The Misremembered Man (12 page)

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Daphne! Would
you
be seen with him?” She turned from the mirror. “Now be honest.”

“Well…”

“Come on—be honest.”

“Well, I’d give him a chance by talking to him….”

“But would you take him along to Heather’s wedding? Remember, that’s the object of this exercise.”

“Well, to be honest…” She hesitated, mobilizing her thoughts. “You want the truth, do you?”

“Yes, the God’s-honest truth.”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead with him.”

They howled with laughter. When they’d recovered themselves, Daphne made a suggestion.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “We’ll have tea at the Copper Kettle.”

“Splendid idea.”

They wiped away their tears of mirth and adjusted themselves in the mirror. Presently Daphne held open the inner door.

“After you, my dear.”

“Thank you, my liege.”

Lydia flung back the outer door—and halted with a gasp. There, on the checkered Axminster, stood a balding little man with a mighty camera pointing accusingly at her from his double-breasted front. Frank Xavier McPrunty.

Lydia gave a small cry. Daphne collided with her back, nearly propelling her into him.

He raised a knotty forefinger.

“You wouldn’t be—?”

“Good heavens, no!” Lydia blurted out, and she reversed into the restroom, pulling Daphne with her. The door shut automatically. They threw themselves against the row of washbasins, Daphne in fits of laughter, Lydia in shock.

“Shush…”

She shook Daphne’s shoulder. They heard the outer door of the powder room opening.

“Oh my God, he’s coming
in
. Quick!”

And they both dashed for the stalls. But it was the woman with the beehive hairdo—one half of the drinking couple she’d spotted earlier—now with a glazed-over, unsteady look about her and Lydia noticed that part of the beehive had come unstuck. She eyed the two ladies suspiciously.

“Is one a yous a
Lid
-something
Day-vine
, are yous?” she said.

Lydia stared at her. “Why, who wants to know?”

“There’s a wee man out there astin’ after ye. Sez he’s a Savior Mick-Brontee.” She jerked her thumb in the direction of the lobby and staggered—like a newborn calf—on into the stall, grasping the door frame for support.

Lydia opened her mouth to speak, but Daphne put a warning finger to her lips and rolled her eyes at the stall.

“Wait,” she mouthed, and busied herself washing her hands. Her friend followed suit and waited for the woman to finish and leave.

By and by they heard a heavy sigh followed by a noisy flushing sound, and out came Miss Beehive. She wobbled to the door, seemingly unaware that she was not alone.

“God, did you see that? She didn’t wash her hands.”

“Look, Lydia, there’s only one way out of this.” Daphne went to the sash window and began heaving it up.

“What, are you crazy? We can’t do that.”

“Well, it’s either this, option one, or stand about here for another hour hoping he’ll go away. That’s option two.” Lydia opened her mouth to protest again but Daphne ignored her. “Or, the third option.” Her voice strained under the weight of the resisting window, but within moments she’d managed it. She turned proudly. “Good, there we are.”

“And the third option?” Lydia asked expectantly.

“Yes, the third option is for you to go out there now, introduce yourself to Mr. McPrunty, and have him explain the inner workings of his life and his mighty camera.” She gave her friend a challenging look.

Lydia dashed to the window and, with as much of her dignity as she could retain in the circumstances, started climbing out.

T
he autumn months of every year were particularly cruel for the little inmates of the orphanage. Every morning at eight a bus clattered into the yard, and the boys would line up and climb aboard. They took their places on bare iron seats, their pale, sad faces lost beneath outsized caps, their frail bodies in ragged, grubby, hand-me-downs.

They swayed and collided and wordlessly righted themselves as the bus drove across the city’s suburbs, bumping and bouncing over the cobblestones, dodging the steaming horses and the chattering traps they pulled. They passed shawled women and weary workmen; rising heavenward, the smoking factory chimneys mapped the sky in monstrous yellow blots.

No one wanted to go to the fields. No one wanted to wrest the muddy potatoes from their muddy pits and load them into the baskets. No one wanted to suffer the ache in his back or the wounding splinters in his frail little hands. They prayed that it would not rain and that they would not provoke the farmer to anger.

The bus driver, Bartley, was a hard man with a pitiless face and hands made for destruction and murder. A raw man, born of pain and violence and raised on both. He despised the children he shuttled to and fro, his vehicle clanking its way through the grimy streets, as the louring sky moved above him and a sludge of fearsome thoughts foamed in his head.

He talked to himself, directing a rapid, broken discourse at the windshield, bending over the big wheel to round a corner at speed, laughing loudly when, in the mirror, he saw his charges fall out of their seats and stumble to retrieve their caps. He roared and shouted in his strange language; he made misery for others, and in so doing, warped the peace that could never be his own.

