COWARD

“Brother.”

“Wife,” Maggie said.

The nurse told them that she would take them to a waiting room and that a doctor would come and explain Aidan’s condition fully. As soon as she left them Maggie went off to the toilet and did not reappear for a long time. They had arrived at the Intensive Care Unit at almost the same moment: he from Belfast, and she from somewhere in the Midlands – Birmingham, he thought.

She hadn’t been tidying her hair, Niall noted with disapproval when she came back, for it was still half caught up at the back of her head and hung round her pale face in long black strands. Her stone-coloured raincoat, which she still wore, her large black bag – she was the colour of newsprint.

When they were given a briefing (for that’s how she seemed to treat the doctor’s account of what had happened to Aidan – the pub encounter, an attack, a single blow, felling Aidan to the tiled floor) she had asked terse questions and listened so intently that Niall could almost see the words forming up in her mind. Sentences. Paragraphs. “Inoperable acute subdural haemorrhage complicated by extensive intra-cerebral bleeding secondary to alcoholic cirrhosis.” He watched her note this down meticulously. They both understood that Aidan was going to die. The doctor left them, saying that they would be brought to Aidan’s bedside shortly.

“Are you staying?” Niall asked her abruptly, irritated by that coat.

She was still wearing it when they were left alone with Aidan in a curtained cubicle. Niall had seen this set-up before, on tv. It looked exactly as it ought to and he had a role to play: the sombre, steady eldest brother. He even knew he wasn’t supposed to obsess over the monitors or fret about procedure. The dedicated staff were sure to be doing everything they could, while keeping their complex personal lives on hold. He expected to be overwhelmed by information. That’s what everyone said about these situations. The unpredictable element was Maggie but even in respect to her he felt fore-armed. He watched her take her coat off, look around briefly for somewhere to put it, then drape it over the end of the bed. At once he snatched it up, saying pointedly, “I’ll get another chair.” He disappeared to find one and returned, placing the chair ostentatiously away from the bed and putting the coat over its back. She sorted through the contents of her bag, as though catching up on a small routine task. Clearly, she was not going to make this easy.

Niall was uncomfortable. They ought to talk but he had seen how she stiffened at his shocked remarks to the doctor about the attack on Aidan. Yes, he had said conventional things: When? How? What next? Was there anything new to say when a brother had been assaulted in a pub? And, of course, he wanted to know who’d done it? Had Aidan brought it on himself? That was a possibility.

Maggie had found him wanting in the conversation with the doctor. But she always had. Well, she wasn’t going to get away with sitting there being superior. What could he begin with? Something insultingly mundane? How are you? How’s the job? He wasn’t sure which paper she worked for. One he didn’t read.

“I thought you’d be full of questions,” he found himself saying. She raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t seen Aidan for a long time.”

“And you have?”

“We keep in touch! The odd phone call.”

“When? When was the last one?”

“Last week,” he bridled.

“Oh?”

“Aidan phoned to say he was coming over to Belfast. ‘Get the weekend over,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be home.’ He should have been with us today. Ma….” In front of this Englishwoman he checked himself from saying ‘Mammy’. “My mother’s very ill. Very ill,” he stressed, pointedly. “She wanted to see him.”

“Never waste a good deathbed.”

As he gasped, she stood, snatched up her coat, said, “I’ll be back.” and was already reaching into her handbag. Still a smoker, Niall thought. The curtain billowed in her wake.

Had Aidan heard that bitchery? But Aidan was motionless.

Maggie returned. Niall went to the toilet. She left when he came back. She returned. They sat in silence together.

A medic came in from time to time, did this or that procedure, and each time Niall forgot to breathe. Was this going to be the action that saved Aidan, the crucial intervention in his life? There had been so many efforts over the years of boozing. The hope and promises. The return to zero. Maggie. Aidan had wasted years of her life. Aidan told him she said that the night she left for good.

But her column! Living with an Alcoholic. That she could sit down and methodically craft something out of their misery! ‘Tellin’ our business about the streets,’ Mammy called it. Plenty of meat there! The troubled Belfast childhood; the Irish Catholic family numerous enough to disgust English tastes. Maggie had pinned Aidan down on page after page for the entertainment of strangers: the decline, by fits and starts, of a brilliant, fearless journalist; her keeping the show on the road, sobering him up and filling in for him; his tearful promises; his sudden, ruinous extravagances; his self-deception. There was a story there, all right, and she hadn’t missed the chance to tell it. Self-righteous cow!

From the other side of the bed, she returned Niall’s gaze and held it, before coolly looking away, at the monitor, the ceiling, her nails.

