He remained silent, for he sensed that he had already communicated his discomposure, and he did not want to blunder. He looked around him: over the low partition; back at Fondler. Something further seemed to deflate from her; she looked down at her conjoined hands, at the upturned fingers stiffening, like slow-growing tendrils in speeded-up time. It was a glimpse of disappointment – the first glimpse of disappointment – after all the magic and glitter of the last day. He could not safely locate this disappointment; he was sure it was in both of them. He privately reproached himself. He looked down at his trousers, in case his flies were undone.
Finally she said:
‘My name got drawn out in the lottery. Please come to Minnesota with me. Observe a moment in time.’
***
He had never been further west than Riverside Drive, and he had never been at a Viking funeral before.
On the stroke of midnight, after three hours of propitious faintness (so far from city lights, there was a sherbet tinge to the sky; later, some said it was the dust churned up by the Valkyrie; another said it resembled ‘a screen the moment before hibernation’), a blast of a horn, reminiscent of a note of whale song, swept through the pines and the still Midwestern air and over the palisades. The door of every cabin down the slope stood open and silhouettes of figures waited, framed by the light behind them, each as if for the command of another to lead them on to the stake-paved path and down to the forest road. The smell of turf drifted from the open doorways, and then a movement of grey figures at the bottom of the slope pulled everyone into its tide. The portent was false: the mood of the mourners was not dour; it was jocular, even, although the chat and laughter did not rise above a whisper. Ahead, a flaming torch led the line. Here and there electronic devices were held aloft for added light, their soft blue screens bobbing in the darkness like luminous moths.
The forest road opened to a plain of even and dry though spongy ground. Far off to the left and right the dark treeline continued against the faintly glowing night. From all directions, from many paths in the forest, hordes of mourners pooled on to the plain. Flaming facias on long poles were skewered into the ground, spaced regularly apart. The crowds settled into a crescent formation around the head of a lake, or to the point that the rushy ground would allow. The lake stretched away into the darkness, more like a sea. The surface was silver glass and held the picture of the moon without any degradation of the satellite’s power. A black tuft, like a brush head, poked out of the water around where the silver became darkness. A flame could just about be seen flickering in the tuft. The mourners waited, all eyes on the island. A small dark blip appeared in the clear silver; only when it was near the shoreline could the shape of a small Viking galley be made out, sitting high in the water, its prow cresting to a carving of a cat’s head with mouth set in a wrinkled and pained cartouche. A team of men waded through the soggy littoral ground and into the water, either side of a wooden track. The boat hit the track underwater with a crunch. The oarsmen threw ropes to the team of men, who dragged the craft into a flat-bottomed stabilising frame half in the water. The boat was left in this position for several minutes, the team of men having to dig their heels into the bog to keep the ropes taut. They waited like this until, one on each side of the boat, two rafts had caught up. One carried Guru Mahseer Chaudhuri, wearing robes of pink and beads of white and blue; Guru Chaudhuri had been Townsend Thoresen’s spiritual adviser since, as an eighteen-year-old, Thoresen had run away to India. This raft also carried the rock star Rainy Fairmount, who was shaking and wearing a life jacket. On the other raft was a tall blond local Scandinavian man, who wore dark woollen robes secured around the waist with vines of ivy. Once the raft passengers were on land, the boat, in its stabilising frame, was hauled on to the track’s rollers and fully out of the water and on to the plain, and lugged in time with the slow pace of Guru Chaudhuri and Rainy Fairmount on one side and the Scandinavian man on the other. The track ran out at the top of a low flat-topped mound. Here the boat was left to rest. The oarsmen laid their oars against the gunnel of the craft and climbed out, down a rope ladder. In the centre of the boat was a cube-shaped cabin. It was understood that grave goods had already been left in the cabin. These might have included the various iterations of Townsend Thoresen’s technological innovations, plus charms. Young ladies in white robes ascended the ladder and spent some time in the cabin. One of the ladies’ tasks was to tie Hel-shoes on the corpse, which would be needed if Thoresen’s passage to Valhalla included time in the Hel-world. The ladies left the cabin and two men followed soon after. Then some more men climbed the ladder and produced buckets of tar from inside the cabin. The tar was dripped down the sides of the boat. Once everyone living had left the craft the hull was torched. The flames licked up the splashes of tar and took a while to eat into the wood. But soon the wood of the hull was glowing, and the cube collapsed into the flaming ribs. Men stood near to the fire casting into it green bushels. A great amount of smoke was produced, gathering and twisting into a pillar, which became huge and thick and rose to the sky that resembled a screen the moment before hibernation.