Before long, the city had fallen behind them: a gray tattered veil in the cracked rear window of the bus. Grassy swards opened up on either side of them, and a weak sun stroked the fields and raised their spirits. Mountains lay in the distance, soft and still, like sleek, sleeping deer.

Each boy observed and sought solace in this beauty, escaping for a while the graceless, lumpen nature of the life he led. Happiness for the time being was that peaceful place, always moving out of reach through the grimy glass of the window, something beyond the implacable band of nuns and men who peopled the present and the future. Each knew there was something more, when released like this on the rattling bus, with the insane driver; released from the harsh, unstable world of the orphanage with its draughty rooms and flailing voices, into this gentler world. There was peace in the unpopulated countryside under the bird-blown skies.

Eighty-Six sat with his forehead pressed against the glass, his fingers gripping the rubber ledge of the window frame. He felt every hump and hollow of the road in his throbbing brow and trembling hands. He wanted the tender violence of the journey to last. His small body thrown this way and that, whilst he dreamed his little dreams.

Sometimes he glimpsed white-and-brown cattle in a field, heard the bleat of sheep as they rushed toward the barbed wire fence at the sound of the rackety vehicle. He dreamed one day of befriending such animals, thought they would understand him as no human could. He imagined stroking their rough coats and speaking to them in their own language—their stuttering baa’s and moo’s. His little heart beat faster when he thought of this; it quelled his fear and put it to rest, replaced it with an emotion he did not recognize yet as passion. Later in life he would never be able to recapture—or describe—what he felt in those moments.

They all leaned instinctively to the left as the bus approached the final bend. Each boy grasped the horizontal bar of the seat in front, bracing himself in readiness for the sudden, jolting violence of Bartley’s stop. As they stumbled out, he raved and spat and cuffed any boy who dared to look his way. It was said that Bartley had been an inmate of the orphanage, too. He was a sorry reminder of what they could become, the essential nature of him stripped away so that only a few raw wires and a high-pitched madness remained.

A sharp, dry wind was cutting across the landscape and driving down the open field as they braved the early morning chill. They shivered in their thin clothes, their bare knees revealed like birch saplings where their pants ended and their Wellington boots began.

The field was a vast, ribbed expanse of flowering potato heads. By nightfall a quarter of it would be turned over, the orphans having scrabbled deep and rooted out the sustenance that would keep the bellies of the Doyle family filled for a year. Farmer Doyle drove his tractor up and down the drills, spraying out potatoes from under the spinning disks of the digger. A cloud of hungry gulls flapped in his wake, swooping and diving on the exposed earth.

The boys broke into pairs as Bartley threw out the baskets. Eighty-Six and Eighty-Four stuck together. They did not speak to one another but bent immediately to the task. The reward, five hours later, would be a mug of tea and a hunk of bread.

If it were judged that anyone had been slack or if they’d talked on the job, the food was withheld and the culprit went hungry.

Soon all twenty were immersed in the torturous rhythm of bending and harvesting, their bodies a frieze of hooped shapes inching up the field. Bartley walked behind them, kicking at the ground, attentive for missed potatoes, feeling the necessity to lash out or drive his boot into a backside if he felt so inclined.

Eighty-Six and his partner worked in unison, wordlessly sharing their burdens. Their eyes scanned the mucky soil, where the worms squirmed and the bugs crawled, as their hands dug and tore and dropped the bitter harvest into the basket, their cargo growing heavier the farther they advanced down the row.

At one o’clock, a glorious sight: the tea. Mrs. Doyle at the gate in her wide, floral apron, struggling with two enormous bags. She’d set her burden down and holler at the men both big and small. The boys would rush toward her, wiping their hands on their clothes as they ran, clamoring for their hard-earned reward.

She’d unstopper the soggy newspaper plugs from several bottles of tea and fill a clatter of tin mugs laid out on the grass. Then she’d unwrap a batch of fresh-baked bread rolls and hand them round, each thick scone glued together with homemade butter and jam. Such a treat! So far removed from the stale bread and dripping which was their daily fare.

On the rattling bus back, and later on as they slept, it was not so much on the painful labors of the day that the orphans dwelt, but on the smile Mrs. Doyle had bestowed upon them as they ate.

One smiling adult in the long, grim day—a rarity indeed, a gift.

J
amie returned to consciousness on the morning following his unfortunate bout with the bold Chuck in O’Shea’s bar. He was heavily hungover and mightily depressed.

He lay still in the rumpled bed, staring up at a damp patch of ceiling, while a reel of the previous night’s events twisted sluggishly through his head. He saw himself once again up there on the high stool, driving the rich, sweet music into the room—“A brilliant performance,” Declan had said. And then suddenly the scene had darkened: sullied and stained by the piercing shouts of the wee bastard at the back. “Jezsis!” Jamie swore aloud at the very thought of it.

