by Jan Carson
Several of Jim’s old mates from the shipyards appeared at the wake. Sandra didn’t recognise any of them, but every so often recalled a name in passing, the memory of it hooking at her grief as she remembered an anecdote Jim had once passed across their dinner table, easy as a dish of boiled potatoes. They were big men with damp skin and proper suits, kept good for funerals and marching. A fair percentage of them were also called Jim or some clipped version of James. They announced themselves from the hall gruffly, as if they’d not yet grown into their names. They refused to sit, even when seats were available. ‘I’m not stopping, love.’ ‘No tea for myself, I’ve just risen from a cup.’ When leaving, they lingered too long in the doorway, holding one of Sandra’s hands in two of theirs like they were trying to pray and forgetting the words. When they drew back to leave, as often as not, she’d find a clammy fiver or twenty-pound note marking the place where the two of them had met and parted and, in doing so, remained just as strange as ever.
Sandra would have liked for these men to cry. Every one of them was thick with the need to cry, and not just about Jim. She could see the yearning just beneath their skin. It was tight and straining like the stretched surface of a blistered heel. There was nothing she could say to provoke it. They were not the kind of men who cried, even over a dead wife – though a child might have been the exception.
The minister was equally faithful during Jim’s wake. He came every day around teatime. He was a young fella, just ordained and not married. Sometimes he wore a V-neck pullover over his collar, grey or burgundy, but never patterned, even with a stripe.
‘Yon fella can smell the stew from the other side of the East,’ her sister said. And, sure enough, the young minister seemed to time his visits around meals. At first resisting any food the family offered and, when pressed, accepting under polite duress, a plate of something substantial.
The minister took his suit jacket off to eat, hooking it over the back of a dining-room chair. He ate like a man who lived on sandwiches, and Sandra was glad to see him fed. They’d often had this minister or one of his predecessors for Sunday lunch, and the presence of a dog collar leant an air of normalcy to their meals. Where possible, she tried to force a hot pudding on him.
‘Sure, there’s no harm in feeding him while he’s here,’ she said. ‘There’s more than enough to go round and he’s no wife to cook for him.’
Before leaving, the young minister always read the scriptures aloud. Pushing his chair back to stand, he’d remove a black leather Bible from his breast pocket and hold it open in his right hand. He had the look of an actor when he read. The familiar funeral verses, the yea-though-I-walks, and the neither-shall-there-be-any-mournings slipped from his tongue like honeyed milk. The open Bible was only there to keep his hands occupied. This in no way diminished his appeal. This was East Belfast. People expected a minister to know the Word by heart and deliver it like a politician. After the scriptures, the minister sucked a long breath into himself so that it caught like wind at the back of his teeth. Then he raised his hands in a manner suited to a much older man. If he’d not been holding the Bible, she’d have suspected he was about to launch into some kind of dance routine.
‘Folks,’ he said, ‘will we have a wee prayer?’
No one ever said no, though there was a different room of people every time he posed the question. No one ever said no, though half the people there hadn’t darkened the door of a church in years. On the third day of the wake, Sandra felt as if she could not bear another of the minister’s wet prayers, and almost spoke out in defiance.
‘No thank you, Mr Cunningham. We’ll not have a wee prayer after all,’ she wanted to say. ‘We’ll have another cup of tea instead, and talk about who I’m going to go on holidays with now I’ve not got Jim.’
Sandra didn’t say any of this. She could not even explain where this loud thought had come from. Instead, she bowed her head and closed her eyes and, on the final hallowed beat, added her own dull ‘Amen’ to the chorus. Afterwards, upon opening her eyes, she was shocked to find that her hands had curled into themselves, four red lines like More code running across each palm where her fingernails had dug in.
There was a lack in the house without Jim. There was an echo after the children and the children’s children went home. Yet, at this, the most empty moment of her life, Sandra understood that there was no room in her for God or any of his comfort. A loneliness slid between her and the rest of the family. It had a stiff back to it and would not bend. They were church people, and, in moments of death and serious sickness, held to their faith like drowning fish. Sandra still said all the same things the children were saying and agreed with them on everything, even the funeral hymns, yet felt herself a spectre, haunting the edges of her own living room. She tried to explain this to her son on the morning of the funeral.
