On the Floor (30 page)

In my mind we are all still in that room, suspended in that moment:
a family in the grip of a question never answered. And that is how it would always be. Nothing we could do, that moment defining past, present and future and rendering it all meaningless. The pain binding us together and keeping us apart. Time passes but the scene doesn't change. A teapot frozen in mid-air between the cardboard cut-out of my mum and dad, stone-faced and absent, seated at the kitchen table. The things I knew she touched secretly when alone, sitting on the cold narrow bed, running her hand over the dry electricity of memory, her insides scooped out and filled with pain. So she had to lose herself in a wilful dementia or shrivel up and die.

Kieran was in a coffin swamped with coloured wreaths in the cool sanctuary of the church. My whole class filed through in craning curiosity, the subdued thrill of event that I remembered so well from my only other funeral experience the previous year: Helen Murphy, leader of the Heather Patrol and with the longest hair in our class, who died of leukaemia, aged ten. In the pew I held my mother's handbag while her clawed hand bit into Dad's arm. I followed their shuffle out into a heartless rain in the new scratchy black coat that Aunt Joan made me wear, while men in dark suits shunted the coffin into the jaws of the waiting hearse. My mother's wail broke the crowded stillness, a flock of birds burst from a tree and I pushed through the mourners and ran and ran and ran, through the car park, down the hill, slamming my feet on wet cement until I could run no more and lay down in Mullens' driveway.

It was the day the tinkers set up camp on Chestnut Road and never left.

Pie Man lies with his mouth open and gasping in erratic snores. Rex's gold is silvery in the lowlight, his front paws still raised and bent and twitching a little in dream. A million heartbeats and it's all over.

I pull at the duvet but I can't contain my shivering. I will drift into exhaustion, but there is only a drift backwards, the unceasing pull of a past. An unravelling all around me, an unbearable sadness that has nowhere to go.

‘Go on,' says the red mountain. ‘Finish the story.'

‘After Kieran was gone I learnt to stop concentrating.' It was really a surrendering to dream. In the grey drizzled mornings of English class I could feel myself slipping into a beckoning open grave, in wistful pursuit of the elusive nightingale, scribbling tiny notes in the margin of Keats's reverie, flicking soft, worn pages to the condemned Pearse, his love for God, mother and country fused into an alluring vision of glorious death and eternal life. Late at night watching the orange street light seep under the too-short curtains, they all collapsed into one exhausted tangle:
I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge / My two strong sons that I have seen go out / To break their strength and die, they and a few / Now more than ever seems it rich to die / To cease upon the midnight with no pain / In bloody protest for a glorious thing / They shall be spoken of among their people / The generations shall remember them / And call them blessed; / Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth…

My mother's first few weeks in hospital, that time when it still seemed reasonable to believe it could be temporary but was really the beginning of her irreversible decline. And all these years later she is still there. On Christmas Day just gone my father drove me down to the hospital for our first joint visit in five years, buzzed through a thick glass security door. A giant foam lozenge that serves as a couch in the centre of the ward. Dad leaned forwards in the couch, arms folded on his knees, head lowered, sleeping or praying or avoiding, looking more like an inmate than a visitor. Two nurses stood chatting over by the station, their shoes like great dollops of cream and I wondered: do they see it? All the broken relatives, the battered families thrust into despair? And what do they think about the inmates we visit, the homewreckers who choke on the mess of their own lives, unwilling or unable to stop its cancerous infection, like creeping parasites of destruction.
Their existence whittled down to the gaps between medication, days measured out by little white cups. Once I sat in the middle of the ward and watched while a woman set fire to the hem of her pink dressing gown and the nurses sprayed her head to toe with foam. And I thought: why not just let her burn?

A nurse patted my father's wreck of a shoulder and he wandered off for a cup of tea.

‘Mum, we've come to take you home for Christmas lunch.' The foot of my mother's bed was just visible from the doorway, the blinded window casting a weak strip of horizontal sunlight across the grey carpet.

‘I… didn't have any breakfast.'

‘You didn't want any, remember? You told the nurses you weren't hungry. And anyway it's Christmas dinner in a few hours.'

She hummed, a flat snatch of sound or extended sigh. The noises that she makes now startle me. She was always such an exact communicator, not given to redundant emissions.

‘Tell Kieran to come in here. Tell him I want him.'

‘Mum, you know Kieran isn't here anymore.'

I heard the snuffle from the bed, and I knew that this was just the prelude to the familiar head-banging that would descend to an inhuman moaning, a steady unchecked flow of tears and snot dripping down her chin and I walked over and put the box of tissues on her bedside table just as Dad arrived, rubbing his hands in false cheer. ‘It's a fierce cold day outside, you're well tucked up in here, girls,' and he sat on the side of the bed and patted her hand, stuffed a wad of tissue onto her heaving chest. ‘There now, don't go upsetting yourself, Pat,' he droned in a practised soothe.

‘She asked for Kieran,' I snapped. But he didn't look at me, just kept on stroking her hand. ‘Jesus, Dad.' I turned and walked past the glancing smile of the arriving nurse.

‘D'you know what would do you the world of good, Patricia, would be to get out of that bed and have a cup of tea with your family.'

I backed out of the room, signalled for buzzer release.

By my last year at school, Mum had been permanently installed in hospital and I took to practising smoking in Kieran's bedroom, home alone after school, dropping cigarette ash on my uniform, going over the distant final moment I had spent with him. At 4:45 p.m. on 1 March 1979, I had met him wheeling his bike up the road. I asked how he could bear studying for six years just to end up looking down people's throats all day? He said it didn't really matter what he did, looking at me with a smile that didn't seem connected to his lips. Hours later I heard his low-volume Tchaikovsky, but I didn't see him after that, just the crusts of dead toast on his plate when I came down to breakfast after he had left for an early lecture.

