They beefed her up a bit and let her go. A couple of months later we got a card from Amsterdam. I don’t know where she got the money. The flat was all paid up till Christmas and I might have taken it myself, but one look at my mother was enough. I could not do a thing to hurt her more.
Then one day I saw a woman in the street who looked like my gran, just before she died. I thought it was my gran for a minute: out of the hospice somehow ten years later and walking towards St Stephen’s Green. Actually, I thought she was dead and I was terrified — literally petrified — of what she had come back to say to me. Our eyes met, and hers were wicked with some joke or other. It was Serena, of course. And her teeth by now were yellow as butter.
I stopped her and tried to talk, but she came over all adult and suggested we go for coffee. She said Brian had followed her somehow to Amsterdam. She looked over her shoulder. I think she was hallucinating by now. But there was something so fake about all this grown-up stuff, I was glad when we said, ‘Goodbye, so.’ When I looked after her in the street, there she was, my sister, the little toy walk of her, the way she held her neck — Serena running away from some harmless game at the age of seven, too proud to cry.
The phone call from the hospital came six weeks later. There was something wrong with her liver. After that it was kidneys. And after that she died. Her yellow teeth were falling out by the end, and she was covered in baby-like down. All her beauty was gone — because, even though she was my sister, I have to say that Serena was truly, radiantly beautiful in her day.
So, she died. There is no getting away from something like that. You can’t recover. I didn’t even try. The first year was a mess and after that our lives were just punctured, not even sad — just less, just never the same again.
But it is those ninety-one days I think about — the first time she left, when it was all ahead of us, and no one knew. The summer I was twenty-one and Serena was seventeen, I woke up in the morning and I had the room to myself. She was mysteriously gone from the bed across the room, she was absolutely gone from the downstairs sofa, and the bathroom was free for hours at a time. Gone. Not there. Vamoosed. My mother, especially, was infatuated by her absence. It is not enough to say she fought Serena’s death, even then — she was intimate with it. To my mother, my sister’s death was an enemy’s embrace. They were locked together in the sitting room, in the kitchen, in the hall. They met and talked, and bargained and wept. She might have been saying, ‘Take me. Take me, instead.’ But I think — you get that close to it, you bring it into your home, everybody’s going to lose.
So, it was no surprise to us when, after ninety-one days, Serena walked back into the house looking the way she did. The only surprise was Brian, this mooching, ordinary, slightly bitter man, who watched her so helplessly and answered our questions one by one.
I met him some time after the funeral in a nightclub and we ended up crying at a little round table in the corner, and shouting over the music. We both were a bit drunk, so I can’t remember who made the first move. It was a tearful, astonishing kiss. All the sadness welled up into my face and into my lips. We went out for a while, as though we hoped something good could come of it all — a little love. But it was a faded sort of romance, a sort of second thought. Two ordinary people, making do. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mind that he had loved Serena, because of course I loved her too. And her ghost did not bother us: try as we might, it did not even appear. But I tell you, I have a child now and who does she look like? Serena. The same hungry, petulant look, and beautiful, too. So that is my penance I suppose, that is the thing I have to live with now.
I am trying to stop this story, but it just won’t end. Because years later I saw a report in the newspaper about a man who murdered his wife. The police said he was worried she would find out about his financial problems, and so he torched the house when she was asleep. He made extraordinary preparations for the crime. He called out the gas board twice to complain about a non-existent leak and he started redecorating so there would be plenty of paint and white spirit in the hall. He wrote a series of threatening letters to himself, on a typewriter that he later dumped in the canal. I read the article carefully, not just for the horror of it, but because his name was Brian Dempsey. The name of the broody, handsome man who had slept with my sister — and also with me. Which sounds a bit frank, but that was the way it was. Brian. I could not get those threatening letters out of my head. He started writing them two whole months before he set the fire. I thought about those eight weeks he had spent with her, complaining about the dinner or his lack of clean shirts, annoyed with her because she did not, would not, realise that she was going to die. I even wanted to visit him in prison before the trial, just to look at him, just to say, ‘Brian.’ When the case finally came to court, there was a picture in the paper, and I thought he looked old, and terribly fat. I looked and looked at the eyes, until they turned into newspaper dots. Then, when I read the court case, I realised it was another Brian Dempsey altogether, a man originally from Athlone.
That was last month, but even now, I find myself holding my breath in empty rooms. Yesterday, I set a bottle of Chanel No. 5 on the dressing table and took the lid off for a while. I keep thinking, not about Brian, but about those ninety-one days, my mother half crazed, my father feigning boredom, and me, with my own bedroom for the first time in years. I think of Serena’s absence, how astonishing it was, and all of us sitting looking at each other, until the door opened and she walked in, half-dead, with an ordinary, living man in tow. And I think that we made her up somehow, that we imagined her. And him too, maybe — that he made her up, too. And I think that if we made her up now, if she walked into the room, we would kill her, somehow, all over again.
PILLOW
‘Alison,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘What is a homosexual?’
I did not know what to say.
‘It’s a man who loves another man.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what is it?’
‘They are in love,’ I said.
‘But how?’ she said. ‘How are they in love?’ And I thought I knew what she meant then. I said they put their things up each others’ bottoms, though I used the word ‘anuses’, to make it sound more biological.
‘Ah,’ she said and I tried to see what she was thinking.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
But I didn’t feel right about it, so when the next day Karen says to me, ‘What are you telling Li about gay sex for?’ I felt awful already.
‘She doesn’t even know the other thing,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t even know what people do.’ Then she gave me a very hard time. She did not try to make me feel better, at all. I think that is one of the things about Americans: when they decide to blame you for something, they really want you to know that you are to blame.
Karen had requested me from the college accommodations office. She told me this when I arrived; that they liked ‘an ethnic mix’, so she had asked for someone Irish. I was a bit jet-lagged. I said I’d be Irish for her of a Tuesday, but could I have the rest of the week off? Actually, I couldn’t believe this place, the size of it. When they said ‘dorm’ I expected rows of beds. I put my suitcase down and asked when there was hot water for a shower. Karen didn’t understand. She said that there never wasn’t hot water, unless something was broken — the tap had an ‘H’ on it because the water that came out of it was ‘hot’.