‘I’m finding it hard to pray,’ she admitted. ‘It’s like there’s nothing there.’
‘Of course you are, Mum,’ her son replied. ‘You’re in shock. God understands. It’ll all come back to you in time.’
She was proud of their son in his funeral suit. He was the cut of his father and, under pressure, just as wise and serious. They’d brought him up for such a time as this, and here he was, more than capable: carrying the coffin, delivering the eulogy, explaining gently to her grandchildren that Grandpa was in Heaven now, with Jesus. Sandra looked at her son’s big, shovelling hands as they cupped his coffee mug, and he looked older than she felt. She wished, just for this morning, that she was not his mother, but rather one of his two wee girls, still cute enough to believe everything the adults said.
He offered to pray for her right there at the kitchen table. Sandra hadn’t the cruelty in her to refuse him, but his hand on her shoulder was another thing she had to carry. She barely heard him speak for wrestling with the fear that she might, at any moment, get up and leave. When her grandson came bursting through the kitchen door with a picture book and shoes to be laced, she was glad of the interruption. She scooped him up into her lap. He was four now, almost five, and really too big for lifting, but the weight of him and the angles of his wee bony backside digging into her thighs, was exactly the kind of heaviness Sandra could manage.
‘I can’t do my laces, Gran,’ he said, and she bent in two to tie the child’s feet into his new black shoes. The smell of his hair caught in her nose: chamomile and milk. He’d been bathed in preparation for the funeral.
‘There you go, Sam,’ she said. ‘All laced up.’ The unfinished prayer hung over the kitchen table like one side of an argument, never resolved.
‘Grandpa’s with Jesus,’ the child announced. ‘You shouldn’t be sad, Gran.’
‘Right you are, Sammy,’ she said, and ruffled the child’s hair so it rose, like a duck’s tail, at the nape of his neck. ‘Your Grandpa’s happier than he’s ever been right now.’
Across the table, her son smiled and nodded his assent. The child, satisfied that there was nothing here to concern himself with, returned to his picture book.
It was impossible to explain to this small, simple person all the things Sandra was currently feeling: dumb and thundering, tired as death itself. So she made her grandson hot Ribena in a mug and warned him not to spill any of it on his good white shirt. Then she opened the fridge and cried quietly into its stacked shelves, her face glowing cheerfully in the door light.
Sandra barely noticed the funeral. It happened and she watched it as if watching herself on a television programme. Everything was familiar and at the same time removed from itself. Twice she could not recall her own daughter’s name in conversation. She did not cry in the church or at the graveside. She understood that this had been expected of her. Afterwards, there was no way to right it. At the grave, she stared at the coffin containing Jim and could not picture him inside. It was easier to imagine the coffin full of flat-pack furniture or electronic goods waiting to be shipped abroad. It seemed ludicrous to cover her husband in muck and walk away, as if th
e act of hiding him underground might somehow make the last forty years easier to forget.
For the first time, she understood why the Catholics favoured cremation. She knew a lady who’d stored her husband’s remains in the pocket of her everyday handbag, tucking the old man tightly under her arm each time she left the house. This made more sense to Sandra than coffins and headstones or the polished white pebbles they’d ordered to cover Bill’s plot. She knew not to mention this to any of the children. They’d inherited their grandmother’s holy Protestant horror of the crematorium and would sooner have seen their father’s body tipped feet first into the Lagan than burnt.
After the funeral, the young minister gave Sandra a paper booklet about bereavement. It had flowers on the front and a Bible. She recognised white lilies and gypsophila gathered in a tight, old-fashioned bunch. There was also a cross: a Protestant one, without Jesus.
‘You may find that a comfort to you in the coming weeks,’ the minister explained.
There were Bible verses inside and suggestions for things she could pray if she wasn’t up to inventing her own prayers. Sandra slipped the booklet into the back page of her Bible and tried to forget it.
