‘You do, actually.’
He pried the cap off and said, ‘I should hope so.’
He told me that by the end of that summer he was having trouble remembering the most familiar things: the name of the woman in the local shop, the meaning of items he’d written on a grocery list, his mother’s phone number. ‘It was like I had fucking Alzheimer’s,’ he said. So someone had dragged him to the hospital, and he dried out for two weeks with Librium and then did ninety meetings in ninety days. After the first one, in a community centre up on John Street, about a dozen people had come up to him and shook his hand and said, ‘We thought you’d never get here,’ as though he were delivering supplies to some desperate outpost.
He got a head of lettuce and a cucumber from the fridge and then went out back to where he’d planted a small garden, a raised bed in a plot of trimmed grass I didn’t remember from before – the image I’d retained was of the world stopping at the edge of Kevin’s patio wall. He picked scallions and dug up carrots and tossed everything together, then got two chipped plates out of the cupboard and some unmatched cutlery, and a few slices of brown bread. We brought the whole lot outside and set it on a table made of a flat slab of rock. There were short stools of cracked vinyl that must’ve come from a pub, and we perched on them like little old ladies on a Sunday afternoon, sipping our fizzy water and eating our salad.
‘Do you ever hear from him?’ I asked.
‘He’s in London.’
I knew that much. I saw it on the internet. He runs a small theatre company there. His wife is a set designer.
‘He went a bit off the rails, you know.’
I hadn’t known, but it was easy to imagine. Cauley was wired, on a collision course with something – even I could see it, as heedless as I was then, all the energy he didn’t yet know how to harness.
‘But he pulled it together. He’s married, he’s got two boys. He came out to the house a few months ago.’
‘Really?’ It shouldn’t have surprised me that Cauley still visited: he and Kevin had been friends since childhood. But I was startled to think of him here so recently.
Kevin poured what was left of the water into our glasses, then drained his. A bird hopped brightly on the wall. The sun was shining. It was steamy then, after the rain, like we were in the tropics. A hundred metres down the road was the wide sandy beach. I envied him, in a way. A house of his own, the sea on his doorstep. Knowing what his life consisted of, and where it was rooted. A life of limits isn’t necessarily easier, but there is something clarifying in it, and beauty makes up for a lot.
It was late afternoon when I left Kevin, heading back to town along the sea road. Crossing the bridge, I could see the hostel where I had lived that first summer. To the left, the low, drab skyline of Stephen Street, and to the right the docks, where Eddie’s showroom and flat had been. Then I was back on the relief road, which had finally been built, carved right through the town’s centre, houses bulldozed to make way. High walls of forbidding grey stone had been erected either side of it, so that I felt I was driving past a prison, or out of one.
The house creaks and ticks, as though light-footed creatures are living their little lives all around me. I sit down at the kitchen table and make a list for tomorrow. Harry is coming for brunch. He said we’re going to have a reverse housewarming. I asked him what that meant, and he said that it was when, instead of imprinting yourself upon a new place through objects, you think about what the place you’re leaving has given you, the intangible things, and how you’ll bring those with you to the next life. ‘By which I mean,’ he said, ‘the next place you live.’
I nodded. It sounded interesting. ‘Is that a ritual?’ I asked. ‘Where do they do this?’
He shrugged, smiling. ‘I made it up.’
I picture Harry in the kitchen here, conjuring on my behalf. I remember what he said once about how everywhere you leave stays with you. In a satchel on the table in front of me, in a wallet-sized folder that holds nothing else, is a photo of my mother. It is my favourite of the dozens I’ve held on to. She is four years old, and the look of bliss on her face as she stands ankle-deep in the Pacific is more than I know what to do with. Her head is tilted up and her eyes are closed, as though she has heard a whisper from on high. I look at that child and I hold her in the kind of awe in which my mother once held me. I feel my mother less acutely than I did even one week ago. But what I lose in intensity I seem to gain in diffuseness: I feel her everywhere. I think of her belongings, the few I saved. From where I’m sitting I can see them, in a box on the landing, awaiting transport to the next life.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their ongoing and generous support. Thank you to Brendan Barrington, Lucy Luck, Mary Costello, Una Mannion, Adam, Ciarán, and the Searson family of Monkstown.
This novel grew out of a short story, ‘City of Glass’, which appeared in Town & Country: New Irish Short Stories. Thanks to Kevin Barry, who edited that anthology.
The lines ‘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?’ (here) are based on lines from Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary: ‘In the sentence “She’s no longer suffering,” to what, to whom does “she” refer? What does that present tense mean?’
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN IRELAND
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First published 2017
Copyright © Molly McCloskey, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover image © Alison Burford/Arcangel Images
ISBN: 978-0-241-97821-4
When Light Is Like Water Page 18