by Seamus Deane
‘OK,’ I said, ‘Ten distinctions.’
When I got nine – with a pass in Art – she asked what happened to the promise of ten. I told her I broke it. I was joking. She was not.
‘So you did. So you did,’ she replied.
I scored high in the Religious Knowledge test, but that wasn’t good enough either.
‘You could have come first in Ireland if you had tried harder,’ she accused.
She persisted, right into the winter. On All Souls’ Night, we went in and out of the cathedral, saying set prayers for the repose of one soul after another. We used to believe, when younger, that a falling star in the winter sky was a soul released from fire into paradise, a flash into eternity. This year, as always, we were to pray especially for Una, and after her all the dead relations – grandparents, Eddie, Ena – then all the souls in purgatory who were close to final salvation. We exited after each set of prayers, re-entered for the next. She saw Brendan Moran and me talking to two girls outside. At home, later that evening, she told me she had seen me behaving disgracefully in the church grounds, that it made her blush to think that gom was her son, chasing round like that with young girls on a holy night such as this. It would be a while before she would see me staying out at night again.
Fuck this, I thought. What’s she at? Challenging me? I said nothing.
My father was visibly annoyed and puzzled, but wasn’t going to say anything to her in front of us. He was fifty. He looked older. When he was showing me how to box, how to move my feet and angle my body, and held my fist in his hand to fold the thumb into the centre of my palm, his hand felt smaller than it had at the beginning of the year when he had handselled us all with a shilling each for the New Year and shaken us all in turn by the hand while the cathedral bells rang out in the frost.
My mother was increasingly distant from everyone; slowly slipping out of our grasp, slick with hostility. Her anger stayed in her eyes when she was speaking, but when she was silent an empty panic took its place. I stole for her a golden iris from a flower stall in Chamberlain Street and walked into the kitchen, handed it to her and said to her, ‘Don’t worry any more. I’ll never say a word. Don’t worry about it. It’s all past.’
She took the flower with its three heads and three petals on each.
‘Look,’ she said, tearing the petals off, one at a time, and letting them drop on the floor:
‘If you want to, you can tell,’
One petal dropped off.
‘If you don’t, that’s just as well.’
Another swirled on to the linoleum.
‘Get it over, get it done,
Father, lover, husband, son.’
She laughed coldly and threw the remains on the floor, folded her arms across her breast and rocked back and forth, humming tunelessly. Her hair was greying at the side, above her ear.
I picked up the flowers and the petals and tossed them into the bin out in the yard. She was nearly gone from me. I remembered how she had put her hand to her heart the day I had destroyed the roses and realised how youthful her face had been then. Looking through the window, I could see her still swaying back and forth, and my heart went out to her even as I wished I could love her in the old way again. But I could only grieve for not being able to; and grieve the more that she could not love me like that any more either. The air smarted with rain.
‘Did you say something to her? Did something happen? my father asked me.
‘No. I said nothing,’ I answered, feeling I was really telling the truth that mattered, although he couldn’t know that.
He sighed. ‘I don’t know why she’s taken against you so much. Don’t be upset. She can’t help it, God look to her.’
She took to the lobby window again. But she disliked anyone standing with her there to talk, most especially me. There she was with her ghosts. Now the haunting meant something new to me – now I had become the shadow. Everything bore down on her. She got smaller, more intense, her features sealed into no more than two or three expressions. In addition, she fell silent. My father persuaded her to let the doctor come and see her. ‘Her nerves have got the better of her,’ he announced and prescribed sedatives that she refused to take. ‘Don’t bring that fool near me again,’ she told my father.
DANCE
December 1958
A firm called Birmingham Sound Reproducers opened a factory on Bligh’s Lane, just a couple of hundred yards away from us. They employed a lot of men. It was strange to see men coming home from work at the same time as the women from the few shirt factories that had survived. It changed the whole pattern of movement in the neighbourhood. Also, many people got record-players cheap, direct from the factory; the street got noisier, especially in summer when the doors and windows were left open, and the music blared out. We got one too, and my father played the same three records – collections of arias, mostly from Italian opera – every night when he came home from work. As the arias streamed out from the green-and-grey box, he would close his eyes and lean back, rapt with the sound of Gigli above all others. My mother would sit, unmoved, perhaps not even hearing it, although now and then I thought I saw her looking at him sadly as though he were a young boy who didn’t know the trouble that lay ahead of him. My favourite was an aria sung by Björling; Orpheus having turned round too soon and lost Eurydice – Che farò senza Euridice? It wound out from the black disc in long sorceries of sound. I would sit beside the machine sometimes, facing her, and it was then as though the music was winding out of me, a lamentation for the loss of her.