‘I’m having doubts,’ she said to her daughter, just one week after the funeral. ‘I can’t pray.’
The daughter placed a hand on Sandra’s hand. Their hands were dead fish, piled up in a fishmonger’s window.
‘Uch, Mum, give yourself time,’ she said. ‘Even when you can’t pray yourself, we’re praying for you. God knows what you’d want to say if you could. You’re just tired.’
The doctor came, on her daughter’s insistence, and left tiny blue pills for the tiredness. They were diamond-shaped like the extra-strong breath mints Jim used to suck when he couldn’t be bothered to brush his teeth. Sandra took them with hot milk at night and felt the blood drift heavier in her veins. She slept like a woman who had not slept in years. She dreamt of herself as a girl, left behind in an empty room, though the room changed from one night to the next and was often lifted from a television programme.
During the second week, the sleep sunk its teeth into Sandra and held on. She slept ten hours each night and still went back for a nap before dinner. She felt guilty about this and told no one. The sofa was uncomfortable for lying on, and she could not bring herself to sleep in their bed. The absence of Jim was one thing, the untouched Bible on his bedside cabinet, a beast she was not yet brave enough to confront. Sandra slept in the spare room, shoving the grandchildren’s soft toys aside to make space for herself in the single bed. The bed smelt of Sam, and then her own powdery, paper smell, and, after a few weeks, stale like damp flannels dried too often. Sometimes she woke with Winnie the Pooh or Mickey cradled against her chest and cried. It was almost impossible then to get out of bed and wear slippers, to microwave something from the freezer for dinner.
‘You’re doing so well, Mum,’ said her daughters. She looked in the mirror and knew they were only humouring her.
‘Mum’s not making anything of it,’ they said, on their mobile phones in the hall, with the door not quite to. It was, in some frail way, comforting to have her suspicions confirmed.
Then it was almost spring. She had not noticed. Devoid of the margins created by routine, time meant very little to Sandra. The responsibility for laundry and cleaning and meals had been taken from her as if she was a child incapable of looking after herself. She rarely left the house, and never went further than Connswater Tesco, where she purchased things she did not particularly like, and let them go bad in the larder waiting for Jim’s appetite to return. One of the girls always went with her. They were too polite to question any of the items Sandra placed in her trolley. She wanted them to say something. She purchased dog biscuits, tampons, vanilla essence and Radox shower gel for men, hoping to provoke a reaction. An argument would have cleaned her out in a good way, like the dull satisfaction which settles once the vomit’s finally up.
Towards the end of March, Sandra noticed the nights getting a little longer. She kept the curtains open. She wondered if the lawn would soon need mowing, and who would do it now that Jim was dead? There were people you could pay to do things around the house: young, unemployed fellas, retired men looking for cash in hand and also Romanians. They could clean the windows when they were here and have a look at the guttering. There was money enough for this, and also for Christmas and holidays, if the inclination ever returned. She would ask around for recommendations and get a man in to do the garden. The decision cheered Sandra. It was the first time she hadn’t consulted the children since the day of Jim’s death. She’d done him a fry instead of toast that morning, and he’d grabbed her round the waist like a two-armed belt, whispering in her ear, ‘What did I ever do to deserve the likes of you?’
The children would be pleased to see her making progress. Or, perhaps the children would wonder why she had not asked for their help. Her son would say, ‘Uch, Mum, there was no need to pay a stranger. Sure, I can run the lawnmower over the garden any time you want.’ Then Sandra would have to let him, and he’d notice the guttering, and the moss beginning to peek through the patio cracks. She would become yet another thing for him to fit into his week. She did not want this or the alternative which was a fold or moving in with one of them. She made a note in her head to ask the minister’s advice. He was impartial and it would give her a diversion – something else to talk about – when she felt him lumbering up for prayer.
The young minister remained just as faithful as ever. He came to visit every Tuesday en route to the senior citizens’ lunch. By the third week of widowhood, these pastoral visits had fallen into a pale routine. Tea was taken, sometimes with cake or chocolate biscuits. Then they made general conversation about people they knew and things which had recently happened, mostly in the East. Sandra enjoyed these chats. She looked forward to them. The minister was a fine storyteller. He could bring the city right into her living room so, for a short hour, she did not feel quite so removed from the streets outside her front door.
