“Mrs. O’Hara? Did you hear what I was saying?”
I wonder why he’s calling me Mrs. O’Hara in that tone?
He used to steal the apples from the back garden. He knows who I used to be. Sissy O’Hara. “The Lady,” as they used to call me. Who was she? Mrs. O’Hara? I was always quiet with the hidden thing within me. The knowledge that no woman on earth was more loved than me. That I could guide and protect my children and keep my house and live love all the time. Live love. Just that. What woman would let any one in on such a secret? It would be too unfair. And when life got so tough for Tom, was that my fault? I had to have him near me when, oh God, when I fought that long battle for my daughter. He closed that business that he had and did as I asked. He was on call for me and my fear. “Don’t be further than five minutes from me Tom. In case she …” Yes. Five minutes. I insisted. We should have moved to another town then and I’d not have been destroyed by this second death.
“Mrs. O’Hara?… Sissy?”
He can’t make up his mind, poor boy. Is it Mrs. O’Hara or Sissy?
“You wanted to come in. It’s such a good sign.” I’m here because of pain, I want to say to him. The pain beyond feeling. Pain so bad the only place I wanted to be was in hospital. I’m hoping you can control the pain because perhaps the only thing to finish it is death. I want death. Often it washes over me like a benediction, I want death. A sin. Despair? Is that my sin? But God seems determined to take His time, and His terms are tough. You can’t end it by yourself. You have to wait till He decides to put you out of your misery. Gives you some disease or, if He’s kind, a heart attack to rip the life out of you by tearing the heart to pieces. Well it’s shredded as far as I’m concerned but it keeps on stubbornly beating.
“I think you’re doing this for Tom and the children.”
Did he need training for this? This child? Let me think. He can’t be much more than thirty. Brendan Begley. A doctor now. They tell me he’ll be a Mr. in the future, a consultant. Brilliant. Suddenly I want to wound him and ask him, are you happy with Mary? Mary Dougherty, whose father owns a factory in Killucan and who was a good match for you. I can always spot the good-match brigade. You can see it in their faces. Sometimes in as little as a year. The price was too high. Yes, you can see it in their faces. Faster in the girls though—the ones who marry the older man with land. You can see the fear, after a time, that the age is infecting them as well. And sometimes, later, that shiver-sliver of disgust. Brendan Begley’s is a boy’s story. And he got it wrong. He should have married Sorcha O’Leary. Broke her heart. She went off to Dublin. To hide her pain-shame. Brendan was too careful. Thought a farmer’s daughter wasn’t quite good enough. The farm too small. And so he married Mary Dougherty.
Why are these nothing things coming back to me? Because they’re bits of rubbish on the surface of a mind. How does he feel about Sorcha now? Who married here in the cathedral a couple of years ago? To her mother’s great satisfaction. Sorcha, the rejected one, snapped up by the son of one of Ireland’s richest men. Well done Sorcha! You loved this good-looking boy, tall and dark and Irish-handsome. I’ll give Brendan that, he’s the kind of boy a girl could break her heart over. And did. But you recovered, didn’t you Sorcha? Yes, Sorcha went on and made a life, as they say. Like making a bed. So that children can fall out of it. “She’s done well for herself,” that’s what they say. Well if you miss first prize, the love of your life, doing well for yourself is a decent second.
Must be pretty galling for Brendan, though, as he gets into bed night after night with the wrong woman. Thinking of another. Not of Mary, his wife. Is she any comfort, Brendan? Oh she’s nice enough. Pretty as well. I remember her as a child. The little corkscrew curls and the pale skin. But Sorcha’s swishing-around wildness you could almost touch! Sorcha was yours, Brendan. I could see that. We could all see that. I remember I saw the two of you walking up the town once on a snow-cold morning. You were about seventeen, eighteen maybe. Laughing, laughing, flashing magnificence at us all. So I thought, get out of their way. Let their magnificence shine out. The sudden shine-out magnificence of life and love on that frozen day, and your eyes, Brendan, flashing the triumph of “I am loved!” Ah the magnificence, the triumphant magnificence of “Us!—Just look at Us!” You seemed to beam out at the town that old victory call, “Look at us.”
