In Too Deep (18 page)

He had gone to the showrooms to select the type of stone he wanted, had driven all the way up to Charleville on a workday in order to spend over an hour with one of their salesmen, James, a tall, pallid young man who led him smoothly through their extensive catalogue of designs while they drank cup after cup of hot sweet tea. When it was clear that he meant business, that he was here to spend some significant money, nothing seemed too much trouble. The young salesman had the receptionist run out for sandwiches and freshly baked scones, and yet more tea was served. The Celtic cross was indeed a classic design, James assured him. Distinguished and impressive. And of course it could be made to hold in even the most yielding of ground; that was merely a question of counterpoint. One of their best men would survey the site, every aspect would be given the fullest consideration, and a necessary foundation stone would be arranged. ‘Have no worries at all on that score,' the young man said, flashing a practised smile.

Outside the large plate glass window of the showroom, a stiff easterly wind had brought nubs of sleet into the late morning, but here inside it felt bright and warm. The soft tanned leather chairs were comfortable enough to sleep in, and the tea and scones tasted very good indeed. In the end, it came down to a choice between a pair of plump-looking angels hovering above a large slab of open book, and the tallest and most ornate of their crosses. They only had a mid-sized cross in stock, a grand looking piece of work of essentially the same design, and while the angels did look impressive, if anything maybe even more impressive given some of the minute details, the cross just seemed right somehow.

He stood beside it, traced a hand gently over the carefully sculpted surface to feel the ripples of some ancient scrolled pattern, and nodded. ‘I like it,' he said, but what he liked even more was that, since they had no fit model in stock, one would have to be created from scratch, and just for him. ‘I'm afraid that you can probably expect to wait upwards of six months,' the salesman said, ‘but there is an added bonus, so to speak, in that I can show you some samples of Celtic inlay patterns and you can choose one to your very own specifications.' A large plain base-stone would carry the engraved details, names and dates and so forth, and a blank strip slightly above mid-point on the cross, set about chest-height and raised slightly from the intricately woven stem, would bear the requested epitaph. A twenty per cent deposit was required up front, and he stared hard at the young man for seconds that began to stretch uncomfortably towards a minute before clearing his throat and nodding. ‘I suppose,' he muttered, then withdrew a roll of notes from the inside pocket of his coat and with the greatest of reluctance began to count them out.

After that, it was simply a matter of waiting. Well, time wasn't a problem, and there were plenty of ways to make it pass, not least with work. The farm always needed something doing, but he still made the pilgrimage up the hill to the graveyard every Sunday after mass, and even through the family grave was now in pristine condition, he still found a few weeds to pull, still trimmed the grass with his shears and tended to the trim. Mostly, though, he liked to sit up there, settling down on a small boulder that could not have been more convenient if it had been placed there by hand, and he'd fold his arms against the cold, sink down into his overcoat and imagine how splendid the grave would look when the stone was finally in place. The village spread itself out below, quiet in its day of rest, now that the worshippers had dispersed, and the harbour was quiet too, the few tethered rowboats rocking on the tide, the anchored fishing boats drifting out against their line and slowly back again with the roll of the sea. He couldn't help but wonder whether or not the cross would be visible from down there. His family's grave was right on the cusp of the hill where the land flattened out, and he felt certain that from the low perspective of the pier or the main street the cross would rise proud and tall against the skyline, emphasised by the muted shifting of the clouds.

In February, he was taken ill. At first, it seemed nothing serious, a touch of that flu that was doing the rounds. He had a high fever and a numbing ache in his joints, but everyone knew that there was nothing for flu but to stay in bed. The farm would have to survive without him, he decided, when he tried to rise that second morning only to find that his legs would not bear his weight. He gave in to the wave of lethargy that swept over him, slumped back into bed and slept through the dawn for the first time in his adult life. When he finally woke it was almost noon and, convincing himself that he was feeling better, he struggled into his clothes and went to sit at the kitchen table. The little food he managed to eat, two slices of bread and some grated cheddar, made him nauseous, but the whiskey that he sipped did seem to help, at least for a while. Then he slept again, this time in the armchair beside the bare fireplace, wrapped up in his overcoat and an old wool blanket to keep out the bitter cold of the house, and it was all most unlike him, really.

