Grace After Henry

by Eithne Shortall

  ‘Well, how was it?’ she asked, as I clambered into the passenger seat.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, pulling the door shut. ‘Tiring.’

  I told her about my parents’ ambush that morning and the new waitress and how it had taken a little while but eventually I remembered how to do my job. I told her about how quickly time had passed, and I thought to mention the few minutes where Henry hadn’t entered my head but I didn’t. Instead, I told her about the customer who I momentarily thought was him.

  ‘That’s natural.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes. I know it’s not the same thing, obviously, but I remember coming back from basketball camp when I was younger and thinking I saw all the other kids from camp on the way to school for about a week afterwards. It’s just what you’re used to seeing, and what you miss.’

  ‘I know it was in my head – I mean, I know that now – but at the time I’m always so sure it’s him.’ And as I said it out loud, I scared myself. ‘I was so sure, Aoife.’

  ‘I’m telling you, it’s totally normal.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘Maybe you should talk to someone who’s been through it?’

  ‘I’m going to see the Three Wise Men tomorrow,’ I said, and Aoife, who enjoyed hearing about my new friends up at the cemetery where Henry was buried, nodded her approval.

  ‘And another thing, Grace.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You need to sort out that house. I’ll help, no problem, but you can’t keep living like that.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And you need to get a proper night’s sleep.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘In a bed,’ Aoife chided, giving me a side glance as she pulled out onto the road. ‘We’ll take it one room at a time. I’m off on Friday. What if I call around?’

  ‘All right, okay. But now can we just—’

  I didn’t even have to finish the sentence. Aoife leaned over and pushed the button as the sound of the radio filled the car.

  SIX

  ‘Used to happen to me all the time,’ said Billy. Patsy agreed. ‘I would have given you unbeatable odds Maureen was walking down Grafton Street a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Ho ho! That was a good one,’ exclaimed Martin. ‘Tell Grace that one, Patsy. That’ll make her feel better.’

  It was Wednesday afternoon and the four of us were on our tea break. The wise men had been coming here for years, visiting their lost ones every Wednesday and Saturday and whenever else they got lonely, or bored. Glasnevin Cemetery was their men’s shed, basically. I came when I could. Patsy brought the flasks and we always gathered at the graveside of Maureen O’Connell – his wife. It was Patsy too who decided when tea break was.

  He took a sip of his own milky tea and placed the tin mug down on the cool marble. He waited for Martin to stop poking me – ‘Wait till you hear this, Grace! This is a good one now’ – and for the group to give him the attention to which he, as unofficial leader of the Three Wise Men, was accustomed.

  ‘I was strolling down Grafton Street—’

  Martin was already chuckling.

  ‘I was strolling down Grafton Street,’ Patsy repeated, louder this time, ‘on my way to meet a man about some business.’ Billy, quietly shifting back and forth in his wheelchair, winked at me. We all knew the only ‘business’ Patsy ever had in Dublin city was a swift one in the Palace Bar. ‘And I saw this woman up ahead. I could only see her from the back, but there was something in her hair, her coat, that I would have put serious money on it being my Maureen – and you know I don’t gamble easily.’ I couldn’t even look at Billy that time. ‘Then she started to walk and I was convinced it was her. I hadn’t felt as sure in years—’

  ‘Ho ho!’

  ‘So I went into pursuit. I started running down the street—’

  ‘Ah now, Patsy,’ interjected Billy, rolling a little closer, ‘I’ve been running more recently than you.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t run in so many words, but I walked at a very brisk pace. The stick could not keep up.’

  ‘Watch out, Usain Bolt.’

  Patsy ignored him. ‘By the time I got to her I was out of breath but I tapped Maureen on the shoulder, ready to accept that the past thirteen years had been an awkward misunderstanding, and she turned around and . . .’

  ‘And?’ I said, in spite of myself, in spite of knowing how the story would end. There was only one way this story ever ended.

  ‘And it wasn’t her, of course. Maureen’s right here’ – Patsy leaned back and placed a hand on the gravel of his wife’s grave. ‘The woman hadn’t a patch on Maureen in the end. Couldn’t have held a candle to her. And she was one of those charity collectors. I was so embarrassed about the whole business that I ended up sponsoring a rescue dog in Myanmar.’

