Under My Skin (31 page)

Three pumpkins climb the steps to Jack’s house. The American flag waves from the door. There is a log fire burning in the grate and a little Halloween witch stands inside the porch. All around me the brownstones of Brooklyn are getting ready for Thanksgiving. And this year why would anyone say thanks? Everyone I meet is asked about Larry. There are pictures of him all over the city, sellotaped to every lamp-post and covering
the subway floor. There is a new language in the city. It comes from the news bulletins and subway flyers and from talking to people on the street. It goes like this and until recently no one ever heard anything like it before –

120 storeys
1500 feet above the ground
At 8.46 a.m. America was wounded by an aeroplane
1000 degrees Celsius
Windows of the World
Pastry chefs and short order cooks
1000 trapped in the North Tower
600 trapped in the South
Nearly 3000 people were missing
‘How many of them jumped?’
‘No one jumped – they were blown or forced out’
The Falling Man
Some poor soul
Choosing to be seen
The quietness of falling
Nobody wants to know the jumper
There was something ‘forever’ about him
The grace of falling
Such heat
But to be out in the air
Away from the heat
The final act of control
A lonely ten-second journey
A very public way of dying
A very private way of mourning
No one knew him
No one wanted to know
A text that said, ‘I love you, Kate, take care of our son’

No blood. No guts. Just a person falling
‘I would recognize my brother’s hands and feet’
Landing loudly like stone
The unknown soldiers
A final email that asked, ‘Are you there?’

I don’t know what any of this means. These words fall and land without any real sense around me.

But where is Larry? These are the only words I need.

New York. Swallow me up. It is a warren of yellow taxis, wooden escalators, skyscrapers and kosher restaurants, Mexicans, Irish, Chinese and blacks. Yesterday an old Jewish man beat a yellow taxi with his umbrella. That’s what you get if you don’t stop. The manholes puff out great moving clouds of steam. The cops eat doughnuts in their cars. It’s like being part of a new TV show. It’s better on TV. You can turn the volume down. Nicer without sound. The noise, the hum of it, the blowing, honking, screaming decibels of New York.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jack says suddenly and without any reason. And we stand and face each other at the bottom of his steps. ‘Nobody cares about anyone here.’

Jack’s wife tells me where she was when the towers fell. Her name is Marcia Gallagher and she sits near the fire with her long blonde hair combed loose and falling below her shoulders. She is not what I expected. She is beautiful and soft and welcoming and she says her family, and this must include Jack, are ‘her joy’.

‘I was at home… nursing Adam. I was watching TV and there were two guys in the house, painting downstairs… and they came in and we watched it together… and I remember they started freaking out… they dropped everything
and said – “We have to go home” – and I was just staring at the TV and thinking… “
Oh my God, a plane just flew into the World Trade Center
”… then my brother Sean called – and he was hysterical – he said something really weird had happened and then I started getting scared. I put Adam into the car and then I drove to my mom’s and then Franklin, my brother, got called in and everyone was trying to call The Chief. That’s my eldest brother – he heads up the Midtown North Precinct. Everyone calls him The Chief. All the firefighters were called in and Franklin was down there a whole week. And then –

‘they fell…

… while we were watching…

… I’ll never forget that…

I just got up and ran to the car and went to the school for my kids. The teacher was saying, “They’re OK, they’re OK,” but I just wanted them with me, I wanted my family around me,’ and her eyes are wide and frightened now and she scoops the air in around her as she speaks.

‘So Mom and Sean were OK. And Franklin. And The Chief. He hadn’t been working. Thank God. And the kids were with me. But it’s a day I will never forget.’

I want to ask her where Jack was and why she did not mention him in any of this. For me it would have been him before anyone. Jack, hammering on metal somewhere near Battery Park. Not far from it as it happened. He might have gone to get a coffee at the deli. He might have taken the wrong exit and ended up made of dust. I would have called him first and I would have cried just dialling up his number. But she didn’t seem to remember doing that.

She tells me that this is a season of funerals, wedding bands buried without any fingers or hands, body parts, whatever
they found, are mourned and laid to rest. She looks into the distance and her eyes ache with pain.

‘Funeral after funeral after funeral,’ she says like a mantra. ‘It’s like it’s never-ending. We all know someone who was taken. It could have been my brother. But you have to move on.’ And here she mourns the loss of other people and an America that has been lost. And yet she is calm and gentle around me. Like someone who understands pain and has seen more of life than me. She is sorry that I have lost my husband but she has seen so much of it now, she would be happier if I gave up. At a time like this and after all those funerals, it is uncomfortable to be around Hope.

