‘I can’t take the flight with him,’ I say. ‘It’s just too…’
‘“Would passengers requiring assistance please come to the front of the queue.”’
And I laugh. Whatever he means.
‘Really, it will be fine in the hold,’ he says.
He is not good-looking. His mouth is too squished and full; he is too soft and unformed. But there is nothing wrong with him. I look at his hands and they do not disgust me, and his eyelids, when he closes them, flickering, in order to make a point about buffed steel as opposed to chrome, have a faint pattern on them of medieval veins. His clothes do not mock his body. You could unpeel him, and he would still be true.
I must ask his name again. (Azrael.)
He touched my arm while I stood by Liam’s body and he led me away. He is the person who comes after you have seen the worst thing. He is the rest of my life.
After I arrived at Brighton station, I walked around for a while, thinking that I should play this the way it happened-I should start at the place where Liam walked into the sea-because there is an order to these things that has to be obeyed. So at lunch-time, I am walking along the prom and Liam is still, residually, alive, and I am imagining this place in the darkness, and the lapping around my waist of black salt water. Liam is in the air. The figures that pass are scribbled with the graffiti of his gaze: everything they have spills over, or droops. An overweight child with breasts-a boy, it seems. An old man with a scab under his nose. A woman with a widening tattoo. A parade of lax flies and stained trousers and bra straps showing under other, shoestring straps. The living, with all their smells and holes. Liam was always a great man for people’s holes, and who stuck what into which hole.
He is back in my head like an expanding smell-a space that clears to allow him look out of my eyes and be disgusted by arse or tit, or ‘cold tit’, even, by flesh that is never the right temperature or the right humidity, being too sweaty, or flesh that is saggy, or hairy, and the women, especially, who inhabit this sad human sack too craven or too beautiful (except, of course, for their holes), and in the end, who do you sleep with, who do you kiss? People with no pores? I say this to him, in my head. I argue it out, but I can’t shake him, I can’t win, as I pass old men and old women, with their eczemous creases, or lean over the railing, pulling in the sea air to keep the rising vomit down, while thinking of my brother’s own flesh and how it will look in two months’, then three months’ time.
I look over the railing as though to examine the density and variety of brown stones on the beach below. And there it is: the open tang, the calling, the smell of the sea. Such a miracle, at the end of the Brighton line, with the town stacked behind me, and behind that all the weight of England, in her smoke and light, jammed to a halt here, just here, by the wide smell of the sea.
The first time we took the ferry, myself and Liam, it was the end of his second year, and my first, in UCD. We were going to work in London for the summer. We sat in the space between carriages, from Holyhead to Euston, watching a man-who turned out, by some freak, to be our own postman-squeeze oranges into a bottle of duty-free vodka. He was giving the vodka to a drunken girl he had met on the crossing, and he waved the bottle at us too, and we may or may not have taken it, but what I liked was the way he winked to us before turning back to the girl-who was completely rat-arsed-as if we were all in this together, the seduction business, the business of, ‘Crikey! Quids in.’
Liam never gave us a wedding.
The Hegartys loved a wedding, and a few of us actually had them, small or large, and some of them secular, and in the centre of it all, this decorous thing, an honest man, a lovely girl, fucking, in the nicest possible way, to cheers and the chink of glasses-and this was a thing that Liam never learned how to do, how to switch in and out of sex, how to talk around it, or share it, so although there were girlfriends we never saw them, or if we saw them he did not like us, the Hegartys, to speak to them: a line of spindly, droopy human beings who held his hand and peered at us over his shoulder. Liam liked nice women. He liked women who were kind or gentle. He liked those translucent girls. And he was quite right not to share them with us, the Hegarty hyenas, myself and Kitty singing, ‘And they called it puppy lo-oo-oo-ove’ as soon as they left the room.
The funny thing, apart from the horny postman, about that first journey through the British night for us-fresh off the boat, fifty paces across our first foreign soil and then stepping up again on to the iron floor of the train-was that we always thought that we were nearly there. We looked out the window and, after a period of darkness, there were so many lights we assumed they were the coming lights of London town. Except that we never arrived. And it seemed to us that England was a single city from one side to the other, without pause. Then, in the morning, when we had finally, definitely, absolutely arrived, we stood at the mouth of the underground in Euston, thinking that a train had just pulled in, and we would be able to make our way down when the crowd was gone. After a while we realised that the rush of people was not going to ease, that there was no one, particular train. London was all flow, it had no edges, it was everywhere.
Liam never liked the English, or so he claimed. In this he was helped, he said, by the fact that the English did not like themselves.
Clever Liam.
And I can not manage to love them, this herd on the hoof down the Brighton front, all of them enjoying the sea where Liam drowned. But I manage not to hate them, even though they are alive and my brother is dead. And I wonder how I escaped it-Liam’s hatred of this or that arbitrary thing. Queers one year, Americans the next.
Who should I hate?
We swam at night somewhere. When we were young, we swam at night, and I can not remember where that might have been.
I look out at the wide, shifting sea, and, just for a moment, I think I have a smaller life, alive as I am in this sunlight, than my brother, walking out in the darkness; blood and whiskey into salt sea. Liam, pissed, just the skin that separated himself from his yearning self. Just for a moment, I think that it is more heroic not to be.
I look at my hands on the railings, and they are old, and my child-battered body, that I was proud of, in a way, for the new people that came out of it, just feeding the grave, just feeding the grave! I want to shout it at these strangers, as they pass. I want to call for an end to procreation with a sandwich board and a megaphone-not that there are many children, I now notice, on the playground that is Brighton beach, at least not this Tuesday afternoon. England, the land of the fully grown.
But I really don’t mind these people, one way or another, and I love the undertaker. My catalogue companion, my English boy. This trendy ease he has is almost spiritual. I wonder who he goes home to-friends he likes, or parents he likes-and how do you have sex with a guy like that. Does he have moods?
When I am done, and have felt his harmless hand in my own (old) hand, I stand on the pavement outside his funeral parlour and I open my mobile to ring my difficult, middle-aged husband when what I want to do instead is lie down, just there, across the boy’s doorway, until he steps across my prone body and lifts me up.
Azrael.
‘How are things?’ I ask Tom, and he tells me that the girls are going to friends’ houses after school, and everything is fine. It takes me a moment to figure out where he is.
‘Are you at work?’
‘Of course I’m at work.’