Bend for Home, The Page 26

  He was trying to work up an affair with you. And you a grass widow.

  Your Uncle Jim at the time, Nancy explains, was in England.

  Yes, It’s lilac time again, Matti Sheridan said to her.

  He did, agrees Nancy, and the two laugh outrageously.

  My mother blinks, feeds the rosary through her fingers. Maisie studies her, burps suddenly, then exclaims, Dear God.

  Winnie, she says.

  My mother does not reply.

  It’s terrible to think she doesn’t know what’s going on, says Maisie sadly. And she can’t hear a word we say.

  Winnie, shouts Nancy, have a drink.

  My mother throws Nancy a hostile eye.

  Take me to my bed, she says, and then leans over and nips me.

  In a minute, I say.

  Blessed God, she sighs.

  She dribbles her beads into the pot, and sits with her hands joined in her lap, and her eyes on the ceiling.

  Seamus, says Nancy, in a low voice, was very cut up when Mammy died. I never told her I loved her, he said.

  That’s right, agrees Maisie.

  We go quiet for a while, the central heating shudders and figures go by in silence on the TV. Nancy looks into her glass and nods to herself. She weeps a little and shakes her head. Maisie leans on her arm and watches Mother.

  Dermot.

  Yes.

  What time is it in Canada?

  I don’t know.

  Are they before us or behind us?

  Behind us, I think.

  Well, ring Tony in Canada, said Maisie, and let him speak to your mother. She’d like that.

  Do you want to speak to Tony, Mother? I shout.

  My eldest is far away, she says.

  I can get him on the phone.

  Don’t be bothering me.

  I can phone him, Mother, I shout.

  Stop shouting at me.

  Tony, says Nancy. Do you want to speak to Tony?

  The mother forms the word Tony on her lips a number of times, then closes her eyes, as if she were tempting providence. I reach over and take her hand.

  What now? she asks wearily.

  C’mon with me, I say.

  Are we going for a walk?

  We are.

  Good.

  She tries to rise from the chair and falls back again. I take both her hands and haul her to her feet. She adjusts her glasses and plods fearfully across the room. She heads in the direction of her bedroom so I steer her before me along the hallway to the front door. We open the door and look out at the stars. I close the door and ring Tony. Nancy and Winnie wait behind me. When he answers I say, Hold on there, Tony, the mother is here. I hand the phone to her. She looks at it uncertainly.

  Mother, I can hear Tony saying, is that you?

  It’s Tony, I say. I raise my voice. Mother, it’s Tony.

  She drops the phone and heads off.

  Come back, says Nancy, and speak to your beloved son in Toronto.

  I bring her back again. She lifts the instrument to her ear.

  Mother, says Tony.

  Say something, can’t you, Nancy orders.

  Will you take me to the toilet? Mother asks.

  I will, says Tony.

  Then she replaces the phone.

  Chapter 32

  In an ironic piece some time ago in The Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times, Kevin Myers wrote that out beyond where I live in north Sligo every few years Hy Brazil, like another Atlantis, rises. This was news to me. I have not seen it yet, but I think of it this morning, rising out of the sea like a whale, or resting gently on the bottom of the ocean, waiting for the next time.

  I think of Hy Brazil as I sit in the living room with a terrible hangover, my mother asleep in her armchair, Nancy asleep in my room, Maisie perched by the radio in the dining room, the central heating going up into a whine. Lack of sleep after spending the night on cushions on the floor has made me start to hallucinate.

  If I close my eyes I think I can see Hy Brazil, a little beyond Inishmurray Island, not exactly land, not even someplace eternal, but a place imagined by people long before me that I must imagine in my turn. Imagination hands on a duty to those who come after. So it is with Hy Brazil.

  So it is with Hy Brazil. Because it doesn’t exist we wish it into being because someone else did in another age. Like a star that appears say once every two hundred years, you watch for Hy Brazil every seven years but in truth it has no definite orbit, no mathematics can accurately predict its appearance at a definite hour on a definite day. But you want to be there when it happens. Even if it never happened. Even if it never existed, you wish it into being. You wish for the language to recover it from the void.

