The Lost Souls' Reunion (23 page)

She called me to her, crooking her long bony finger.

‘Sive, Sive, listen to me now. When I was young I had a tall straight father who had white blond hair and a big fishing boat which took him out into the water. The water found him and his boat so fine it wanted them and it took them, leaving my mother and me all alone. And she died on the birth of another child while wailing for my father. Then the war came and I walked the world. I was alone in my wanderings. When I found you, Sive, I knew that you were already a woman, you had grown in ways I had never grown. You were alone from the first moment and you survived aloneness,' Myrna went on. ‘But now is the time you will be tested most. All around the air feels close; I can barely breathe. It is filled with warning, Sive, and we must listen to it. Don't be alone, Sive. Take company over aloneness. Be close to protection.'

She was fading and I could not leave her.

*   *   *

Carmel came to me many days later and said, ‘You need to get out again.'

I did not answer her. Eddie had helped Myrna to bed, in a downstairs room that we had made up for her, since she had grown too weak to climb stairs.

‘There is no weight left in her at all.'

Myrna was disappearing before our eyes. There were shadows where life had once been.

‘How can I leave Myrna?' I said to my mother.

‘If you don't get back to work you'll have no work to get back to!' Eddie came in on us. ‘We can't all four of us live off window-cleaning money.'

‘I'll mind her,' Carmel promised. ‘I'll look after her well.'

*   *   *

I made my way up the hill slowly, my ears and eyes searching for signs of Jonah. None.

The gates were a welcome sight for once; my body had lost strength.

Thomas was different. I found him talking easily with the men and I found him dressed in clothes of his own and the fit of them said he had grown into himself. He had put on weight and he had begun to use his bad arm.

I found the pain of missing him turn to a kick of joy, which took the wind out of me. I could see his eyes fill with delight before he hardened them and turned away to continue his conversation.

Said Joe O'Reilly, ‘That was a long holiday you had. We were not certain you were coming back.'

‘It was no holiday.'

I went to Sister Mauritius.

‘You took your time. I had a day or two more in me and then you were no longer employed here,' she said. ‘You will find Sister Saviour gone to the missions. I am looking after your ward personally for the present.'

Her eyes said that whatever fight had been, Sister Mauritius had won it.

I went to Thomas then, who was lying on his bed.

‘Have you Sister Saviour's address?' I asked. ‘I would like to write to her.'

‘I have, in the drawer there, help yourself. Could you pull the curtains round my bed?' he asked. ‘I need to sleep.'

I did and remained inside them. He stood up and put his hand on me. I turned into him and he pulled me into his chest and I put my lips to it and my arms around him and we rocked slowly back and forth.

‘Where have you been, girl? Where have you been?'

He wanted to tell me that he knew me, but when he moved back to look at me, he saw a sore turning to scar on my temple and he put his fingers to it.

‘What happened to you? Where did you get this? Who did this?'

‘Nothing and no one. I fell.'

I did not tell him. I thought of the father and the son and the need for peace between them. I knew that the peace could not be reached if I told Thomas the truth.

‘Thomas?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you still of a mind to leave here?'

‘More mind than ever,' he whispered.

‘What are you to do about Jonah?'

‘There is nothing I can do. He is the way he is,' the softness gone out of him now.

‘And he was not always that way. Thomas – I want you to leave with me. But there is…'

‘Sive?'

‘Yes?'

‘The café in Soho – what was it called? I have no memories of these things – only supposition.'

‘Sergio's.'

‘Sergio's, I do not remember at all. But I remember your eyes.'

‘That,' I smiled, ‘is only because you know them now.'

I heard the movement before I saw the broad feet at the edge of the curtain and knew Margaret was close at hand.

‘You will have to rest now, Thomas,' I said loudly. ‘We'll sort this out again.'

In the few days that followed we had no time to finish our conversation. But we had silent times together in the bathroom and it was all that we needed to know one another again.

