – which wouldn’t have been the worst crime, and possibly not a crime at all. But I don’t think he did know when he wrote that first letter, or on either of the visits. He didn’t seem at all sickly and, though he was self-contained, he was nothing like the greying, sedentary figure I’d imagined. He was someone who loved to swim and hike almost as much he loved to read and write, and I don’t recall there having been any whiff of morbidity about him.
I was devastated by his death – he was a future snatched from me just as I had glimpsed it – but there was, at the same time, a discomfiting sense in which death seemed to return him to his natural state, for in the years before I met him my father had often seemed oddly posthumous to me, a distant ancestor rather than the person who begot me. I don’t know what would’ve become of us had he lived. I think that, in his own reluctant way, he wanted to know me, and for me to know him. But I think there were limits, too, to his capacity to absorb me into his life, and I can imagine that as I got older and felt the need of a father less, I might’ve closed the door, unwilling to forgive him his years of absence.
When Light Is Like Water Page 4