  I don’t have any books to hand here in Cootehill in County Cavan that tell me who the imaginary folk were who inhabited Hy Brazil, how they arrived there, whether it is like Tír na nÓg. Are they ageless folk who live there? Is it an island inhabited by heroes? Shapechangers? Is it where suicides go? Or has it been long deserted, and rises out of the sea as a reminder to us of another civilization that has long disappeared off the face of the earth. Did the inhabitants do wrong that the island sank? Did a catastrophe greet them because of some terrible evil doing?

  Is Hy Brazil the place we go to after we die? I don’t know, so I make up my own Hy Brazil.

  But the minute I start imagining it, my mind refuses Hy Brazil. The language won’t budge. Instead I think of trivial things, irritations, domestic affairs; a dream of the previous night where an old lover, with astounding familiarity, visited, and a book that I can’t finish writing presented itself. Nursing. Drinking. How the smell of my mother’s waste made me retch as I cleaned her this morning.

  But I suppose those who dreamed up Hy Brazil must have also known these irritations and mood swings. Mythology is full of sordidness. The fears of the storytellers are exaggerated in the tales. The unbelievable takes on a human presence. What has happened repeatedly turns into a ritual. What has not happened turns into the mystery. The island is peopled with our uncertainties. Peace is only allowed a certain passage of time before terror intrudes again.

  So that is how it must be on Hy Brazil for those who live there, and how it must have been for the makers of Hy Brazil, the ones that dreamed it up and make it sink and make it rise.

  It’s not the island that rises out of the sea but the observer out of the torpor of everyday. And on the Hy Brazil I imagine there is someone looking back at us, wishing that they might begin again, be trapped once more among all that human and domestic trivia. Someone out there would probably like to swap places with me, they’d like to hear human voices again, listen to human despair and laughter, wake to a new day.

  By thinking of Hy Brazil I get homesick for my cottage in Sligo. I sit there thinking of the cottage in the same way I used think of Finea before sleep. I go up the road that was taken away in the storm. The asses roar. The sea is thumping the rocks. Beside me my mother sleeps with a cooing sound. She – despite infirmity, spasms and weakness – is on her own Hy Brazil. Next door Maisie calls for green grapes. On the TV, 7000 people gather in the Shankill Road in Belfast to mourn nine out of ten killed in an explosion in a fishmonger’s shop.

  The tenth they will not mourn.

  He planted the bomb.

  *

  Nancy staggers out of bed. She looks pale and wasted.

  God, she says.

  Nancy, I say.

  I didn’t know where I was.

  Can I get you something to eat? I ask.

  No, thank you. She pats the air with her hands, I’m off solids and on a herring.

  Tea?

  A cup I suppose.

  Are you all right?

  I feel dreadful. How do you feel?

  Terrible.

  What time did we go to bed?

  About two.

  God of almighty.

  That’s the way.

  Was I drinking brandy?

  You were.

&nbs
p; I thought so. She sat and laid her hands on her lap. Her chin shakes. And I’m eighty years of age.

  I know.

  Why do we do it?

  I don’t know.

  Neither do I. And those cursed radiators. The din they make. It’s like a hothouse. She gets up and looks into the mirror. Dear God. I better get home. Will you ring Raymond.

  I will.

  She looks at my mother.

  Are the dolls all right?

  Yes.

  Poor Winnie, she’d drive you crackers. I did two weeks here by myself and I thought I’d never get home. No one called. I was demented. By the second week I thought of climbing up onto the roof like those prisoners. This place is worse than Strangeways.

  You’re right, I laughed.

  Strangeways, she laughed. God, she grimaces, I shouldn’t laugh.

  I bring her a cup of tea.

  And Maisie?

  She’s inside at the table.

  Did she eat?