With the new record-players available, somebody had the idea that there should be social evenings with music and dancing in the local Ashfield Hall, at the foot of Tyrconnell Street. People of all ages came, every second Tuesday. Usually, I sat in sidelong-eyed discomfort during the dancing and singing in case some girl, even my sister Eilis, might ask me to dance. But I need not have worried. Instead, Crazy Joe came along, still wielding his walking stick, and sat on the bench beside me in the darkest corner of the local hall. Joe was invited to nothing and he came to everything – weddings, wakes, birthday parties, anniversaries, dances. He stared at the dancers moving round the floor space cleared by piling the benches at both ends of the hall. His false teeth slid in and out, a smile in mid-air, a smile in his face, alternately. The suction of his mouth remained audible above the noise of the recorded dance music – and of the crowd. A girl from Cable Street approached and smiled in my direction. I bared my teeth at her, thinking I must look like Joe, a smiling non-smile semaphoring in the semi-darkness of the low-lit hall. But she moved away again. I wished I could dance, but it wasn’t only dancing that was the problem. There was touching and talking to girls and being watched by the older people.
‘Stay away from the women, boy. Don’t let their smiles fool you.’
Now he’s going to say, ‘Stick to football,’ I thought, feeling nauseated.
‘Stick to your books,’ he advised, clapping me on the bare knee and squeezing it a little. I constricted my body inward, away from him.
‘Filthy lot!’
‘What do you mean, filthy?’
‘Lot is fate. Once you see that, you see everything. Why is everyone so stupid? You’ve a lot of books to stick to, I can see that, if you can see the pun, though I’m sure you don’t. Here comes another one of those women. Tell her to get lost. I want to talk to you.’
But, whoever she was, she was not interested. She passed us by without a glance. Liam was dancing. He was waving his arms and clicking his fingers. Envy sprang like a trap inside me. Joe touched my knee again, very lightly. Teeth in, teeth out. Suction noises. His right hand shifted back and forth on the curve of his stick that he kept perpendicular on the floor. His other hand strayed by his side.
‘Sexual heat. That’s all drums are for. It’d make you sick, that music. Should be banned.’
I could see my mother and Katie with some other women seated in a circle around a table to the side of the platform wher
e the music was playing. Katie was dabbing her eyes, and my mother was bent in close to her, talking and patting her bare arm. I wondered what had upset Katie. My father sat down the hall on a bench, upright, alone, although he seemed to be smiling a little. Most of the other men of his age were in a corner of the hall, round a table, drinking. I could hear their talk coming and going in waves: ‘Oh listen, says I, says I, listen to this …’ ‘An’ I turned round and said not you nor any one of your family ever could …’ Joe stopped his sucking and turned to me, his face calm with madness.
‘Here’s a conundrum. There’s a place where a man died but lived on as a ghost, and where another man lived as a ghost but died as a man, and where another man would have died as a man but ran away to live as a ghost. Where would that place be?’
He put his hand on my knee again. I ignored it. He rubbed my knee as though it were the crook of his walking stick. I looked at his hand moving on me. The noise in the hall was terrible. His teeth slid out as he stared me in the face.
‘Where? Where?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
‘Don’t know? Me tell you? I could tell you anywhere. Egypt? Brazil? The Atlantic Ocean? The back of beyond? In the Bible? C’mon. Guess, you scut. You know damn well.’
He rubbed my knee vigorously and at that I was lifted clean off the chair and planted on the ground. My father was holding my shirt at the back of the neck and staring furiously at Joe.
‘Don’t you ever lay a hand on him again, y’hear that?’
Joe quailed and put one hand up across his face, saying nothing. He sat there like that, the other hand still gripping his stick. People were looking in our direction. My father pushed me ahead of him.
‘Stay away from Joe; he’s sick in the head. What were you sitting there with him for? Go and dance or talk with people your own age. Go on.’
He pushed me forward, and I wandered ahead of him, seeing my mother and Katie turn round to look down the floor, hearing my father resume his seat behind me, seeing Joe as we left him, arm across his face and his wild eyes staring. A girl touched my arm.
‘Y’want to dance?’
I moved gratefully to the floor with her, wanting to hold her tight in my arms.
The next day, my mother also told me to stay away from Crazy Joe. I spent too much time with him, she claimed, and he was not normal. I was never to let him touch me. He was odd. You mean he’s queer? I asked. She shook her head almost in disbelief at the word. Then she shook her head again.
‘God forgive me, God forgive what I have done,’ she wailed.
