Martin Sloane

by Michael Redhill

  This he placed flat against the bottom of the box. Then he put a miniature bed in. He had purchased this with his own money only last year, and for some reason he didn’t know, it had become one of his prized possessions. He could hardly understand why, but he knew the little bed, or the line of trees, or the empty matchbook held some of his emotions with the full and perfect speechlessness of things. He would sometimes glance at this bed and peacefulness would flood through him. Beside it he placed one of his mother’s thimbles, as if it were a glass of water for the tiny sleeper, or a basin to wash his hands in.

  Then, using his penknife, he pried open a slat at the front of the box and revealed the open space under the main compartment. It had been the original bottom, but when he discovered that the lid of the box had been made in two layers of thin cedar, he pried the bottom part away and laid it in about an inch from the bottom of the box. Then he cut a slat off the outside to make a door into the false bottom. With the little bit of light seeping into the thin space, he could make out the original manufacturer’s label: Linwood Cigar Company, Dublin. And a picture of a lady in a red hat, winking. In here he usually kept bits of chocolate or paper money, but it was empty now, and he placed in it a gift his mother had received from her grandmother when she was a girl, and which she had passed on to Martin without Theresa’s knowing (for Theresa would have wanted it for herself). It was almost a hundred years old, and had gone smudgy from handling, but it was still recognizable as what it had been when it was new: a small naked infant cast in hard rubber, its features rendered in detail. There was its fine nose and its small puckered mouth, ten fingers and toes with tiny nails, and hair wrought in thin lines along its scalp. The infant lay on its side, fast asleep, its hands tucked under its head, and it was the size of a robin’s egg. There was no way to tell whether it was a boy child or a girl, but Martin believed it to be a boy. He placed it in the secret compartment, and it lay like a seed under the trees and the bed and the thimble. Then he pressed the slat back into place and closed the lid of the box. It was complete.

  He looked at what was now left behind: a model car, a tiny plastic flute, the cloth monkey, and an array of smaller objects, corks and bottle tops and buttons. These he put into a paper bag and tossed into the steamer trunk with the coats and shoes. Then he put the Linwood box on top of the steamer and stood back, regarding the emptiness of the room, which was now total. He went over to the window and looked out again. Somehow all of this had taken half an hour, and he could see that the sun had moved over a little. It would soon go down. He looked over the way, and through the window in William’s bedroom, he could see his friend pulling on a pair of socks. William tugged them on and then stood and turned, seeing Martin standing at his window. The two boys stared at each other over the expanse of street that had been their territory for their entire lives, but neither of them waved or acknowledged each other, only stood like sentries at their windows. Then William nodded slightly and turned away. Martin saw his back when William left the room on the other side.

  Down, down into the streets and parks, along the river, past the churches and squares. Down Phibsborough over the canal bridge to Circular Road, where the statue of the soldier was, and down to Berkeley Street, past the Mater. St. Joseph’s over there, where his father had wanted to go in and thank the Virgin. He was running, past Eccles Street, past Mountjoy, and his chest began to ache. He slowed down, guilty, but realized no one would think it strange, the Sloane boy on his own walking down streets he’d walked many times. He passed Goldman’s and even waved to Missus.

  It was the night of May twelfth, Coronation Day, and now his friends and his parents’ friends were walking up the street to their house to say goodbye and offer their farewell presents, and he was not there. He had slipped out of the mudroom door and gone along the back gardens until he’d hit the main road, and now here he was, with the failing light and the sounds of the city. Now seeing was more than an absorption of things, it was an action. He saw the streetlamps and the pubs, the shopfronts with their painted signs, the bright lights in the windows of Walton’s School of Music, where he’d canoodled on a wooden concert flute on Mondays between the hours of five and seven only last year. He passed McCann’s on Frederick Street, although they were closed now. His mother wouldn’t shop there because they charged them as much as they charged people who weren’t their neighbours. His mother figured living on the same street gave them a different status. She figured it would have if they’d all been Catholic.

  The road turned here, angling into its midtown longitude, and the character of the street changed. It was no longer Phibsborough or Old Cabra, where the houses were tall and the commercial streets full of fruit and vegetable merchants, and nice pubs with orange fires going once you stepped inside. It seemed a little ruthless here between the outskirts and city centre, this was the corridor where people passed through and grabbed something, rather than lingering. There were twelve pubs between Dorset and Denmark Streets, and they looked black inside, their windows featureless and buff-coloured. No one went into them or came out. It was as if they had tenants, not customers. And above them rose the flat-faced buildings on either side, which were on the verge of becoming tenements, or rather, reverting. His parents had warned him that Frederick Street was not a place to go alone. Some of the casements above his head were even barred. The only thing that was nice about the street today was the bright Union Jacks hanging out of one or two of the windows. Strange to see them, his mother’s flag. You never saw that flag.

  After Frederick, it was nicer; he heard the sounds of a tin flute and someone banging a table with the flat of his hand. A voice was saying, It don’t make no bit of difference! It’s the same bloody thing. And a voice replied, Get him another one of these! Keep your blood up!

  Three men in suits were coming out of the St. George Hotel, laughing and singing,

  God Save the King,

  A ring a ding a ling!