The following day he made two telephone calls. For a long time he had resisted the notion of a telephone in the house, but now he was glad of the contraption. The first call went to Kelleher, a request, posed as a favour, to send one of the young lads down to look after things, the cattle mainly, just for a few days. A fee was suggested and agreed upon without argument, and Kelleher, who had always been a scrupulously fair man in his dealings, business or otherwise, was no less so now. He thanked his neighbour, put down the receiver so that he could give in to the coughing fit that was tugging at his breath, and then he dialled again, this time putting a call through to Dr Lenihan.

Lenihan, a man in his sixties with a long narrow face, mournful green eyes and pale, almost translucent flesh, arrived a little after six. ‘It's the flu,' he said with a shrug, after performing a quick examination. ‘You'll live, I dare say, though it might take a week or even two before you're back to anything like your old self again.' Smiling didn't become him, it looked sordid somehow, but he only gave it a moment on the surface before bottling it up again for the next patient. ‘Here,' he added, just before leaving. ‘Let me write you out a prescription to see if we can't shift that cough of yours.' Then he took his money and was gone. The whole area was enduring something of an epidemic, and he was far too busy to waste time on idle chatter.

The week dragged. Every morning, Dineen woke from a restless night expecting to feel better, even a little better. And every morning he was disappointed. The cough was still there, a stabbing thing now that pecked away at his chest and which made it hurt to swallow, and he had no strength at all left in his body. He lay in bed, drifting in and out of his dreams and wishing away the days and, even more so, the nights, suffering his share and then some. Then, on the ninth or tenth morning, he staggered to the bathroom on trembling legs and moaned, eyes clenched shut, as he passed blood. Terror flushed through him and he crumpled to the floor. Kelleher's eldest, Michael, found him a couple of hours later. Over the past days, the boy had fallen into a routine of stopping by the house on his way from one chore to the next, just to see that everything was okay and to give an assurance that the cattle were fine, that the farm was in safe hands. By nightfall, Dineen was in a hospital bed and a battery of tests, bloods, scans, x-rays, begun. The cancer, though, had spread too far and was beyond treatment. The best they could do said the solemn-faced doctors and the pretty but slightly disconnected nurses, was to make him comfortable, to keep his pain at bay. Palliative care, they called it, a big word for something that he couldn't even begin to understand.

On St Patrick's Day, Kelleher came to visit and from under his coat produced a flask of whiskey. ‘What do you say we wet the shamrock, boy?' he said, and the nurse, who fully understood the situation, cleared her throat in a not-quite-disapproving manner, produced two water glasses and muttered something around a smirk about not having seen a thing. Dineen accepted a drop, but could do no more than take the spirit on his tongue. Swallowing was too much for him. Then he lowered the glass and nodded occasionally to his visitor's efforts at small-talk. There was no mention of what would happen to the land and the cattle, because this was neither the time nor the place, but also because the high doses of medication made him mentally unfit for such a discussion. Under the influence of such potent drugs, all he wanted to talk about was his new headstone. It would arrive at the beginning of the summer, he said, a beautiful Celtic cross, hand-sculpted to order, and it would be the finest stone in the entire county.

Kelleher was familiar with the details, just like everyone else in the village, but rather than let his impatience show he smiled and nodded his head and said that yes, it would surely be something to see, all right. Fit for a High King, indeed. And when Dineen began to struggle against the pull of sleep, he got to his feet and said that, well, he'd better be getting back, that there were a hundred things to be done before night, but that he'd call again, soon. A promise. ‘Don't worry about anything except getting better,
'
he said, and he'd remember those words often in the months to come, knowing that they were the last words his old neighbour had ever heard from anyone who was not a doctor or a nurse or a priest.

A fortnight to the day, the hearse arrived in the village. The weather was fine for early April, cold but bright and dry, and just about everyone in the locality turned out for the funeral, filed into the little chapel and then afterwards stood around the opened grave and said that it was a real shock, him having never been sick a day in his life that anyone could recall. And a crying shame, too, that he'd left no one behind to mourn his loss. Especially with him being such a wealthy man. Just about the only mercy that could be said about the whole business was that it had been quick in the end, hardly more than a couple of months from start to finish.