‘The trouble with him,’ Marcia says, and she nods her head towards Jack, ‘is that he doesn’t know when to come home… and apparently…’ and now she looks at me, ‘neither do you.’ It was 5 a.m. when we left Kitty’s and we stood together and waited for our car in the cold. I didn’t want to go home then either. I would have gone anywhere else with him. Jack says that New York is the loneliest place in the world but at least we were together and we could have been anywhere if it wasn’t for the lights behind us on Brooklyn Bridge.

Thanksgiving dinner. Jack’s boys have their hair brushed back and they’re wearing little dicky bows. We carry bottles of wine, chocolate cake, and Jack carries the turkey which was put into the oven at 5 a.m. And Marcia walks ahead, her hair blowing backwards, fresh and full of life, and our hangovers follow her through her neighbour’s door. There is no real welcome for me. Only her younger brother, the firefighter
called Franklin, asks for my number and says he will take me to the firehouse so I can talk to the men there.

‘Everyone wants to slide down the pole,’ he says and I look back at him.

‘I’ve just lost my husband,’ I am thinking, ‘I will not want to slide down the pole.’

The table is set for eighteen and everything is laid out on paper plates. There is turkey, egg salad, pickled onions and sweet potato pie. And there are children everywhere, under the table and jumping on every chair. This is Thanksgiving and the only time to say thanks is when it is finally over. At grace most people there are in tears.

I am put sitting beside Marcia’s three brothers. Her eldest brother is Chief Gallagher who is in his fifties, and on the other side – the last remaining bachelor of New York and in the next place after that – the younger brother, the firefighter who has my number in his phone.

Jack owns a green cardigan, bought at the Blarney Woollen Mills, and I look at it hanging on the stairs, and when it gets cold and that New York wind blows I want to put it on and in some way wrap a piece of him around me and feel safe and warm. But I can’t because it would look weird – and so I sit there, chewing on cold turkey and watching how his wife walks behind him and touches his shoulder with her hand.

The bachelor looks like Jack Lemmon and he sits in close to me and tells us what he knows about women in New York.

‘The women are different in all the boroughs,’ he says. ‘In Brooklyn it’s all family. Having babies. Making a home. The Manhattans are different. Harder. The city makes you hard.’

He watches me carefully. And when I look away I know he is staring at the side of my head. He is mentally undressing me and I am mentally dressing myself again.

‘What’s the beef?’ he asks quickly. ‘Do you have children?’

‘No.’

‘Are you married?’

Silence.

‘Is there a man in your life?’

Silence again.

And then Jack walks past and puts one hand on my shoulder and Marcia looks up at him and then looks away. We make four pots of tea and then the table is covered with every kind of dessert. The people around the table begin to relax now and one by one they open up and talk.

The Chief’s wife is called Maggie and she tells me about the subway people – the people who live in the underground city of New York.

There is a man living under Greenwich Village. He has his own green couch. He carried it down the stairs and on to the tracks, in between trains and into subway land. He has a TV connected into the subway system. He has a favourite TV show. He has a woman. They live underground. They carried the couch between them. They know the trains. They’ve got the timetable down. They watch TV and there are rats. They don’t know or care about the dirt and the steel dust that they breathe. They can’t hear the noise any more. Without it the world would be a strange silent place. They’re together. In the dark. A subway couple. And if they can make it work, why can’t everyone else?

‘So there’s a whole world down there?’ I say.

‘A whole world,’ she says. ‘They’ve even elected their own mayor.’

‘What you need,’ the Lemon says suddenly, ‘is a man to keep you warm at night.’

‘Great… do you know any?’ I reply.

Then they talk about relationships and Maggie and the Lemon have a lot to say about this.

‘Men and women fight about such stupid shit,’ he says. ‘Like who made the mess. If the mess bothers you, clean it up.’

‘Why should one person have to clean up after someone else all the time?’ Maggie asks.

‘I think the thing men and women fight most about is sex,’ she adds. ‘Men can never get enough. Never enough, and if you don’t give it to them – they sulk.’

‘I never sulk,’ he adds here, ‘and some women want sex all the time. Everyone knows women want to at more times than others depending on their cycle. Some men don’t want to have sex during a woman’s period – what do you think?’ he asks.

‘You’re putting me off my turkey,’ I tell him.

And Maggie looks at her husband and smiles and then she takes another slice of apple pie.