And I smiled for days just to think of it. So what can you do for me? You’ll teach me courage, will you? For life? You who had none for love? Such cowardice will always mark you. How do I know these things? Me, this middle-aged Irish-Catholic woman? I could tell you that a man and a woman and a life together is a bedtime story. The rest is only lovely when that’s what’s keeping it all true. You see, that’s what a man and woman need to know. Children whip up a storm of love all right and leave you so tired with loving them and caring for them that a whole lifetime can be eaten up by them. Yes, once you’re tricked into that you’ve got no chance of escape. But if it’s a piece of heaven for you when you roll into bed and feel the man or woman you want moving beside you, ah then the whole thing is different. I could tell you these things now, Brendan, because I’ve known you since you were a child and I know well your mother wouldn’t give you the same story. Indeed I know she didn’t. Mothers can be mean to children, hiding things like the truth from them then dressing the lie up as love. The world is drowning in the lies parents tell their children. I would not have lied to him, my beautiful boy. I would have told him the truth.
Oh but Sissy you lied to yourself that day. You ran away, Sissy, because you couldn’t look at what you’d half-glimpsed that day in that back garden. The wounds. Or what you heard. The noise. The calling out. Stop! Stop! I am frozen in the deepest part of hell. Are my thoughts sinful? The sin of malice? M a l i c e. Why even the word has the hiss of the snake about it. I could become like Betty Shaughnessy. Betty Shaughnessy who lost her twin brother, ten years later still waiting for others to join her club of perpetual mourners. Happy to see others weep as she’s wept. Driving her husband Ray to drink and to women. Tom will never do that. His very soul is mine. Nothing and no one on God’s earth could take him from me. Who else can say this? No, I don’t feel malice. But what can this young man do for me? Can he howl down the howling? No. He cannot. He got love wrong. What can he do well?
“Mrs. O’Hara you’ve been like this for months now.” Months! The man makes it sound like an eternity.
Youth!
“And Dr. Sullivan and I have talked, and you’ve been observed now for a week.”
That can’t be true! A week? What a gamester time is.
Plays months and a week to the same tune. A tune played on a concertina. A week! Can that be true? What is happening to me?
“And we are very worried. You are in such a deep place.”
First good line he’s spoken.
“You know, I studied at the Maudsley and there is a technique, a treatment.”
Is there a treatment? Is it new—a new treatment for such ancient pain? I don’t know. If I wait, he’ll tell me.
“We’ve talked, Dr. Sullivan and I, about Electro-Convulsive Therapy.”
Have you indeed, Brendan? I laugh inside myself. Electro-Convulsive Therapy. I’m convulsed. Well, I suppose that’s what he trained for. To be able to say a line like that and not laugh! It sounds irreligious as well. I wonder if it’s been sanctioned by the church. They’re not keen on psychiatry. God has all the answers and he communicates them through the priest, who probably doesn’t want any competition. I suppose it’s a surprise we ever got this hospital.
“We don’t know exactly how it works.”
That’s honest of him.
“Sometimes there is a risk that short-term memory will be impaired.”
What is he talking about? Short-term memory? What a child this man is.
“In a sense, the therapy shocks you back into life.”
One shock to kill another.
“There’ll be a few sessions but there’s no guarantee.”
Well now, I’m not a great believer in guarantees any more Brendan.
“But I must emphasise the risk. The risk is of some memory loss. Possibly more than some. Can you understand what I’m saying to you Sissy?”
But memory is the pain. Maybe. Maybe I like the sound of that machine, of a ruthless little machine going into my head and twisting the odd screw here and there. Isn’t that how they describe mental illness? She’s got a screw loose. Maybe the machine will tighten it up.
“You’re in a deep place of shock and grief and we’ve got to shock you back to us. We must get you back to us.”
To us? And who might “us” be? The arrogance! But we’re not an arrogant race. Too careful for arrogance. We think the British are arrogant. I never found them so. Always seemed a bit uneasy to me. They say the German is arrogant. Doesn’t talk much. But then do we talk much to him? He walks tall; I suppose that’s a sign of arrogance. And he doesn’t seem to bend under the weight of his memories. Sure, every time anyone looks at the German they can feel the weight. I suppose he’s got lots of memories. Terrible memories. Bombing. And, God knows, lots of other things. We didn’t want to know that much about the War. Tom insists I call it that, not the Emergency, but even afterwards we kept ourselves … pure? Yes that’s the word. We didn’t stain ourselves with the knowledge of it. Ah well I don’t think the German is a bad man. There are lots of Germans around now in Ireland; some of them I suppose must be bad. But all of them? I doubt it. I could be wrong, of course. But how did he kill memory, the German? And did he? Dr. Carter? He was Major in the British Army, I’m told. A doctor must see terrible things in a war. Won a cross or something. Áine, his housekeeper, found it. He swore her to secrecy. But she told me. People tell me things. They trust me. They’re right. I didn’t tell anyone apart from Tom. But I don’t trust myself any more. And never will again. A cross! We could give them away! Yes, Dr. Carter and the German. They’ve seen some things! Why did they come to a country dripping in memory? Maybe to drown their own. Did it work?