“Why did you come?” he demanded.

She shut her eyes. “Because….” She opened them and looked at him unflinchingly. “I loved him. I don’t now, of course but it’s tidier if someone’s here with him, isn’t it?”

“You made enough out of him anyway!”

“Fuck off,” she said calmly. “I didn’t think any of you would be here. But you overcame your scruples, did you? Turned up for talks?”

“God forgive you!”

“Oh! Please!”

A nurse pulled the curtain aside, frowning. “OK?”

“Yes, yes.” Niall reddened. Maggie smirked at this. The nurse vanished. “You never gave him a chance!” he hissed.

She snorted. “If he’d sobered up life would have been boring. That’s what he couldn’t face. Your brother couldn’t handle an ordinary, daily slog. He had to have more and more… something. Something had to always be happening! Yeah. You know that.”

He turned away from her. She stood. “Do you want a coffee?” He shook his head, incredulous that she could ask. She shrugged and left.

Niall looked at Aidan’s thin fingers. Skin and bone. Stubble on his poor, battered face. His mouth all wounded. Oh, Jesus!

“Stubborn bastard!” Niall said aloud. Aidan could always hold out against anyone.

When they were teenagers, Aidan’s laughter would be heard from behind a bedroom door, impervious to teasing and attempted interruptions; the radio on; people with English voices making Aidan laugh. Later he’d do the sketches for them, announcing, “Wait’ll ye hear this!” and he’d deliver the lines, perfect accent and all. The skits didn’t always seem funny to Niall but Aidan soaked them all up. Words. Words. He’d get hot and bothered about reports in the local papers. Who cares, Niall would demand, about what gets said after the event? It was the thing itself that mattered, and didn’t Aidan think they had enough to cope with, living on the front line, every other night a running riot, sirens, bullets? “Nobody cares!” Niall had said, time and again.

“I’ll make them care. I’ll tell it like it is!” Aidan had finally declared.

“You?” and as soon as the contemptuous word was uttered Niall had seen the hurt flood Aidan’s eyes and his eyelids drop in a peculiar, slow, shuttering blink, long enough for them both to know they were seeing the same thing, the one particular night.

There it was, the bed they shared in the smaller front bedroom. Two younger brothers were stacked in a bunk bed. Other brothers and sisters were in the bigger front room. When there was shooting, Niall would hustle the two wee ones into the back bedroom with Mammy and Daddy and return to bed to wait it out. Aidan would lie still, apparently asleep.

Night after night in that bedroom, Aidan would pretend to be unconscious but Niall felt constantly stretched, sending his attention out into the urban un-darkness to sift information from its sounds. He had learned how to tell when an army patrol was approaching. All casual noise – a walker’s cough, the clink of milk bottles being put out – would drain away into a tense absence and resume once the soldiers had passed. He could judge when a night’s climax had been reached from how the soldiers sounded: while things were still on the climb he could hear their things rather than them – the scrape of a boot as someone eased his position; the incidental tink of metal on metal; a radio squawk. Later it would be a sigh, a laugh, a belligerent, ostentatious fart.

He hated being in this corner bedroom on the end of a terrace, exposed on two sides, for there was a small window in the gable-end. It was like being on the prow of a ship forever facing into danger. He braced himself through every night, holding himself ready for the moment when he would have to do something. He was sure he would. Something would happen and he would have to act, to save the family. Why it wasn’t his father’s job to do that he never considered. He was certain it was his. And there lay Aidan, oblivious. Wilfully.

On that night, a very hot night in August, Aidan slept as usual against the back wall opposite the front window and Niall lay on the outside of the bed. He watched the lights of an armoured car swing across the curtains. There were still hours to go before daylight. The room was chokingly warm. Niall went to the window and eased the curtains aside a little. Across the road, heavy trees pressed against the far side of the long, high wall of the city park, their black masses paralysed by the heat; so stiff they looked like cut-outs.

There were occasional shots. Niall listened to feet thudding past only yards away on the pavement. Shouts and curses came through the walls as an army patrol hugged the gable-end down the side street that ran off the main road. Niall sweated from more than the heat. He shepherded the wee ones out of their bunks and into the back bedroom, carrying one and trailed by the stumbling, sleepy other.

He got back into bed beside Aidan. As long as Niall could interpret the sounds outside he felt he was somehow in control. He could tell himself that he knew what was happening. But on this night, he could read no meaning into what he was hearing. There was a distant chaos outside. A riot gathering in the offing? Niall felt something slipping inside him. He grabbed Aidan’s arm in the bed. “Listen!” he urged. But Aidan resolutely absented himself, eyes shut.