  At the bottom of the park, the street turned into O’Connell, and here the double-decker buses careened into their stops and roared off again into traffic. It was even louder now, and he crossed carefully to the meridian, looking both ways. People kept bumping into him, and he grasped tight to his pants pocket, which held a handful of coins he’d brought from the house. He bought a bag of hot salted groundnuts from a man with a cart and then stood, staring down the great street from the island in the middle. There’d been a big row that started at the post office, down there, on the right. There had been blood in the ruined streets.

  It was beginning now to get dark. Martin lifted his face into the lights and the noise, into the smells of the city, and walked slowly along the grass as the traffic sped by on either side. He’d been down here first in his pram when he was an infant, then probably once or twice a week they’d been down here, walking or going to a restaurant. They’d taken high tea in the Gresham Hotel, here on the left. Expensive, his father had said. Martin kept his eyes open only slightly and let the layers of time and memory swim down into the street. His whole life. His whole life had happened here, against these buildings, against these streets, and he was leaving it. Nelson’s Pillar was here, towering over everything, its massive length lit up by lights in the grass. At the top, Nelson himself gazed down on the rest of the city, perhaps on the statue of Sir John Grey, who would have been jealous to learn he rated a pedestal only twenty feet high. Martin stared up through the trees at the Trafalgar hero and walked backwards around the column, taking nuts from the bag and cracking them in his teeth.

  He’d already gone past the Savoy Cinema, and across from it, the Carleton, both with people lining up for the early seatings, their light coats on. There was John Keys, too, Tobacconist, where his father bought his cigarettes and the occasional cigars. Mr. Keys himself had given Martin his cigar box. Some of the street seemed to shimmer, unreal, like it was a memory already, shifting, insubstantial.

  In-ep-IN-en! Read about the London coronation!

  Wh
en he got to Grafton Street, the shopkeepers were noisily drawing down their gratings. Motorcars drove slowly down the thronged street, and Martin was thrilled to see the horses so close, the carriages with their giant wheels clattering by. Would Galway sound like this? He worried there would be nowhere to go to vanish into the sound and the activity. He was worried you’d always be able to hear the wheat growing in Galway. To be that alone!

  He threw the empty, oily paper bag into a bin and sat down on a pub-barrel across from Mitchell’s to catch his breath. There, in the window, a girl poured a long tray of sweets into a bag. He couldn’t imagine anyone would throw out that much confectionery. The girl put the bag down and leaned on the empty countertop, looking out the window. She pushed the inside of her arms forward and yawned. The light mounted in the window turned her skin a bright yellow.

  He was getting tired now — usually this walk would take him thirty minutes at the most, but he’d left the house over an hour ago. Stopping and taking everything in, storing it, was tiring him out. But he forced himself up and continued along Grafton, noting only momentarily the For Let sign in the window of Sloane & Son. The shelves behind the sign were still full, though his father’s assistant, Old Morris, wasn’t there.

  The crush of pedestrians carried him across the street and he stood on the sidewalk at the northwest corner of the green. He entered there, and quickly the trees absorbed the sounds of the world outside the park and a hush floated down. It was sudden, the silence, and sensuous. The delight of it surrounding him. He heard the clicking of a woman’s heels and the plashing of wings hitting the water in the pond. He slowed, letting the scent of lilac and lavender draw him into the middle of the green. Every time he came here, he saw men and women who looked like they lived in the park. They walked in measured circles, like a dance, the woman’s arm on the man’s, his face tilted down to hers. Martin pictured himself and Nuala ten years from now. He’d come back to Dublin to live, and find her through her parents in Clontarf. Then they’d come here, and walk slowly back and forth along the paths, talking quietly to each other.

  He went through the trees, where it got darker, and came out on the other side of the copse, and there, at the top of his plinth, sat King George II on his horse, the iron hoof of the steed rearing up with the king in the saddle on top. King George II, a brave king who almost looked good on a horse. This was all Martin knew about this king. It was all he knew about most kings, but it was enough to inspire him. The first stars were coming out just below George’s finger, pointing out across the river as if to direct his troops onward, into the night. Martin walked closer to the monument. After tonight, he thought, everything here will vanish behind me, and everything that happened here will go with it. Now he earnestly believed in the reality of the body. Curses always had a kind of logic to them. It was no wonder he’d been resistant to the idea of hearts and spleens and stomachs: they held the key to his fate. Why would he want to know about his own death, lying in wait under his own skin?

  “Who’s the king of Ireland?” a man behind him said, and then laughed, clapping Martin on the shoulder with a glove-clad hand.

  Soon it was very dark. The world seemed to be concentrated here for him. The statue was a representation of a real person, but it was much larger than that person. However, so far away, on top of its huge pedestal, the king looked as though he could fit into the palm of Martin’s hand.

  He went back out onto the street. Instead of waiting for the light to change, he walked up to a policeman and pretended he was lost. Fifteen minutes later, he was dropped at his door and left with his parents, a warning not to let him out after dark offered to them.