But where could I go? Tipperary? England? New York? Oh for God’s sake! No, Tom is right. Living close to what is lost. What would we be without it, memory? Well, it’ll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well. Still that machine, what if it worked? No, it’s a mad idea. But let me think. If I could choose, what would I choose to forget? The sound? Sound sudden-shaking into a moment. Which was the last moment of my old life. Not ringing out. No. Rolling over us. Rolling us up into it. I was paralysed by sound. In my own kitchen. The rim of the teacup trembling on the edge of my lips and me looking at Olivia stretching her hand out for the country butter to heap onto the brown bread I made myself, hovering between the brown bread and the soda bread, greedy and not certain which plate her hand should land on … And then the Sound. Would we be killed by Sound? That’s what I thought: my God, we’re going to be killed by Sound! No wonder I want silence. I will always want silence.
And then the look between us! Our eyes and heads were twinned things. Moving in unison to look at the swinging door through which he’d walked and then. The scream. Mine. “He’s in the yard!” He wasn’t. He was in the back garden. Half in and lying half out of it, as I found out in a second, after the Sound. And after the running. The running. Did I run? Yes. Yes. The running and the second’s sight of him and the voice. His voice calling to us, “Get a doctor and a priest quickly.” And then, oh take these words away. Take them away. “Turn me over quickly. Don’t let my mother see me.” Or should I carve it on my breast? On my left breast above my heart? “Turn me over quickly and don’t let Mama see me.” Could his time machine kill that?
“It involves passing an electrical current through the brain for a short period of time. There’ll be a number of sessions. We’ll give you a muscle relaxant, Sissy, because the current causes convulsions. And there are physiological and biochemical changes.”
Change my mind, would you Brendan? A change of mind. A shocking change of mind. Sissy changed her mind and came back to life. A miracle.
“I know it sounds brutal, Sissy, but…”
Brutal? It sounds exactly what I need.
“You will be given an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant, Sissy.”
Anaesthetised, he says, and I wonder at the word. I’m sedated enough in this place not anaesthetised so the pain of nothingness gets through. Now he’s talking about pain. He’s still on about pain. How it won’t be there. No pain will visit me. But I want pain. Physical pain. I have a need of another kind of pain.
“It might not happen in your case. You might not suffer any memory loss at all.”
So it might all be for nothing. Oh Brendan!
“I would never be anything else but honest with you Sissy.”
Ah—he’s hopeless! Never be less than honest? Poor Brendan doesn’t seem to know there’s no one gets through life without sometimes being a liar. Particularly to themselves. Do you think I would have lived the day out if I’d have seen my child, bits of him scooped out? I lied to myself. I would not believe. I wrapped it all up in a lie, the lie of my life and ran into the place I’m in now. Frozen here in my terrible lie. “Come to bed. He’s going to be all right. We’ll go in the morning.” Oh I knew. I knew.
“I don’t know, Mrs. O’Hara …”
He’s back to Mrs. O’Hara. Regrets the intimacy, I suppose. Maybe it’s unprofessional.
“I don’t know if you understand how ill you are.”
My God this boy is brilliant! Dripping in wisdom. Dripping in it.
“What happened, Mrs. O’Hara, to your family … well a death like that… an explosion, like a bomb …”
Was it like a bomb? Maybe. I suppose he’s right. An explosion … a bit like a bomb. Yes. But I suppose it could have happened in the school lab. But bombs, we have no bombs here. We know nothing of bombs down here. Not in this town. Oh a few in 1940: the Germans lost their way, evidently. But they paid compensation. Which is more than the British ever paid over the centuries. And of course there was May 1941, that May bank holiday. The North Strand, Dublin, got the worst of it. How many killed? So we suffered a bit. But really, bombing was for the Six Counties. And the British. Did we feel sorry enough for them? We took it all a bit calmly. And we’d exploded a few ourselves in … when? Was it 1939? Before the Emergency? The War. Sorry Tom, sometimes I forget. Ha! We were sorry for Belfast. Their love of Britain came at a price. Yes we were sorry, and for England, for London especially. But it wasn’t happening to us. And we’d suffered enough for centuries. Why is my mind doing this? Making such quick, mixed-up connections. Connected to electricity. That’s what will happen to me. Because I’m sad in a dangerous way. Not mad. Well, I know that. Sad. Madly sad, perhaps.