However, these visits were not without purpose. Every act, including the particular way he sat on the sofa’s edge, neither absent nor fully committed, was a mere preamble to the praying. Once his teacup had been drained and topped up and drained again, the young minister would set it, quite deliberately, on the carpet by his feet. Adjusting his trousers at the thigh, his voice would make the barely perceivable slide from secular to spiritual. Like all good clergymen, the Reverend Cunningham kept a second, slightly forced, accent for talking to and about God. It helped Sandra to imagine this process as a key change, like Boyzone or one of those other bands of young lads going up an octave every time they hit a bridge. However, the young minister’s voice did not rise. It descended: down, down, down to the carpet and the heels of his well-polished brogues. ‘Well,’ he’d say holding his own hand in his lap, as if it did not belong to him, ‘how’s it been this week, Sandra?’ The ‘it’ was not her health or even her grief, but rather some ill-defined place between faith and unbelief, an island of sorts, perpetually adrift.
‘It’s not easy, Mr Cunningham,’ she’d say. ‘It’s not easy at all. I want to believe God’s up there and he’s listening. But I don’t feel anything any more.’
‘Feelings come and go,’ the young minister would answer quickly, ‘and God isn’t the least bit affected by how you feel about him. He’s still there Sandra, no matter what you believe. There’s far too much talk about feelings these days. Proper faith is believing in things you can’t see or feel.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Sandra agreed. She did not see the sense in devoting herself to something which couldn’t be depended upon. Jim’s faith had been a blanket, big enough for both of them. Without him, it was hard to remember if she’d ever really believed at all.
At the beginning of April, Sandra noticed the crocuses. Jim had planted them himself, filling the plastic planters which ran the length of their windowsills with handfuls of onion-coloured bulbs.
‘They were in a box in the shed,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve no idea what they are, maybe snowdrops or miniature daffodils. Sure, we’ll see in the spring, when they come up.’ He’d never been much of a gardener – more of a handyman – but the crocuses tore into Sandra every time she drew the curtains back. She could picture him with a trowel and the particular hat he’d kept for gardening. She let the crocuses be, relishing the way they crept along her windowsill like a slow bruise. Their heads, by the second week, had already started to hang and nosed at the soil as if ashamed of their own beauty.
‘Is it Easter soon?’ she asked her son on the telephone.
‘Next week,’ he replied and Sandra said that she’d thought as much, on account of the crocuses and the nights growing longer.
‘Will you come to us for Easter, Mum?’ he asked, and she said she was looking forward to it. This was neither a lie, nor the truth entirely.
She asked how many days it was to Easter. It was nine; just a little over a week. This seemed believable. She made a note in her head of the number and planned to write it down once her son had hung up.
She asked if the weans would be better off with money instead of Easter eggs, and her son said either would be fine and she really didn’t have to bother this year, on account of Jim.
She thought, without saying it, that Easter would be a line under all this ugliness.
For weeks, Sandra had been bracing herself for Easter.
Lent was always a thin time. Even during ordinary years, she’d kept herself half starved right through till the last Sunday. It was how she’d been brought up, how she’d raised her own three children. ‘You give things up,’ she’d taught them, as soon as they were old enough to understand, ‘and it’s hard. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. But the missing makes you lean all the more on the Lord. Lent’s there to show God you’re serious about him.’
When the children were really young, before they’d made professions of their own, she’d made the decision for them. Emptying her larder of all but the staples, she’d fed them three bland meals a day and plain digestives when they asked for something after dinner. She hoped they had understood the difference between sacrifice and punishment. She was never quite sure if she entirely understood herself. She’d been harder on the children than Jim, who’d slipped them creme eggs when Sandra wasn’t looking, and let them read comics in church during the sermon. Jim, whose belief had remained as wide as the transatlantic gulf and had not required proof nor testing of any sort.