by Martin Roper
—She was only young. The wife and now her.
Ma isn’t dead, I want to say. She’s worse than dead. I wish the slut was dead. He has some infuriating need to explain all to strangers. He knows Mulligan thirty years but they are strangers to each other, and yet he doesn’t understand this. Maybe he does, maybe he understands everything. I don’t know my father at all. Mulligan can tell I’m judging him, he takes my expression in slowly, pretends not to notice. He lets my father talk until finally he is out of words, sitting there like a toy that’s motor has stopped. Mulligan lifts up his book of coffins.
—We want the cheapest.
Mulligan nods at me and manages to ignore me at the same time. He puts the book in front of us. He begins to explain the various features of the coffins.
—The cheapest.
He smiles tightly and nods.
—This is a nice one, he says, tapping the book with a finger. Cheapest, too. It has gold-plated handles, but of course you won’t be able to lift the coffin by them. They’re plastic. Glued on. But it’s a solid piece. Fine wood.
He rubs his nose with a knuckle as if he’s a farmer selling a pig. He’s not going to spend much longer with us. He can see Daddy is ready and he slithers towards the sale. The word obsequious was invented for undertakers. He starts to list what else we might need.
—Nothing else, Sir.
—You’ll need a hearse?
—No.
—Ah Stephen the man’s right. Unless we put her on a pram, he laughs to make Mulligan feel more comfortable. The family disease—the effort to make strangers comfortable, to be liked. We decide on a hearse and one limousine for the two of us. Aunt Muriel will travel in it too. The bill is just over twelve hundred pounds. Six hundred for the hearse alone. We stare at Mulligan and my father repeats the price of the hearse.
—We didn’t have her insured.
—Yes. Well maybe someone has a car. A friend. That way you’d save on the limo.
—No. It’s alright. We’ll manage. We’ll have the limo, right?
Daddy looks at me, pleading with his eyes to go along. I stare at Mulligan, wanting him to understand he is profiting from grief. Outside, we argue about the need for the car. I’m worn out and agree with him, will agree with anything now.
* * *
The priest wants to meet with me to arrange the reading at the funeral and to say a few words. Father Macken had visited Ruth from time to time at the hospital, uninvited. She had no intention of giving her soul to him, and this is how it was, he would sit by her bed and pray for her, hoping she would come back to the church she had left. She had abandoned Catholicism, but not God. If she could have given Father Macken her soul, she would have, she would have emptied the brown paper bag of his grapes and slipped her soul into it for his care. The presbytery is ringed with barbed wire. He’s been broken into five times the previous year. I ring the bell on the outside gate and wait. He comes down the steps slowly, even though he’s a young man. He’s walking with the gravitas of the bishop he wants to be. He shows me into the sitting room and goes through the selected readings for the funeral service. I dislike them all and tell him so, and that, more importantly, my dead sister would not have cared for them. He seems to be as offended by me referring to Ruth as dead as he is by the effrontery of considering any passage of the bible inappropriate. He suggests I take a few minutes to find a suitable passage and leaves the room, wiping the palms of his hands on his thighs.
I look around the room for the first time: heavy floral wallpaper, bookshelves, dining room table with a vase of hydrangeas on it. I thumb through the bible, uninterested. Nothing is suitable. I shut the bible quickly and open it and stick a blind finger on the page—it is from the Book of Psalms, Lamedh. Your word, O Lord, is eternal. This would do, anything would as long as it wasn’t chosen by prickface. I wait long minutes for him to return. Reluctantly, he agrees to the reading but is unhappy I want to say a few words as well. It might upset people, he says. Might upset me not to say them, I say. He suggests I say my few words afterwards at the cremation and not in the church but I explain I want to say something to the neighbors who will not be at the cremation. He will give me the nod, he says.
