Why not?
Why should she not touch Him? Thomas touched Him, Thomas was invited to put his hands inside His wounds. These things mattered to me very much, at the age of eight.
For a while, I practised with my own wounds and scabs, and was taken, each time, by the brightness of the red on the white toilet paper I used instead of Ada’s tea towels. Children do not understand pain; they experiment with it, but you could almost say that they don’t feel it, or do not know how to feel it, until they are grown. And even then, it seems we always feel pain for the wrong thing. Or so it has been with me.
I am not Veronica. Though I have done my fair share of wiping, in my day, and it is true that I am attracted to people who suffer, or men who suffer, my suffering husband, my suffering brother, the suffering figure of Mr Nugent. It is unfortunately true that happiness, in a man, does not do it, for me.
I remember a slow afternoon with Ada’s sewing basket, trying acupuncture on my thigh, testing the depth of the needles as they went through fat and meat to the cartilage or the bone-maybe there was a tendon in there-I can’t get interested in what goes where. I can’t get interested in doctors, or bits, or gristle-give me the general anaesthetic, I say, give it to me now, before something goes wrong, and I also remember a night with Michael Weiss, hacking away at my inner leg, with a biro of all things, and then later, running through the ineffectual blue lines with his kitchen knife. And I remember the coolness of the cut.
And after a while.
After a while, the distant world came seeping back, beading at the edges, thick and red; rising up to join and flood the gap, then spilling slowly over the lip of flesh, with one engorged, delicious drop. The whole world came bleeding back, a world that consisted first of Michael Weiss, or at least his voice, going, Would you just, would you please, would you ever just fucking stop!
Such disgust. Such complete and utter disgust. Are you pleased with yourself now? Good, gentle, human Michael Weiss.
Oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate.
There is no blood here. There is no blood in this house. But I am residually interested, you might say. I am residually interested, in the bleeding face of Christ, and the woman who may have existed, but who was certainly not called Veronica, who wiped the blood away and with it some of the hurt.
I don’t go to Mass now, and have passed little of it on to my children, though Rebecca, at eight, is going through a pious phase, probably to thwart me. They are surprisingly tall-eight-year-olds. They are surprisingly like real people. Of course your own babies are always real to you, they are all there from the word go, but even strangers’ children look like proper people by the age of eight, and, as if she has realised this, my eight-year-old has turned her new, fully human face to God.
Liam liked St Catherine of Siena, the sore-licker. He also liked three Roman saints with funny names who were turned upside down and had milk and mustard put up their noses, which killed them, apparently. It didn’t seem to bother Kitty, as I recall.
20
AS I WRITE, I look out of the window and check with the corpse I have sitting in the Saab at the front gate. He is always there (it is always a he), a slumped figure in the front seat who turns out, on examination, to be the tilting headrest. But even though I know this, I am drawn to his stuffed, blank face, and wonder why he should be so patient. He lets his gaze rest endlessly on the dash, like a man who is listening to the radio and will not come into the house. A sign of the loneliness of men, and of their obduracy. He will not come into the house, my car corpse, the crash dummy in the front seat. He is waiting for the last of the football results.
I don’t actually want him in the house, but that does not mean I am happy to always see him in my car, this man who talks to me, quite bluntly, of patience and ability to endure. And the possibility that people don’t care about each other-or not really-that what they want most in life is sport.
I can stay up with him or I can go upstairs and sleep with my husband.
All night is a very long time.
I am in the horrors. It started sometime after the funeral, a week perhaps, after Tom tried to resurrect me by lying the length of my body and kissing and rubbing and all the rest. But I was over that-I had forgotten it. I was back to school runs and hoovering and ringing other-mothers for other-mother things, like play dates, and where to buy Rebecca’s Irish dancing shoes. Everything was sad, but fine-good food, fresh air, a few too many glasses of wine, and off to bed. And then.
Here it comes-the four o’clock wake-up call. It creeps into me and I wake to the slow, slick, screaming heebie-jeebies. What are they? He is sleeping with someone else. No, that isn’t the four o’clock call. The four o’clock call is a much older, and more terrible, thing.
I can not feel the weight of my body on the bed. I can not feel the line of my skin along the sheet. I am swinging an inch or so off the mattress, and I do not believe in myself-in the way I breathe or turn-and I do not believe in Tom beside me: that he is alive (sometimes I wake to find him dead, only to wake again). Or that he loves me. Or that any of our memories are mutual. So he lies there, separate, while I lose faith. He sleeps on his back. And one morning at-yes-four a.m., I wake to a livid tumescence on his prone body; a purple thing on the verge of decay. Tom is flung wide on his back, asleep like a dead saint, or a child. He is, anyway, beautifully asleep, with his palms turned skywards and loose by his sides, and a straining smile at the edge of his eyes, like what he sees in the centre of his blind forehead is so convincing, and fleeting, and lovely. I watch him for a while-so silly, such a silly idea to wake up to-but I can not check to see if it is true, the thing that I have dreamt on to the body of my sleeping husband; a cock so purple and dense it was a burden to him. He lies there, pressing his back into the mattress just to support it, this unbearable thing, that is stuck to him and moving away from him, while he sleeps on under it. Helpless. And full of pleasant thoughts.
And I turn around again and gather the covers about me, as the thing my husband is fucking in his sleep slowly recedes. A thing that might be me.
Or it might not be me. It might be Marilyn Monroe-dead or alive. It might be a slippery, plastic kind of girl, or a woman he knows from work, or it might be a child-his own daughter, why not? There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I am not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw a line.
21
HERE IS ANOTHER scene. It happens in Ada’s house in Broadstone, much later. Years later. It is a scene where Ada wants to comfort Nugent because Nugent’s life is not going well. Nugent’s life is going very badly, and though nothing is said, Ada knows this because of the odour that hangs about him, and the way his shoulders stay straight while the rest of him sags down and away; she knows that growing old, with all its disappointments, does not suit Nugent.
She is not sure that it suits her either.
When she offers him tea, it is with a surprising wobble in the saucer, and he takes it quietly and sets it down. The biscuits are, in the circumstances, a little garish. With their fluffy white coconut sprinkled over pink marshmallow, the biscuits are a bit beside the point. Ada knows that he is sad, but she has yet to sympathise. Lamb Nugent has a wife, Kathleen, and four healthy children. He has no cause for complaint. What he asks is what Ada refuses most to give, he asks her to believe in his grief, the ordinary grief of a man with a wife he does not love overmuch and four children who he does not, for a moment, understand; the usual grief of men when they find that they have done nothing, and there is nothing left for them to do. He wants her to pity him his perfectly pleasant life, and the fact that it does not belong to him; the fact that he is a ghost in his own house, looking at his wife, who drives him up the wall, and his four children, who rob each breath as it comes out of his mouth. While he sits here with a woman too old to bed, the keeper of his treasures, the woman who will not love him, though she really knows she should.