Five Bells (20 page)

In the Museum of Contemporary Art Catherine stood before a huge installation in perspex and steel labelled
Cosmos 4
. She had moved from a room in which all the artworks appeared demolished and ruined, mere scraps assembled with proud disarray and charmless autonomy, and found herself now confronted by a sequence of objects that might have been constructed by robots. They were of space-age substances and undetectable handiwork. They had a technological sheen and a kind of high unheard frequency; a dog led to this place might suddenly begin howling. Catherine leant forward to read the
little caption pinned to the wall and discovered that the artist was younger than she and had been born in Berlin. But she was none the wiser about the artwork and felt excommunicated. The sanctimonious tone of galleries often distressed her; she felt once again like a working-class girl from Pearse Tower in Ballymun, that she knew nothing, really, that she was ignorant, stupid. She had studied, as one does, potted histories of art; she had read the currently fashionable coffee table books on art movements and styles (it was cool to adore Gaudi, Boltanski, Bourgeois and Viola; Fluxus was back in, and posters from Cultural Revolution China), but faced with unfamiliar works she often found herself dispirited.

This gallery seemed also to have within it a hidden hum, as if circuits were at work in cables and grids, and technicians, invisibly efficient, were twiddling knobs and keying symbols behind the scenes to keep the electric lights low, the temperature moderate, and the atmosphere one of a lost city newly discovered with all its indecipherable artefacts. A sculpture of multiple breasts in pink neon drove Catherine from the room.

 

She took the lift to the third floor and there she was humbled. On the walls were Aboriginal paintings from all over Australia and though these were also in a strict sense incomprehensible, she could see in the patterns of dots the suggestion of lavish effort and deeply responsive notations of the world. There was a group of works by women with mellifluous names – Kathleen Petyarre, Gloria Petyarre, Emily Kame Kngwarreye – these she found particularly compelling. These women seemed to believe that pattern was everywhere. Pattern was thought, and spirit, and land, and time. Here were no portraits or conventional depictions of objects, but something aquiver, energetic, like human activity seen from the sky. Australian earth from the sky. That must be it. Dirt-coloured: ochre, iron, quartz.

Catherine recalled the ring of the angelus, how Mam had made them stop still at 6 p.m. when it came on the telly or the wireless.

She did not understand her own response. She was addressed by these paintings as a stranger, but it was a welcoming address, and in order to be receptive she had to quell her own Irish scepticism. When at last she moved on she realised she had felt, or had imagined, a fellowship with the images. And she thought for the second time that day:
beauty as a kiss.

 

Catherine stepped into the sunshine. She would take a ferry ride, she decided, for no reason other than to cross the Harbour and come back again in such splendid weather. And she was thinking once more of Brendan, and how he would have loved this, the mysterious paintings, the light, the unruly adventure of Sydney. Before her the water in the Harbour shimmered. With the change of light it reminded her of sugared ginger. How could anyone, no matter with what burden, bear to leave this world?

When Catherine boarded the ferry she remembered the unbeautiful kiss, the last time she had seen Brendan, lying in his coffin. She had flown in from London and the business was already done; there he was in the funeral parlour, the smart one in Finglas, in a suit of new clothes she'd never before seen, ‘all done up like, and fancy', Ruthy said, ‘and dressed to kill.' Catherine was surprised to see that his face was at peace and unmarked, but for a small yellow bruise in the centre of his forehead. She leant down to him and kissed. It was true what they said: the dead are cold. Her sisters and Mam also kissed Brendan's cheek; each in the ritual was saying goodbye, each was silently weeping.