The horn that sounded like whale song rang out again and everybody seemed at peace. Then the funeral ale was passed around, which made heads berserk, and the mood became morose, and the next phase was entered.
13
The body was delivered in a glossy white casket, brought upright in the service elevator, and rested across a trestle table borrowed, by the Mac An Fincashel brothers, from a caterer. There were no Christian or any other religious symbols on the lid of the casket; only a yellow sticker that said BIODEGRADABLE. The lid was attached by suction or a snug fitting; certainly not by weight: Jeremiah and Rickard were surprised by how light it felt (‘like polystyrene,’ said Rickard) as it came off.
‘He looks only beautiful,’ said Denny’s seventy-eight-year-old sister, Geraldine, who had flown over from Ireland the day before. It was Geraldine’s first time in America, and the first time she had seen her older brother since the early sixties, which was the last time Denny had visited Ireland. She had arrived at the apartment directly from Appledorn’s enormous New Jersey outlet, with her fifty-two-year-old daughter, Karen, the both of them laden with bags of shopping. The chairs in the apartment were draped with new coats, dresses and handbags and the door handles were hung with frocks. Ladies’ shoes and balls of tissue paper littered the floor. Geraldine and Karen were tipsy at this stage: the Mac An Fincashel brothers had set out the wake table with cans of beer and bottles of spirits for the evening’s spree. Karen, who wore a sequined top that revealed almost the entirety of her deep pink prickled bosom, kept lifting her knee into Emmet’s behind.
But Denny did not look beautiful. Clive and Rickard knew it – Rickard’s face was warped in terror. Rickard was grey. But then Rickard had not looked right since his return from his trip out west.
It could have been worse: there might have been no head there. There might have been some botched attempt to cauterise the hole in the middle of the shoulders. But it was horrible all the same. It was not easy to look at. In place of Denny’s head was a bung of white wax. No effort had been made to shape the bung into the form of a normal human head; and there was no neck, as such. It was all neck: round in its girth, and a foot long, and tapering suddenly at the top to a chiselled end, like a lipstick. Two pockmarks for eyes and a simple blip for a nose and a zigzag frown made a hideous mockery of the hominid face.
‘He aged very well, it must be said, God bless him,’ said Geraldine, surprising Clive again with her pronounced Dublin accent. ‘That’s over fifty years now since I last seen Denis, and he hasn’t changed, not much at all. He always had a great complexion. I was jealous of him, Karen, I was. He had this gorgeous creamy white complexion, it was like a girl’s, and the smoothest most flawless skin, not a line or a wart on him. He could have modelled for a Parisian make-up house. And that awful bitch, Aisling, God forgive me for using language like that in the presence of
the dead, but she couldn’t appreciate what she had. If he’s beautiful now, a dead man of eighty-three, can you imagine how he looked in his twenties?’
Jeremiah held Bit upside down over its master’s body, gripping it by its soft belly and delicate hind legs; its little leather triangular ears flapped about and its front paws paddled the air in panic. He gently let the animal on to the corpse’s chest whereupon it took one sniff of the wax column of a head and flinched. Whimpering, it turned itself in the tight space and examined the hand; the whimper levelled to a low, distressed oboe-note, and rose to a grumble. It began to gnaw at the knuckles and fingers. Jeremiah scooped it away.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘in its grief, all it can think to do is eat him.’
Or in its hunger, thought Clive – in its hunger. He put his own hand to Denny’s. As he’d suspected: cold, cold, colder than cold, and not firm enough for a human, living or dead, compressing to beyond the point where the bone should have been. Like putty. Protein. Meat.