A bullet pinged off the edge of the front window frame and Niall cried out, instinctively ducking away. When he opened his eyes his face was almost touching Aidan’s and he could see the frissons of tension in his brother’s forehead, the effort he was making to not see, not hear.

It wasn’t fair. Aidan shouldn’t escape like this, leaving Niall alone. “Wake up!” Niall yelled. “Wake up!” but Aidan didn’t move. “I know you’re awake. I know you are!” Niall insisted. Nothing. But then Niall felt something on his leg, something warm, and a smell, unmistakeable.

Niall leapt out of the bed, furious. “Loser!” he shouted. “Coward!” No reaction. Wild with frustration, he ran downstairs and out into the back yard. He was shocked to find himself crying. Aidan was getting away with something – something – while he was having to take all the burden. It wasn’t fair. Why was it he who had to be brave while Aidan ‘slept’? Why should he be the only one who had to see what was going on?

Niall’s contemptuous ‘you’ had echoed between them as they had both emerged from the intimate, night-time life that Niall had dragged into the light. Aidan had said, “Aye, well.” He had looked Niall full in the face. “Aye, well. We’ll see.”

And now Aidan lay so still that Niall urged, “You’re not asleep. You can hear me, can’t you?” No answer.

“You’re hurting him, I should think.” Maggie’s voice broke on Niall and he realised he was squeezing Aidan’s hand white. He let go. She was looking curiously at him, sipping from a plastic cup. “I thought you didn’t like him. That’s what he always told me. Though, oddly enough, he said it’s because of you he stuck with journalism. I never got that, really.”

“Could you please…” Niall burst out. “This isn’t the place, or the time. This should be…” but he couldn’t go on. He couldn’t say ‘holy’ to this woman, though it should be a holy time. She couldn’t know how often they had prayed about this moment, as a family. The Rosary every day. ‘Pray for us now and at the hour of our death’. If this was Aidan’s hour, then it ought to be holy. “We should get a priest,” he said.

“No. Aidan wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“Yes, he would!”

“No. And before you rant on, I’m his wife.”

The trump card.

“God, it was a hard day he met you!” he snarled.

“You think? What do you know? You self-righteous, uptight … teacher! You never encouraged him. Never gave him a word of praise.”

“That’s not….”

“Sanctimonious, patronising. You made him feel small, no matter what he did. I hated your visits because he’d always drink more after you left – to get rid of the taste!” she hissed.

“He’d never have said….”

“He thought it. We’re married, remember?”

Yes. Maggie as a bride, almost smothered in the wedding photos among the tribe of Donnellys; her own thin parents insignificant and strained-looking. Aidan’s wife. Aidan, he thought, with a sudden sense of wonder, has been inside this woman.

“You didn’t know him like I did,” she insisted.

“I did!” But, of course, she was right. He couldn’t know the intimacy of their marriage and she couldn’t know the life they’d led as kids, packed close like cubs in a den – a world away from her tidy upbringing by a mother always in pastels and a dad who played golf.

“And you Donnellys,” she went on. ‘Oh, you can’t say this. You can’t say that.’ I’ll say what I like, write what I like, about my life – our lives.”

“There are things that shouldn’t be said outside the home – things it’s not decent to tell other people.”

“Because we have to keep up a front? Aidan wasn’t like that. You don’t get that, do you? He wanted to get behind things. He wanted to turn the spotlight on.…”

“Not on himself!”

A nurse swept into the cubicle, remonstrating. Maggie pushed past her and disappeared. Niall would have followed Maggie but the nurse stopped him, saying, emphatically, “You only have so much time.”

There’d be no priest, then. No deathbed blessing. No forgiveness of sins. No readying for the journey. Aidan shouldn’t die like this. Even that time on the doorstep there had been… words, at least. Niall subsided into his chair.

He and Aidan had had a row. In the kitchen. Niall had three empty milk bottles in his right hand, his fingers stuffed into their necks. Aidan was persisting with a mad plan to interview a paramilitary. “Who do you think you are?” Niall demanded. “You’re seventeen!” But Aidan was adamant and suddenly Niall’s envy had overwhelmed him – that Aidan, who pissed himself in the night, could want something so much and believe that he could get it! Didn’t he know life was about cutting your dreams down to size?