 

The accident was commonplace. Traffic. It happens all the time. A car crash on the M50 and probably no one to blame. Brendan had hit another car and both drivers had died, the other two
days later. There was no explanation or meaning. No point, none at all, not a skerrick of making-sense she might present to poor Mam, sobbing her eyes out at the kitchen table, wringing her apron as if she would tear it in two. A paramedic Catherine tracked down said that when they pulled Brendan from the wreck he was already dead, and Charlie Mingus – he recognised the track – was still playing from the car speakers. Catherine was not sure why this musical detail had been mentioned, except that the fellow was keen on displaying his knowledge of jazz. She hated to think there was a soundtrack, a Mingus riff on bass saxophone, sad and sultry, to accompany Brendan's premature and smashed-up dying. She had liked Mingus too, and knew then that she could never, never again, listen to him play.

 

At first she coped. It was Mam who went to pieces. Catherine was so preoccupied holding her mother against loss that she would not allow herself to feel what might break and undo her. They were a community now of women, the two men of the family gone, and they were like a Greek chorus, wailing in harmony, sounding ancient and forlorn and meanly damaged by the gods. They even moved in concert, all bending at the same time, reaching at the same time for the pot of tea, rising up as one body when the phone rang, or there was a knock on the door.

The accident offended each of them by its ordinariness. They thought differently of Brendan, that he was special, and clever, and had been a centre to each of them, that he was solid, more defined. So that when they were telling people at the estate it was a dull-as-ditchwater story; nothing they said could make Brendan's death even halfway worthy, or rescue him from the awful banality of his fate.

A fuck-up on the M50? Ah, for fuck's sake. Wouldn't you know it? Another one. And him so young and sprightly, apple of his dear mam's eye.

Within a week of the funeral, in a snowy winter, Mam decided on a pilgrimage to the Holy Mother at Loreto. She asked Catherine to take her and Ruthy, then still living at home. Mam had been educated as a child by Loreto nuns, and had always loved the story: the little house in Nazareth, simple and pure, where Mary was visited by the multi-feathered Gabriel, had been lifted up and flown around the planet by a team of angels. First to Croatia – ‘of all places!' said Mam – then on 10th December, in the Year of Our Lord 1294, the angels lifted the house once again and flew it to Loreto, in Italy. Mam loved the fact that they knew the exact date. This seemed to her unimpeachable evidence of the truth of the matter. She always celebrated the Feast Day of Our Lady of Loreto on 10th December and she kept a card from her schooldays that the nuns had given her – of broad-winged angels fluttering in the sky around a little stone hut from which Mary, dressed in blue, with her shiny halo, peeked. The sky was awhirl with diaphanous gusts and the soft breath of God, a splendid lapis screen, with a sprinkle of stars.

 

Neither Mam nor Ruthy possessed a passport, so Catherine's stay in Dublin was longer than expected. After the funeral she rang Luc to explain and he told her to take the time she needed, not to fret or worry. He would ring her office and plead for an extension of compassionate leave; she could accompany her mother and sister to Loreto. He would join them, if that helped. But Catherine said no, just as she had not wished him to accompany her to the funeral. It was difficult enough hiding her apostasy from her mother, and her sense of helpless loss, and this slap-bang wallop of grief. Luc belonged to another history. Luc was another world.

Catherine arranged the photographs and passport applications and visited a travel agent in the city who specialised in ‘holy tours'. He gave her a handful of pamphlets and said he was sorry for their loss, but that the Holy Mother in Loreto would surely console.

‘I doubt it,' said Catherine, and she realised she had spoken her disbelief out loud to the man, who had a mild and unassuming manner and a crucifix above his desk, and who would not understand,
could not
understand, what vast hollow in herself she might be implying. His round face looked like the surface of the moon, remote, pitted, without any connection.

‘Well, you never know, now, do you?' he calmly replied.

