The Lost Souls' Reunion (19 page)

So the council sent letters and the letters were ignored until one day the residents marched
en masse
to the house, armed with paint, trimmers and strimmers and lawnmowers and the like. They got busy in their rightness and righting – they worked, painted, chipped, primmed and preened at the front until it appeared to be like all others. All the while not a sound from the inhabitants, though it was a Saturday afternoon and the television was on and they had to be home.

For an entire decade they neighboured and laboured while Patricia Cave spat blame on the long absence of Thomas.

When the neighbours found her lifeless body they tidied it up quickly.

*   *   *

It was a solitary funeral without flowers, and the lost body of lost soul Patricia Cave was put into a grave marked with a white cross that only Jonah visited.

All this Jonah told Thomas and Thomas heard, but chose not to speak. To reply that he had faithfully sent money in the place of love for almost forty years was no reply at all.

‘Why did you marry her?' Jonah asked. ‘Why did you take her on? Why did you have me? Why did you leave me with her? Why did you never come back?'

Thomas did not answer that Patricia had been pretty and she had been an actress. He had met her at parties and she had always been gay at them in a brittle way, her eyes always bright, too bright now when he looked back. His eyes had always been piercing and that made some afraid of him and others distant. His own mother and father were cold to him and warm to each other.

His father was a bank manager who painted and visited galleries at weekends. Thomas had gone into photography because it offered a training wage straight away and because he could not paint but wished to please his father into noticing him. His father noticed only that photography was a poor imitation of painting.

His father noticed that Thomas had not got a job as a bank manager and would never be able to live respectably. Thomas's mother shook her head sadly because she agreed with her husband that their only child should be respectable.

So Thomas had grown tall and mournful.

He reached thirty and had not loved and was not aware of being sad, only of being missing in some way from the world. Patricia's lips were glossed to a wet inviting. He took her picture; she kissed him softly in thanks. She took off her clothes and walked naked into the bedroom. He did not follow. She came back out and found him, sitting, staring at his own hands. She called his name and he looked up and came to her.

At the beginning it went well.

This woman poured over him like cream on tart and he loved the easiness about her. He did not realize that her easiness hid a similar aloneness to his own. He was an innocent and he did not know her golden honey smile was for many a man and came from golden whiskey that she drank neat.

Shared melancholy brought them together in a frenzied way at the beginning. The new reality came only when she had given him her all softness and he landed on the hard edges of her despair. She would go missing and come back and weep and he would look at her and not know what to do. She could never say why she was crying and he could never ask. They did not live together. It was not respectable.

Thomas knew that Patricia was not respectable, but he did not think less of her for that. He was glad to have a woman who had come to meet him, since he could never manage to go to a woman.

Even with her tears and disappearances it was still good to have comfort.

Then she fell pregnant, though he had been fastidious in his use of French letters.

He married her because he believed he had taken something from her. And he expected he would not meet any woman he would love so what was the harm in having a wife and child? They would be company at least.

After they married, with no parents present, hers dead, his disapproving, they lived on as they had before. He visited her in their home for his dinners and for a bed when he was not working and he had no say in the home or its running. She cooked and someone else cleaned and they got along until she grew big. With that she grew demanding and he was at a loss.

So he tried, and she grew more demanding still and one day she was lying belly up, swollen stomach pointing skywards, blind with drink and tears.

‘I married a stone,' she said. ‘I have a rock for a husband all right. A stone he is.'

He had asked her to come, please, out of the cold and she had not come until he pulled her in, screeching her lack of love for him and how it was not his baby she carried at all, but a bigger, braver man's.

The next day she woke and did not remember. There was no talk between them in the days that followed.

Her pains began and she bore a child, trembling cold, sickly with the need for milk mixed with whiskey. The doctor had words with him and the nurses tut tutted and he looked at them all with his piercing eyes and they avoided his and could not tell him what to do.

He asked her to stop drinking so much and she drank vodka so he could no longer smell it.

He got a commission to photograph a war and he went and when he came back she did not even bother to hide the bottles. But the paid help minded the child like her own and Thomas paid her for the kindness.

She left when Thomas Cave left Patricia.

In two years, Thomas could see well that Jonah was not his but had the look of another man he had often seen in the party days. So he decided it was more honourable to leave than to stay and hate a child. He could provide for him at a distance.

So that is how it was. Now the effects of that provision had been made apparent in the small boxroom of 45 Peter's Road where Jonah Cave had slept and grown without a father.

Patricia Cave had shown Jonah a picture one day in the newspaper.

‘Your father,' she said, ‘took this. He is very good at what he does.'

And a half smile came to her lips and Jonah reached up to touch it. She put the paper between them and turned away. From then on Jonah Cave looked for his father's name in old newspapers and magazines from the Calcia and vodka shop.

He kept ring binders of his father's work and pasted the press photos in and waited for the day when he would turn up to take him away from her.

But over the years he had learned, Thomas Cave was not coming.

*   *   *

Thomas would have liked to put a hand on Jonah. He would have liked to say to Jonah that he was not his father but should and could have been, and nothing could be done about it now.

Sometimes Jonah took a long time to come to the room and Thomas thought on those occasions that he might be able to die without further incident. But Jonah knew when to return, how to keep Thomas on the same thin point where life and death are one and the same.

Jonah had never felt more alive. He kept Thomas alive and gave him the Calcia cheese and told him it would always be like this.

Then the standing order stopped. Thomas had always renewed it yearly and increased the amount according to inflation. Now, without Thomas to sign there was no money for happy cheese. Jonah would have to let him go. Jonah made preparations as to where – scouring the surrounding areas for a suitable hell for the once active man, a chance to live among those similarly desecrated.

