LATER THAT NIGHT, Father Cotter told him he had been very calm throughout his ordeal. He had been sitting on the floor looking down at his mother when the ambulance came. He’d had one of her hands in his. He had closed her eyes. He had answered all of their questions. She had been dead for at least five hours, the doctor said.
March
CHRIST, there’s a great stretch in the evenings. March already, imagine! March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Bejaysus, the year is pure-solid flying. The worst of the cold is gone, anyway, thanks be to God.
Daddy would make these same observations every year at the start of March. He would also give his predictions for the weather to come. The quantity and location of slugs and beetles and other creepy-crawlies; the hop of a cock robin; the zigzag of rabbits and foxes across fields; the colour of the evening shadow cast by the Arra Mountains on the fields that cuddled up to their feet; the early or late departure or return of migrating birds and the height of their flight: all of these things and more spoke to Daddy of the temperament of the coming season in a secret language of signs and signals.
Yerra stop spoutin’, Mother would tell him, and roll her eyes towards heaven. But then you would hear her repeating Daddy’s predictions word for word to her friends the ICA biddies while they drank tea and ate currant cake and clucked in the kitchen and they’d Ooh and Ah in wonder at Daddy’s knowledge and skill and nod to each other knowingly and say Now! How’s it them feckers in the Met Office and all their smartness couldn’t tell us that?
LONELINESS COVERS the earth like a blanket. It flows in the stream down through the Callows to the lake. It’s in the muck in the yard and the briars in the haggard and the empty outbuildings are bursting with it. It runs down the walls inside of the house like tears and grows on the walls outside like a poisonous choking weed. It’s in the sky and the stones and the clouds and the grass. The air is thick with it: you breathe it into your lungs and you feel it might suffocate you. It runs into hollow places like rainwater. It settles on the grass and on trees and takes their shapes and all the earth is wet with it. It has a smell, like the inside of a saucepan: scraped metal, cold and sharp. When it hits you, it feels like a rap of a hurl across your knuckles on a frosty winter’s morning in PE: sharp, shocking pain, but inside you, so it can’t be seen and no one says sorry for causing it nor asks are you okay, and no kind teacher wants to look at it and tut-tut and tell you you’ll be grand, good lad.
But you know if another man stood where you’re standing and looked at the same things he wouldn’t see it or feel it. He’d see that the fields are only wet with dew and the walls only running because the vents are blocked with dirt and grime and it’s Virginia creeper climbing the house that people used to stop to admire for its lovely, fiery colours on their passage up the yard towards the front door. So it only exists in your head. It only occupies a tiny space. Is it even an inch squared? Probably not. How big is a feeling? Not even as big as one of them atoms that the science teacher used to be on about. It’s nothing and everything at the same time.
The world doesn’t change, nor any thing in it, when someone dies. The mountains keep their still strength, the sun its heat, the rain its wetness. Blackbirds still hop and flutter about the back lawn, fighting over worms. The cat still screeches and paws at the back window for her grub. Bees still dance about the flowers and the apple trees, always searching, searching. There’s an awful cruelty in the business of nature, in the brutal sameness of things. The sky was the same blue the day after Daddy died as it was the day before; the uncaring rain didn’t stop while they buried Mother, only bucketed ignorantly down and ran in muddy rivers from the Height to the road below.
EUGENE PENROSE and the dole boys relented for a while. If they were at the pump or the memorial of an evening, they left him walk past unhindered. But he knew they’d soon tire of their nod to common decency and resume slagging and ciffling and tormenting him. Even Packie was tolerably nice to him for a few weeks. The Unthanks gave him a fine lunch every day in the bakery, and a few times Herself bent down and kissed him on top of his head while he was eating. Whenever she did, he felt like crying again. She gave him his dinner every day as well in her own kitchen for the first while, then after a week or so, when he was back working in the co-op, she gave him a plate of something every evening, wrapped in tinfoil to carry home and heat up in the microwave.
Mother had nearly never used the microwave. It was a present from one of the aunties. Mother said the old witch was too scared to use it and so dumped it on her. She said it could give you any kind of disease, how would you know? She said some lady had stood in front of one while it was working and it fried her liver and she died in screaming agony. The first time Johnsey turned it on by himself, carefully following the instructions Himself had written on an envelope for him, he stood well clear. When it pinged to tell him it was finished, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Himself said if a microwave had fried someone’s liver, it was years and years ago, when they were invented first and no seals were put on them. Now, the microwaves could not escape. Johnsey wasn’t fully convinced. He always opened and shut the door fierce fast. He didn’t want runaway microwaves flying about the place and frying bits of him.
The Unthanks had suggested he come down and stay with them. He couldn’t. It would be just too embarrassing. Among other mortifications, he would have to use their toilet. Imagine the two lovely gentle people trying to pretend they didn’t notice the terrible stink from the great ape they had invited into their home! It wouldn’t be fair on them. Probably, if he stayed there any length, he wouldn’t use the toilet at all. Like the time Daddy’s cousin from New Jersey in America and his scary blonde wife and their wild children had come to stay in the house when Johnsey was twelve. They were touring Europe, thank you very much (the cut of them, Mother said, that fella hadn’t a seat in his pants growing up and he going around now touring Europe for himself! I ask you. How’s it he wasn’t staying inside in town in the new hotel so, besides issuing himself an invitation to land his whole family on top of them if he was so swanky?), and they stayed a week and a bit and he never shat the whole time and was doubled up in agony for a finish. When they were safely gone and he finally went, his hole nearly burst open with the concrete block he had to force out through it.
Or, he could run up home. He still couldn’t imagine, though, being a guest in someone’s house, even the Unthanks who he had known and loved dearly since childhood. He would be a big, smelly, sweaty nuisance and they would hate the sight of him and want him to leave. Johnsey didn’t even know how they made themselves be so nice to him during his daily lunch.
JOHNSEY HAD GOTTEN used to being sad after Daddy died. This extra sadness was just like taking more weight forking hay: you built it up gradually so that when your burden increased, your muscles were ready and you would not collapse under it. Mother had spent two and a bit years wrapped in a cloak of sadness, hardly talking and, he saw now, only waiting around until her time came to join Daddy. How could she have just upped and left him like that? Granted, he was no great prize of a chap; he had never given her any reason to be below in the Post Office boasting about him like some women who would talk out loud in the queue for fear anyone would not accidentally overhear about their sons who were doing Masterses, or just finishing their accountancy exams, or were abroad in Australia for a year, sure didn’t he deserve a bit of fun after studying so hard for years, blah de blah de blah.