  A whole breakfast, I say.

  How does she do it?

  I don’t know.

  And she’s over ninety. My God. Nancy drinks a little tea then lays the cups aside. And they ate the pizza.

  They did.

  That’s something, I suppose.

  Maisie appears on her steed at the doorway.

  Is that you, Maisie?

  It is. I’m still here. You can’t get rid of a bad thing.

  So I can see.

  And how is poor Nanny this morning?

  Don’t mention it.

  Well, you can’t be told.

  I have a head.

  Oh, and last night we were on top of the world.

  Don’t, says Nancy.

  We were drinking brandy to beat the band. We were going to go courting again.

  Stop, says Nancy, raising a hand.

  It’s lilac time again, says Maisie chortling. It’s lilac time again.

  And she went away on her steed.

  *

  The minute Nancy returns to Cavan the mood drops in the house. Eileen is away so my niece Grainne stands in for me for an hour while I go to town to shop and have a drink. When I return Mother is ill but asleep and Maisie is vomiting. Maisie’s hernia has erupted. I bring her paper towels, a plastic bowl, and talk to her.

  I’m destroyed, she says.

  You’ll be all right.

  I’m not well. Oh God in Heaven.

  Drink this.

  I can’t.

  She sits with the bowl on her lap, and her hands on her knees. I turn down the TV.

  And leave the TV on! she orders.

  This goo, not from her stomach, pours out of her mouth. A latticework of blue veins clusters on her cheeks. Her eyes water. She gasps for breath.

  Between bouts of this she says: You must be fed up with us.

  No, I’m not.

  This is terrible.

  Never mind.

  I hold her forehead. She’s sweating badly.

  Oh God in Heaven.

  Drink some water.

  I can’t.

  Do, please.

  Then another fit of retching goes through her.

  Get me to the toilet, she says.

  I walk alongside her. From the toilet her cries carry out. In one hour everything has gone wrong. No one is right. And I cannot wish everything better. Maisie cries out again. I sit waiting. If she gets trapped in the toilet I’ll have to break down the door. With each cough of bile I hope for the sounds of relief. This is the ordinary – nobody caused it! – ordinary shameful everyday. It’s what Una and Eileen and the rest go through when I’m not here. I wait on the silence which means she’s getting well.

  Why, she cries inside, had this to happen to me?

  Terrible! Terrible! Terrible!

  I hear the basin emptied, the plunge of water into the toilet bowl and relief pours through me as she appears.

  Now, now, she says to herself as she goes a step at a time on her walking-aid.

  Now, oh. Her voice that of a young girl.

  She stops.

  Where is it? she says to herself.

  Goes on.

  Now see, she says.

  Stops.

  Oh God bless us! she says.

  I follow her into her bedroom.

  Will I put the radio on? I ask.

  Yes, she says, at least let’s have music.

  Then I go to clean the toilet. You’d be surprised how quick vomit sticks to porcelain. Why am I recording this? Because it’s worth while telling that at the end of awfulness there’s always a generous spirit who says: At least let’s have music. The music would not mean what it does if we had not been in the bad places.

  *

  So I scour the bowl with Vim that’s handy and think: Stop panicking. It’s not me that’s having an awful time here – it’s the two girls. But I feel powerless. I ring Maura, the mother of my daughter, Inor. She lives in Cavan, nursing her mother, who is also ill.

  How are things? I ask.

  It’s hard going, Maura says.

  I think I’m losing it.

  Hang in there, she says.

  A few days before this Maura and Inor had come to call.

  Who’s this? asked my mother.

  Inor.

  Who?

  Inor, I say. My daughter.

  She peered at Inor and lifted her hand and waved as if she were seeing her from a great distance, waved very slowly with her fingertips while Inor smiled, uncertain of what to do; so she waved back – the two waved at each other – then Mother dropped her hand, and, dismissing us all, closed her eyes.

  I put down the phone. Peer in at Maisie. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, with her head down.