* * *
My father disappears down to the church the morning of the funeral. Muriel and I wait an hour for him to show up so we can all go in the car. The doorbell rings. Ursula. Muriel lets her in. No love lost there. My father will be talking to whomever will listen, anything to distract himself. After getting the bloody limo it sits there with no one to go in it. I invite Ursula to accompany us in the limousine but she says it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to go as she isn’t family. I tell her I would like her to come with us but she says it is not the right thing to do. I am sick of her rigidness, her knowing what’s the right thing to do. We take the limousine to the church and she follows in her car. When I look around at her I can see the strain on her face. In a way, she is the only person outside the family who cares. She had brought rich soup to the hospital, lotion for Ruth’s bedsore legs, simple things that no one else did. But none of that matters—I am burning with dislike for her. Appropriate. What am I doing with a woman who says appropriate? People are blessing themselves as our car passes. This is what the black limousine is, a mobile stage for us to act out our sadness.
He is outside the church talking to neighbours.
—This is Mrs. White and Mrs. Grey. Do you remember them? You were only knee high to a grasshopper. I smile at them. Yes I remember. The bitch who made us eat our lunch in the garage and the bitch who didn’t pay us for over a month. The Whites, the Greys, the Browns, the Blacks, Protestants so dull they couldn’t pick good colours for names let alone their houses. He tells them Ruth and I had been very close, and they nod gravely affording me what they hope is a suitable degree of reverence. Mrs. O’Neill, the wife of the press secretary for the Taoiseach, is there. Didn’t pay us at all for the last job. That’s how they have it, is all my father said. But we’ll get our reward in the next life, he’d say.
—You’re needed in the church.
He looks at me as if he is about to be executed. Outside the church the pallbearers are starting to take the coffin out of the hearse. I ask them to wait and call my uncles over. I remember playing with them as a child but haven’t seen them since they moved to the Southside. The four of us lift the coffin. We buckle briefly under the weight of her. As we walk up the aisle I notice how full the large church is, fuller than it should have been. Who were these people, come to mourn a woman they did not know?
Father Macken is talking and no one is listening to him. His voice carries no understanding of Ruth. He mentions Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ and the joy of suffering and I glance at Muriel and smiles spread across the two of us. He comes down to shake hands with the family during the service, and he skips me. I am astonished I am passed over, and Macken becomes more human, smaller, less priestly.
The time for the reading comes and I walk soberly up to the altar, open the bible at the section marked by the brown taper and stare at the words and start to read and then stop, only slowly absorbing that it is one of the passages Macken had chosen.
—This isn’t it, I say, and then look up shocked that I have said it aloud into the microphone. People stare. I look down and pray to find the passage. I cannot remember where the section is. Lambeth. No, that’s the place in Wales. I had picked it so quickly. Then I turn the page and there, like a small miracle, it is. I read it carefully, and when done, I turn and look at Macken. Macken looks at me blankly, without resentment, the look of foe respecting foe.
The service ends and he does not give me the nod to say the few words. Muriel puts a hand on me and says to let it go. But I am not going to let it go. I am not being bullheaded. I am cold inside and still. I am doing what Ruth would have wanted. The priest is stepping off the altar, people are starting to walk up the aisle to pay their respects, the pallbearers are making their way to the coffin. I ask them to wait
and they look from me to Macken and when they get no sign from him they move forward. I tell them not to touch the coffin. Macken wets his lip with his tongue. My hands tremble with the look in the man’s eyes. What was wrong that he would not allow us to grieve in our own way? I ask him where I should stand and he goes up and pulls the microphone down off the altar. I unfold the sheet of paper I have made notes on. I begin to remember her. Her patience with the scum we have for neighbours. Her courage, her humour, her despair, her love of God but not of organised religion. That does it. Macken grabs me by the shoulder and pulls me but I push him gently and continue. Then it’s over. I’ve had my say and feel foolish. I want to carry Ruth out as we carried her in but am overwhelmed with the people gathered around us. People I don’t know, people I do know and don’t like, people who don’t like me, people who didn’t like Ruth, they line up with their words and their reasons for being there. Uncle Aidan, a man uncomfortable with touching, embraces me.