 

So here, on the ferry, bobbing past the Opera House, Catherine remembered her brother yet again, and the wake of his death.
Wake
, the parting of water, this design of ripples they are making. This pattern on pattern made in the shock waves of uncompleted mourning.
Brendan's Wake
, she was thinking, by Mr James Joyce. Undiscovered manuscript by the master, rollicking portrait of the artist as a young man untimely ripped, set in the fluid anachrony of elegy and the lonesome no-tense of remembering. Or the movie, starring a younger-looking Gabriel Byrne. Young genius of Erin, ladies' man and ultra-literary, visits China to protect good-looking, adoptable orphans, all of them wide-smiling, from an epidemic of typhoid. Dies a heroic death:
Brendan Hero.
Toga and sandals man on mythic travels with his sister around Dublin and the Globe. Exploring
this gorgeous mad fuck-up
. Ballymun is Ithaca, Ireland wins the World Cup and the Eurovision Song Contest, the Celtic Tiger roars:
Brendan the Sailor
by Mr James Joyce.

Rejoyce, rejoyce. Catherine smiled to herself. Like Brendan, like Joyce, she enjoyed the opportune pun. She watched the
wake on the water, the decoration of where they had been, the backwards vision of any journey.

Brendan the Voyager, Apostle of Ireland
, Saint's day and his birthday, 16th May. With you in spirit, my brother, I ride across water.

 

Mam had hated the flight, but enjoyed the train journey from Rome, and the three nights they stayed in a pensione in Loreto. Ruthy read out segments from a guidebook and remarked on the food. Too much garlic, she said thrice. And all so oily. She was perplexed to discover that Italians seemed never to drink tea. And that every bar had a television, and that every television showed a football match, at all hours of the day and night.

 

In the bright pilgrim morning they woke to the sound of bells. Chimes broke in trembling circles through the chilly sky. Catherine lay awake with her eyes closed, listening to her sister and mother stir. Ruthy had risen first, and was splashing her face at a basin. Mam was already stripping from her nightgown and dressing for the day, hurried by the ascetic, unwarmed air. Catherine thought of Antonioni's movie,
L'avventura,
and the scene in Noto, beautifully filmed, when bored lovers overlook the city from a church roof and begin to ring bells, then hear answering peals echo from somewhere invisibly afar. A rare moment of intersection, a criss-cross of yearnings.

The movie had stayed with her. In the pallor of the world seen in black and white, Italy was a country of languid desire and unhappy women. Monica Vitti, starring as Claudia, leant in her petticoat with sexy despair at an open doorway. Emptiness, suspension, a vague searching that led nowhere. Catherine rose, shivering, and unfolded the city map on a brecciated marble table. She planned their visit, but was quiet
and subdued, confused as to whether what she felt was grief or self-pity.

 

When they arrived at Santa Casa di Loreto, Catherine felt sure her mother would be disappointed. There was no quaint modest hut, but a marble Basilica, Renaissance on the outside, Gothic within.

‘Could this be it?' Mam asked.

The white marble edifice, of pillars, columns and chunky seated saints, was not what any of them had expected. But inside, yes, sheltered a small brick building. Mam exclaimed quietly: ‘Mary's house'. To prove it was so there was an inscription etched onto the altar, ‘
Hic Verbum Caro Factum Est
': Here The Word Was Made Flesh. The walls were rough and brown, with the remnants of worn frescos, abraded almost to nothing by the soft rub of time; and there was a statue of the Virgin, quietly looking on. She was high up, with the infant Jesus, and both were black-faced and solemn. Mam fell to her knees and silently prayed. In that chamber within a chamber, in that space that looked nothing like a poor family's house from year zero in Nazareth, or in the Bible, or depicted on the nun's card, or envisioned circling in her schoolgirl head, Mam talked to her God. Ruthy knelt beside her and Catherine, standing apart, watched them both with love. In some odd way the lunar travel agent was correct. There was a sort of solace here, in seeing her mother and sister placated, in witnessing how confirmed they were by this imitation of imitations. Kneeling in dim candlelight they expressed the ardour of their faith. Prayed in grave tones to the mother of their religion. They stayed long enough somehow to know when to rise and leave, and slowly, with heads bowed, followed the other worshippers from the church.