  ‘But it really does look like Henry.’

  ‘All the time?’ asked Patsy, taking up his mug again.

  ‘No, not all the time . . . Always at first and then sometimes . . .’ I couldn’t be sure. ‘Sometimes it does look like him, I think. And sometimes like maybe he dyed his hair or—’

  ‘Audrey dyed her hair once,’ interrupted Martin. ‘She looked completely different. Have I told youse about that?’

  ‘Yes, Martin. Several times.’

  ‘Jesus, it was great,’ he said wistfully. ‘It was like having an affair.’

  ‘Look, Grace, you’re new to this,’ declared Billy, turning his chair so as to block out Martin. ‘We’ve had years to get used to it, you’re only starting.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘It does get better,’ he said.

  ‘And then worse,’ offered Patsy.

  ‘And then worse,’ agreed Billy. ‘But then better again.’

  ‘Probably.’

  The wise men had been coming here since they opened the new wing of Glasnevin Cemetery thirteen years ago. Well, Patsy had been coming since then – Maureen was the first person buried in this section – and Billy and Martin had been regulars since their wives died the following year. They used to be known as the Forlorn Four but the fourth fella was buried two over from Maureen now and they thought it was only respectful to find a new name. I’d given it to them, though I hadn’t realised I was doing it.

  It was a couple of weeks after Henry, and I’d come to visit him on my own for the first time. I was trying to fill the watering can so I could revitalise the flowers left by his parents but I couldn’t get the tap to work. Patsy had shown me how to pull it up and jimmy it a bit before turning. Then Martin wandered over and said that if I ever forgot to bring flowers I could take some off Paddy Cleary’s grave because his wife had Alzheimer’s and never remembered what she’d brought anyway. Billy joined us then and told me that if I needed weed killer there was always some in the locker in the shed at the entrance to our wing.

  ‘You’re best getting the weeds before they start,’ Patsy added. ‘Lay some poison first week of May and pull them up a few days after.’

  ‘I love the satisfaction in giving them a good tug. It’s about all I get to pull these days.’

  ‘Martin!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, surveying the three lads with their flasks and shovels and Patsy with a newspaper tucked under his arm. Maybe it was because Henry had been one, but I had a lot of time for newspaper readers. ‘Is there anything about this place youse don’t know?’

  They looked at each other and shook their heads. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, actually,’ said Patsy, ‘we’ve only just learnt why it is that the residents over there’ – he pointed to the only row of houses visible from where we stood – ‘aren’t allowed to be buried here.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked, following his gaze into the neighbouring estate. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because they’re not dead yet!’ And the three of them erupted into hysterics and started slapping each other on the back.

  It was the first of many times I would hear that joke but, on the first occasion, i
t had made me laugh, and back then that was rare. ‘The Three Wise Men,’ I said, smiling, rolling my eyes.

  They looked at each other again, getting excited.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ho ho!’ said Martin, poking Patsy before he was smacked away with the newspaper.

  ‘I think we have it, men.’

  ‘I think we do, Billy. The Three Wise Men.’ Patsy repeated it slowly, considering it. ‘That’ll do nicely. Thank you . . .?’

  ‘Grace.’

  ‘Amazing Grace.’

  And though I had always hated that nickname at school, there was something in the way Patsy said it that made me feel, somehow, better. Almost immediately, I had become an unofficial member of the gang. Martin had been a bit nervy at first about having a woman around but I promised I could top any dirty joke he told and he was soon won over. ‘Amazing Grace,’ Martin agreed whenever I helped him tend to Audrey’s plot. ‘Our lucky charm.’

  I came to see them a couple of times a week. Mostly we worked quietly at our own graves, tidying them or watering flowers or often just reading the newspaper and staring into space. Every hour or so we’d meet at Maureen’s plot for tea, shoot the breeze and rehash the same terrible jokes.

  The buzzer went on Patsy’s tiny alarm clock – which meant this break had officially come to an end.