I spend as much time as possible alone, but it is difficult to put Daddy out of my mind. I am full of resentment towards him—I tried for a long time to show him that this day would come and he needed to talk to Ruth before she died. Week after week we had sat on either side of her bed talking to each other, and she watched us as if watching a game of Ping-Pong. How well intentioned but impossibly stupid I was to foist my understanding on him. It was like this with everyone who came to visit her. The tentative How are you? was never really a question at all. Ruth said hospital is an unbarred prison. You enter, they take away your clothes, force a routine on you, force muck they call food down you, make you share your days and nights with strangers, and the visitors, the visitors are the worst of all; slinking in, fear mingled with guilt, and out with embarrassment, relief trailing behind them.
* * *
The scattering of the ashes. I telephone him to arrange it. That’s taken care of, he says. It is not even a week since her death. Paddy Howard took me out to Howth and we did it there, he says. I am glad he has done it that way. I need to hate him. Now I can leave Ireland finally, without guilt. It’s as if Ruth has died twice and I have been excluded from this more private funeral by my own flesh. I hate him. I hate him because I am closer to Ruth than anyone, no one could love her as much as I do. I didn’t think she could be loved more, even by the man who had helped bring her into the world. The vision of Daddy climbing a hill with his favourite customer to scatter his daughter’s ashes sundered the idea of who I was in the family. He had lost his only daughter. He, who had brought her into the world, and raised her, he alone would watch her leave.
Only in New York years later did I begin to feel how wrapped up in myself I was, and when I told Holfy about this, she told me I must ask him what happened. I couldn’t. Daddy had been through enough. I did not want to bring him more pain. This is only partly true. Fear and anger kept me quiet. I was not certain what I was afraid of but I knew I was angry for being left out. Five years later when I did ask him, I did it in Lone Tree, four and a half thousand miles away. Daddy had only recently decided he could afford a telephone and when it rang he associated it with danger and expense. He went quiet when I asked him about the scattering. I don’t remember about all that, he says. The contempt I am trying to rid myself of rises up. He isn’t even sure where the hill is.
—Paddy didn’t walk all the way with me if that’s what you mean. I walked on a bit on my own. It was a lovely day. Very still. There wasn’t a sound or a murmur anywhere. I got to where I thought was a good spot and said a little prayer, and I opened the urn and scattered the ashes. But just then a wind came up and blew the ashes in my face. It got in me eyes. Paddy said to go for a pint but I didn’t think that was right so he drove me back to the house.
I am shaken when he tells me the story, not because of the wind, I can dismiss that as pure chance, but because he tells it so succinctly. I understand in the calmness of his voice how I have wronged him. He is an old dog after being abandoned by his owner and having no understanding of why he is alone. I see him differently through the few letters he has sent to me in America. Tentatively, humbly, he offers his son advice. He says he knows nothing of life and says he makes many mistakes. His age shows in the shakiness of his inelegant handwriting. His letters with their dates and their regular indentations at the beginning of every paragraph remind me that he is not just from a different generation; he is a man from a different era. And, despite the poverty he endured in the early years, he had held us together as a family. Nothing, not even our mother broke our family. Nothing, except death.
* * *
My mind died for a long time during her illness, and immediately after her death. I thought of her every day after she was cremated, though of her as ashes. Every night my last thought was her in the coffin in the mortuary at the hospice. She had been alone there. I cannot shake from my mind that she was still alive then, and scared. Thought of her as dead flesh, as ashes, as gone.
