The Lost Souls' Reunion (16 page)

Still he could not give up. His body had been broken up and his mind had been broken up. Each day he spent in the dark boxroom, denied the irregular shape of the world, he wished for life to end.

So out of his brokenness came the heart-driven task of piecing together the map of existence and the world it had taken place in. The curtains were his Asia – their shape presenting shadows and patterns, which, if he stared hard enough for long enough, would offer something in the way of memories. The ridges of the beige candlewick bedspread became the ridges of desert in the worn, old land of Africa and the many lives it offered. Lives in lush jungle, on open plains and lives on relentless sand. The three separate walls were bare but for the memories he had hung on them of India, the Americas, the frozen reaches of the polar caps and Siberia and Central Asia.

All this world he had lived in and not belonged to.

Footsteps could be heard. Thomas's fear rose and he felt the ache in his frozen side as he twisted and shifted to fit himself into the corner furthest away from the door.

‘Father,' Jonah Cave's long shadow entered the room before him. He threw back the bedspread. ‘You have soiled yourself again.'

Since Thomas had lain in the dark boxroom his bowels had almost ceased to work. For this Jonah punished him. It was Jonah's considered task to spare his father no shame. Jonah wanted his father to remember all that he could not remember, all he had not been there to witness: the growing of Jonah, his child, the stretching of his bones towards the sky.

They had been fatherless bones. Jonah had grown tall like his father, so his small spirit rattled around inside a tall emptiness. When he moved there was a hollow echo in the cavern beneath his ribcage, which his father now heard.

Thomas did not weep when Jonah made the pain come, for even now he was not a man given to emotion. He cried single tears not for what his son inflicted, but for what had been inflicted on his son in his absence and because the time to put that right was long past. He found in the box of feelings he had opened that regret was the first to jump and grab him.

Sometimes Jonah would decide to turn on the main light, the bedroom light, which was not welcomed by Thomas, who did not like the ruin of his own wasted body – the skin had turned grey without daylight. Sores had formed on all points that rested on the bed, and when Jonah pulled back the sheets to survey this, the smell rose and Thomas closed his eyes.

Jonah's face did not light up at the sight of his father's wasting, he stared at it and occasionally he would nod as if to say he understood it, as if he were an artist studying a work in progress for clues as to where it might lead.

Thomas made efforts not to catch the eyes of Jonah, eyes that were not like his, in a face that shared no similar feature to his own. He saw plenty there of a woman whose face he had purposely forgotten.

The food that Jonah provided on a daily basis was serviceable. It served to keep the father awake and alive to the son. The son gave bread and the father ate bread, dry with a slab of dull cheese, the life processed out of it.

He dreaded Jonah's violence less than his tears and he dreaded Jonah's tears less than Jonah's emptiness. It was a void he had helped create as carelessly as he had once coupled with Jonah's mother and married Jonah's mother.

‘Love me,' Patricia Cave née Nolan had said, and he had loved her with his eyes on the wall.

‘Don't leave me,' Patricia Cave née Nolan said when he had found her under another man's heaving. He had not been hurt, the feeling had been one of relief, one of a way forward opening that did not include her or Jonah. The child who was not even his own but might have been.

Jonah was two when Thomas left. The ring that he took off on that same day had not made a mark. Thomas made one or two visits in the first year after his departure. But as Jonah grew so did the knowledge that he was not Thomas's son.

He forgot the boy who was not his own and simply sent money to Patricia and Jonah once a month and entry forms for good schools and fees.

Jonah was five when Patricia wrote.

‘Help me.'

When she drank she wrote and when she dried out she wrote. No mention was made of Jonah's progress, or name.

‘Your son needs new shoes, your son needs a uniform, your son needs money for a school trip, your son needs…'

Thomas forgot the boy's name and soon his existence, only the standing order that still left the account each month reminded him that Jonah still lived. Now he and regret visited many places together, including the short-lived days of his marriage.

