‘Hello, it’s me, Liam,’ he said when he was at the bed. The old man opened his eyes flickeringly. He tried to speak. Liam had to lean over but failed to decipher what was said. He reached out and lifted his father’s hand in a kind of wrong handshake.
‘Want anything?’
His father signalled by a slight movement of his thumb that he needed something. A drink? Liam poured some water and put the glass to the old man’s lips. Arcs of scum had formed at the corners of his sagging mouth. Some of the water spilled on to the sheet. It remained for a while in droplets before sinking into dark circles.
‘Was that what you wanted?’ The old man shook his head. Liam looked around the room, trying to see what his father could want. It was exactly as he had remembered it. In twenty years he hadn’t changed the wallpaper, yellow roses looping on an umber trellis. He lifted a straight-backed chair and drew it up close to the bed. He sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward.
‘How do you feel?’
The old man made no response and the question echoed around and around the silence in Liam’s head.
Maisie brought in tea on a tray, closing the door behind her with her elbow. Liam noticed that two red spots had come up on her cheeks. She spoke quickly in an embarrassed whisper, looking back and forth between the dying man and his son.
‘We couldn’t find where he kept the teapot so it’s just a tea-bag in a cup. Is that all right? Will that be enough for you to eat? We sent out for a tin of ham, just in case. He had nothing in the house at all, God love him.’
‘You’ve done very well,’ said Liam. ‘You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.’
‘If you couldn’t do it for a neighbour like Mr Diamond – well? Forty-two years and there was never a cross word between us. A gentleman we always called him, Bertha and I. He kept himself to himself. Do you think can he hear us?’ The old man did not move.
‘How long has he been like this?’ asked Liam.
‘Just three days. He didn’t bring in his milk one day and that’s not like him, y’know. He’d left a key with Mrs Rankin, in case he’d ever lock himself out again – he did once, the wind blew the door shut – and she came in and found him like this in the chair downstairs. He was frozen, God love him. The doctor said it was a stroke.’
Liam nodded, looking at his father. He stood up and began edging the woman towards the bedroom door.
‘I don’t know how to thank you, Miss Hart. You’ve been more than good.’
‘We got your address from your brother. Mrs Rankin phoned America on Tuesday.’
‘Is he coming home?’
‘He said he’d try. She said the line was as clear as a bell. It was like talking to next door. Yes, he said he’d try but he doubted it very much.’ She had her hand on the door knob. ‘Is that enough sandwiches?’
‘Yes thanks, that’s fine.’ They stood looking at one another awkwardly. Liam fumbled in his pocket. ‘Can I pay you for the ham . . . and the telegram?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said. ‘Don’t insult me now, Liam.’ He withdrew his hand from his pocket and smiled his thanks to her.
‘It’s late,’ he said, ‘perhaps you should go now and I’ll sit up with him.’
‘Very good. The priest was here earlier and gave him . . .’ she groped for the word with her hands.
‘Extreme Unction?’
‘Yes. That’s twice he has been in three days. Very attentive. Sometimes I think if our ministers were half as good . . .’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t what you could call gospel greedy.’
‘He was lately,’ she said.
‘Changed times.’
She half turned to go and said, almost coyly,
‘I’d hardly have known you with the beard.’ She looked up at him, shaking her head in disbelief. He was trying to make her go, standing close to her but she skirted round him and went over to the bed. She touched the old man’s shoulder.
‘I’m away now, Mr Diamond. Liam is here. I’ll see you in the morning,’ she shouted into his ear. Then she was away.