BIRTHDAY GIFT
May 1959
It wasn’t just that she was trapped by what had happened. She was trapped by my knowing it. It must be shame, I decided. She’s paralysed by shame. She was ashamed of what she had done to my father. She was ashamed, I knew it. Every time she saw me, she felt exposed, even though I made it clear I would never say anything and even tried to make it clear that I understood why she had behaved so. But I couldn’t wholly understand, not without knowing more. I wanted to ask her if she had loved McIlhenny at any time, really loved him. But I was afraid she might say she still loved him, or even that she loved him for the years in between, when she first went out with him, through his leaving her and marrying Katie, through her fingering him, with Joe’s help, as the informer, through her tipping him off and seeing him flee and vanish to Chicago, through Katie’s grief, and finally through her meeting my father four years later and realising what Eddie had meant to him and his family. I didn’t want to hear that she had loved him for all of that time or for any part of it, even though I knew there must be some truth in it. What, finally, did she not know when she stood with my father at the altar-rail to be married? That her father had ordered Eddie’s execution? Was that all she didn’t know? And what did he know? Just that his brother was an informer who had been shot? Yet there were all those years since their marriage in 1935. All those stories, hints, all that cover-up about Eddie having got away and disappeared. Did he not recognise that the story of Eddie and the story of McIlhenny were so close? How could he have missed the connection, how could he not have seen that one was the imprint of the other? Or did he know and hold in his pain, his suspicions, for saying it out loud would destroy everything, make their marriage impossible?
Sergeant Burke died, and his priest-sons concelebrated the Requiem Mass for him in the cathedral. The Bishop attended the funeral.
‘How dare he do that!’ hissed my mother.
She wouldn’t listen to us tell her that the police and the priests were always in cahoots with one another. No theories like that for her. It was personal. Everything was personal. I understood that. It had to be, when everything that was precious to her was so bound up with betrayal.
I asked her once what she would like for her birthday.
‘Just for that day,’ she answered, ‘just for that one day, the seventeenth of May, to forget everything. Or at least not to be reminded of it. Can you give me that?’
I didn’t reply.
‘Why don’t you go away?’ she asked me. ‘Then maybe I could look after your father properly for once, without your eyes on me.’
I told her I would. I’d go away, after university. That would be her birthday gift, that promise. She nodded. I moved away just as she put out her hand towards me.
MY FATHER
June 1961
Staying loyal to my mother made me disloyal to my father. In case I should ever be tempted to tell him all I knew, I stayed at arm’s length from him and saw him notice but could say nothing to explain. I went away to university in Belfast, glad to be free of the immediate pressures of living there, sorry to have so mishandled everything that I had created a distance between my parents and myself that had become my only way of loving them. So, I celebrated all the anniversaries: of all the deaths, all the betrayals – for both of them – in my head, year after year, until, to my pleasure and surprise, they began to become confused and muddled, and I wondered at times had I dreamed it all.
Hauntings are, in their way, very specific. Everything has to be exact, even the vaguenesses. My family’s history was like that too. It came to me in bits, from people who rarely recognised all they had told. Some of the things I remember, I don’t really remember. I’ve just been told about them so now I feel I remember them, and want to the more because it is so important for others to forget them. Someone told me how my father, the night his parents were buried, was found lying down in the back shed of that house on the High Street where they had lived, among the coal sacks and the chopped wood, crying unstoppably. I imagined it and believed it, but when I looked at him again, I wondered: was that my father?
My father. He would have loved to have been educated. When I came down from Belfast the night I got my degree, I came into a kitchen crammed with people and chatter. I’d had a few drinks and was feeling light, so as I came through the door, and as they looked up expectantly, I was about to put on an act of despair and pretend I’d failed, when I saw my father behind the door getting off his chair, his face grey, his legs leaden. The rafters came swooping down again, the cloud above the Atlantic nudged the light into rays and I was looking up at him as he straightened. At once I said, ‘I got it. A First.’ His huge hand held my shoulder for a second and he smiled.
‘A First,’ he said and sat down. ‘A First,’ he whispered to himself, his head down as everybody else began to talk again and my mother nodded at him and said, ‘He’s – we’ve been waiting since six for that news. What kept you? It’s one in the morning.’
‘I had a drink or two in Belfast.’
‘A drink or two!’ they all echoed, laughing.
‘I’d have a drink myself if I didn’t have to work in the morning.’ He came from behind the door. ‘But I’ll sleep well tonight.’
He went upstairs. He never took a drink in his life. I’ve reconstructed his vigil behind the door in that noisy room a hundred times since, just as I recons
tructed his life out of the remains of the stories about his dead parents, his vanished older brother, his own unknowing and, to me, beloved silence. Oh, father.
The man behind the door, the boy weeping in the coal shed, the walk down that dusty road, the ruined rose bed, the confession in the church, his dead, betrayed brother – was that all? In a whole lifetime? How bitterly did he feel or was he saddened into quietness? How much did he know or not know?
I remembered one night, long before I knew anything, we were all listening to a boxing match on BBC radio between the British heavyweight champion Bruce Woodcock and a Czechoslovak miner called Josef Baksi. My father, of course, knew something about boxing, and retained an interest in it even though he said the sport sickened him. This was a terrible fight. Woodcock took a pulverising beating but stayed on his feet the whole way through the twelve rounds. The commentator was screaming as though someone were standing on his neck; the noise of the crowd seemed to swell the fabric on the radio’s speaker. My father listened as though he had a gun in his back.
‘Stop the fight,’ he said to the radio every so often. ‘Stop the fight.’