For Thomas, then, there was no question that he had not behaved honourably. Even when Patricia died of her drinking, he had continued to send money to Jonah. The child had done with the money what the mother had done with it because the mother was the only one there to teach him.

Thomas Cave had reached seventy before he had learned his deeds were not honourable. Then the day arrived to teach him about that and much more besides.

*   *   *

It was a month after his birthday, a birthday that he had marked alone in his small and comfortless cottage in the emptiness of a western townland.

His chosen emptiness and isolation had near killed him when the white blindness and burning pain had shot through him and the cold numb after it. There was no one around to hear his cries but the black crows that answered them.

He lay unconscious for a long while and when he woke there was a bright sky, then a dark sky. Then he saw no sky, but heard only the sounds of his life disappearing into light that he did not find peaceful, but in time all he could do was go with the whiteness and he left the body behind. But the postman found it while it still breathed in the grey-white dawn.

The postman prided himself on his role as link between outside world and forgotten people of the countryside, had delivered valuables and letters and, on one occasion, even a baby. After that he decided to do a first aid course.

So it was with great interest he stumbled on the whispering shadow of a human being turned blue with the lack of breath. And he knew how to pipe air into the losing lungs and splint the broken wrist. He lifted the twisted form into the back of his van, though it took a long while to shift the giant. To leave the man for any length of time was to let him die.

He transported Thomas Cave in his green van, on sacks of undelivered mail, to a hospital twenty-five miles away, whistling cheerfully in the knowledge that he would surely secure the Postman of the Year award for services above and beyond the duties of mail delivery.

*   *   *

So Thomas Cave was carried on the whinges of men and women who did not get their post that day, or for three days later in the year when the postman travelled to Dublin to receive his commendation at a special awards ceremony presided over by the Minister for Post and Telegraphs himself.

Thomas Cave was a known figure, a winner of many meaningless awards.

So a picture of Thomas, bedridden, was published in the papers alongside the smiling and rigid snap, badly composed, of a proud postman and a bored minister with his mind on lunch.

‘Photographer saved by Postman', the clippings would not have a chance to gather dust in the postman's scrapbook, so often would they be taken out and shown to canvassing politicians and door-to-door collectors and deliverers.

Those clippings brought an unknown man to Thomas Cave's bedside, an unknown man who told him he was his son. Thomas knew on first sight that Jonah Cave was not his blood son, but he was the son of his experience. For both of them were tall and both of them had the small, rattling spirit of non-feeling.

The hospital was only too delighted to sign the care of the surly patient, after some months of no improvement, over to his only living relative, who took pleasure in transporting him to the nameless suburban dwelling of 45 St Peter's Road. It was the house that Thomas had left Jonah to rot in, Jonah told Thomas as he pushed the wheelchair through the gate and up the garden of weeds and neglect.

Jonah closed the door between Thomas Cave and the world.

20 ∼ The Same Love

T
HE SAME LOVE
Thomas Cave felt grew in me, though I had no name for it. I knew a horrendous excitement that robbed me of sleep and knew a calm that could help me dream standing up.

I did not know what to do with all that I was feeling, just as he did not. The tasks of caring for him in my daily work were tasks of loving. I had his hair cut and I found him clothes that never fitted but at least brought living back to him. I grew used to seeing jumpers that came only to mid-arm length and so did he. We would laugh about them.

‘Look at me, poking out here,' he would smile. ‘There's just too much of me.'

‘There is,' I would laugh, and want to cry at the same time. I would want to ask – how come you came with no shoes, Thomas? Where are your clothes? You speak like a man who should have plenty of them and good ones at that. What has happened to you?

But I felt the thin line of pride that was in him was all that he had. I could not take it from him with questions of how he came to this. Though I did not know it, he looked at me and thought the same.

Whatever we had to tell we would tell in our own good time. We were silent and the silence brought the questions and the questions brought more interest. My last act each day would be to fold down his bed and to straighten out the little he had on his locker.