The Celtic cross had yet to arrive, but that hardly seemed so important now. That was a detail, nothing more, a material possession designed purely to shore up the ego; time would put that matter right, just as time would eventually wear it down to dust. Besides, it wasn't hulking headstones that made high kings, or even that preserved the memory of them. Only stories did that, tales that turned history to fancy. And down there in the musky and slightly fetid earth all became one, the high king and the farmer, levelled at last, dust to dust, one inseparable from the other. Stories were what mattered most, then.

The priest rumbled through the duties of prayer while the gathered crowd breathed the clean, sea-blown air of the hillside, and wandering eyes watched the breakers rip open the tide out in the harbour, just for something on which to focus their attention. Then, with the formalities complete, they picked their steps along the muddy path out through the rusted, leaning wing of gate and on down to the village, the women turning for home, most of the men slipping in to Reilly's pub so that they might take the harshness out of their thirsts and bury the man properly.

I saw my exact double in Manhattan, walking down Fourth Avenue. Honestly. And in my mind I can still see him now, as clear as any reflection. He is clean shaven except for a ropy piece of moustache with tails that hang all the way down his chin, and he wears a dark grey pinstripe suit that is probably a long train ride out of my league. His whole image – the moustache and the suit, but other things too, tiny details that combine to create this air of strict, cultivated perfection – looks more trouble than it is worth, but surface foibles aside, it really could be myself that I am seeing. There are things going on in the world that we can't even begin to comprehend.

The experience bothers me, I can't pretend otherwise. As soon as I get back to the hotel, I put a call through to my wife. While I wait for the fuzz to clear and that tinny bell sound to stop, my eyes scan the wall of the phone box. Booths, they call them over here. The cork is littered with scribbled words and numbers, such a crisscrossed score of blue, black and red-penned graffiti that the messages lose any value they might once have contained. It takes me a moment to realise that I am searching for dirty words; my tongue plays against my palate to make a small, disapproving tut sound, then I blow it away with a sigh. I suppose I'd been hoping for a limerick, and I'm probably in need of the amusement. A mad fluttering has made a shaken cocktail of my insides. I really can't get over just how much this fellow looked like me.

Through the receiver's earpiece the clanging ring-tone notes push on with determination, a steady stacking, but I am too upset and anxious to keep count. The fluttering inside of me is severe, a quiver that must surely be visible. In this imagining sort of mood I get to thinking about cartoons, chiefly Sylvester and Tweety. On the very few occasions that the cat did manage to catch his supper, little old Tweety Pie would just kick up a fuss, flapping and pecking, until there was nothing left for Sylvester to do but open up that mouth in abject surrender. That's how I feel now, standing in the phone box and pressing my sweaty ear against the receiver. Well, sort of, anyway. But when I try that cure, opening up my mouth, I find no relief. The bird in my stomach is having far too much fun churning my insides to butter. Waiting here at the receiver isn't easy – patience has never been one of my virtues – but today I think I am prepared to wait all day long, if that is what it takes. I'm after peace of mind, and maybe the succour of a friendly voice. Just now, those things take on the mantle of gold and uncut diamonds, treasures unbound. And finally, on perhaps the twentieth or twenty-fourth ring, the call connects. There is a moment of fumbling, chunky crackling sounds that remind me of other things from other times, and then, at last, the breathy hello that opens up my smile.

‘Jen? It's me.'

‘Sean? Is something wrong? Are you okay?'

I can feel her confusion, and for a moment it confuses me. There is a fogged texture to her voice, as if she is speaking through a veil. She doesn't seem to be breathing right, too hoarse. I clear my throat, but it doesn't help. Technology really is a wonder, though. Imagine, an ocean and a mass of land stands between us, thousands of miles of busy people and salt water soughing back and forth, stretches of calm, more stretches still buffeted by raging storms. And yet, here we are, talking. Okay, so she's not clear as a day or anything – those miles have to count for something – but it isn't anywhere near so bad that I can't make out her words. I suppose it is the same at her end. We might as well be a room away from one another, muffled only by a wall instead of half a world.