Dear Jonah,

With all the chances I had to get to know you and not used, I don't know how this letter will be received. I only know the need both of us have to talk.

I am not asking you to do anything that you do not want to do. But if you would visit me we could at least reach some sort of agreement. I am sending this letter via the solicitor who facilitated the signing of my assets over to you. I do not know where you live now.

Yours

            Thomas

With each passing day Thomas grew stronger in the knowledge he wanted to leave St Manis and make his way into the world again. Still, he knew he would not go empty-handed to me; he would make having him worthwhile. He would find a way for that.

29 ∼ Not Ready to Go on – The Card of Passage

T
HE HOURS CARMEL
had spent roaming were now put into Myrna. Eddie was left to fill in the times she was not with him.

It was something the years of window cleaning had trained him well for, to witness a world on the other side of the glass, a silent world which, when it spoke words, produced no sound at all to his ears.

He watched the woman he had always cared for. She treated the old and worn Myrna like a shining jewel. She spooned food into her and washed her with the love a mother shows for a child, took the shame out of the straight and unbowed Myrna's losing strength.

And Myrna thanked Carmel for her kindness.

‘This is life,' Myrna said softly. ‘Where one fades, another grows. You grow fine, Carmel, finer each day.'

‘Don't leave us,' Carmel whispered.

‘No intention of,' Myrna smiled.

When Carmel came to bed each evening she was bone tired. Eddie held her. In her stillness he felt the memory of the young girl come back to him and he pressed his lips to the hair that had lost its shine to all others but not to him. Though not aflame it bore the shadows of the flame that had once risen within her. He kissed the white skin of her shoulders, which in youth had the appearance and texture of pearls and in middle age was clouded pearl, sweeter for all the suffering it had endured and for all the love it was still capable of.

Sometimes she would murmur names and fight to put out flames which, in her sleeping, she insisted were consuming their bed. The dream flames had taken a little more of her by morning. She grew finer each day and she grew more tired.

‘It is caring for Myrna has you worn out,' Eddie said to Carmel as she carried the breakfast tray into the back room, which Myrna rarely left now.

‘It is not,' Carmel said.

‘It should be Sive looking after her, you're not able.'

‘Sive has looked after us all. Leave her have her time away from us.'

And that was how the talk went each morning. By evening there was too much tiredness to talk. The weeks turned to months.

At night I would sit with Myrna, sleep on the bed beside her. We did not speak, but the dreams passed between us and when I woke each morning I expected her breath to have left her. Then Carmel took on the caring the days required.

We three had established a rhythm of our own which Eddie could not follow. The rhythm of those who know all there is to know about the ones they travel through life with, the rhythm of lost souls preparing to lose one of their number.

While Carmel slept heavily one morning Eddie and I should have gone out the door together to work. But he chose to stay behind to let Carmel sleep and to spoon soft egg into Myrna's mouth. I was grateful to him and I felt Myrna's eyes on me as I left, eyes that reached through the stone wall from the back room and I did not turn back because what I wanted was ahead. I had now to see Thomas or my day had no brightness.

He had told me, in whispers, that he had known me. I nodded and smiled and watched who I was.

‘How could I not have known you immediately?' he asked me as if I would know.

‘We were to know one another again in a different time, and one day you will meet the woman who said that,' I promised. ‘That will be when you come through my doorway.'

There was not time for anything else. Margaret's curious, bowl-shaped eyes were continually on us. Even our bathroom time was all looks through mirrors and not at each other.

Eddie broke pieces of white bread and made to give it to Myrna with the egg but she said softly and firmly, ‘I will feed myself if I need feeding.'

‘You need to eat. You don't eat if we don't feed you. You need strength,' Eddie replied.

‘I have enough strength to go on for as long as I choose to go on for,' Myrna smiled. ‘But I could use a cigarette. I know you have one of those.'

