Mothers and Sons (15 page)

‘I take it you don’t like him,’ she said.

‘Well,
you
like him, that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’ Lisa said.

‘Hey, I asked you.’

‘I don’t know,’ Lisa said.

‘This is serious,’ Julie said. ‘Tell me what you think.’

‘I feel he’s put you in a sort of cage.’ As she watched her sister colour, Lisa instantly regretted the remark.

‘I love him.’

‘I hope he doesn’t cause you trouble,’ Lisa said.

‘If he does,’ Julie said, staring directly at her, ‘you will be the last to find out.’

As the tour progressed, relations between the five of them were not improved by a number of reviews, both of the concerts and of the album, which suggested a turn towards commercialism, giving Shane more ammunition to fire in the direction of both Matt and Julie. On the last night of the tour, when the lights went down on the stage, Shane packed his instruments and left the venue without saying goodbye to any of them. Somewhere in her files, Lisa remembered, there was a photograph of him that night, angrier than he had ever been before. He never played with the band again. Soon, Phil announced that he wanted to take a break and go to New York. Lisa, on a trip to Dublin, read in the Irish newspapers that Julie was to begin a solo career in the United States.

Over the next year in Dublin she heard news of Julie from their father, whom Julie telephoned every Sunday with news of gigs and plane journeys and hotels. A few times when Lisa was asked to sing, she refused. Without Julie’s voice, it was pointless. She preferred to take photographs. The only sign she was ever given of what was to come was a phone call from Phil from New York. It was nine in the morning Dublin time. He was drunk. He told Lisa that he had met someone who had seen Julie in a sort of folk bar in San Francisco. She was not well, he said. She was on crutches and wearing sunglasses and her face was bruised and, when she had realized that someone there knew her, she had left the bar quickly.

Julie was not on the bill that night, Phil said, but Matt was, complete with guitar, singing some of his own songs and singing also some songs associated with the band. Lisa asked Phil to find her a number for Julie, even for Matt, and he said he would find them if he could and call her back. Her father, she found, did not have a number for Julie either, but as the calls continued to come each Sunday he was not worried about her. When Lisa went to her father’s house one Sunday and managed to answer the phone before he did, she found Julie friendly and distant, giving no sign that anything was wrong. Lisa wondered if Phil had not been too drunk to judge what might have been idle gossip. Phil had not seen Julie himself. Her father, when he had finished speaking to Julie and hung up, remarked at how happy she was and what a power of good America seemed to be doing her.

*

O
N
S
ATURDAY
Luke told her that he had made their three albums into two CDs. Ian and himself had listened to them, he said, and she was right – some of them, especially the songs in Irish, were terrible. But some of the other songs, he added, were great and should be reissued. He was going to make a single CD of the band’s greatest hits, he said. Lisa observed his confidence, his ease discussing his own musical tastes, and his utter failure to notice her at all as he spoke. She wondered how many years more his innocence would last, how long it would he before he learned to read signs that things were not always simple. She could not say to him now that she did not want to hear the CD. She would, she supposed, have to listen to it.

Luke knew, Lisa remembered, that Julie was dead. How strange that he would not ask himself if Julie’s death meant that her voice, recorded on all these songs, might not carry too much sadness with it, too much regret to be listened to casually after all the years.

T
WO AND A HALF
years after the break-up of the band, two Guards came to her flat in the early morning and told her that Julie had been found dead in a hotel room in California. She took a taxi to her father’s house and woke him and told him.

‘That’s the end for me now,’ he said. ‘That’s the end.’

When she asked him if he would come with her to identify the body, he seemed puzzled and wondered if Matt would not do that.

‘She died alone, the Guards told me,’ Lisa said.

Her father said he did not want to go with her, and told
her he did not care where Julie was buried, or where the funeral was. It was the last thing he cared about.

‘It’s all over for me,’ he said.