Liam heard the old ladies’ voices in the hallway below, then the slam of the front door. He heard the crackling of their feet over the frozen slush beneath the window. He lifted the tray off the chest of drawers and on to his knees. He hadn’t realised it, but he was hungry. He ate the sandwiches and the piece of fruit cake, conscious of the chewing noise he was making with his mouth in the silence of the bedroom. There was little his father could do about it now. They used to have the most terrible rows about it. You’d have thought it was a matter of life and death. At table he had sometimes trembled with rage at the boys’ eating habits, at their greed as he called it. At the noises they made, ‘like cows getting out of muck’. After their mother had left them he took over the responsibility for everything. One night, as he served sausages from the pan Liam, not realising the filthy mood he was in, made a grab. His father in a sudden downward thrust jabbed the fork he had been using to cook the sausages into the back of Liam’s hand.
‘Control yourself.’
Four bright beads of blood appeared as Liam stared at them in disbelief.
‘They’ll remind you to use your fork in future.’
He was sixteen at the time.
The bedroom was cold and when he finally got round to drinking his tea it was tepid. He was annoyed that he couldn’t heat it by pouring more. His feet were numb and felt damp. He went downstairs and put on his overcoat and brought the electric fire up to the bedroom, switching on both bars. He sat huddled over it, his fingers fanned out, trying to get warm. When the second bar was switched on there was a clicking noise and the smell of burning dust. He looked over at the bed but there was no movement.
‘How do you feel?’ he said again, not expecting an answer. For a long time he sat staring at the old man, whose breathing was audible but quiet – a kind of soft whistling in his nose. The alarm clock, its face bisected with a crack, said twelve-thirty. Liam checked it against the red figures of his digital watch. He stood up and went to the window. Outside the roofs tilted at white snow-covered angles. A faulty gutter hung spikes of icicles. There was no sound in the street, but from the main road came the distant hum of a late car that faded into silence.
He went out on to the landing and into what was his own bedroom. There was no bulb when he switched the light on so he took one from the hall and screwed it into the shadeless socket. The bed was there in the corner with its mattress of blue stripes. The lino was the same, with its square pockmarks showing other places the bed had been. The cheap green curtains that never quite met on their cord still did not meet.
He moved to the wall cupboard by the small fireplace and had to tug at the handle to get it open. Inside, the surface of everything had gone opaque with dust. Two old radios, one with a fretwork face, the other more modern with a tuning dial showing such places as Hilversum, Luxembourg, Athlone; a Dansette record player with its lid missing and its arm bent back, showing wires like severed nerves and blood vessels; the empty frame of the smashed glass picture was still there; several umbrellas, all broken. And there was his box of poster paints. He lifted it out and blew off the dust.
It was a large Quality Street tin and he eased the lid off, bracing it against his stomach muscles. The colours in the jars had shrunk to hard discs. Viridian green, vermilion, jonquil yellow. At the bottom of the box he found several sticks of charcoal, light in his fingers when he lifted them, warped. He dropped them into his pocket and put the tin back into the cupboard. There was a pile of magazines and papers and beneath that again he saw his large Winsor and Newton sketchbook. He eased it out and began to look through the work in it. Embarrassment was what he felt most, turning the pages, looking at the work of this school-boy. He could see little talent in it, yet he realised he must have been good. There were several drawings of hands in red pastel which had promise. The rest of the pages were blank. He set the sketchbook aside to take with him and closed the cupbo
ard.
Looking round the room, it had to him the appearance of nakedness. He crouched and looked under the bed, but there was nothing there. His fingers coming in contact with the freezing lino made him aware how cold he was. His jaw was tight and he knew that if he relaxed he would shiver. He went back to his father’s bedroom and sat down.
The old man had not changed his position. He had wanted him to be a lawyer or a doctor but Liam had insisted, although he had won a scholarship to the university, on going to art college. All that summer his father tried everything he knew to stop him. He tried to reason with him,
‘Be something. And you can carry on doing your art. Art is O.K. as a sideline.’
But mostly he shouted at him. ‘I’ve heard about these art students and what they get up to. Shameless bitches prancing about with nothing on. And what sort of a job are you going to get? Drawing on pavements?’ He nagged him every moment they were together about other things. Lying late in bed, the length of his hair, his outrageous appearance. Why hadn’t he been like the other lads and got himself a job for the summer? It wasn’t too late because he would willingly pay him if he came in and helped out in the shop.
