Himself had begun his day saying it wasn’t necessary for him to attend this funeral of a third cousin of mine he’d never met and I could as easy go alone. But no I insisted he, as my husband, must accompany me, that people might think him ill if absent and that stung him. He never liked to be considered incapacitated. If I hadn’t heard the death announcement on the radio the cousin would have passed on without us. Occasionally you get to know a cousin in their death without having much knowledge of them in life and I was feeling terrible on account of it.
I still remember the old red Cortina we drove to it in and the funny plastic damp smell we could never get shut of round the gear lever, and how we speculated for years on what had been spilled there. In the car he was humping angry at leaving Jimmy behind in the bed. If, he reasoned aloud, he should have to go, then the same should follow for the Buck, which gave rise to a rain of criticisms on the Buck. What was he at with his life anyway? I defended him he had gone to college in Dublin hadn’t he? He didn’t want to hear it, wasn’t he only a waster, a loafer, wasn’t there work to be done here, never mind his gallivanting off. And now I reminded him, sure he’s in the military for God’s sake — what more do you want? It’s the first useful thing he’s done, but he won’t last mark my words once they realize the type he is, they’ll kick him out and home to us he’ll be again. He won’t be able to keep that quiet. It’s written all over him. Abnormal and you know it. Then back again how I had him spoiled and he was never useful about the place only spent his day chatting like a woman at the table and getting nothing done, only under your feet and you get nothing done and …
I went at him. I went at him in a way I mebbe shouldn’t have given it was his last hour and he had the right to be right in it even were he wrong, as wrong as an outdated bus timetable, half removed from the stop.
— Don’t be so smug, I said. Newly qualified doctors can be run over by buses, electricians can be injured on their first day there’s nothing assured for any of us. He’s a lovely decent lad.
— You have made him useless and he’s soft every which way as a result. You’ve done it to him.
— He’s not useless, I said. He’s loyal. I made him loyal the way his own father was not.
But I noticed the colour in his face rose, the way it went when he was indignant and I thought I saw a bit of blue creep on his lips. The veins, the odd purple one across his cheek seemed more pronounced and when I saw the bit of sweat on his forehead I worried and opened the window. I kept quiet but my head was leaping, leaping with plans.
I knew it. I knew it. He was repelled by Jimmy and it was only me who could provide for him. And that day I knew above everything else I must find a way to get some money, to have money in case Jimmy was in trouble and needing it. His father would do nothing for him, the way he might for the girls.
Then he put the car into second gear to get on my nerves and he drove like a barrel bouncing down the mountain. All the way there, we did not speak, except for a few words that I do regret but at least I told them softly: you’re a weak man, I said and I regret the day I put my hand in yours. Confront yourself deeply within. You’ve destroyed me with your nonsense. And he came back that I was a half-crazy woman who had given him nothing but a bucket of trouble and there wasn’t a man in the pub who didn’t agree I should have left you and your madness and your carryon. You! he shouted! You are the woman who has been in the hospital let’s not forget! And you! I shouted back. Should have occupied the bed beside me at the very same time! For it was you who put me there.
He should have come back with a bigger shout, something deafening. I shoulda opened the door and stormed out, back the road and we never would have made it to the funeral and maybe the day would have been so different. Same outcome, different, somehow different. Perhaps a cup of tea could have been taken instead to calm things down. He did not shout back. He did not speak. I paid attention to how the water flew, leapt outwards from the windscreen. I thought of how much water falls on us and how we might as well be living beneath a waterfall and I wondered was I truly happy in this life I’ve chosen and decided I probably was not. I have to tell you that because of the circumstances that followed, those were the last significant words my husband spoke to me before what was about to happen. He said I was a half-crazy woman. I said he was a whole-crazy man. What he meant was his son was imbued with the other half of my craziness, but he was polite enough not to say it. He was restrained you see, and I admire him for it now.
At the church, my husband jumped from the car, banged the door in and strode away — his good jacket flapping over to reveal the corner of his shirt had not been tucked in. I thought physically at that moment he was a fine man, who looked well that day in his suit and tie. I hadn’t had a thought about him since I came to know Halim for I was always distracted by the darker, younger man’s beauty and glow and there was no getting around it, Halim had far better manners than my husband.
— Mind the seat belt, he called back. The seatbelt dropping on the ground and becoming wet bothered him immensely. It bothered him as much as someone being buried bothers me, hence I was dawdling into the church, hoping to hold the person above the ground as long as I could. I had to run to catch up with him because it would look funny us arriving separate and I had to smile twice as hard because he was not responding to anyone who hello’d him. I did not hear a word of that service. They could have been burying anyone. They coulda been burying me.
In the graveyard he was sneaky. He knew how unsettled I am around graves. I’m very unsettled around them. Walked with me and then lingered at the back, touched my arm, whispered he’d to go to Ballina. He’d be back to collect me at the Afters.
— No, I protested, I don’t want you to go, I don’t want to go to the Afters, I need to go home and make Jimmy his breakfast. See Jimmy was up.
— I need you to bring me home. I need the car to bring me home. But he’d turned on his heel and I didn’t like to raise my voice beyond the four cries where I uttered his name and implored him to turn back to me a minute. The crowd now surrounded the grave, I was starting to stand out, shouting at the back of my husband who refused to hear me. Above that grave, as they began to move the coffin, I was crying inconsolably, crying in a way I had never cried, for a cousin I’d no knowledge of. I was crying my loudest howl over my husband’s ability to prevent me making the decent breakfast my son deserved this day, that there would be no one in the kitchen when he came out from his bedroom. My third prolonged bout of howling came nearly out of the depths of my groin, I offered it the way we offer prayer, I offered this howling to the misery my husband was going to Ballina this day to reach for the Red Twit. I was crying over that woman lying in the box and weeping gratitude to her for lying there. I could have nearly thanked her for dying and told her the truth that I knew there was only me left to care about my son, that his father had given up on him. I said a louder Amen than those beside me and a man and a woman either side of me, whom I could not name because my eyes were so blurred, linked my arm and handed me tissues. They held me up. Probably thought I was the dead woman’s sister. Was it disrespectful to cry about unrelated things at a funeral? I did not doubt that it was. I was crying for my son and for the husband who made me wait fifteen years to marry him and now had given up on us. I had to get myself home to Jimmy urgently that was all I knew.