This was not Denny, but a gimcrack, fobbed off on them – a shambles left in his place. A changeling, yes. The real Denny was being put to use somewhere, somewhere still, on this earth here.
A changeling, he thought, touching his face. This could have been for me. (His face was as cold as the meat; his flesh thin and numb against the cheekbone.) It was true. Or am I the changeling, he thought – left behind? What is my status now, in the sweep of this and the parallel life? In life, such as I have been given and stolen more of for myself?
He slowly lowered himself into a chair, into the rustle of a crispy fabric.
‘Mind that feckin’ dress,’ said Geraldine.
‘Hey, Mam,’ said Karen. ‘These lads have another brother. Emmet was saying there’s a fella called Breffny down in the basement. Says he works out and that he has the best arse of the lot of them. Get him up here, Emmet!’
‘Yeah! Get him up here!’ said Geraldine. ‘And bring an extra one for me!’
‘Would you like me to invite the other super we’ve got?’ said Emmet.
‘Yes!’ said Karen. ‘Call Superman, call Limahl Ataturk, call Don Bon Johnson. Bring them all up here and tell them they must be six foot eight and ripped and we’ll have a proper Irish wake.’
Breffny came to the door, his eyes propped wide open in pretend sexual agitation, and sputum pouring over his stiff bottom lip and down his Punchinello chin. He was banging a handheld brass Eastern gong, much to the amusement of Emmet. Emmet had also brought with him Denny’s record player and a box of LPs that had been gifted to Jeremiah after the clear-out.
‘In remembrance of the old man,’ said Emmet, dropping the needle on a Richard Tauber record.
‘Oh get that off!’ said Karen, not a minute into the first song. ‘So bleedin’ miserable. This is a wake, for Jesus’ sake.’
She began twiddling with the MP3 player that Denny had bought to replace his record player.
‘He never got around to loading that up,’ said Jeremiah, and so Karen planted her own portable MP3 player in the stand, and the sound of the ubiquitous ‘Sexy Taxi’ by Much Ass Gracias feat. Luzette vroomed into the room, completely drowning out Tauber.
By late in the evening several of Denny’s neighbours had joined the party. The room filled with peaty-smelling cigar smoke and the sweet smoke of fried bacon. The music turned mellow; Jeremiah had swapped his own machine for Karen’s, and now McCormack came from the speakers. And Karen hadn’t the energy to object having danced herself silly, and her mother was more or less passed out, lying over the back of a chair into an empty bookshelf, while Breffny mimed the movement of a horse jockey behind her bottom.
‘McCormack?’ said Clive to Jeremiah.
‘Yes. Denny’s favourite.’
He was singing a Chauncey Challoner song – ‘We Will Leave This Vale of Tears One Day’. And from the other room came another Challoner song.
‘Mister Franco down the hallway has brought the record player inside,’ said Jeremiah.
‘And is that still the Tauber record?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
Tauber was singing ‘Wild, Wide, Uncrossed’, and the two songs together – discordant, words falling on and between words – were a memory bank gushing empty to the sound of a punctured accordion and made the rhythm of a heart, it was like, or a wheel, buckled, with one vane, beating through smoke, that compelled a person to rest.
‘Whoo,’ said Clive. ‘It’ll put me in the mood to sing myself before too long.’
‘Yes!’ said Jeremiah. ‘Sing for us!’
‘Jeremiah,’ he said, leaning forward on his knees. ‘Do you know what my name, Clive Sullis, means in the Gaelic language? It means “sword of light”. Don’t you think it’s strange that a man’s complete name would translate to something? Almost as if he made it up himself?’
‘I knew what it meant all right.’
Jeremiah gave a great yawn.
‘Jeremiah – now. Now. The time has come, I think. We must tell our stories. This is a wake. We must tell our stories about Denny.’
‘Sing first!’
‘No. There’s a great elephant in the room, as they say, and we’re ignoring him and we must talk about him. He is why we’re here, let’s remember.’
