Liam is clever.
No. Liam is dead.
Liam was clever, I should say.
Anyway. For someone who was blunderingly stupid most all of the time, my brother was very astute. And what he was astute about were other people’s lives, their weaknesses and hopes, the little lies they like to tell themselves about why and whether they should ever get out of bed. This was Liam’s great talent-exposing the lie.
Drink made him vicious, but even sober he could smell what was going on in a room, I swear it. After Tom’s father died he did nothing but talk about rot. I saw Tom looking at him with a face that was completely blank, while Liam chuntered on about how long it took corpses to go off these days, because everyone was so full of E-numbers and preservatives. The thing is, I am not sure I even told him about my father-in-law dying, he just picked it up. Liam could be a completely shocking human being, but it was hard to say what exactly he had done to make you feel so off-key.
‘What was all that about?’ said Tom, when he left, pretending not to have understood a single word-because the place Liam worked best was under your skin. I don’t think it was something he could control. It was like a contagion, he just had a contagious mind.
And then, he’d take a few drinks.
‘Genital warts,’ he said, with a sneer, into the clear air of our family sitting room, discoursing with much hilarity about how they traced a particular strain of them through a chain of infidelities in the Hampstead Royal Free. ‘We called them the free warts,’ he said, this followed by sluice-room japes, and shocked consultants’ wives. Also patients in comas getting fucked, of course, or just waking up with sperm in their hair, and hey! Liam! you get everyone so excited, it’s great to have you around.
Sober, he would miss buses and fail to make connections and lose things or steal things. Though Liam didn’t steal exactly-it was an intellectual problem for him, he just couldn’t figure out why you had something and he didn’t, and the only solution was to walk away with it, whatever stupid thing it was. Money sometimes, certainly from me, and probably from Kitty, though it is not something either of us would ever discuss, but also peculiar stuff. He took a phone off the wall of my kitchen in 1989, even though-or possibly because-I was renting at the time. Even though, and this is the stupidest thing, Irish phones did not plug into British Telecom. Liam, of course, would ‘know someone’ who could convert a phone, so the damn thing would be lying around his bedsit with the wires hanging out for God knows how long. All I know is that when I rang for the next six months, no one picked up an Irish, British, or any other phone. I also know that he took it because he sensed that he was going to disappear for a while, and he wanted to have something of mine with him, when it was time to leave. He wanted to keep the connection.
So I left him and he left me. What else are siblings supposed to do? The very first time was when we went to St Dympna’s in Broadstone. He went in one doorway, and I went in another, and though we were still sleeping in the same bed at night, during the day he was a boy and I was a girl, and he could not be seen to talk to me in the school yard. So whose fault was that?
This was 1967, the year that I grew taller than Liam, and I have remained so ever since. Other than the great bus-station adventure, nothing much happened in Broadstone. We mooched around the streets; two small raven-haired children with ice-blue eyes, and the lanky, sandy-haired one, which was me-this was the year I became dissatisfied with my hair, being stringy and under-washed. There were other intimations of adolescence. I stuck my face in the upstairs sink to see what killing yourself might be like, or I sewed the tips of my fingers together with one of Ada’s needles, while Liam played with her cigarettes. Though I think all that happened later, in the surprising springtime, when we were still not gone home.
It was only supposed to be a summer holiday. One day the road was full of children and the next day they were gone, and we realised, myself and Liam and Kitty, that school had started without us. We had been left behind. We walked the streets past houses made intimate by silence. It seemed we could go anywhere. But we preferred to go back to our Gran’s and sit a while.
There was sporadic talk of what to do with us. Ada would mention it to a neighbour on the doorstep-‘Do you have someone in St Dympna’s?’ Myself and Kitty finally trailing down behind her to the nun who would make room for us; Sister Benedict, a black-eyed, passionate woman who kissed us mightily and laid one childish cheek after another on her bosom, stroking us and talking to Ada, while we listened to the buzz of her voice and the amazing drum of her heart.
Looking down, I was fixated by her rosary beads, hanging to the floor, and by the great frankness of her toes, splayed in their monkish sandals beneath her robes.
She pushed me back, and knelt down in front of me, and held my head in her two large hands. She actually put them over my ears, so it was again in the echo of her body that I heard her say I was a beautiful girl and the school was so very, very happy to have me. I would be in her own class, she told me, I would be one of God’s little soldiers-and this is how I remember my time with Benedict, as a time for marching, with all our desks in a row: Jesus in our hearts, and Mary looking over one shoulder, our Guardian Angel on the other side; God looking straight down, while the Holy Spirit dive-bombed the parting in our hair, exploding there in a harmless lick of flame. And there was no room anywhere for the Devil, who was a dark shadow over your left shoulder, just beyond the roll of your eye.
The best thing about Benedict was her name. She had chosen it, she said, after the monk who was fed by a raven in the desert, because when she was little there was grey mould and beetles in the bread. The school was named for Dympna, an ancient Irish princess who refused to marry her father. When her mother the queen died, Dympna’s father looked all over the kingdom but could not find a bride. Then his eyes lit on his own daughter. Dympna escaped with her father-confessor, all the way to Belgium, where her father-the-king caught up with her and chopped her head off. What a fantastic story. St Dympna is the patron saint of the insane, Sister Benedict said, because her father was insane to want to marry her. Of course.
My own name, Veronica-an ugly enough thing I had always thought, it sounded like either the ointment or the disease-was one of her great favourites. St Veronica wiped the face of Christ on the road to Calvary and He left His face on her tea towel. Or the picture of His face. It was the first-ever photograph, she said.
I became quite fond of her; a figure leaning out of the crowd, both supplicatory and tender. I still think of her wherever wet towels are offered in Chinese restaurants and on old-fashioned airlines. We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch. I knew my fate must be linked to Veronica’s, in some way. Perhaps I would be a photographer. Perhaps there would come a moment when I would step out of the crowd, and then return-nothing more. I thought I might become a wiper of things when I grew up: blood, tears, all of that.
I confused Veronica with the bleeding woman of the gospels, the one of whom Christ said, ‘Someone has touched me,’ and confused her again with the woman to whom He said, ‘Noli me tangere,’ which happened after the resurrection. ‘Do not touch me.’