One night, just as he was going to bed, Liam found the old framed print of cattle drinking. He had taken out the glass and had begun to paint on the glass itself with small tins of Humbrol enamel paints left over from aeroplane kits he had never finished. They produced a strange and exciting texture which was even better when the paint was viewed from the other side of the pane of glass. He sat stripped to the waist in his pyjama trousers painting a self-portrait reflected from the mirror on the wardrobe door. The creamy opaque nature of the paint excited him. It slid on to the glass, it built up, in places it ran scalloping like cinema curtains, and yet he could control it. He lost all track of time as he sat with his eyes focused on the face staring back at him and the painting he was trying to make of it. It became a face he had not known, the holes, the lines, the spots. He was in a new geography.
His brother and he used to play a game looking at each other’s faces upside down. One lay on his back across the bed, his head flopped over the edge, reddening as the blood flooded into it. The other sat in a chair and stared at him. After a time the horror of seeing the eyes where the mouth should be, the inverted nose, the forehead gashed with red lips, would drive him to cover his eyes with his hands. ‘It’s your turn now,’ he would say, and they would change places. It was like familiar words said over and over again until they became meaningless, and once he ceased to have purchase on the meaning of a word it became terrifying, an incantation. In adolescence he had come to hate his brother, could not stand the physical presence of him, just as when he was lying upside down on the bed. It was the same with his father. He could not bear to touch him and yet for one whole winter when he had a bad shoulder he had to stay up late to rub him with oil of wintergreen. The old boy would sit with one hip on the bed and Liam would stand behind him, massaging the stinking stuff into the white flesh of his back. The smell, the way the blubbery skin moved under his fingers, made him want to be sick. No matter how many times he washed his hands, at school the next day he would still reek of oil of wintergreen.
It might have been the smell of the Humbrol paints or the strip of light under Liam’s door – whatever it was, his father came in and yelled that it was half-past three in the morning and what the hell did he think he was doing, sitting half-naked drawing at this hour of the morning? He had smacked him full force with the flat of his hand on his bare back and, stung by the pain of it, Liam had leapt to retaliate. Then his father had started to laugh, a cold snickering laugh. ‘Would you? Would you? Would you indeed?’ he kept repeating with a smile pulled on his mouth and his fists bunched to knuckles in front of him. Liam retreated to the bed and his father turned on his heel and left. Thinking the incident over, Liam knotted his fists and cursed his father. He looked over his shoulder into the mirror and saw the primitive daub of his father’s hand, splayed fingers outlined across his back. He heard him on the stairs and when he came back into the bedroom with the poker in his hand he felt his insides turn to water. But his father looked away from him with a sneer and smashed the painting to shards with one stroke. As he went out of the door he said,
‘Watch your feet in the morning.’
He had never really ‘left home’. It was more a matter of going to art college in London and not bothering to come back. Almost as soon as he was away from the house his hatred for his father eased. He simply stopped thinking about him. Of late he had wondered if he was alive or dead – if he still had the shop. The only communication they had had over the years was when Liam sent him, not without a touch of vindictiveness, an invitation to some of the openings of his exhibitions.
Liam sat with his fingertips joined, staring at the old man. It was going to be a long night. He looked at his watch and it was only a little after two.
He paced up and down the room, listening to the tick of snow on the window-pane. When he stopped to look down, he saw it flurrying through the haloes of the street lamps. He went into his own bedroom and brought back the sketchbook. He moved his chair to the other side of the bed so that the light fell on his page. Balancing the book on his knee, he began to draw his father’s head with the stick of charcoal. It made a light hiss each time a line appeared on the cartridge paper. When drawing he always thought of himself as a wary animal drinking, the way he looked up and down, up and down, at his subject. The old man had failed badly. His head scarcely dented the pillows, his cheeks were hollow and he had not been shaved for some days. Earlier, when he had held his hand it had been clean and dry and light like the hand of a girl. The bedside light deepened the shadows of his face and highlighted the rivulets of veins on his temple. It was a long time since he had used charcoal and he became engrossed in the way it had to be handled and the different subtleties of line he could get out of it. He loved to watch a drawing develop before his eyes.
