I rang a number one time I read off of the notice board in the vestibule of the church. I didn’t mean to memorize it, but my eye was drawn to it so often, and the picture underneath it in black and white of a woman with a hand across her forehead and a phone to her ear and her long hair drawn across her face, and an air about her of sadness and need, that it sat as clear as day before my mind’s eye. Then I felt a terrible rush of embarrassment when a girl answered, with a lovely soft voice, kind and warm. She asked me my name and I said William and regretted not having had a lie ready. I started to tell her how I missed my little nephew and then remembered he was only little now in my memory of him; wherever he was he’d be a man, tall and good-looking and athletic, with only a vague memory of an auld uncle he used to be minded by now and again in his childhood. No matter what, I’ll never see that little boy again. Does the man who was the boy think of me? Hardly if at all, I’d say. I’m only a ghost to him now, and he a ghost to me.
I hung up all of a shot for a finish, barely having mumbled my thanks to the girl who was trained to give sympathy, and sat on the seat at the telephone table in the hall in a stew of embarrassment, and a shame, at once strange and familiar, that rose from somewhere, I don’t know, I don’t know where.
That wasn’t the finish of my foolishness, though. I fell back into it not even a year later. I read a number that appeared on the television at the end of a programme that was about finding lost family. As I listened to the foreign ringtone I imagined Billy might answer. That kind of a thing happens: wedding rings lost on beaches turning up years later in the bellies of fishes caught by the loser; identical twins separated at birth and never knowing one another turning out to have the same jobs and children of the same names. But it wasn’t Billy, of course. I went off half cocked into my story to another soft-voiced girl, this one with a lovely English accent. Once I stopped talking, after telling her how the years without word from Lourda or Billy had stacked themselves one upon the other almost unknown to me into decades, she was silent a long moment until I said Hello, are you still there? I’m so sorry, William, she said, nearly in a whisper, but that’s not really the type of scenario we’re interested … and she caught herself and said instead, In a position to get involved in … it’s more of a … a …
A what? I could have said. A what? I could have been sour with her, indignant. But I ended her discomfort, her struggle to parse my story into a single word by pushing down the contacts with my finger and I left the receiver cradled between my shoulder and chin and sat listening for a good long while to the unbroken bleep as my tears pooled between plastic and flesh, thinking of heart monitors and hospice bedrooms, and souls unshackled from gravity.
I did a computer course in the library and I learnt how to look things up and about search terms and Googles and all of that. I searched there, and searched, and found nothing. The young lad who was the instructor helped me to send away online for a laptop computer of my own and he showed me how to get broadband for the house on a little square thing that only had to be plugged in and turned on and connected remotely.
When my laptop came I unpacked it and plugged it in and turned it on and connected it to the broadband step by step the way I’d learnt and I clicked on the Google symbol and the empty rectangular window came up with the cursor inside in it and I looked at it as it blinked and winked back at me and my heart palpitated in time with it and I got scared all of a sudden of what was in behind that window, and the lack of a watching instructor or librarian behind me, and the unfettered access to everything I now had, a world of knowledge and nonsense, and none of it any real use to me, and I unplugged the laptop and the broadband and put them in the back of the hall closet and they’re in there still. And the money goes out of my account every month still without fail for the broadband.
The sky is enough for me, I decided, and the wonder of all the things in it, besides concerning myself with the webs and ways of imaginary people. What knowledge is there, really? What can be known?
That silence can open between people that can become a gap, a distance, a gulf, and widen and deepen, and be for a finish fathomless and untraversable.
That the crows will leave one morning for their last day’s work and I’ll look one night at the sky above me for the last time and feel the cooling of the cores of distant galaxies.
That all things tend towards chaos, and chaos itself tends in its turn towards stillness and peace.
That all the parts of all the atoms and protons and quarks and leptons of the stars and of me and of the haughty crows and of my parents and of Lourda and of my Billy and all the things that are or ever were will arrange themselves for a finish equidistant from each other in all directions and stop still there in the darkness and the cold.
From a Starless Night
I PUT ON MY running gear this morning early and went downstairs and out the door and started to run. The landlord was smoking a fag outside his shop, facing away from me. I crossed the road to avoid talking to him. Murty is sound but I knew he was waiting there for news, for the story. I couldn’t face it. His shop-girls would have told him there was something up. They’d have seen the leaving through the window yesterday, the comedy of boxes and baling twine.
I went slowly at first. Under the birdsong, through the fumeless breeze, past the Lidl that was once the Davin Arms where we’d meet and pretend to be strangers; past the deathly whitewashed front of Ivan’s where we used to go to buy posh bread and wine; past the tyre place and the garage and the Limerick Inn hotel where I used to work weekends washing dishes when we were in college and she’d always ring me when the kitchen hummed the most and all the chefs would roll their bleary eyes and chop and clang harder in temper; past the roundabouts and traffic lights and onto the shoulder of the motorway, into the clean and still and misty countryside, into the morning, the rising day.
Jenny told me the night before last that I was disconnected. We gave until the sunrise to exchanging sentences starting with I’m the one and You’re the one. I begged her but she told me all my chances were used up. Her father came to collect her yesterday morning. She left the flat bare behind her save for a hillock of tat, summited by the ornamental Ganesh that I bought for her in New Delhi. There’s an echo now that was never there before; all the soft, downy things are gone, there’s nothing to swallow the sounds of me. I sat on the edge of a kitchen chair in the middle of my plucked flat and blew smoke in Ganesh’s elephant face and said, Well, Ganesh, what the fuck will we do now? And he said nothing back, only sat four-armed and cross-legged and stared at me through his alabaster eyes.
I don’t like being alone in the flat. I saw a ghost one time, walking across the kitchen floor from right to left. She was wearing jeans and a long, loose shirt; her hair was long and brown, her face was pale. She lived there once, and was killed in a car crash. She was coming home, she didn’t know she was dead. I never told Jenny; it happened on a weekend night. She hardly ever stayed in the flat on weekends, she stayed in the habits of college: going home Friday evenings to her family and childhood friends, bussing it back late Sunday or early Monday. Murty’s wife called a priest she knew and he came one day when we were at work and anointed the walls and floors and whispered gently to the dead girl to walk into the light. I think she did; I haven’t seen her since. I’m still afraid she’ll come back, though, and frighten the piss out of me again.