‘Listen, Jen. There's something I need to tell you. Now, I know that this will probably sound like I've dropped my bag of marbles, but I think it's important.' She knows of my belief in anything even vaguely supernatural, knows that I have always held such fancies as omens and premonitions in the very highest esteem, and she can probably read by the way I groan a preparatory breath that I am about to deliver some newfound thesis of my latest life trauma. I wait for some feedback, but there is nothing from her end at all but the dust-filled static of her waiting, and all I can do is push on. ‘I saw myself, Jen,' I say, taking things slowly. This is long-distance, after all. Plenty of room for confusion. ‘Not an hour ago. I swear to God, just walking down the street. I was dressed differently, and I'd lost the beard for something a bit more stylish, but it was absolutely me.' I want to say more, to paint pictures for her if I can, but the words pile up against a hard reflex swallow and I find myself waiting for her response. That's probably best; I am excited and upset, always a Toad's Wild Ride combination where I am concerned. I wish that I could explain myself a little better, but even at the best of times clarity is rarely my friend, so for now, what I've said will have to suffice.

What follows is a moment of total emptiness, echoes of nothing that roll along the line, gathering speed over thousands of travelled miles. Then they hit, jabbing into my head with all the force of a sonic boom, but silent. I am reeling when Jenny takes aim.

‘What the hell is wrong with you, Sean?' She's not quite shouting, which is worse than shouting, a state she preserves for the most flaming of her rages. Shouting expends energy that can be better utilised in other ways. I can picture her very clearly, her mouth a wavy pencil line, her body all small and pent-up, sparking like a cut cable, fairly spitting with anger. I hold the belief that a day will come when she'll actually physically explode, just spontaneously combust. They say that such a thing happens and that it is a mystery as to why, but it is no mystery to me. Some people are calm by nature while others simmer until they simply boil over. Jenny is a volcano; she generates enormous inner heat. That can be an incredible thing at times, if you know what I mean, but mostly it terrifies me.

‘It's the middle of the night, for Christ's sake.
'
That wavy mouth flaps for air with an audible slurping sound, but the words knot and tangle up inside her. She's as Irish as mutton stew and thatched cottages, and if her job has influenced her into acting like a modern woman and speaking with all slow, careful propriety, she still sings with a soft and lovely Galway brogue, and still blisters at a moment's notice to Civil War talk, her patriotism worn like a second layer of skin and her truest hide. But in moments of raw anger there is an undeniable Slavic bent to her make-up, a gypsy grounding that makes her gag with a plethora of ancient fire-breathing hexes and knife-wielding aggression. Seven years of marriage, of the tightest imaginable binds, have made me sensitive to even the slightest warning signs. My heart offers up a prayer of thanksgiving for the mercy of that ocean between us. ‘You've been drinking. Come on, admit it. You have, haven't you?'

‘No, I …'

‘After the last time, you promised that you were done with it. “Never again,” you said. Swore on your mother's soul that you'd stop.' Her bitter laugh sounds like a saw's blade chewing through wet oak. Dogs run from that laugh, coma patients shiver in their beds. ‘And then, as soon as you get a step out of my sight, you're right back to your old ways.'

‘Jen, I haven't been drinking. Honest to God. Just a glass of wine with lunch, and that was it.'

‘Yeah,' she snarled. ‘And the rest.'

‘No, I mean it. Just a glass. Look, I swear, cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.' But she isn't in a laughing mood, and I really don't want to be giving her any ideas. ‘Well, actually it was two half glasses, but that only adds up to one, doesn't it? And anyway, you know that wine doesn't do a thing to me.' Which is true; with whiskey I'm a devil and even beer can produce some unusual side-effects, but I could drink wine for a week straight and I wouldn't so much as stagger. I think I have an immunity to grapes and all their enemy variants.

Her breathing whistles with nasal alarm, and I have the thought that a dragon's menace is at least half its power. The worst of her rage has died away, but she likes her simmering anger, enjoys the sense of it around her slim frame, and she is predictably slow in letting that fully go. ‘So, what the hell is so important that has you calling me up in the middle of the night? Damn near shifted the heart and soul inside of me, too. I mean, Christ, you really could be the world's heavyweight champion of selfish, stupid bastards, Sean Lenihan.'

‘Is it the middle of the night?' I ask, pleading innocence but actually realising that I probably already know it. Japan is a long way away, and those time zones can pile up fast over water. ‘I'm sorry, Jen. Really, I am. It's just, well, this thing has got me all turned around. I suppose I lost track of myself. You know how it is, I must have stopped thinking for a minute.'