She flew to London and then to Los Angeles and then, on a small plane, to Fresno in California where Julie’s body lay in a morgue. She had never been in the United States before, and perhaps, she thought, it was the hours flying and the day becoming night as much as the unfamiliarity that seemed to soften everything she saw and felt, seemed to render colours bland and voices hard to make out. The only hotel she knew was the one where Julie had been found. It did not occur to her to go anywhere else. It was a new motel at the edge of the city, and it was only when she had checked in and was lying on the bed that she realized this might not be the best place to stay. She thought of seeking out the manager and asking him to show her the room where her sister had been found, but she postponed the request. She studied the staff, wondering which of them had seen her sister dead and which of them would know if Matt had been with her on the night or day she died.

In all the years that followed, she wondered why she did not go to the police, or ask to see the police, or find the Irish consul, and she still thought that one of the men in the morgue who witnessed her signature might have been a policeman. She had phoned the number given to her in Dublin and arranged to go to the morgue the next day. She had also given them Matt’s name and asked them that if he made contact, they were to tell him where she was. It sounded as though she were making a business transaction and this added to the strangeness of that time when no one recognized her, when no one spoke to her, when she could
find no bar or restaurant or coffee shop where she felt comfortable. She was in a land of ghosts.

She remembered the night and morning in Fresno before she went to see her sister’s body as interminable, a limbo time in which there was nothing to do, no duty to perform, no possibility of sleeping. She tried to take a taxi to the city centre so she could stroll in the streets, but after much misunderstanding, she discovered that there was no city centre, and no streets, merely long leafy rows of houses which led to more of the same, like an enclosed city of the dead, the houses like small tombs. She tried to phone friends in Ireland, but each call had to go through reception; the people who worked there were not in the habit of dealing with international calls and mostly failed to connect her. They began to view her lurking in the lobby waiting for taxis, her coming and going, with something between hostility and suspicion.

She had seen America in the movies, but nothing here, a short plane ride from Hollywood, belonged to the images she had seen on the screen. The flatness, the deadness, the long waits for taxis, the tiredness of every object did not come from any Hollywood drama. Only once did she see a sight worthy of the movies. She had felt a craving for Chinese food, and had asked at reception for the name of the nearest Chinese restaurant. The receptionist seemed to have no idea what she meant. In the end, Lisa spoke directly to the taxi company, who dispatched a driver after forty-five minutes to take her to a nearby mall.

On the way there, as evening fell, she saw the beautiful graveyard, the headstones all low and uniform, the grass freshly cut. She noticed the slanting sunlight, as though the
graveyard were in brave Technicolor and the rest of the world in black and white. On the way back to the motel, having picked at her food and eaten almost nothing, she asked the driver to stop and she walked among the graves, looking at the foreign names and the foreign places of birth and sensing in this community of the dead, resting in this twilit clearance, some warmth, something even close to hope, and for some seconds the dread lifted of what was in store when she arrived at the morgue.

She asked each time she returned to the motel if anyone had called, but there was no message. She had given the number to her father in case Matt rang. But there was nothing except the receptionist’s irritation. She presumed that the people at the morgue would know the circumstances of Julie’s death, whether anyone else had checked into the motel with her. Thinking about the questions she could ask distracted her.

T
HEY WHEELED
Julie’s body into a small, cold, narrow room. There was no sheet over her face so Lisa could instantly see her. Julie was smiling. It was not a dead or distant smile; no make-up artist could have painted it. It was a smile which belonged to Julie alone, it was how she often looked before she spoke, the smile impatient, it was how she smiled when she was ready to interrupt. It seemed astonishing that her face, being frozen and dead, could produce this smile. One of the orderlies who had wheeled the body in stood and waited as Lisa touched her sister’s hand and forehead and spoke to her, whispering what words she could, telling her how much they had loved her, adding
what their father had said. She thought of singing a verse of something, but the thought was enough to make her cry.

