‘That’s a lovely suit,’ Aunt Lilly says, reaching over and stroking the sleeve of his jacket.
‘Yeah, it’s Italian,’ he says, not looking up from the Eircom bill. ‘Surprise, surprise.’
‘And the shoes?’
‘Yeah. You have to make an impression. That’s what it’s all about these days.’
‘La bella figura.’
‘Well, they invented it.’
Mark half suspects that these emergency calls of his aunt’s are as much about the company as anything else – which is fine. It’s a bit like having the TV on, unwatched, in another room. He does see her regularly, at least once a week, but if she needs an extra visit now and again, he’s more than willing to oblige. She’s certainly done enough for him.
‘Erm, did Uncle Des have broadband?’
Aunt Lilly looks slightly pained, as though he’s just asked her to explain the general theory of relativity. ‘Broad -?’
‘Broadband. On his computer. There’s a monthly charge here for it.’
‘He did use the computer quite a bit.’
‘Well, I’m sure that’s it then. I’ll get them to cancel it. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of everything.’
He replaces the Eircom bill.
From where he’s sitting Mark can see the TV flickering in the next room. He shifts his chair slightly so that the TV is no longer in his direct line of vision.
‘You’re very good,’ Aunt Lilly says. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
Mark looks at his watch. It’s just after nine. He’s meeting that builder again in town, but not until eleven.
‘Yeah, why not? Thanks.’
It was a more convoluted process than he’d imagined, but he’s pretty confident now about securing the contract.
Aunt Lilly gets up and busies herself with the kettle.
Mark flicks a tiny piece of lint from his trouser leg.
Then he turns his attention to the documents spread out on the table. Besides the pile of Eircom bills, there are ESB bills, NTL bills, bank statements, share certificates, tax-relief certificates, P60 forms. They go back over what must be years, and in some cases possibly even decades.
He feels a sudden ripple of anxiety.
‘Aunt Lilly?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why do you keep all of this stuff?’
She’s standing at the counter, and turns around. He sees that she’s slicing what looks like a Madeira cake.
‘I… don’t know. Des was very conscientious about paperwork and things like that. Why?’
‘It isn’t necessary, that’s all. Going back a few years maybe, but this seems a bit extreme. I mean, these days, with identity theft and all, you can’t be too careful.’
The second he says that he wishes he’d kept his mouth shut.
‘Identity what?’
He explains briefly, doing his best to make it sound as innocuous as possible. She is, nevertheless, appalled.
He knows that his aunt is trying to keep herself busy here, organising all of this paperwork, but he resolves to bring a small office shredder with him the next time he comes, and with her permission he’ll destroy most of it.
She arrives carrying a tray. Mark makes some space on the table by picking up a thick wad of old bank statements, and as Aunt Lilly settles the tray and starts fussing with the tea things, he idly flicks through them.
Some of these statements are more than twenty years old.
Uncle Des…
Mark gives a little shake of his head.
The man was so fastidious, so hardworking, so morally upstanding. OK, he was also introspective and moody, and seemed, on a permanent basis, to be angry about something – but he managed to keep that to himself. He never took it out on anyone. He never lost his temper.
He was a good man, a good father, and Mark misses him.
He rests the wad of bank statements in his lap.
This isn’t easy. Mark has only the vaguest memories of his natural father – his parents died when he was five – but whenever he does think of him, of Tony, he gets this weird feeling in his head, or maybe it’s in his heart… a plunging, plummeting rush of confusion, of longing, and of course – Jesus – of guilt. It’s intangible and unquantifiable, but the feeling is as real to him as a migraine headache, or a malignant tumour.
With his uncle, on the other hand, things were always a good deal simpler. Despite the moodiness, Des was a father figure who didn’t come with any real baggage.
Looking around the room now, at all the documents on the table, up at Aunt Lilly, Mark wonders – and quite possibly for the first time – what it was that his uncle ever had to be so angry about. He also wonders – and most definitely for the first time – if any of it had to do with him, if any of it might somehow have been his fault…
2
When she gets up, Gina has a splitting headache. She did have a few glasses of wine last night, finally – but this isn’t a hangover. She hopes that taking a shower will ease the pounding in her head. When it doesn’t, she takes two Panadol. She puts on coffee and goes to the bedroom to get dressed.
She’s glad the weekend is over. As it was happening, it felt endless, and desolate, and empty. Now that it’s Monday morning, though, she’s not sure how much any of that is going to change.
After the funeral on Friday, there was a big catered thing back at the house on Clyde Road. With her three sisters there, and various relatives, and old friends from Dolanstown – all of them clearly uncomfortable – Gina came to appreciate for the first time the divide that existed in Noel’s life between where he came from and where he ended up. Later on, out in Yvonne’s house, there was a lot of reminiscing, vodka-fuelled for the most part, and sitting there listening to it Gina also came to realise that there was a good twenty years of Noel’s life – the first twenty – that she had no knowledge or memory of at all.
Saturday was spent mainly at Catherine’s. Various people stopped by, but there was no real structure to it anymore. The formal side of things was over, and as the day progressed there was an awful sense of not wanting to let go – coupled with a growing realisation that everyone else, the rest of the world, already had. On Sunday morning, lying in bed, Gina thought obsessively about the previous weekend. She was tormented by its innocence and abandon, by its blind ignorance of what lay ahead. She spent most of the day alone, curled up on the sofa, unable to face any of the usual Sunday stuff – the papers, the eggs, the laundry.
She managed to rouse herself from this torpor towards evening time. Then at around seven, P.J. phoned, and she agreed to meet him for a drink. They met in Kehoe’s and had a fairly depressing conversation about the future of Lucius Software. They skirted around it but eventually had to admit that with no production date in sight, and the economy heading into recession, the chances of a second round of VC funding were looking increasingly slim.
Sitting at her kitchen table now, Gina sips coffee, unconcerned about the location of keys, mobile phone, earrings, her Monday morning drained of its urgency.
She’ll go into the office all right – there’s plenty to do – but not until later. In the meantime, she has that appointment in Baggot Street at ten o’clock.
As Gina leaves her building, walks along the quays and makes her way over to Pearse Street, she thinks about Paddy Norton and what she’s going to say to him. She also thinks about her sisters, none of whom seems to share her concerns about the way their brother died. When she brought it up on Saturday, for the second or third time, Michelle even snapped at her and told her to stop it.
Which, in fairness, she did.
Gina’s concerns are real, but she also knows that people grieve in different ways, and that maybe this is just her way. If so, she doesn’t want to impose that on anyone else – at least not for the moment.