‘A minute? Your problem, Sean, is that you never think, or never think about anything or anyone else but yourself. Be honest now, you don't give a shit that you called me up at, what, nearly five o'clock in the morning? Just to tell me that you've seen someone who looked a little bit like you on the street. Well, here's a newsflash that might just shake you out of your little fucking centre-of-the-universe ego-trip: there are millions of people in New York, and there can be only so many faces to go round.'

She has said a mouthful, maybe more than she's intended to say. I can feel each word as a nail hammered into the bones of my chest, and through the phone-box's perspex window my stunned gaze watches the hotel lobby receive a heavy wash of clear white light. Rain on its way; we get that sort of light a lot where I live.

‘What do you mean?' I say, trying hard not to whisper. What she gets is a croak, the best I've got.

‘I mean, you really are a conceited son of a bitch. Christ almighty, Sean …'

‘No, not that.
'
We're past my imperfect state; I have already accepted my flaws as factual. ‘What you said about faces.'

Her answer is a sigh. I take the air of it, almost feeling its slow weariness. ‘I'm hanging up now, okay? I'll have to be up in another hour or so anyway, I've got a lecture to give at ten. Call me tonight, okay? Say about eight? Whatever time that is over there.'

I think I catch a hint of thawing. But just a hint. We've been married long enough now for me to be able to recognise the signs, I suppose. Seven years, a long time since she'd swept me off my feet. To be honest, that whole corner of my life is like a blur to me now, like something safely interred behind a mass of concrete in an effort to benefit my health. We met at the afters of a wedding, some friend-of-a-friend gathering that looked to me like a convenient excuse for some serious drinking. I was coming off the ropes of a relationship gone sour and had spent the past couple of months or so just limping from one black hole of a bar to the next. It had been that or else cry myself to sleep every night, and I needed the liquid. Jen came dancing across the floor, swept on a wind of ‘Just The Way You Are', the wedding singer tottering a couple of tones too high for comfort and fathoms of the food-chain removed from Billy Joel. If I had been sober I'd probably be still laughing now, all these years later: Jen had moves that were far too old-fashioned for a twenty-four-year-old. People who can't dance should stay off dance floors, just as people who can't drive have no business behind the wheel of a car. But I suppose there are times in our lives when we all have to make do with what we've got. And hours of dedication at the bar had made me less judgemental. She looked good in blue and with her hair up, and when her eyes fixed on me her man-hungry smile widened to show incisors. I was feeling like I had been dropkicked off the back of a speeding bus, my heart held together with band-aids and blue tack, so I was a famished dog for the least crumb of female affection. I'm certain that we looked a right pair as we twisted or jived our unsteady way first through the usual wedding fare of ‘Do You Want To Dance', ‘All My Loving' and something with a strong Bo Diddley beat that I can still feel in my heart and in my feet even to this day, but which I have never been able to identify. After some kind of eternal struggle we made it through to something slower, ‘Wonderful Tonight' and then ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes'. As I've said, she was no great mover, but she learned right off that I couldn't dance either; whenever I felt myself wilting or running out of steps, I simply slipped into robot mode. A robot whose hinges needed oiling. A lot of girls would have started running right there and then, because dancing wasn't the half of it, really, when it came to inventorying the things I couldn't do, but in Jenny's family twenty-four was practically old maid status, so running probably wasn't at the top of her list of options that night. And the rest, as they say, is history, filler for some boring book.

‘Happy' is a heavyweight word, similar to ‘love' in certain respects. I'm not sure that our life together has been heavyweight enough to deserve such a label, but we are okay. When you can pass the days without despising the very sight of one another, you can get by. There are plenty of people worse off than us, and that's a fact. We both work hard, and we've built up a comfortable sort of existence – a nice house, two cars that even on cold mornings start without too much coaxing. No kids have entered our little equation yet and we have no plans for any, at least not in our immediate future. It's not that we've been actively preventing them, but we haven't really been trying either. We communicate about small things, the busy nothings of bills and holidays and what colours to decorate the living-room this summer. The bigger issues are left to take care of themselves and, for the most part, they do. We have our moments, of course, like all couples, but our arguments tend to blow themselves out quickly, like kindling fire. In arguments, I just bow my head. I tell myself that it is because I don't want to fuel Jen's flames, but the truth is that I prefer peace to war, even if it means abject surrender. Jenny rages with blitzkrieg force, trampling my meagre defences. I let her have her way, because it doesn't matter so much to me.