He tried to imagine how great the night would have been if he hadn’t been maddened to violence by the filthy words that poured from young Sproule’s mouth. But he couldn’t somehow picture it; the damage had been done, like an ink drop clouding clear water, the brightness could not be retrieved. The night had been ruined.

He shut off the dark thoughts and eased himself carefully out from under the covers, sat for a while on the edge of the bed, staring down at his feet, planted now on the red linoleum. The area beneath them had faded to pink from years of wear and from Jamie’s habit of simply sitting there in contemplation.

That morning, he sat for a lengthier spell, dwelling on the nature of his being: his very lonely being, now that his dear Uncle Mick had passed away. Mick’s death had cut him loose from life’s easy groove and thrown him back within sight of a terrible solitude where the wind forever blew, the snow forever fell, and the devil blackened the night and the daytime hours. Ten months of heartache so far, and every day very much the same.

Dr. Brewster called it “depression” and was treating it accordingly, but Jamie knew deep down that he needed more than pills. Life was cruelly demanding that he finally take responsibility for himself and, in short, become a “man.” But how could the child who had never been allowed to be a child somehow suddenly become that “man”? He’d have to leap across a gorge of emotions and scale an awesome height.

The future was waiting for Jamie, skulking in a dark forest with no way out. He tried not to brood on it and looked to the past instead; to that part of the past which shimmered bright with his uncle’s memory and the only happiness he’d known.

His gaze fell on a St. Brigid’s cross, now gathering dust to the right of the window. His uncle had painfully fashioned that cross with his unsteady fingers shortly before he died. Below it hung a photo of a youthful, pain-free Mick, smiling broadly on his wedding day, the toothy grin, stiff-winged collar and breast-pocket hankie all now deeply yellowed through years of smoke from hearth and pipe. And his beautiful bride, Alice, her delicate features dwarfed beneath a surging flourish of peacock feathers and plastic fruit; an extravagant bunch of lace sprouting at her throat.

Tragic Alice had tripped over a bucket of chicken feed and struck her head on the doorstep. Some days later it became apparent that the accident had released a toxin into her aggrieved synapses that disposed her to suffer agonies of prolonged disquiet. Dear Alice would never be the same again. Mick nursed her as best he could, but had to admit defeat when she came at him one day with a bread knife in the hen house, mistaking him for the Sunday dinner. Mick, heartbroken, had sobbed mightily at this great misfortune, and with a heavy heart and trembling hand, had reluctantly signed her over into the care of the St. Peregrine Institute for the Mentally Deranged, Disturbed & Those of a Nervous & Anxious Disposition.

She died there soon after.

Jamie’s eyes began to well up when he thought of that misfortune; he reached for his wallet on the bedside table. Inside, folded into a neat square, was a handkerchief, yellowed with age and edged with a delicate border of tiny shamrocks. He dabbed his eyes with the cherished fabric, and with great reverence returned it to the wallet. He immediately felt better.

After some moments his eye fell on his most treasured possession: his uncle’s silver, two-row accordion in its walnut case. Playing with the pleasure of such memories helped Jamie to face the reality of yet another day.

He heard the animals in the yard crying out for breakfast, but ignored them. His head felt like a rock trembling on a stick, his legs and arms toothpicks that might break under the weight of him. Slowly he rose, trying not to look down, seeking for support, as he scrabbled into his work clothes. Finally belted and buttoned up, he stumbled to the scullery for his first, sobering, brew of tea.

It took him longer than usual. Every sound—the clanking of the mug as he retrieved it from the crammed sink, the gushing and spitting of the water from the tap, the teaspoon stirred in the mug—all contrived to assault his fragile senses. As he sank into the tattered armchair, nursing the mug on the armrest, fishing in his pocket for the first cigarette of the day, he vowed never to drink again. But it was only a thought and it would pass.

The sun struck hotly through the window, a great shaft of mote-rich light, giving a cruel wash of clarity to the room. A blue-bottle madly buzzed. Jamie watched it settle on the armrest, knitting its frantic legs, its metallic engine throbbing. He thought he might touch it, but knew his merest shift would send it off immediately. He wondered idly how a fly always knew when it was about to be touched—or killed. Could they tell the future, feel the air from a raised hand, or maybe they had an extra pair of wee eyes on the top of their wee heads. Who was to say?

He drew on the cigarette and reached for the poker, could hear the fly stitching its way desperately up and down the windowpane. A flame shot up from the banked coal and at once the fire leaped into life. He returned the poker to its place by the crane crook and reached automatically for the bottle of Valium. These actions, these mindless moves, Jamie performed every morning with the sureness of an acrobat tumbling through the air to land, as always, dizzy and dazed on the same spot. But on this particular morning, as he unscrewed the tablet bottle and shook the pill into his hand, a thought struck him that made him falter.