Clive got up, and in this movement quieted the room. And as he was standing, looking into the casket, he remembered again with horror that the elephant in the room was a different one to the one he thought it had been a moment before, and that it was one that did not bear talking about. In horror he sat down again.
‘Yes indeed,’ said Jeremiah, standing up himself, and loudly cupping his hands together, while he had everybody’s attention. ‘Who is the person that we have gathered here to remember? Well, I’ll tell you who.’
But where is this person we have gathered to remember? That is the question.
Thought Clive, staring at the blank white side of the casket from his seat: Where is he, Jeremiah?
Where are you, Denny?
As Jeremiah went at his brothers fists and feet flying and the room exploded in a burst of broken bottles and the casket was knocked off its stand and the Turkish curtains were ripped from the rail.
***
Oh blessed mother undoer of knots what was this? Blessed mother daughter of Ephesus elected intercessor and buffer of wrath give me strength.
He gazed at his watch until the blood drained from his arm by the power of gravity. His arm collapsed anaesthetised. It was five o’clock. Was five o’clock. He looked at his watch again. Ten past. Dark already. The only light – and he was outside, because he was cold to the bone, and a dog, a slimy black docker or a butcher’s dog, was sniffing around his feet – came from a bulb on a bracket, attached to a wall, opposite. The underarm of the bracket was wrought into a delicate shamrock sprig.
He thought: My home, my prison, my emerald in the hospital waste, here by my Anna Livia Pleurisy.
Wasn’t it wonderful even in the murk of Hell to find such a detail? Butler Yeats’s stated wish to exist eternally as a golden bird upon a bough came to mind and he thought that it would not be a bad thing to be a wrought-iron shamrock on a lamp bracket, being shone on all the time, and expressing so succinctly what one was about.
He was at least supported: his back was against the wall. Someone in his anger could find it in him despite it all to be merciful. Wasn’t that wonderful too? He stood up, turned around, and studied the soot-black terroristic brickwork. For a whole minute. And took one step to the side. There was a door and he tried it. To his surprise it opened and he found himself, by and by, in a brightly lit showroom for gas-powered household appliances.
A little old man dressed as a gendarme came skating towards him. Ladies in headscarves eyed him askance and aghast.
‘Ah, it’s all right, I know where I am now,’ he said.
The gendarme came up close. ‘Mister, if you’ve any respect for yourself you’ll remove yourself from these premises, go home if you have one, and clean
yourself up.’
‘I know where I am now,’ he repeated, ‘and if you’ll just allow me back the way I came in, I’ll be out of your way.’
‘You’ll go out the front door.’
‘Can I use your bathroom?’
‘You’ll go out the front door now.’
‘Can I dry my knees in one of your gas-powered monstrances?’
‘You skedaddle out of here fast and stop scaring the customers.’
He stood for a moment on D’Olier Street, turned right, and right again back into the dripping wormhole of Leinster Market, and came through on to Hawkins Street where he paused and looked up at the Theatre Royal, itself resembling a fancy gas-fire surround. Two young girls in raincoats ran by.
‘My great-grandfather saw Pauline Viardot in Don Giovanni in that place,’ he shouted after them, then blunderbussed into the grubbiest rugby-club ditty he could think of, holding up, as he spun in the middle of the street, a Press lorry on its way to or from Burgh Quay:
‘John Clancy’s sister bends and picks
The coal up from the road.
The fuel van’s not the only thing
That easy sheds its load!’
… and continued to the opening of Poolbeg Street, and carried on to Mulligan’s Bar, feeling aglow in himself again.
‘No hard feelings,’ said big Vincent Fennelly, who had turned around on his stool. His two bigger pals either side of him looked at Denny with amused contempt. ‘You’ve swollen up worse than I’d thought,’ said Vincent. ‘You wouldn’t want to get a second concussion.’
His seat, on the bench at the corner table, was still free. Billy Sperrin – who hadn’t a tooth in his head after taking a kick in the mouth from his own out half, and proudly on nights like this left his gnashers in his pocket – and Beast Features McHale – that very out half, who had never pretended that he had missed the ball by accident – greeted him, with a large amount of irony, like a returning hero.
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