I remember him best with my skin. The creeping delight as he bent down to whisper; the bristle of his moustache and the grease of his tweed. He tickled you with the idea that there was something hidden in his hand or pocket-and there never was. Charlie played Find the Lady with no lady: he just loved the flourish, and after the flourish he loved to leave.
Poor Charlie. His was the first corpse I ever saw; massive and still under Ada’s rose-pink eiderdown. Which is why it is a kind of blasphemy to write of their marriage night in the same bed-though blasphemy seems to be my business here.
I would love to remember how he died-whether with a noise in the night, or a lengthening silence in the middle of the afternoon. It must have happened while we were staying there. It might even have been the reason we went back home. But such details and dates were too terrible for a child to take in, it seems, because my mind has blanked them out-but completely. All I remember is the aftermath, trying not to laugh as we were brought up to the room.
It must have been the February of 1968. I was still eight, Liam was nine, and we were going up to ‘say goodbye’ to Charlie. I think I knew, even at eight, that you can say goodbye all you like, but when someone is dead they’re not going to say anything back, so Liam had to stiff-arm me up past the neighbours reciting the rosary on the stairs. My memory has them all bundled in shawls; Ada’s back ascending in front of us corseted in black taffeta. But this was 1968: there would have been patterned headscarves and big-buttoned coats that smelt of the rain. Ada would have worn her navy Crimplene with white piping, that came out for all occasions, with a matching navy bolero jacket and one of those hats that look like a bubble of felt, punched in on one side.
The neighbours’ feet stuck out a surprising distance from the step where they each knelt: their shoes waggled midair, and there was something tripping and wrong about this other ladder, made of shin-bones in support tights, at cross purposes to the staircase we were trying to climb.
A very loud woman was praying on the return. She saw me giggling with Liam and rolled a sad eyeball, like there are some things beyond rebuke. I remember that, all right; the slow-motion feeling of being utterly wrong-minded and unable to change. I did not, I realised then, want to go into my grandparents’ room. Not at all.
A few more kneelers cluttered the second flight, and then, through the open door, I saw the end of the bed and the still, uneven lump of Charlie’s feet. I remember the straightness of his legs as revealed through the expanding door frame, the horrible little peaks of his knees, then the merciful swoop of the eiderdown up his fantastic belly’s rise. His hands were on his chest, knotted, and complacent, and tied together with rosary beads.
The beads looked too tight, they looked like they were digging into his flesh. These little fierce formalities at the end; a sort of revenge on him, for being dead.
Ada looked to check us behind her, and then moved out of the way to give us a better view. It was a view that I did not want to take.
Charlie did love to leave.
‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ You never knew where he was going. He left in a fug of explanations that explained nothing at all. So Ada was proved right, at last-he was a most annoying man. You could tell by the way she twitched towards him as though to swat the dandruff from his lapel. And in fact there was something there-a fly crawling on the side of his neck. I thought it had come out from under his collar and I was much bothered by the idea of maggots-from that day on, really. It stopped my awful smiling at any rate, like Ada was going to swipe at me, and not the fly.
She watched it rise and shift away from him, and hit the roller blind, once, twice. Then it came back to the bed. I was standing behind her; I could feel the still, raw rage as she saw it circle, and scoot away, and then come back to settle again on Charlie’s dead neck. It landed and ran across the skin, not bothered by the deep creases in the soft flesh, or by the few high strands of hair. Ada moved, or went to move, and the fly lifted and repeated its escape to the roller blind, this time finding a way around the bright edge of it to hit the window pane, where it buzzed and thumped. We listened to it for a while; the sound of the rosary outside, and the sound of the fly battering the glass. Ada was mortified. She looked to the corpse. She could not move. Then, of a sudden, she seemed to realise that this was her own bedroom, with her own husband in it, dead or not, and she simply walked around the bed. When she reached the window, she raised one hand and pressed the blind flat. The buzzing stopped. Ada the housewife, with a terrible spot on her blind. We children now exposed to Charlie’s bald head, naked in death.
You might think there is something light about the dead-our lives feel so heavy to us, sometimes-but the dent Charlie’s head made in the pillow was living and deep.
I remember him lying down in the Phoenix Park, his head like a rock in the grass. And I remember my hand in his mouth-the whole of my hand-while he garbled around it and laughed. I must have been very young, my hand all disappeared into this huge face and-somewhere else, it seemed-the surging chaos of his wet tongue, the gentle flats and tips of his molar teeth.
The skull is the bone that is nearest the air. This is what I realised as I looked at the skin on the dome of Charlie’s head; it was bloodlessly transparent, and the tan was all on the surface, in the thinnest glaze. Ada was back from the window, urging us forward to view, or witness, or maybe even touch, this briefly sacred thing, our dead grandfather. And I suppose it is amazing. The viewing moment. When they have left, but are not yet gone. When you are not quite sure what it is you see.
So I did look-at him, or it. And it was all fine and unsurprising, except for the moustache. Charlie, alive, had the most wonderful white bush of a moustache, lemon-scented and turned slightly at the tips. My grandfather was the only man I knew with a toy on his face. His moustache moved and distracted and dazzled. It was a sleight of mouth. And now it was still, and hiding nothing at all.
There was no trick.
That was the thing that made me cry-waiting for Charlie’s moustache to move, and finding that it did not move. There was no trick, after all. Ada back beside us whispering, ‘Say goodbye, now,’ and Liam, who was older than me by nearly a year, taking a step forward and then stopping, because he did not know what to do.
‘Shush,’ Ada said to me. ‘Stop crying.’
I wonder did they take the blood out? I mean, I wonder if he was embalmed before he was laid out, was that the custom in those days? The blood that was pooling in his shoulders and buttocks, the blood that had fallen to the back of his head, seeking gravity, already wanting to leach down through the mattress: the blood that bruised or hardened in him now, as the front of him (you see it is true) grew infinitesimally lighter, and we stood there, letting him go: that blood, so heavy and sticky and wrong-I wonder if it was still inside him, because it is the same, or a quarter the same, as my own blood. If I cut myself, right now, I would see it running free.
It’s funny, but I have never thought of myself as related to Charlie, even though he was my grandfather. He was a different kind of person. He danced with Ada in the kitchen. He didn’t have a job you could put a name on. He wasn’t always home.
None of the Hegartys got his dog-brown eyes, or his fine, high nose-though it is true that his grandsons all went bald, in time. And this is something Liam could not have foreseen as he stood there waiting to do the proper thing, as soon as he knew what the proper thing was to do. He did not see that he would die bald as a coot, though I think we both knew, as he leaned forward to touch Charlie’s poor dead hand, that Liam would die.
He was on his way.
If you ask me what my brother looked like after he was dead, I can tell you that he looked like Mantegna’s foreshortened Christ, in paisley pyjamas. And this may be a general truth about the dead, or it may just be what happens when someone is lying on a high, mortuary table, with their feet towards the door. That is how I knew that Liam was dead, when I finally saw him in Brighton, the fact that he was too high off the ground, and the thing he was lying on was too hard and flat, because the dead are never uncomfortable-even as we start forward to make them so. I don’t think I looked at the top of his head, or thought about his baldness, or thought about anything. And I was glad I had some practice in this whole business-the viewing business-because although I loved Charlie, it was with the easy, anxious love of a child, that is always ready to love someone new.