What if it’s like this for a body all the time? He posed the question to his open palm. What if I’ve to take these pills for the rest of my life? Wake up always to this empty house with only Shep for company. What if…?

He gazed about the shabby room as the tears began to flow again and he plunged into the vast terror of the question he’d been avoiding since his uncle died.

“What if it’s like this always?” His appeal rang out in the hollow silence, but only the ticking clock and the madly buzzing fly responded.

Reluctantly, Jamie began to push down all the dark alleys he’d been afraid to tread. What’s the point in looking for a woman, he thought. Rose and Paddy and Dr. Brewster think it’d be a good thing, but they don’t know how shocking hard that would be for me. They don’t know about the orphanage or what was done to me. They know nothing about all that. Besides, he pondered, he’d posted the letter to the mysterious woman well over two weeks ago and still she hadn’t answered. There’d be no sign of it now.

He stared down at the Valium tablet again, then flung it into the fire, finished the tea in one hot glutch, and made for the door.

Shep leapt up to greet him as he stepped out into the sunshine. Jamie smiled and ruffled the dog, then crossed with determination to the barn with Shep on his heels. Inside he stood in the dusty silence contemplating the high rafters. He saw the last joist Mick had hammered into place all those years before when Jamie was just a boy, and thought it might be the appropriate one for the job. He studied the rafter, the hank of baler twine that hung near the door, then the rafter once more. Yes, it would be so easy to do, he reasoned. That rope and rafter could take me away from all this. Could take me to paradise in no time at all, to be with Mick and Alice again. Just a breath away, he thought. Just a breath.

“Hi, Jamie, are ye in there, are ye?” Someone was shouting from outside.

Shep was barking at a rare sight: Scrunty Branny, the postman, cycling into the yard. Jamie’s heart lifted as he went to greet him. But he didn’t dare hope.

“How ye, Scrunty? Not often I see ye here.”

Scrunty Branny, a Breughelian peasant with a wart on his left eyelid and chipmunk cheeks, heaved his fat frame off the bike, wheezing and puffing. “Aye and it’s well ye…it’s well ye…it’s well ye don’t get many letters, Jamie…” He maneuvered his weighty satchel unto his ample front and sighed deeply, “for that hill a yours would ’ave me damn-near kilt, begod!”

“She’s a steep boy, right enough, when you’re not used to her,” Jamie agreed.

He and Shep watched with interest as Scrunty rooted in the satchel and unearthed an elastic-bound bundle of mail. He licked a chubby finger and peeled off an envelope.

“Very grand writin’, Jamie. A wonder who it’s from.”

Jamie studied his own address, elegantly rendered in what could only be a female hand. He believed he knew who it might be from. But Scrunty Branny, he vowed, would be the last to know.

“Could be Mick’s sister in Amerikey,” Jamie lied, avoiding Scrunty’s tiny, prying eyes.

“But then there’d be an airborne stamp on it. That letter’s from here.”

“God, you’re right. Well, be seein’ ye, Scrunty.” Jamie hurried into the house, leaving postman Branny in a state of beetle-browed perplexity as he readied his bike for departure.

In the scullery he found a knife clotted with day-old lemon curd. He wiped it off on the sole of his boot, slit open the envelope, sat down in the armchair again, unfolded the pristine pages, and proceeded to read.

Jamie scratched his head in puzzlement, wondering what she could mean. Maybe he’d find out soon enough.

The word “teacher” frightened Jamie somewhat, his memories of such individuals being less than happy.

Jamie looked up from the page. The fly still buzzed madly round the window frame. On the sill stood the only two books in the house, old possessions of Uncle Mick’s, which Jamie had barely opened, let alone read:
Old Moore’s Almanac
and a worm-eaten copy of
Great Expectations
, which had been purloined from an ancient school by Mick’s Uncle Fergal. A fearless young man with a thirst for knowledge and an eye for profit, he’d escaped a bitter boyhood by losing his religion and boarding a coffin ship to the Americas in 1849. Once there, according to Mick, Fergal had got himself an education. He became a bank clerk of some importance, only to be felled at thirty-two by a single bullet meant for Fred “The Fats” McSweeney in a New York gangster shoot-out. Fergal had been emerging from The Thirsty Bull liquor store at the time. “So it was the drink that kilt him,” Mick used to wryly say.

Jamie thought that his curlicued signature, “Fergal J. McCloone,” on the inside cover of the novel, indicated a man who was “terrible clever” and who knew a thing or two about something. He continued reading the letter.

Eating, thought Jamie immediately, but knew in his heart that that would probably be the wrong answer.

That phrase “Sunday service” bothered him. A Catholic would have written “Sunday Mass.” So she was maybe “the other sort.” But then he remembered that Rose had said that religion didn’t matter much and Rose, being a wise woman, was usually right about most things, so she was.