He would thank me for it with eyes that looked away as I was doing it. A man, I knew, who had never had a woman do for him. I put a picture on his wall. A sad and tired thing left sitting in a cupboard, which featured ill-drawn mountains and a careless sea. But he looked at the picture like it was a masterwork.

‘Thank you, Sive,' he said without a smile, ‘for bringing something of outside to me.'

The things I did for Thomas were not noted as unusual. I did the same for the other men.

In the dayroom Mauritius only allowed each man three smokes.

‘One for morning, one for afternoon, one for bedtime.'

The men had grown in a time when smoking was a way of life. It was the one pleasure they had left. Drinking alcohol was allowed on Christmas Day and Easter Sunday and on the birthday of each resident. Those that did not smoke were given chocolate. Three squares. As soon as their visitors had left Mauritius made it her personal business to gather from the men everything that was not allowed in the way of luxuries. These were kept in a ration cupboard and doled out by the matron herself. No other hand touched them. The men complained regularly about this, but she would reply, ‘What would you prefer – to eat and drink this in one go or to have it as God intended and recommended. Moderation in all things!'

And her soft, sensible shoes would carry her away on noiseless determination while the men grumbled and said, ‘Half of it will go missing.'

The men got a small allowance each week, but there was nothing to spend it on. Each month Sister Mauritius organized a tombola, for which the men bought tickets. The prizes were religious objects, left over luxuries from residents who had died before getting through their rations, personal effects that relatives had not claimed. The allowances tended to be squandered on this one event, which offered the only spontaneity in the lives of the men. Most of the men had a religious object in the cubicle. There were more statues of Mary and various saints to be won than bars of Cadburys and packets of Players or Sweet Afton.

One day I saw Mr Black press money into Peter's hand and Peter refuse it.

‘I was told if I was caught again bringing things in I would be sent out. Now I can't risk it. I'll give you one of mine,' he said, trying to placate the grimacing Black whose good hand clenched the wheelchair and whose twisted mouth spat back, ‘That cunt Mauritius says I can have no more ciggies till I take my chance at the fucking tombola. I've won six Virgin Marys in a row and they're not even good-looking ones. I can't go another day without me fags, Peter – I'm gumming. I'm dying I am! I'm a forty a day man. What can I do on three smokes a day? I might as well smoke them with me arse.'

Peter shook his head and carried on out the door.

‘I'm sorry. She said she'd take my room off me and give it to Ted. She checks my pockets and my drawers and lockers to make sure I'm not sneaking the things in. She says…'

‘Ah, she says, she says, my hairy hole! Are you scared of an old dry cunt like her? I'm not. If I had me legs I'd be out of here.'

‘Well, you don't,' Peter lost patience. ‘You've only one and I have both. The walk into town is my only outing. Without that I might as well be dead.'

‘Ah y'are anyway!' Black sighed. ‘Give us a bit of your chocolate then. Or a sucky sweet.'

‘You're allowed neither. You're diabetic for God's sake.'

‘And if I had one of my needles now I'd jab it in your arse instead of me own,' Black roared at the fast-departing Peter. ‘What use have you for legs? You run round in circles with them. If I was a fitter man I'd be gone from here. Not hiding scared like you ye…'

I came up to Black and put my hands on his wheelchair handles to take him into the dayroom.

‘What're you at? Leave me where I am!'

‘What do you smoke?' I asked.

There was a short silence, then an urgent request for Players, untipped, as many boxes as I could manage.

The next day three of the men found their way to asking for a box of Liquorice Allsorts, tobacco and papers and the
Racing Post.

I did not go to town myself for the requests, because word would get out that the black one, as I was called, was bringing stuff to the men up above in the home. Sister Mauritius would have heard in turn. I got Eddie to go in once a week and get it. The men hid everything like prisoners of war.

The downturn in demand for tombola tickets on St Michael's ward was noted, but could not be pinned on anything. The discovery of chocolate in the sluice cisterns, caused the plumber some consternation. Alcohol supplies were delivered to the locker of Ted Leyland, who took them gladly, being partial to the odd drop of Powers whiskey. Mr Black organized it with him.