Authors: Jude Cook
Just stopped for a bacon sandwich and a cuppa at one of those all-night hutches that look like garden sheds on wheels. I literally stumbled across it. And a moment ago I was lost. I left Merrion Street and turned into the great long curve of North Street, which, if I remember correctly, will take me over the motorway. I am on the right track now. It took me a while, but I made it. These all-night transport caffs are always lots of fun. The characters you meet at four on Christmas morning, I tell you! After the tattoo competition and the ragged fight over who gets the last onions on their hot dog, I leave the company of my fellow humans and stand apart in contemplation. There’s not much else to do but sip my boiling tea, swathed in the smells of grilling. Time is indeed behaving oddly. I feel out of time—above it slightly, like Boethius posited God must be for the universe and predestination to work. If this is the case, then it means I have become God in the time it took to walk from Leeds station to this blighted van parked on a sliproad somewhere. And this is the kind of thought I can do without.
I hear the drone of cars. I must be very close. This must be it, the motorway.
Once across the bridge (with its temptations to hurl myself over) I feel brightly optimistic that I’m almost there. Keep passing those open windows, I tell myself—how could I cheat my mother out of a last meeting? Also, I can’t tell you how surprised I was to pass a Byron Street a while back. I wonder why mother never told me about it. Well, I was always Brian to her. I take my map out again and see I am just around the corner. The sky above is that broiling blue of nowhere-time, Eliot’s uncertain hour before dawn. My watch says six a.m. I wonder how it’s taken me so long? Voila! Here we are—Skinner Street. All the houses look the same, so I have to be careful. I don’t want to knock on the wrong door. At this time of night, that would be like waking the dead. The grass on the approach to her place is dark and squelchy underfoot. Yes, I remember how the grass runs out and gives way to a long path. Damn, they all look so similar in the dark. I try my cigarette lighter but it’s gone, kaput, dead. Ah, ha! I knew it was around here somewhere. I look up at the sky and notice the moon above a spire, big and ocular behind sprinting clouds. I stand before my mother’s front door. Usefully, I don’t have to go by house number. The big marble doors on her street all have the names of their occupants chiselled in definite lettering. Hers reads: In Loving Memory, Sinead Mary Maguire, 1939-1999.
The funeral was held at the end of July. I remember the train racing in splintering light past stretches of water so blue they seemed to belong in the Mediterranean. Distant rows of poplars flamed in the strong light, the sky full of surreal architectural clouds. Time seemingly motionless. Every mile or so, a corn field blazed richly up a slope as the carriages streamed under dappled canopies of trees. A sensation of farms, towns, villages, cities passing in quick succession kept my mind from the ultimate destination, the church on Skinner Street, where the small pine coffin awaited surrounded by men in charcoal suits.
The cancer had started as an unobtrusive lump in her throat. About the size of a green bean; but hard, very hard, like a bullet; unyielding to the touch. She had been ill that night in the Indian restaurant, but hadn’t told anyone. Characteristically, with the wisdom drawn deep from a life of suffering, of divorce and separation, of rash action and prolonged consequence, she chose to keep this part of her private life private. A morning like any other had revealed it, in front of the grey mirror in the tinctured light of early dawn, before the routine day in the classroom, only months away from retirement. Arranging her hair into its bun so the scarf could be tightened around it, her fingers had tugged at the necklace that had become snagged in the silk material. And there it was. So revelatory, so surprising, so hard, like an amulet under the skin. How had she never noticed it before? Now her fingers had found it, she couldn’t stop worrying the dark bead under the pale Irish skin. What was it made of? What colour was it? How long had it been there? Was it black? Was it death? Finally, irrefutably death? Panicked, she had dropped the scarf and phoned her GP, thinking all the time: this is it, this is how it ends, not a heart attack, not a speeding car, but here with the discovery of a rock-like, unappeasable impostor in her own body
They operated a fortnight later, and showed her the tumour in the kidney dish. It was indeed black, redolent of death; as menacing as the voided sleep of eternity. For a couple of months she was in the clear. But the doctor’s warnings had proved correct. The cancer had spread, like a multiplying tar throughout her body, down to her lungs and diaphragm. A corrupting inimical progression, invisible on the exterior. And her with no one to go home to, an empty dinner table and double bed in her Yorkshire semi, washed up there after the rapids of life—no one but her errant son, now married to a difficult half-Spanish woman, and her younger daughter, fathered by a man she no longer saw, whose very face, the face that had at times seemed to her as handsome as a Vikings, was now banished from every photograph album, every conversation, even her own memory. And those vital energies, which seemed to vibrate her long aquiline nose as she spoke, now quelled by a cowardly disease, one that says it’s gone, never to darken your door again, when all the while it is still there inside wreaking havoc, turning you bald via chemotherapy, giving you pain that you hadn’t experienced since childbirth, killing you by degrees.
