I often saw the outline of the boy after in the shapes of things living and dead, his head bowed, his body still tied fast, leaning forward from the filthy beam. In the gloaming especially, when spectres are born of shadows, in a tree in need of coppicing, say, or in a windblown fence, or in among a huddle of bulrushes. Some days in the mirror, looking at my monstrously normal face, I’d see reflected in the black parts of my eyes that ghostly post and its weight of torn flesh and shattered bones. And always those times a scream would rise in me and my blood would run to ice and my heart would spasm and pound.
I thought often of deserts in those wintry days, of walking into emptiness until my legs would carry me no further, of lying flat beneath a flaying sun, the flesh being cleansed from my bones, and they in turn being bleached white and dried to powder. That would be the death and disposal of my choosing, if I were able to grant myself the privilege of choice.
But here I am existing still.
Nephthys and the Lark
SHE COULDN’T SLEEP past dawn for the sound of wind. It seemed always to funnel down this road, pressed to wild gusts between the rows of houses. She imagined the roof being lifted by the eaves or a felled oak smashing through the rafters. But there was no oak near them, no trees at all, only clematis bushes and half-hearted hedges and puny garden willows. They could hardly claim treehood, drippy things. Her husband always said he loved the howl of a storm and the rain battering off the window glass. It made him feel cosy, he said, to be in out of it, in a warm bed. And there was a contentment to his snores, for sure, as though the raging weather really did lull him deeper into peacefulness. She considered hanging a foot out the side of the bed and, when it was cold enough, pressing it against his lower back where his pyjama top always rode up, but she wasn’t sure she was still dextrous enough to pull it off. And she wasn’t sure she was wicked enough to wake him that way.
A familiar chirruping filled the spaces between gusts. February the skylark’s song always started. She’d been hearing him all week and she’d seen him skimming low across the green, landing on the edge of the rockery at its centre as she drove from the estate the morning before. She knew him by his raised plume, his rocker’s coif, like it was gelled to standing. The cut of a young fella going to a disco. The sound of him, and the thought of his little hairdo, and the idea of the cold-foot trick, and the roar her husband would let out of him, and the laugh that would be in his feck off combined to a warmth in her stomach, a childish thrill of pleasures. The wind eased with the brightening of the sky, and she lay still, happy almost, for the hour before the alarm, waiting for the grunting and scratching of her husband’s rising, his sighs and hums, the bellows and squeals of teenagers, the clomps and rattles of a waking house.
She told her three children they were having porridge. The youngest wanted to know why she’d bought Coco Pops if they weren’t allowed to eat them. They were snuck into my trolley, she told him, and it won’t be let happen again. You can have porridge with honey in it or you can go to school hungry. She leant and kissed the top of his sulky head and he winced and rubbed his hand along his crown. Ugh, Mamm-y. Her eldest boy had a hurley on his lap and he and his father were inspecting a crack along its bas, their foreheads almost touching. Her daughter was wearing makeup on her eyes and a skim of lipstick; her skirt was too far above her knees but she was wearing thick tights and it didn’t seem worth the row. Her daughter had her iPhone in one hand and a slice of toast in the other and she was scrolling slowly with her thumb and chewing rhythmically, her eyes fixed to the little screen, the light of it reflected in them. The rain was gone and the wind had lost heart. A rainbow rose from behind the distant hills and arched across a sky of baby blue.
Her husband took the hurley and left it leaning against the back door, the way he’d remember to bring it as he passed out to his car. Jimmy Ryan will hoop that no bother, he told the boy. You can probably collect it on the way back from college. I’ll text you and let you know. Sound, Dad. Her husband always had a redness in his cheeks in the mornings, and his thick hair clumped boyishly. He always showered and dressed after his breakfast, because he said he didn’t like to go to work with a smell of food off him. He always took off his pyjamas and put on shorts and a T-shirt before he came downstairs, though, and a pair of flip-flops. He only ever got cross these mornings over those flip-flops. Where the fuck are my flip-flops? Pounding up- and downstairs, in and out of rooms. And the girl would roll her eyes and the boys would giggle and skit and she’d tell him to mind his language and they were in whatever corner he’d kicked them into the day before and she had more to be doing than minding his blessed flip-flops. A fifty-year-old man that can’t mind one pair of flip-flops. I’m forty-nine. Not for long more, she’d say teasing, but she’d smile her best smile at him, because she knew it bothered him, the thought of turning fifty.
He was a buildings manager at a commercial complex. He worried non-stop. About cracks in plaster, moss in gutters, overloaded circuits, rising damp, descending wires. He found it hard to delegate. He had people under him but you wouldn’t think it. You’d think he alone was holding up every building inside in that blessed complex, like Atlas holding up the world. She worried about him, the redness in his handsome face, the deepening creases at the sides of his eyes, the shots of blood in the whites of them; it couldn’t be good for a man his age. Fretting about bricks and mortar. Those buildings would be standing a long time after him. At least he always slept well. Sleep is important. Her own eyes felt a bit gritty. The hours she’d lost to the moaning wind.
The youngest lad wouldn’t give her a kiss at the school gate any more. He was nearly out of the car before it was fully stopped. First year in secondary was tricky. She wouldn’t force the issue or embarrass him opposite his pals. But still it stung a little each morning. It pained her, the leaving go of that part of their relationship. The kisses would come back, she knew, when he was older, but they’d be manly, dutiful, perfunctory. The eldest was starting to do that now: he’d kissed her on the cheek last summer before going off on a holiday with his hurling team. She’d heard one of the other lads saying something like Ooh, did you give your mammy a kiss? And he’d said something back like, I did, ya. Will I give yours a kiss as well? And that quietened the smart-arse, and she felt a burning pride in her son, and tears pinpricked the backs of her eyes. He was so like his father. He was already so much a man.
Her daughter had a boyfriend. A lad from town. Sixteen was too young for seriousness, but it was there. It was hard to talk to her. It was hard to think of her being pressured, feeling obliged, giving herself away too early, letting herself be used and cast away, letting her little heart get smashed to smithereens. There was no avoiding that pain, it seemed, no way of protecting her from it. Her daughter’s world seemed compressed sometimes into the screen of that telephone; all of her tides turned at the pull of its gravity, her whole existence seemed wedded to it. She’d told her daughter to bring the boyfriend out home, but she hadn’t yet. She was desperate for a proper look at him, to listen to his voice, to know if he was respectable, or respectful at least.
She stopped on the way back from town at the church. The car-park was low, surfaced in gravel; loughs of water lay along it. Rain often opened holes in the soft ground of it that would lie in wait for car-wheels beneath the treacherous puddles. She tutted and parked on the kerb, at the side of the main road, annoyed. Because the funds were there for the tarmacking, they’d been raised and left as yet unused. She’d helped with the fundraising herself, months ago, pushing alms envelopes through letterboxes, selling books of tickets for raffles and lines for a sponsored fun-run. And her car was just out of tax, and she didn’t want any nosy-parkers scanning her expired disc and thinking things that weren’t true. She nearly drove away again, but she thought of a debt she owed to Saint Anthony from the previous week when the miraculous medal her grandmother had given her had gone missing. She’d promised to light candles, two euros a go, and the number of promised candles had increased from five to ten before she’d found the medal, sitting dusted with flour in the bowl of the weighing scales. She had the coins in her bag and the debt was being called in, softly but insistently, a whispered voice at the back of her mind.