— Because you told me it was important.
She settles her hands, watches me and nods.
— Did I really? Did I really say that? She says.
— Do ya think if you see your child at something you don’t want to see you can ever be shut of it? I ask Grief the counsellor.
— Well it depends what they were at and how you felt about what they were doing?
— Let’s say you didn’t feel good.
— Well now if we don’t feel good it’s best if we go through it all over again and try to understand why we don’t feel good. In fact I’ll tell you something, to be free of something you’ve to get closer to it than you might imagine.
Jesus Janey Jesus Janey.
— But when I was seeing the naked fellas you told me to scrub the floor?
— That’s right. I did. And did it work?
— I dunno.
— Are you still seeing naked fellas?
— No.
— Well now.
— I am now seeing half-clothed ones.
— The half clothed ones may need a new approach, she admits. They’re a different formation. It would be like trying to move a square to a pyramid.
*
— I’ve had a change I told Grief in the last session before she turned me over to them.
— That’s great. What kind of a change?
— They’re not naked anymore the fellas I am seeing.
— OK. Great. This is good.
— No, they’ve clothes on them.
— Hats and coats is it?
— No, little red underpants.
— Right?
— And I am wrestling with them.
— Whatchya mean?
— You know wrestling.
— Wrestling?
— Yes one at a time.
— And do you like it?
— I do, I assured her, I like it very much indeed. I can’t get enough of it. It’s keeping me awake all night thinking about it. She grew quiet and then issued some terminal words.
— I am beginning to worry about you, she said.
*
No matter how I explained it to him, Halim did not comprehend the pressure of being a widow.
— You must no longer visit me.
— I will visit you every Sunday.
— You don’t understand I am a widow now.
— Yes I do understand. I will visit you every Sunday. I must help you.
*
Now she was a widow Halim could not visit her anymore. It was a simple rule that she respected about widows.
*
Joanie said I was to lock the door. I had to remember. Bina said if I didn’t lock the door she’d personally come down here and attack me herself if only to teach me to lock the feckin’ thing. Still I didn’t lock it. There was no particular reason, other than the matter of them both telling me, I had to let them know just because I was a widow I wouldn’t have anyone telling me what to do.
*
Jimmy came home to me in seven boxes. Six small black ones containing his belongings and one containing his body. I allowed the six discreet postal delivery, but his body I met in Dublin. I stepped off the train at Heuston Station wearing my good coat. I walked the length of that platform, absent, because I had walked this platform so many times rehearsing his collection. Remember I had known how he’d come home to me. I shunted between two people with big cases, one minus a wheel, remember I was ahead of them all. They’d tried to send his body to Shannon, but I’d told them no. My son would come home to Dublin. His cremation arranged on arrival. I asked them to deposit the flag that accompanied him, wrapped him like an envelope, into the fire. Mossie at the local funeral home was obliging when I had a quiet word with him. My son will be coming home, I’d appreciate some discretion, it’ll be a quiet affair.
*
They asked if I wanted to see him, one last time. I approached, put my hand on the edge of the coffin. We’ll only show you his head and shoulders they said. They were gentle whoever they were. He was in a desperate state my Jimmy. On one half of his face especially. His skin was cold, I’d never considered how cold he’d be. Honestly they had pieced him back together and stitched him into his uniform. He wasn’t my son in that box, the way they had covered him in cheap purple satin. Take it off, I said. I want to see his hands. They didn’t advise it. Get him out of those clothes you have on him. But in his face he was young, that was what struck me the most, how young a man my son was. Nothing could obliterate it.
*
Sand down the windowsill before winter came, did I realize how damp the house was, we’re living in a puddle, these were the words that woke me.
I had a terrible time getting up the day I buried my husband. No desire to move from the bed. Granite-limbed, immobile. I felt like a flat battery. Jimmy sat there on the end of the bed and talked out into the damp bedroom air.
— We’ve to do something about the house, he said, we’ve to make it comfortable for you through the winter.
— Come on, he said, come on ’til we have the tea now.
The girls were not staying with me and I do not remember why. They were staying with Joanie because they were organizing. Wait now that’s it. All the organizing I didn’t agree with. But they took it over when I said that cremation could be better than burial, and after that the whole funeral was organized by my daughters.
I didn’t move to get outta the bed when Jimmy said come on, but he didn’t bother me.
— I’ll leave the tea in so, he said.
I could hear the rattling of the kettle beyond in the kitchen, it reassured me if he was to stay all would be well. I had the feeling he would stay, that he would tell the army he’d to stay. Everything in the bedroom was still, the curtains were closed creating a dullness that made all ugly but we’d peace in there, a sad, cold peace. We would not have it once we left. It is this light that sometimes replicates inside the Blue House. The light of sad, cold peace.
— Daddy, I said, he wasn’t a bad man, I said, when Jimmy came in with the tea.
— I know, he said. Sure I know. Take your time when you get up, you might be dizzy havin’ lain so long. I’m going to heat the pan.
Jimmy was full of useful sayings now and maybe it was the army taught him them, or maybe he always knew them.
Later that day at the funeral I’d no part of because it was relieved of me and wasn’t I glad to have it relieved, I was, for I’d a been no use to them only thinking ludicrous things about urns and cremation, as if such a thing were possible, but I remember they didn’t lay him out in the house, why was that? My daughters were organizing it all with Joanie and the girls and I think they decided it would be unsettling for me and so into the funeral home in Foxford we went instead.
People flocked to me. I sat on a chair. I didn’t stand up. Mossie gave me the chair. There’s no need to stand up, Mossie said. At one point the son of a local man who must have worked beyond in the fields with my husband came to me and put his arms around me and sobbed what are we going to do without him? I was squashed beneath him.
Stood about that coffin was a life my husband had been living outside my kitchen, in which he mattered to so many and I had known of it and what harm was it that he left it at the back door when he came in at night. Better he came in. Better he came in to me, I told myself, than not at all. And yet more’s the pity he couldn’t have made a bit of room for his son, I caught myself thinking. I was disappointed I couldn’t escape that last thought. The way it stalked me and staked itself into the ground. Wasn’t I weak to let it come to me that way?
Later when all was said and done, I said to Jimmy: Wasn’t that something, I said, Daddy, how he mattered to those young fellas you know. Isn’t that something? I repeated. Did you see them crying?