  His mother’s face was white, but he would not answer her questions, and when his father told him how worried they’d been, he simply said he was sorry and went up to bed. The house was empty of guests and their practical gifts with their sad ribbons lay unopened on the settee. He closed the door to his bedroom and changed into his pyjamas. He could hear Theresa crying in the darkness of her bedroom.

  Across the street, the lights were off in the Beatons’, but the whole of the city was lit up beyond Iona Road. He felt as though he had strung those lights himself, and that each one marked a place for him. One light for every day of nine and a half years. He climbed into his bed and pulled the covers up, falling asleep almost instantly, and down in St. Stephen’s Green, a man strapped a bundle of gelignite to the belly of King George’s horse and blew the statue to bits. It was in the papers the next morning. They read about it driving west.

  Galway

  IX.

  SLEEP, 1972. 38" X 25" X 20" GLASS CASE CONSTRUCTION. GLASS AND STEEL WITH FABRIC AND FOUND OBJECTS. ART GALLERY OF SUNY BUFFALO. A DROWNED MERMAID IS OBSCURED BY DARK WATER.

  WHO GETS A CHANCE TO BERATE THEIR GHOSTS? ONLY in dreams, and then we’re apt to vanish down rabbit holes, or our mouths don’t work. I’d dreamt of Martin on almost a daily basis for the first few years, but never directly. I’d be dreaming of something else and he’d walk past in the background, pause to look down at something, and then pick it up and move on. I’d be behind a bus window, or buying a pack of gum, or I’d be arguing with someone from school – and he’d be gone. Or else, I’d be free to move and lose him in a crowd, or catch up with him and it’d turn out to be someone else. I was haunted, but my ghost was unwilling to show its face. Then many years passed and I stopped dreaming of him and I concluded he was out of my consciousness. I was free to meet Daniel, and I did. And yet, I remained reluctant to look at my feelings, even with the perspective of distance. I never so much as mentioned my life before Toronto to Daniel. One night, though, in his apartment, in his bed, I dreamt of Martin again. It was a simple dream. It began and there he was, right in front of me, his face still, his eyes clear, those soft black eyes. He was about to speak. I waited. I waited for what seemed many minutes. And then his lips parted and his eyes closed and I woke up.

  “They must have passed all this then,” said Molly, bringing me out of my thoughts. “On their way west.” We were between Dublin and Galway now. The N6, an old pilgrims’ road updated for the use of new centuries, cut through the middle of the country in a drunkard’s line.

  “I’m sure they did,” I said.

  “And what happened to them when they got there?”

  I watched the farms sweeping past. “I’ll tell you more later,” I said.

  I had taken the wheel first, but stopped about five miles outside Dublin, unable to resolve my confusion between the gearshift and the door handle. Molly took over, slipping a pair of glasses out of her jacket. Her arm bounced off the door just as mine had. “Don't get it into your head that you need the window open,” I'd said, “or we'll have an accident.” Soon she got used to it, an experienced adjuster, one of evolution’s darlings.

  What passed for a late-September heatwave had brought the temperature up into the low twenties – a moist country air made it seem stickier than that. We kept the windows up and let the car’s air conditioning keep things comfortable, but outside it seemed the world was slicked with dewy heat. Signs for unseen villages to the north and south drifted past—Kilcock, Eston, Mayford, Kinnegad—and all around was deep green; it would flash by when the high scrub at roadside suddenly dipped and revealed it, rolling off in all directions like an endless canvas. Molly turned the radio on and we listened to a talk show out of Dublin. Someone said, “He’d spoken nary a word in twenty-five years, but when she came into the room, he stretched out his hand to her and said her name. Can you imagine?”

  I'd always loved the soothing rhythms of car trips, the whoosh of traffic passing you in the opposite direction, the view of the sky through the window. When I was a little girl, accompanying my mother on her short drives to neighbouring towns, I'd close my eyes and lean my head against the passenger door. I'd focus on the thrum of the road under us, and feeling the forward motion of the truck, I'd try to convince my body we were driving in the other direction and my body was facing bac
kwards. Threading those sensations against themselves was a strange, private game, but I liked to challenge my reality as a child. I wanted to see if it was anything other than it seemed (for I suspected it was, and that most of my feelings as a child were a product of it). There was the one where I lay in bed and told myself my thoughts were actually being spoken by a being who could control my mind. You only think you're thinking these thoughts, I'd say in my head, but this is the vampire talking, these are my words, not yours. Eventually, I'd sit bolt upright in the bed and stare out into the darkness, certain the bleak, pitch form of the beast was right in front of me. Funny how we scare ourselves as children with ghoulish visions, I thought — the pulse of this Irish highway tying me to that cold little road that connected Ovid to Cortland — funny, when what usually undoes us as adults is something that's been alongside us the whole time, always familiar and often beloved. We lose the luxury of monsters.

  Are you easy to train? Him sitting behind the wheel, looking out over the little stretch of empty highway.

  I think you will find me a most eager pupil. Glancing over, waggling his eyebrows, one hand clenched around the gearshift.

  Well, ease up a little on your grip. Loosen your hands. You’re not wrestling it, I said. I showed him how the shift felt when it was in neutral. That little extra give between gears.