Niall, fuming, strode up the hallway to put the milk bottles out, wrenched open the front door – and all but fell over a soldier crouched on the doorstep. The milk bottles crashed to the ground. The soldier swore, shouldered Niall off – a bullet! Smashing off the bricks by their heads! From the trees opposite. The soldier made to drop into position on the front path but a shot caught him, flinging him back against the door as Niall slammed it forward. Niall fought the soldier’s weight. A wordless, total struggle. The soldier’s gasp. Time only to act, not think. Pure will: to shut out. To shut out. Out.

Niall felt himself pulled sharply backwards. Aidan tugged the door open. The soldier toppled across the threshold, blood pumping from his throat.

Aidan dropped to his knees, pressing his hands over the welling blood. Their mother ran up the hallway. She stepped unhesitatingly over the body so she could look the young man in the face. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Sweet Jesus.” She smiled at him, holding his startled eyes. “Oh, son. I’m here. I’m here now. It’ll be all right.” He died.

“You fuckers!” Aidan yelled towards the unmoving trees, “I’ll get you!”

Niall clutched at Aidan who, checked, looked down at Niall’s hands, astounded. They tussled for a moment till Aidan, with an angry cry of disgust, broke free and ran into the house. The hallway phone was bloodied in his grip and his gaze fixed burningly on Niall as, in a cold, urgent voice, he demanded an ambulance.

Niall groaned. He had held Aidan back. Even then. He put his face in his hands. His skin had already picked up a faint hospital taint. He – his body – would never forget the wrenching, backward momentum as Aidan pulled him away from the door. He could feel Aidan’s bulk pushing in between him and what must not be let in.

But Aidan had opened that door. Fearlessly. No – despite fear.

And Aidan alone had seen what Niall’s choice had been.

Niall looked at Aidan’s ashen face. In that battered head, in that memory, was a record of Niall’s shame.

“Oh, Jesus!” Niall laid his forehead against Aidan’s arm. You never once said it. You never confronted me with it, but I hated you more because you were afraid, but you did things anyway. On the telly. In the desert. In the back streets. You went for them, whoever they were. And I was glad every time you failed at home, behind the scenes. Every time you let yourself down. And there was Maggie’s catalogue of your petty little failures and I was glad. “I was glad,” he said aloud. “Sweet Jesus!”

Maggie’s voice rang out. “I said no prayers.”

“But I wasn’t…!”

“You can stop that cant. He told me, you bastard. He told me how he wanted it to be at the end, what he wanted me to say. Do you think he didn’t know things might end like this?”

“Maggie, I wasn’t praying. I swear. I was thinking how much courage he has. I was….”

“No!” She was anguished now. The nurse returned. “Get him out of here!”

“Both of you,” the nurse urged, “security will have to intervene if you….”

Barely aware the nurse had spoken, Niall insisted, “But, Maggie, you don’t know. You don’t know how it was – how brave he was.”

Maggie recoiled. “Brave?” She stepped close to Aidan and bent towards him. She said in a clear, hard voice, “You are such a coward. Aidan, do you hear that? You’re a coward.”

“Maggie!” Niall cried.

She held up a hand to fend Niall off. “Aidan, you wouldn’t save yourself. Coward!”

The nurse exclaimed and reached towards Maggie, her other arm gesturing in Niall’s direction to two male staff who arrived ready for confrontation. They eyed Niall and moved towards him. He ducked his head and held up his hands in a placating gesture – anything rather than be taken away. He had to stop Maggie.

But she carried on. “Aidan, you’ve been the worst sort of coward. Anything outside yourself, you could face but you wouldn’t look yourself in the eye. No, blot that out. Quick! And you made me watch you slip deeper and deeper and you wouldn’t stretch out your hand. You coward.”

“No!” Niall cried, lunging towards her. He was grabbed on both sides. He resisted with all his strength till Maggie looked at him and said, “It’s the truth.” Niall suddenly gave way, collapsing backwards in the men’s grip.

Through the tangle of limbs and protesting voices he heard her say, “I promised, I’d tell him the truth.” As Niall was hoisted to his feet she insisted, “That’s what he cared about. He couldn’t live up to it but he wanted to hear it – at the end. ‘Tell me then,’” he said.

“Stop now,” said one of the men to Niall. “It doesn’t help. If you want to stay, calm down.”

“Maggie,” he pleaded, “let me tell him…. I want him to know that….”

But she was weeping. “You thought you were shit, Aidan.”

“No, Aidan! Not you!” Niall cried.

“OK, mate. Better off out of here just now.” Niall was pulled through a set of doors, hearing Maggie say, “… that you didn’t deserve…” as they shut behind him.

“It was me!” Niall shouted.

“Course it was,” said one of the men.

“Time and place,” said the other.

Niall was taken into a room and spoken at. He said nothing, for nothing that was said got through to him.