The next thing I saw was his broken face.

In all the family floundering over the entitlement of grief, I didn't figure in the pecking order. My mum had granted herself a private abandonment. My dad finally gave up on the struggle to find something useful to say.
God love him, wouldn't he have made a lovely doctor?
I began spending afternoons lying on Kieran's bed playing his tapes, reading the Russians that he loved, suspecting the dead authors of a morbid intimacy with him, searching for some secret buried deep in Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Esenin and Tolstoy, some hint of what they might have been whispering in his ear. I read them all, quickly, thoroughly and it seemed that it was everywhere, death stalking the thin pages.

I listened to his music, waiting for a sign. Staring up at the light fixture, re-enacting Kieran's last moments, I wondered how long it took to lose consciousness. Wouldn't a second-year med student have calculated all this? And why didn't he write a note? I couldn't believe he had nothing to say as he fingered the rope. I wanted to ask someone but there was no one to speak to about the shame and the guilt, what it meant. Eventually the batteries gave out on the little black tape recorder so I smashed it to pieces with a hammer in the backyard. Then I built a bonfire of his books in the corner of the garden and piled high all
their Russian misery, their unhappy families, their ever-present suicide, whispering to him from their graves like sirens in treacherous waters, stealing him away. I watched them burn and I swore I would never be moved by a story again. I had recurring half-dreams, bloodstained water running over my hands down the sink. I kicked at Kieran's bed and screamed: what about the ones you leave behind? How do the undead ever move on? He had taken everything along with his life.

Dad stared out the teatime window until we both gave up on the wordless strain and picked at our plates in front of the TV, the evenings passing in a blur of sitcoms and canned laughter. I slopped through my homework, cutting every grade down to the bone. I slouched into a wilful and persistent under-achievement at school, learnt to hide my oddity behind a teenage mask of jaded non-engagement. My father sighed at my report cards and then just stopped bothering to read them. In his eyes a disconnect. A not-there. And as the years passed I tried my hardest not to be a comfort to him. Getting pissed, getting stoned, staying out all night. Sometimes I met him Sunday mornings in the hallway on his way to Mass and it was almost as if he wasn't sure who I was. ‘You lucky bitch,' sighed Emer, twirling a bottle of blue nail varnish. ‘You can do whatever you want.'

I low-balled into Arts at UCD. I skipped lectures and spent three years looking for answers in the stale air of the library. I read everything, a spine-numbing search through the chronicles of mankind's obsession with the mysteries of universe and mind, as if understanding could somehow kill the pain. But I never found an answer to my question. The one that stuck was Stekel's address at the 1910 symposium of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society: ‘No one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another.' Suicide as murder transposed. I'd sit staring out the window at the stagnant lake, thinking, who was Kieran trying to kill? But the fact is my memory was fading, I was forgetting but I was still clinging onto anger. It seemed a safer place to be.

And then one afternoon in my final year I wandered into a campus milk-round, and was captivated by Steiner's sleek linguistic promise, the shoe-shine dazzle of applied corporate intelligence, the groomed and barely harnessed ambition. There was a pristine glow about the evangelical speakers that cast a dull pall over the whole auditorium, the campus, my life, my hair. And in the crisp white collars and impeccable suits I saw the first glimmer of a quick route out of stagnation to a place where I might want to be, where my special talent would be my passport. Something within began to shift, the first stirrings of a survival instinct. I had found a stepping-stone that would bridge the aching gap between the past and future.

A month later I stumbled off a plane onto a trading floor, where a hygienic-looking American managing director failed to ambush me in an interview chat about calculus and I thought, looking at the photo of his ranch in Wyoming: a performing dog can make good money in a place like this. And I did.

After three years hunched between my book towers in the library, it was a breeze to catapult from the back of the class to the number-one slot. On the day of the results the lecturers who had spent months issuing me warnings flitted round my First in effusive bewilderment, while the rest of my class slunk past, shooting resentful glances from under their mortar boards at the bandit who had stolen the show. The head of Ethics asked me if I'd like to come and have tea. The departmental head sidled up and asked if I'd considered a doctorate. But I could sense the circular emptiness of academic struggles, two thousand years trying to answer the same fucking question. I showed him my interview letter from Steiner's and his face creased into a sneering derision.

But I had a hunch that the energy of a repressed fury could fuel a great career, and I was right. I had found a kind of sheltered housing, a nice desk to rest my weary head, a little slot that fit so snugly, a place to call my own. An audience that would applaud my circus trick, a showering of corporate affections to fill the empty space: promotions,
money, a cloak of power. Home is where the work is. Consumed by fourteen-hour days, a busyness that replaced distraction with exhaustion. And then one day, I realised I wasn't looking for answers anymore. Mostly it was like the past was someone else's movie. I had found a new virtual life, a historyless reinvention that I could almost believe in. To be so desired, to be so exactly loved that it could be quantified, that I could see it in the numbers – a big, fat, back-slapping cheque at the end of each year, isn't that all the proof a person needs? Like someone who wants to fuck you every minute of every day just to prove the extent of their love.

The window is aglow with the city's pulse. And in the top corner a sliver of moon. We may have slept a little, knocked out by the drone of stories and dream and the foul taste of the past. Pie Man stirs, swallows, passes a palm over his face and holds it there in the shaft of hallway light. His watch says 22:02. Rex yawns, raises his head and licks my free hand.