If only now, in this next half an hour, she had known what to ask, whom to ask for. She showed her passport and signed a form. There were, she remembered, three men in the room, but only one spoke and she had no idea who the other two were. She saw on the form that Julie had died of heart failure. She was so concerned that she could be allowed to see the body one more time that she requested nothing else. It was arranged that she could come back the next day.

She went back to her graveyard, sunlit now, leaving a bewildered taxi driver waiting for her. She believed that she would find an office or a priest attached to the cemetery where her sister’s funeral could take place, but there was no chapel and the only people she met told her that this was an Armenian graveyard. Lisa found the most recent grave and looked at the unused plot beside it, and this was where she imagined her sister would lie in earth warmed by the sun, among these strangers in a place which was neither Ireland nor America. In these days, however, especially once she had slept for a while, she did not have the will or energy to organize it.

J
ULIE’S FACE
had changed when she saw her for the second time. Her smile had fallen inwards. There was no life in her.

‘She has gone,’ Lisa said to an orderly who nodded to her kindly.

‘She has gone,’ she repeated.

She wondered if taking the body from the freezer the previous day might have caused this new deadness in her sister’s face, or if Julie had been mysteriously waiting, holding on, until her sister came. In life she had great strength; maybe in death, too. But it was gone now whatever it was, and there was nothing left. She phoned her father one more time to make sure that he did not want Julie’s body flown to Dublin. He assured her that he did not. Through the morgue, she found a funeral director and arranged to have her sister buried, after Mass, at the edge of the Catholic graveyard at the other side of town among the emigrant Irish.

O
VER THE NEXT
few years, as she worked as a photographer, she asked any musician she met who had been in the United States if they had ever seen Matt Hall, or even heard of him. Phil, when he came to Dublin, looked her up and remarked when they met how strange it was that Matt had disappeared. America was big but the music business was small. He must be in another business now, Phil said. Strangely, it was Shane, the member of the band who had been unhappiest with the music, who wanted the albums reissued when CDs became current, but by that time Lisa wanted to forget what had happened, and, to Shane’s puzzlement, she refused.

She could not refuse Luke, however, since he was so proud of what he had done. She did not protest or announce that she would not listen. She kept a large camera close to her in case she would need to cover her face or distract herself.

Luke was all competence and pride as he set up the disc in the player.

‘I put the best track first,’ he said, ‘and I had space at the end so I put it on a second time.’

She knew what it would be, and, as Julie’s voice sang the opening verse of ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ with no ornamentation or instrumental accompaniment, Lisa saw her face that day when she was dead, the features all filled with life, ready to start an argument, enjoying her own lovely authority. Soon, when the echo effect was added and the cello came in and Lisa’s own voice appeared, she was glad she had spent the years not hearing this music. Of all the songs on the CD this was the only one which still seemed alive, the rest were relics, but the song which began and ended the disc gave her a hint, in case she needed one, of her own reduced self, like one of her negatives upstairs, all outline and shadow, and gave her a clear vision of her sister’s face in the days when the recording was made. Now, as the CD came to an end, she hoped she would never have to listen to it again.

A Priest in the Family

S
HE WATCHED
the sky darken, threatening rain.

‘There’s no light at all these days,’ she said. ‘It’s been the darkest winter. I hate the rain or the cold, but I don’t mind it when there’s no light.’

Father Greenwood sighed and glanced at the window.

‘Most people hate the winter,’ he said.

She could think of nothing more to say and hoped that he might go now. Instead, he reached down and pulled up one of his grey socks, then waited for a moment before he inspected the other and pulled that up too.

‘Have you seen Frank lately?’ he asked.

‘Once or twice since Christmas,’ she said. ‘He has too much parish work to come and visit me very much, and maybe that’s the way it should be. It would be terrible if it was the other way around, if he saw his mother more than his parishioners. He prays for me, I know that, and I would pray for him too if I believed in prayer, but I’m not sure I do. But we’ve talked about that, you know all that.’