Thomas was glad to give Jonah all he had. In return a deal was struck with the money-conscious Sister Mauritius of St Manis. Jonah found it a miserable place for an errant and absent father. Thomas Cave lost everything he had and gained a set of ring binders with his work pasted in them.

Just before Thomas was loaded into the ambulance, Jonah had said to him, ‘I will come and visit.'

23 ∼ The Beginning of One

T
HE CARD OF THE
R
IVERS
– the joining of two and the beginning of one.

My mother's whole life now was Eddie, waiting for him, imagining when he was not there that he had left her. Eddie was a simple man, sometimes he felt he was swimming in a bottomless sea with no sign of land, so strong was her need.

Yet she would not marry him. She would only love him with everything she had.

They walked and walked wide and far now, as if by walking they would walk away from themselves and what had happened and just have each other. Carmel now a shadow woman.

Only on the walks did the world of before surround Carmel and Eddie. Carmel's ways were odd ways and Eddie could not stop himself from feeling afraid when the Scarna people saw them. He took his fear and turned it into proposals. He wanted to be inside her life and not out of it, so as to keep her truly safe.

‘If we married, Carmel, we would not need to be apart,' he said in the long summer after a long time of not mentioning it. ‘You would not need to spend hours at the end of the laneway, waiting for me to come.'

For that is what she did, even though he had told her the night before what time he would finish his work and what time he would come, and she had nodded her understanding. The next day, soon after breakfast, she walked to the end of the laneway and waited like a faithful dog for the sighting that would gladden her heart.

‘I think it is this place has her this way,' Eddie said to Myrna while Carmel slept on the old bony couch. It had been too cold to walk that evening, an evening that had brought with it a bite that had been missing since the first days of summer. It was all the harsher for being unexpected.

‘I think she's the way she is because of all she has suffered here, it must be full of memories for her,' Eddie whispered, as he looked for reasons to take her away from it to his own place which he was missing. It had more comforts than this. It had a television and sports results and all the things with which he had filled up his solitary life while Carmel had been gone. It had been a lonely and comfortable life.

Myrna took herself up out of the chair by the fire and came over to put a hand on Carmel's forehead, stroking it. In the soft light the worn lines fell away.

‘She will not leave here,' Myrna advised Eddie. ‘It is where she belongs. In the town she will be broken in no time.'

‘Well,' he flustered. ‘We can't go on like this.'

He felt uncomfortable in Myrna's presence then and went home before Carmel woke. When she did wake and he was not there Carmel walked out into the night, wordlessly and without heeding Myrna's urging to remain, to wait for him. I found her when I came home from work.

‘He might be back yet,' she explained to me.

‘It is too cold for him to be back,' I answered with shortness. I wanted to be in out of the cold and I wanted Carmel with me.

‘I might call on him,' she said. ‘I might go into the town and meet him.'

‘We'll get you a jumper first.'

I knew well she would not go, for she had never gone into the town since she had come home.

Later, when Carmel was in bed, I was sharp with Myrna for leaving her out on a night like that. The next day the summer was back, unrepentant for its short absence, which had left us unguarded in thin clothing. Eddie and Carmel went out as soon as he called.

Carmel came back alone, in a high, flushed state and wanting me.

‘Eddie says that we have to get married.'

She stared at me, so little of her left and most of it eyes, lines and bones.

‘You may as well, then. Marry him,' I said without looking at her. ‘You may as well make sure of him.'

‘I am afraid of it, Sive. I cannot live in the town. He will not live here.'

‘Have you asked him?'

‘I did ask him,' she said after a long time. ‘Would you want him here?'

‘I don't mind if you want it.'

‘I'll go so and tell him. I'll go to the town.'

Carmel did not go to Eddie but to the end of the laneway. She waited for seven days and nights and he did not come. On the seventh night she began the walk into town. Myrna and I watched her go.

‘Will I follow her?' I asked.

‘This is something between her and Eddie,' Myrna insisted.

So we went to bed and the next morning she was still not home. I went to work and all day I could not eat and moved quickly through my work. Thomas asked me what was wrong. I told him it was home trouble and he did not ask me again but in his eyes I saw the questions, the wondering of what nature of home I had and what nature of life I led away from this place.

When I returned Carmel was still not back. I imagined her lying lifeless somewhere, or wandering, or following Eddie while he ignored her.

Myrna by now had lost her usual calm, had got her cards out and turned them over and over to distract herself. Then, all of a sudden, her face cleared of expression and set again with a sadness that never lifted.

‘What is it?' I asked.

‘Every beginning means an end.'

I knew I would gain nothing from questioning but my own frustration.

We waited. The dog's warning bark outside brought us to our feet.

We sat with Carmel and Eddie at the hour of midnight. They announced their intention to be married at the earliest opportunity. A calm had come to my mother, which she had lost before I had known her. She was a stranger to me. Her eyes shone and Eddie's look was contented enough.

‘I can move in me television,' he offered.

‘No,' the women spoke together.

He sighed.

‘Well, there's always the wireless.'

The sadness was still with Myrna which, when we raised our steaming mugs of tea to toast the new intentions, could not be driven away from her black eyes.

But that night was all of us together and all of us opening rooms in the old house that had been closed for many years so that we could fit in our new family member. Behind each door we were expecting to find ghosts. Only Myrna saw them.

We found nothing but the spiders' webs filled with the dust of the times before even Carmel had lived here.

‘This is a place where life went on before death took hold,' Myrna said. ‘This is a place where life can begin again.'