His work had been well received and among the small Dublin art world he was much admired – justly he thought. But some critics had scorned his work as ‘cold’ and ‘formalist’ – one had written, ‘Like Mondrian except that he can’t draw a straight line’ – and this annoyed him because it was precisely what he was trying to do. He felt it was unfair to be criticised for succeeding in his aims.
His father began to cough – a low wet bubbling sound. Liam leaned forward and touched the back of his hand gently. Was this man to blame in any way? Or had he only himself to blame for the shambles of his life? He had married once and lived with two other women. At present he was on his own. Each relationship had ended in hate and bitterness, not because of drink or lack of money or any of the usual reasons but because of a mutual nauseating dislike.
He turned the page and began to draw the old man again. The variations in tone from jet black to pale grey, depending on the pressure he used, fascinated him. The hooded lids of the old man’s eyes, the fuzz of hair sprouting from the ear next the light, the darkness of the partially open mouth. Liam made several more drawings, absorbed, working slowly, refining the line of each until it was to his satisfaction. He was pleased with what he had done. At art school he had loved the life class better than any other. It never ceased to amaze him how sometimes it could come just right, better than he had hoped for; the feeling that something was working through him to produce a better work than at first envisaged.
Then outside he heard the sound of an engine followed by the clinking of milk bottles. When he looked at his watch he was amazed to see that it was five-thirty. He leaned over to speak to his father,
‘Are you all right?’
His breathing was not audible and when Liam touched his arm it was cold. His face was cold as well. He felt for his heart, slipping his hand inside his pyjama jacket, but could feel nothing. He was dead. His father. He was dead and the slackness of his dropped jaw disturbed his son. In the light of the lamp his dead face looked like the open-mouthed moon. Li
am wondered if he should tie it up before it set. In a Pasolini film he had seen Herod’s jaw being trussed and he wondered if he was capable of doing it for his father.
Then he saw himself in his hesitation, saw the lack of any emotion in his approach to the problem. He was aware of the deadness inside himself and felt helpless to do anything about it. It was why all his women had left him. One of them accused him of making love the way other people rodded drains.
He knelt down beside the bed and tried to think of something good from the time he had spent with his father. Anger and sneers and nagging was all that he could picture. He knew he was grateful for his rearing but he could not feel it. If his father had not been there somebody else would have done it. And yet it could not have been easy – a man left with two boys and a business to run. He had worked himself to a sinew in his tobacconist’s, opening at seven in the morning to catch the workers and closing at ten at night. Was it for his boys that he worked so hard? The man was in the habit of earning and yet he never spent. He had even opened for three hours on Christmas Day.
Liam stared at the dead drained face and suddenly the mouth held in that shape reminded him of something pleasant. It was the only joke his father had ever told and to make up for the smallness of his repertoire he had told it many times; of two ships passing in mid-Atlantic. He always megaphoned his hands to tell the story.
‘Where are you bound for?’ shouts one captain.
‘Rio – de – Janeir – io. Where are you bound for?’
And the other captain, not to be outdone, yells back,
‘Cork – a – lork – a – lor – io.’
When he had finished the joke he always repeated the punch-line, laughing and nodding in disbelief that something could be so funny.
‘Cork a – lorka – lorio.’
Liam found that his eyes had filled with tears. He tried to keep them coming but they would not. In the end he had to close his eyes and a tear spilled from his left eye on to his cheek. It was small and he wiped it away with a crooked index finger.
Collected Stories Page 18