Because Mark was forgetting things too. Already his memory was deciding that some things could be discarded, that some things could fall out of view. On this, his memory was not consulting him. There was nothing Mark felt willing to discard. But it was just one more thing he could not control, and what he could not explain to Nuala was that he felt miles away, even, from being able to worry about that, much less panic about it. None of this was in his control, but some of what he had to get up to, face up to, was more consuming than anything else. And what he had to face up to, every day and every hour, was the fact. And at the fact, Mark felt as though he was still staring, still trying to make it real. Still trying not to be as startled by it every morning as he would have been if he had woken to find a stranger in his room. And so there was no time to cry over what was going, over what was slipping away. The business of being the self that could cry over such things, that could exist after a fact like that and react with sorrow or anger or fear: all of that would have to wait. All of that he could not do. Not yet. He was not yet ready to realize that he was alone.
Alone. He was not alone. He had a father who called him every day, a father he had to call every day. He had a sister. He had friends, who tried to do the kinds of things they thought friends, in such a situation, were meant to do — although some of them vanished, some of them could not face him, call him, text him, even, to say a version of the same old lines everyone felt they had to say. And he had Aoife. A daughter. A child. Sixteen months old, with her mother’s quick, vivid glance. A challenge and an interrogation, meeting with him every morning, looking at him over the bars of her cot. She watched him as he came towards her, she watched him as he walked away from her at night. She watched him as she sat at the kitchen table, as she stood, demanding, beside the fridge. She watched him as she walked, as she wobbled. As she sat in front of the television programmes he hoped she would watch. Before, those programmes had only ever been on for an hour a day. But this was not before. This was now, or this was afterwards, and in now, or in afterwards, he depended on cartoon animals and animated trains for distraction, for relief, for help in spinning the hours into a pale, dulled haze. But she did not watch these programmes, not really. She watched him.
She had three words. The name she called him, which made her sound like a little Dubliner hollering for her da. ‘Boy’, the name for the blanket she carried with her as she walked — it had looked angelic and soft when they had bought it, in its whiteness and its satin and its fleece, but now it looked like a month-old lump of snow. And she had ‘mere’, which meant ‘come here’, which was Mark’s signal to follow her, go to her, take her hand and walk with her to the fridge, the toybox, the staircase, the front door; c’mere, it said, and do what I want you to do. Do what has to be done. Do the thing that has just occurred to me and is full in my mind’s eye as the only needful thing in the world. Look sharp about it. Or be with me as I do it, as I get it, as I turn the dial or climb the step or push the door to make it happen. To make it begin.
He spent his days with her now, mainly indoors. Mainly in the house on Arbour Hill. Because of her, there was need of a routine. He took her for her walk. They came home and ate breakfast. She played, walked through the rooms, waved things at him, gave him her bright, urgent orders. He changed her. For a long time as he changed her, he found himself on the brink of turning to Joanne to make a comment about the smell or the colour of the child’s shit. He found himself, more than once, beginning to turn his head towards the bedroom door, towards the other room, towards the rooms downstairs. As the child watched him look there, she looked there too.
Money was not short. They were fine. The mortgage was long paid on the place. His funding was safe for next year — McCarthy had phoned early on to assure him of that, and what was left would stretch. The money his mother had left him came through in a cheque, and for months he let it sit in a drawer. Eventually he opened a savings account for Aoife. It was something he and Joanne had meant to do. Now the account was there, and it had more money in it than any bank account Mark had ever had, but by the time she used it, he knew, it would pay for maybe a couple of months in America on a J1. Or a second-hand car. Or a master’s in something useless, if they still had degrees in useless things by then. But they would. There would always be degrees in useless things.
*
The Phoenix Park was depressing. Homeless people slept there. Rent-boys worked there. The pope had blessed the country there. Animals lay in filthy cages in the zoo there. But it was a park. It was Mark’s local park. And the park, he decided one morning, was where you were meant to go on your morning walks. Not the square in Smithfield. Not the footpaths along Manor Street. In the park, with trees and greenery and water, and sunlight reflecting off them all. ‘We’re going out to see the sunshine,’ he told Aoife, and she frowned and tugged at his hair.
They passed the disused travel agent’s, and the hair salon already busy with women sitting under driers, and the four squat cottages at the foot of the hill. He felt the pushchair jolting, and he knew that Aoife was pointing to something, kicking her feet, saying one of her words. It was impossible to hear her. At this hour, these streets were at their worst; hardly wider than country lanes, bloated with rush-hour traffic. From narrow junctions all along Manor Street, drivers tried to edge into the main flow, surging forward, stalling, ignoring the horn blasts. Ahead of Mark on Arbour Hill, a lone cyclist was forced in tight to the kerb by traffic, one foot on a pedal and the other stepping its way along the pavement. A siren dipped into the clamour of horns and engines and car radios. The bells from the nearby church rang for nine, and an instant later, the jingle for the hourly news sounded from inside the car that Mark was passing. The driver pounded both hands on the wheel and swore. Ahead, several sets of lights changed to red at the same instant. So imperceptible had the crawl of the traffic been that it was only in its sudden seizing up that it made itself known. Mark walked on.
People were still sleeping on benches in the park. It was too early to expect them to be up and moving in towards the city. An old man lay on a bench, a piece of clothing bundled up as a pillow, his feet on the armrest as though he were basking in the sun. Farther on, a couple lay locked together under a blackened blanket, cider cans on the ground beneath the bench, like skittles toppled in a game. Sometimes, especially during the winter, passers-by would leave things under the benches: packets of crisps, or sandwiches, or cartons of milk. There were no offerings today. After he had passed, Mark reached into his pocket, thinking to leave them some coins, but he found nothing that could be of use — a clothes-peg, a penny, a soother. He moved on towards the pond.
He settled the pushchair at a bench in front of the spot where the ducks seemed busiest; they were surfacing, circling, fussing. Aoife was straining against the straps, calling out. It was her new word, her fourth word. Up. He unstrapped her and lifted her out as she squirmed. She started, in her hurried, half-balanced steps, towards the water, towards three fat ducks, which were ignoring her, picking at themselves with their beaks. She squealed, and still they ignored her, and she turned to look back at Mark, and to wave her arms at him, and to smile a smile of such unbuttressed glee that he found himself feeling, for an instant, almost sorry for her. They’re ducks, he found himself wanting to say to her; dirty, probably diseased ducks, and they’re ignoring us, and if you go closer they’ll scatter and get as far away from you as possible, and yet, from the look on your face, they’re the best thing in your life right now. In your little life.