Eddie weighed up Carmel's or my anger against Myrna's pleasure and lit up two cigarettes. Together they sat and smoked and Myrna even managed to drink hot sweet tea that brought a flush to her cheeks.

‘Has there been any sign?' Myrna asked.

‘Of what?'

‘The man, Jonah.'

‘No sign of him.'

Eddie felt ashamed to remember his inviting the man into the house at the end of an evening where had he paid for no drinks.

‘I'll talk to the girls,' he had promised. ‘They have to listen to a man sometime.'

He had been glad there was no visible sign of Jonah taking him up on his offer.

‘Keep him away, Eddie,' Myrna broke through his thoughts. ‘You must promise to keep him away, always.'

‘I will. I will.'

He thought to do what he could, maybe have a word with Jonah's father, the next time he was in St Manis on his window cleaning, ask him to keep the son away from the place.

They sat quietly together. Neither heard Carmel stirring.

‘It looks like rain today,' Eddie said mischievously, looking out at the unrelenting blue sky in a week that had been filled with grey ones. ‘I might stay home.'

Carmel appeared in a half sleep and came to sit by Eddie, taking his hand in hers, a smile just for him.

‘Well, that's me decided,' Eddie said. ‘It looks like it's going to lash all right. Will we go for a walk in the lashing rain, love?'

Carmel frowned and took a sip of his tea. The moisture on her sleep-hardened tongue was welcome.

‘What about Myrna?' she asked.

‘Myrna's much more herself today, aren't you?' Eddie winked.

‘I am.'

They laughed all together. Carmel said, ‘Were you smoking at this hour, Eddie?' and she went to get dressed.

Myrna took hold of her blanket and pulled it around her knees.

‘Eddie, please could you get my box?' Myrna asked.

They left her shuffling the cards and they walked into the cool, crisp air that put a freshness on everything, although its fine blaze of red and gold was already browning, preparing to be stripped bare by the harsh and bony hands of winter.

They had not gone long when Noreen Moriarty came, wearing her sunflower hat at a determined angle. She took up the chair beside Myrna.

‘You have an air about you today,' Myrna said as she shuffled.

Noreen nodded.

‘Could you not just enjoy yourself in the other place and not trouble us for a few days? You seem to mean work for me lately.'

Noreen smiled.

‘I have lived through times,' Myrna said in a voice that gave away all her years. She spread the cards on the table and one fell to the floor. Noreen picked it up. Myrna turned it over. The card of Passage.

‘I am not ready to go on,' Myrna's hands shook as she pointed at Noreen to stress her insistence. ‘I cannot go until I give that girl some sense. I know it is coming. She needs more sense and I will go then.'

Noreen continued to smile at Myrna. Her eyes said, ‘These are not your concerns now. It is time to come away.'

Myrna grew angry, ‘I would think that you would understand. She is your flesh and blood. You should protect her.'

Noreen rose and left by the door. She looked back and her eyes said, ‘The next time, there will be no asking.'

*   *   *

Jonah read his father's letter and would have done little about it if the prospect of meeting me, away from the cold-blade eyes of old Myrna, had not come with it.

Jonah wondered whether his stranger-father meant to contest the financial arrangements. The solicitor assured him they were incontestable.

He could still feel the flood of soft strength that had run into him when I held him, the protection it offered against his father's indifference. Now his father was writing lame and badly worded attempts at reconciliation and Jonah was not interested in those. He was interested only in the warmth that came with me.

There was plenty of money now; he could look after me now.

He poured himself a drink. It was almost lunchtime but he did not feel hungry. He worked it out.

If I had lived and woken it was a sign that he was meant to have me.

*   *   *

In my dreams that night I felt the one who watched me wanting to join me. All around black walls sprang up and I had no choice but to face his watching. I woke, wet with sweat, and went to Myrna's room – faint shadows all around her. She was sleeping like she would never wake. The breath so faint she barely breathed at all. She would be gone from me. The alone time was coming.