  Maisie.

  What?

  Get into bed.

  I thought I might get sick again.

  You won’t. It’s over.

  You think so?

  I do.

  So can I have a brandy?

  Why not.

  I step into the mother’s room. She’s praying. Her eyes without her glasses on are weak and colourless. The room is boiling. Nevertheless, I pull the sheet round her.

  Is that you, Dermot?

  It is.

  Was Maisie sick?

  She was.

  But you got her to bed.

  I did.

  Will you call me in the morning?

  I will.

  Don’t forget.

  I won’t.

  Because you see I don’t think I’ll be much longer here, she says. She turns her face to the wall. And leave the light on, she adds.

  *

  I bring Maisie her brandy. The lamp on the side table is dim. The room is dark. She’s in her blue nightdress.

  Do I only get the one?

  I’ll bring you another later.

  Do, won’t you?

  I will.

  My God, she says.

  Try a sip.

  She takes a little taste.

  And Nancy’s gone with Raymond.

  Yes.

  She’s good fun, Nancy is. And how is Winnie?

  She’s gone asleep.

  Poor Winnie.

  I stand in the doorway a while longer.

  She rests a hand on the side table, lowers her head and puts her two wrists together on her lap. She raises a hand to her thinning scalp, then puts her wrists together again, as if she were handcuffed. I wait a while. She doesn’t move.

  Maisie?

  What! she says startled.

  It’s Dermot.

  Are you still there?

  I am.

  Well I’m all right.

  Are you sure?

  Yes. You can go now.

  *

  Hy Brazil is a place that is hard to imagine inland. Sitting in the living room drinking Rioja I can barely remember the place I live, never mind imagine the impossible rising out of Sligo Bay, trailing seaweed and gravel. But standing at the headland of Dooneel it’s easy to imagine mermen stroll
ing the rocks at night. It’s easier there for the weather and the rushing light to make an imaginary island before a storm breaks.

  There is magic in the calm as far out black clouds gather. The swell rises into the air and salt lands on Moffit’s field. A wave strikes the rocks from some disturbance far out. But there are days you don’t even bother to look. You hang around indoors.

  There are days Hy Brazil rises when you’re not there.

  *

  I push Maisie’s door ajar. She’s lying on her back piping breath into her lungs with her hands folded on her breasts. I put off the light. Then I tiptoe into Winnie’s room. Her eyes are open. The Sunday suit is hanging ready from the handle of the wardrobe. The blouse folded on the other bed.

  I tuck her in. Her eyes follow me.

  That’s right, she says.

  Chapter 33

  What age was Somerset Maugham when he died? asks Maisie.

  He was ninety-six, I think, I say.

  Mother watches us. She’s wearing a blue cardigan buttoned to the neck. She looks away.

  Was he indeed? says Maisie.

  He was.

  He couldn’t be got rid of, I suppose.

  Mother studies her beads. She kicks. She sighs.

  And Vincent Price died today, I add.

  God bless us.

  And he still, I said trying to make a joke, had all his teeth.

  Some do, nodded Maisie.

  Let me out of here, cries Mother, as she jumps to her feet. The girl has arranged to collect me in the car.

  Stop where you are, I say, pushing her back into the chair.

  But the girl is waiting, she complains.

  There’s no girl.

  Dear God is there nothing I can do? She holds the bag dearly in her lap, and kicks at me. They are outside! – she glares wildly – waiting for me!

  No, they’re not.

  Yes they are. The car is outside.

  There’s no car. Una is in America. Helen is in Sligo. There’s no car.

  She puts the handbag down, lifts her beads out of it, then lifts the bag again and slowly, bead by bead, trails her rosary back into it.

  I have an arrangement, she says rising.

  What are you saying, Winnie? asks Maisie.

  Look, I shout, opening the curtain behind her, there’s no one, but Mother stares straight ahead at the sitting room door, the handbag over her arm.

  There is no one, shouts Maisie.