  ‘Right,’ he said, draining his mug before handing it to Martin. ‘Back to it.’

  Billy put the lids back on the flasks and Martin gathered the cups as myself and Patsy rose from the graveside. The smell of Billy’s coffee made me shudder. Since Henry died, I couldn’t hack the stuff. We went back to the final resting places of our favourite people and alternated between diligent work and idle daydreaming. I could tell from the pen in Patsy’s hand that he was working his way through the racing pages.

  There wasn’t a lot to do at Henry’s plot. I’d already watered and straightened the flowers, and I’d finished the only magazine I’d brought. All that was left was to sit beside the temporary headstone refusing to accept that I felt no closer to him here than I did anywhere else.

  ‘Do you need a hand?’ I called across to Martin, who was undertaking some serious weeding.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he shouted back, and I grabbed a pair of gloves from the storage shed and hunkered down beside him.

  ‘I used to leave the weeds, and the moss.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said, burrowing a little hole in search of roots. ‘How come?’

  ‘Audrey was always shocking cold. She’d have the electric blanket on all year round, and up until the night she went into hospital she used to push her feet between my legs so I could warm them up. I thought the weeds and things might keep her cosy, you know?’ He blushed. ‘A little grassy blanket.’

  ‘That’s lovely, Martin.’

  ‘It is in my foot,’ he blustered, the crimson blotches rising further up his cheeks. Then after a thought: ‘Don’t tell the others I said that, all right? They’re still mocking me about telling Billy to leave Audrey’s plot alone and not to be rolling on our consummated ground. They knew well I meant the other word.’

  ‘Consecrated?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said, dragging my finger across my chest in the sign of a promise kept. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  We sat there digging in silence, each building our own little stack of discarded green. Being in the cemetery may not have made me feel any closer to Henry but sometimes it made me feel less alone.

  SEVEN

  Imade my way through the mass marital breakdown that was Ikea on a Friday afternoon and pulled a newspaper rack from the pile. I’d always meant to buy one of these for Henry. Aoife held the shopping list – stopping systematically at the items I needed, ignoring any protestations.

  ‘The minimalist look isn’t working, Grace. You need a couch.’

  The newspaper rack was not on The List but she let me add it to the trolley.

  We shuffled through Bedrooms and Bathrooms – bed base, clothes rail, more shelving, lampshade, light bulbs, towel rack, towels, toilet brush, toilet seat—

  ‘You really should have that one already,’ said Aoife, lifting a bright yellow seat and cover from the pile. ‘Even grief can only excuse so much.’

  I’d been here once before, on a Monday evening, when Henry and I had first moved into our flat. I’d vowed then that I was never coming back, but that had been a mindfulness retreat compared to this. Kitchenware was particularly stressful. There were several broken plates, a toppled pile of oven gloves and a relationship combusting in the middle of Utensils.

  ‘How are we supposed to grow as a couple if we never move forward?’ the woman was shouting, oblivious to their children using spatulas to catapult teaspoons into the wheels of passing trolleys. ‘Why are you so terrified of change? Why won’t you let us grow?!’

  ‘We do not need a pizza cutter, Diane.’

  ‘We eat pizza!’

  ‘Yes, takeaway pizza. From the pizzeria. WHERE THEY CUT IT FOR US.’

  I was left minding the trolley as Aoife scavenged for crockery and cutlery. The slingshot children kept missing the wheels but they managed to wrong-foot a couple of older shoppers. Aoife returned with a mountain of plates and bowls and cups.

  ‘Loads of spoons, no knives,’ she muttered. ‘Alanis Morissette must be running this place.’

  We shuffled on, making it past the children without sustaining any injuries, and Aoife picked up a frying pan.

  ‘Hold your horses there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nope.’ I took the thing out of the trolley and balanced it on a stack of candles. ‘I draw the line at that yoke. I’m a chef; I’m not using an Ikea frying pan. I have lots of pots at home.’

  ‘You might think about taking some of them out of their boxes so.’

  Several more kitchen items were vetoed and Aoife picked up some tumblers.

  ‘We already got glasses.’

