How does he do it?
It is his job. My brother has a trained heart; compassion is a muscle for him; he inclines his head when you speak. He barely looks at the coffin, but apprises, instead, the look in my eyes. Then he turns slightly towards the body.
‘Don’t tell the rest of them I’m here, will you?’ he says. ‘Not yet,’ and sends me, with a nod, out the door. And of course, this is why I hate him too, in all his priestly candour-this fakery. Still, Ernest was always nice to me, growing up. We were just the right distance apart.
Out in the hall, I give an ear to the voices in the kitchen-a sharpened American note, that must be Ita’s. And Mossie’s wife shushing her perfect kids.
I turn and go upstairs to find my own.
‘Rebecca! Emily!’
The stairs are narrow, and steeper than I remember. I can hear the sound of their laughter, above me, like children hiding in the branches of a tree, but when I reach the landing they are gone.
It is a long time since I have been up here. This was the girls’ floor: Midge, Bea and Ita at the back; me, Kitty and Alice at the front, with a view of cherry blossom, and slanting black wires, and a white street light. It did not seem small, at the time. Kitty’s overnight bag is on her bed, the other two beds are bare. Framing the window is the maze of shelves and little cupboard doors my father built for us out of white MFI. A few schoolbooks are left on one shelf; none of them in English-perhaps this is why they were not thrown away. Das Wrack by Siegfried Lenz, and stories by Guy de Maupassant, one called ‘La Mer’ in which, as I recall from school, a sailor stores his severed arm in a barrel of salt in order to bring it home. The books look soiled as opposed to read, but we did read them too:
Tá Tír na nÓg ar chúl an tí
Tír álainn trína chéile
I turn and find the girls at the door.
‘Come on, down you go.’ And these children, who never do a single thing I say, turn and walk ahead of me down the stairs. At the bottom, Rebecca takes my hand in hers and walks me to the kitchen, like a mislaid giant she has found in the hall.
There was a thing Mossie would do with our hands. He would squeeze the small bones until you screamed, running the knuckles across each other, over and back. He is there in the kitchen, standing with Tom at the table: the two professionals in the room, talking man to man. Why do men never sit down, I think, then realise that all the chairs are in with the corpse. I look around. Ita is leaning back against the sink. She looks smaller. Even her face looks smaller-perhaps it is the light of the window behind that has her so reduced. But she is too well-preserved and I have, as I kiss her, a retching sense of the waxed flesh next door.
Then the twins are hugging me from either side-as they do, being always delightful, and hard to see. I look around for Kitty and see her outside in the garden, smoking. The mysterious Alice is not here. Probably mad, I think suddenly. The mysterious Alice was probably always mad.
Midge’s children stand in a gang and I turn gratefully towards them, but Bea throws a look at me, swinging her hair back over one shoulder.
All right. All right.
I go over to where my mother is sitting and stand by the wing of her chair while a neighbour finishes saying the ritual words.
‘Yes. Thank you. Yes.’
The neighbour, Mrs Burke, is bent low, telling some great and particular secret into Mammy’s ear; stroking her hand, over and over.
‘Yes,’ says Mammy, again. ‘Thank you. Yes.’
When Mrs Burke moves on, I step forward to kiss my mother.
It has happened. She sat watching television for the past ten days, waiting for something which has now well and truly arrived. It has, as they say, ‘hit her’. Like a truck. There isn’t much of her left.
Always vague, Mammy is now completely faded. I look her in the eye and try to find her, but she guards whatever she has left of herself deep inside. She looks at the world from this far place, and allows it all to happen, without knowing quite what it is. It is hard to tell how much she takes in, but there is a peacefulness to her too.
‘Oh. Hello,’ she says to me, and there is a hazy kind of love in her voice-for me, for the table set with food, for everyone here.
‘Mammy,’ I say, and bend down to kiss her cheek, and although she was never good at kissing or being kissed she does not flinch from me now, but angles her face like a debutante to receive the childish pucker of my lips. I suspect she has forgotten me entirely, but then she takes my hand, and sets it flat between her two light hands, and she looks up at me.
‘You were always great pals,’ she says.
‘Yes, Mammy.’
‘You were always great with each other, weren’t you? You were always great pals.’
‘Thanks, Mammy. Thanks.’
Tom’s hand is warm on the base of my spine. At least I think it is him, but when I crook my head around, he is not there. Who has touched me? I straighten up and look at them all. Who has touched me? I want to say it out loud, but the Hegartys and the Hegartys’ wives and the Hegartys’ children are some distance away from me: they shift, and talk, and eat on, unawares.
‘Are you all right there, Mammy?’ I say, by way of taking my leave.
‘I need to see the children,’ she says.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’
‘The children,’ she says again. ‘I need to see the children.’
‘They’re upstairs, Mammy,’ I say. ‘No. They’re here. I’ll go look for them, Mammy. I’ll find them for you.’
Then Tom is finally, actually, at my side. He dips to take my mother’s hand in wordless sympathy, then straightens up to take my elbow again and wheel me around to the rest of the room.
‘Have you been in?’ I say.
‘He looks,’ says Tom. Then he stops. ‘It’s not him.’
‘I wouldn’t really know,’ I say.
Tom’s fingers grip my arm. They are very full of themselves, these fingers of his. They do not leave me in any doubt. This is the man who will fuck me soon, to remind me that I am still alive. In the meantime he says, ‘He looks like an estate agent.’
‘It’s the shirt,’ I say.
‘Ah. It comes to us all.’
Then the children come up: Rebecca, Emily, and Róisín, who is Mossie’s youngest-so often seen, so seldom heard. Such a cutie. She stands before me and swings her tummy from side to side.
‘Will you say hello to your Auntie?’ I say. ‘Will you say it, or will you squeak it, like a little mouse? Squeak. Squeak.’
I tweak her tummy with my witchy old hands. Then I straighten up and mutter at Tom, ‘Mammy says she needs to see the children.’
‘Right so.’
‘Would you ever fuck off,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘Why does she need to see the children?’
‘Well,’ says Tom.
‘It’s not what children are for,’ I say, quite fiercely. And he gives me a look of sudden interest, before twisting the girls by the shoulders, to push them across to their Gran.
‘Give your Granny a kiss, there, go on.’
The girls stand in front of my mother. There is a chance that Emily will actually wipe her mouth in front of her-she does not like wet kisses, she says, only dry ones ‘like her Daddy’s’. In the event, there are no fluids involved. My mother lifts her hand and places it on Rebecca’s head, then she turns, quite formally, and does the same to Emily, who receives the gesture with large eyes.