As the train neared Leeds that summer day, I thought of her alone in her house, on the dark mornings as her strength failed, as the cards from work colleagues collected on her simple dresser, like cormorants on an outcrop of rock, until they were all moved to her hospital bedside, along with her favourite books.
Sarah was the first person I saw on arrival, suffering terribly from hayfever if I remember correctly. It was hard to tell the real tears from the deceptive ones, as it had been in Lille with my father as he chopped the onions. I gave her a tissue and she said, ‘Thanks Byron, you’re always so well prepared.’ Once outside, after the numbing eulogies, the priest dark-eyed and deep-voiced, we watched the surprisingly small yellowish box as it was lowered into the grave. The earth was thrown in, great handfuls containing small stones, and smelling richly of the ground. The light came streaming through the yews, causing an old friend of my mother’s to express a worry that she may get sunburnt.
At least, I thought my mother had endured an empty bed … In the modest chapel, with its monochromatic mourners, there had been a number of people I didn’t recognise. The pews were crammed—mostly men and women in their sixties and seventies, with the ravaged, hacked-about faces of anyone who’s seen three-score-and-ten; plain-as-spades Yorkshire faces, black suits tight under armpits, dewlaps resting on crisp collars, all the accoutrements of mortal difficulty in their eyes, skin, cancelled expressions. After a reading, by my half-sister, of Tennyson, she rejoined me at the front, the buoyant cadences of Vivaldi’s ‘Summer’ filling the church. She nudged me in the side and pointed to a tall, head-bowed man with abundantly healthy head of dark hair that seemed at odds with his deeply creased face. This, apparently, was Benjamin Brown, with whom my mother had shared her last years. A decent, hardworking man neither Sarah nor Sinead had informed me of. I was flabbergasted. Not only at how little I knew of my own mother, how little I had enquired, how unobservant I had been in her house, the hospital and, finally, in the hospice that held her cradled form in her last days, but also astonished that I was the last to know anything. And also startled at my own feeling of happiness in knowing, in the end, she may have been happy.
The box gone into its beastly hole in the earth, I lingered with Sarah in the relentless glare. A towering goldmine of a day: the azured vault stretching to the near horizon, the light touching the leaves with its gentle fire; the full-bloom hedgerows unbearably blue with lavender, the indolent summer breeze speaking of wild fertility. And no rain anywhere to remind me of her rain-coloured eyes.
As Sarah gripped my arm ever tighter, her defiant eyes staring sightlessly into the ground, the axing finality of it all almost knocking me off-balance, I thought of Mandy by her mother’s grave that chilly day. The barren afternoon I stood as she laid a wreath and spoke to her mum as if she were alive under the soil, a matter of feet away. With me enduring all the pangs of ‘up here’. Well, now a kind of parity had been reached between us, I could understand her better. Mandy, whom I knew to be wrong for me even as we kissed forbiddenly for the first time like Paolo and Francesca, the sunlight pouring through the open sashes. Mandy who would eventually shop me to the cops for supposedly knocking her about when they were called that night of our last awful fight. Mandy, exigent in the extreme, a victim when wrong, a martyr when right. Mandy, that splendid actress and manager, full of zinging efficiency and purpose, who would use those qualities in the professionalism of her betrayal, though I didn’t know it then. Mandy—that festering lily! That Cressida! And yet … until you encounter the same pain as someone, you have no idea who they really are. Because that pain, that bereavement, becomes part of them, like the ossification of bones, or the indelible spilling of ink onto paper. The subject and the abstract emotion are merged for good. If I ever came close to forgiving her it was then, by that gaping hole, into which rushes all our projections and hypothetical conjecture about what, if anything, comes next. The hole next to which it is proper to feel the torment of things never said, of thanks never given, of time never shared. The black rectangular gouge in the ground by which we contemplate the bottomless mystery of what it is to be alive, to be in motion, to be assailable by the world we’re born unwillingly into.