The Sunday before she died I took her out to the front of the hospice and wheeled her down to the Grotto. She was running out of cigarettes, and I said I’d go around to the shops to get her some. I walk down the long drive, and, as soon as I turn the bend, run. She might die there and then in the wheelchair. She is weaker than I have ever seen her. The shopkeeper is chatting amiably to a customer who is wearing a pink hat. Why remember that pink hat when I can’t remember the sound of her voice? While I wait for the shopkeeper to be done talking I pull some sweets off a shelf. Maybe she would like some chocolates. Biscuits, too. A Sunday newspaper. When the man finally serves me I ask for eighty Dunhill. Always Dunhill when she was in the money. I shove them in the bag and rush out. No matches. I run back and throw ten pence on the table and shout matches at the man who has returned to his conversation with the pink hat. I stop running at the bend in the drive, slow to a fast walk. Her head is down, her chin on her chest, asleep. A cigarette, trailing smoke, held loosely between her fingers. I say her name quietly and she opens her eyes slowly, like a cat waking from a hot sleep. The cigarette drops from her hand. She can tell from my face I am thinking how close the moment is. She looks ashamed of herself, of the indignity of dying, dying before she becomes a woman. She reaches down to pick up the burning cigarette off the tarmac and stops half way, as she does I can see her as a teenager crouched for the four-hundred-metre relay, digging her spikes into the hard grass for leverage, the fastest finisher in the school. She could be behind thirty metres by the time she was passed the baton and still hit the tape first. I pick up the cigarette and hand it to her, but she shakes her hand minutely.
—Sick of being sick, she says.
* * *
The night before she died I slept badly. Sadness finally exhausted me and I dozed. My mind fell in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams, morphine drugging Ruth into death, Ruth calling for our mother, Ruth calling, screaming an animal scream at death. I thought I should take her out of the hospice tomorrow and bring her to Tivoli Road. I thought about getting up now and visiting her. It was nearly three in the morning. I felt her mind awake, felt it moving through me, through the streets, through the houses, felt her breathing a goodbye, each breathing in a heavy triumph and each breathing out a resignation; soon it would be the last breathing out, no more words would be spoken, no more thoughts would form. She would be lucid. Everyone asleep in the hospice, the night nurse listening to the radio in the curtained office. I fell back asleep and in my sleeping, she slipped away. Nothing bit like that single regret.
Whenever I look at her photograph on my desk I freeze and am able to think of nothing, not even her. Eventually, I begin to notice the photograph less and less. The funeral begins to occupy my thoughts. I question my motives. Was I no different from the priest who wanted to save her soul in his fashion when I wanted to celebrate her memory in mine? Perhaps I was looking for attention by dramatically and poignantly making a stand at the funeral with the priest. Perhaps I was no better than the hypocrites who shook my hand in their effort to a
ssuage their guilt. I wasted so many days not writing when I promised her I would write every day. The most horrific truth is forgetting, forgetting and going on. But there is no other choice. The only option is to live a fiercely joyous life knowing full well that misery leans against every street corner.
Ursula
It must be easy for fiction writers—to make it all up. To shape reality and make it conform to some vision of the way it should be. Truth is not easy. I thought it was, that facts made it so. How could Ursula, she who was so vital, be gone? After Ruth’s death, I thought life would be easier, that death hardens one against pain. The endless well of naïveté. There is no chronology. I cannot weave them together.
* * *
We go for a walk up the hill of Howth. Ursula is coquettish, looking for my hand on the steep rises. It’s not like her and I like her more for it. We sit on a boulder and look out to sea. Gulls are squawking over a mass of brown in the blue sea.
—Enough to put you off your lunch.
All I can think of is kissing you. You turn and stare at me, a serious face.
—Kiss me.
I kiss her and her lips are lovely. She kisses back. We kiss and kiss and I burp in the middle of it I’m so nervous.
—Pig.
—It was an accident.
She pushes me on my back. We kiss and find each other. Her buttocks tight against her jeans. I run my hand down her leg. Her leg is hard as rock. Sweet, sweet touches. She raises herself off me and smiles intriguingly. She sits back and pulls her trouser leg up to the knee and knocks on the leg. She nods at my astonishment.
—Where does it start?
She karate chops above the knee.
—And the other one?
—That too. No, the other one is fine.
She shows a white ankle for proof.
—I never guessed.
She shrugs.