  ‘These are for me,’ she said. ‘I broke one at the weekend and I’ve been getting the smallest dinner portion ever since.’

  ‘How long are you going to stay living with your parents?’

  ‘Have you seen the cost of rent, Grace? Be glad you got out when you did. And I couldn’t go back to a house share, having to be nice to weirdos who never wash up after themselves and leave passive-aggressive notes about noise levels and phantom milk thieves.’

  A couple of wooden spoons were added to the growing mound. I managed to throw one of them back out. I was a woman with a mortgage, a single income and a finite amount of financial support. I could not afford all this crap.

  ‘So I don’t know,’ Aoife continued. ‘I didn’t realise how poor I was until I broke up with Rowan. When there were two of us, rent was affordable. Now the only financial option open to me is sleeping in the twin room with my equally hard-up sister. It’s like there’s a tax on being single.’

  Aoife McGrath and I had been friends since we were kids. But while I was an only child, Aoife was one of nine. It had taken me a while to get used to the McGrath household. At the beginning I jumped every time someone shouted – sibling at parent, parent at sibling, sibling at sibling, parent at parent – but I adapted. I learnt that selective hearing was an evolutionary requirement if you wanted to survive in a family of eleven. Screaming matches soon became the background music to us playing with Sylvanian Families on Aoife’s bedroom floor.

  ‘Get down here and FINISH YOUR DINNER!’

  ‘I’m not hungry! And the CHICKEN IS MANKY!’

  ‘THERE ARE STARVING CHILDREN IN AFRICA!’

  ‘Send it to them then, and when you get locked up for POISONING BLACK BABIES WE CAN ORDER PIZZA FOR DINNER!!!!!!’

  Even now her house was never quiet. Her youngest brother was still in school, and two sisters at university also lived at home. Her eldest siblings had children of their own and used Aoife’s parents as a dump-and-run babysitting service. When Aoife had moved back home afte
r breaking up with Rowan for being a useless layabout, she discovered her old bedroom had become a makeshift crèche. So she had to bunk in with her sister Sharon, who was as unhappy as Aoife about the situation.

  ‘I thought we’d got rid of you,’ she’d said, arms folded, the day Aoife turned up at the door. ‘Have you no friends you can stay with at all? Are you not embarrassed to be back here at, what are you now, forty?’

  ‘Thirty-one.’

  ‘Well, you look forty.’

  Sharing a room in your parents’ house at thirty-one was nobody’s idea of winning at life, but it was particularly frustrating when you were (a) as independent as Aoife was and (b) sharing with a sister who shouts ‘F-M-L!!!’ every time you came into the room. It didn’t help either when everyone loathed the ex-boyfriend you were trying to sneak upstairs for a quick midnight shag. Even Aoife’s mam had slipped up once and called him ‘Moan’ to his face.

  ‘It’s hard to enjoy a bit of how’s yer father, when you’re half thinking, “Where is my father?”’ Aoife picked up a doormat and tossed it into the trolley. ‘I wish Mam would reserve house keys for those of us who actually live there. Susan called in when we were in the middle of some Afternoon Delight to see if there was anyone she could pawn her spawns off on, and I had to shove Rowan under Sharon’s bed and pretend I’d just come in from Hot Yoga.’ Storage boxes, clothes hangers, some hooks for hanging paintings. ‘It’s getting hard to maintain dignity.’

  ‘Maybe you should stop sleeping with him?’

  ‘If only it were so simple.’ Aoife sighed. More storage boxes, more light bulbs. ‘I swear the fucker’s getting better-looking just to spite me.’

  Rowan was, to put it plainly, a waster. He’d start projects – writing a book, starting a band, getting a job – and then give up. Everyone was always better off than him and it was always someone else’s fault. But Aoife enjoyed calling him on his bullshit, and there was the aforementioned attractiveness.

  ‘I wasn’t half as interested in sleeping with him when we were together. But now that it’s forbidden, I can’t get enough of his sorry-looking scrotum. I’m like a really lame Mills & Boon character.’ She put more candles in the trolley, and I took them out. ‘Will we get some things for the backyard?’ she said. ‘Plant pots? A trellis?’