Sarah tugged my sleeve and whispered through her sobs, ‘David’s here.’ I turned and nodded hello to her meaty-faced boyfriend—still slightly dog-like and in his element in a situation that didn’t require humour. He was accompanied by a woman I hadn’t seen for years. My mother’s friend Barbara, or Babs, with whom I used to stay at her child-infested council house in Stevenage. Sure enough, she was still the largest woman I had ever seen, with her folds like black cushions absorbing the light of the unforgiving sun; she too was weeping uncontrollably. Seeing her there made me think of Delph in his seventies prime, and feel for once a measure of
his
pain: walking into a marriage with a child he knew no other way to discipline other than to hit, as he in turn, so my mother had told me, had been hit by his father. And later, desperate for a family with a woman nearing her forties, eager for something meaningful in his life; excluded, marginalised, playing second-fiddle to somebody else’s soap opera, the product of another relationship. It could have all worked out so well for everybody, if he hadn’t been held powerless in the grip of uncontrollable appetites. If he had had an ounce of mitigating intelligence to inform him of
what he was doing
with the emotions of other people, not just my mother’s. If, when he had forced Sinead into having a child by him, he hadn’t taken for granted her unimpeachable sacrifice.
Behind me, I was aware that Sarah, David and Babs were talking softly. But I didn’t register a word—all I heard was Sarah’s soft, confident voice like a bird singing in the solitude of a deep wood. Instead, I stood with the sun idiotically and unsympathetically warming my face, staring into the dark hole, and saying in my head all the unsayable, unrefinable things that come from love.
It all looks very different now, the graveyard, in the darkness, with its long indistinct path, the heavy clouds rolling above, the first glimmers of dawn in the sky—although the latter could be an optical illusion. It occurs to me, as I trace my finger along the wet grooves of my mother’s name on the stone, that the blue-black void of the sky is similar to the sight my mother’s soul is experiencing. In other words, nothingness. If that’s the case, I really have nothing to fear. Maybe I should give you, tired reader, the satisfaction you deserve and blow my head off right away. Maybe. But first some last words.
If I glance around I can just make out the shadowy presences of tombs: Victorian family plots with their carved angels missing heads or wings; long slabs with information desecrated by moss and the vandal’s aerosol; newer stones like my mothers, the black marble catching glints from the moon which journeys fast above, behind intermittent clouds. Nearer still is a Jewish grave, with its touching pebbles arranged in arcane patterns; rain-wet, devoid of the wilting flowers deemed appropriate by the gentile. I surprise myself by how at home I feel here, with time itself seemingly arrested, my heart broken, yet brokenly living on. There is a clarity to everything around me, the stones, the blades of grass silver in the moonlight, the beached diggers, the crisp shadow of the church on the blue ground—although, it has to be said, a lot of the graves look poorly maintained. Shame on those relatives. I hadn’t thought death could look so ugly. But predominantly there is the feeling that I have finally arrived at Now, that finally I am living in the present tense, with all impetus to future action cancelled, all lust for revenge dissipated. Ah, revenge. The moment for actual revenge has passed. I let Rudi and Mandy live—the latter mainly because now, and at that summer funeral with the July sun outrageously at odds with my gravid heart, I have a measure of how she felt. I too wondered, as I wonder now, whether Sinead is watching me, like Mandy imagined her mother was. Now I know what it feels like to wish for a mother’s touch of deep redemptive tenderness and know, finally, that none will ever come again. No, out of all the feelings or naive notions about human behaviour that brought me here, revenge is the worst, the lowest. Because, although reputed to be a dish best served cold, it resonates for me with the casual violence of the world—like the spear in Christ’s side—easily meted out, but taking centuries to correct. So, any kind of real retribution will always be off the menu. However, if you abuse people emotionally or physically in this life you can expect to be revenged within the pages of fiction. It’s the least you can expect. In fact, you (whoever you are) should be fucking honoured—think of Dickens’s villains, immortalised with an affectionate hatred. That’s a small price to pay—nothing to the foaming calumny of a wife, the blows from a man who pretended to be your dad, the sexual abuse of a headmaster.