POND, 1977. 18" X 14" X 6" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH PORCELAIN, FEATHERS, FOUND OBJECTS, PAPER. CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART. A POND IS VISIBLE BEHIND TREES WITH SEVEN FEATHERS FLOATING IN IT, EACH WEIGHTED DOWN WITH A GEM. IN THE BACKGROUND, AN EARLY PHOTOGRAPH OF A CITY PARK IN WINTER.
THE WEDNESDAY THREE DAYS BEFORE THEY WERE TO leave, Martin went to meet his father at the shop on Grafton Street. He walked from the green through the busy late-day throng of shoppers, pausing to look in at Sibley and Co. on the corner, whose window was full of bone and enamel pens and a semicircle of gold nibs. Mr. Sibley was at the back of the shop, tearing the cover off a hardback book. Farther down was the Canada Life Assurance company, whose window said in silver letters STRENGTH SECURITY STABILITY against a black silhouette of Canada. His father had shown him where Montreal was: there, in the thinnest part between the ocean and the Great Lakes. That was where his Buby and Zaida lived.
Then, right beside Mitchell’s (the confectioner, whose window was more outrageous than any dream of sweets a child could have), was his father’s shop, and there his father was, standing behind the counter of Sloane and Son (he, Colin Sloane, was Son) as a man looked at himself in the mirror, a grey fedora on his head. The white price tag spun in the air above the man’s shoulder.
Should it come down over the eyes like this?
Just tilt it back a ways. That’s it, rakish.
The man turned in profile, keeping his eyes on the mirror. Then he turned the other way. His father glanced at Martin and smiled, but Martin knew not to speak.
The man said, It feels cold inside.
The lining’s silk, said Martin’s father. It’ll become warmer after you’ve worn it for a while. It looks excellent.
And is it guaranteed?
Unless you fall into a river or get hit by a train, it’s guaranteed for life.
Mine? the man laughed. He paid by unfolding a sheaf of bills and snapping them off one by one.
Martin’s father put the money in his pocket, and then went and pulled the blind down over the door. It was exactly five o’clock. He called into the back, You’ll finish up, then?
No worries, Mr. Sloane, said an old man, and they could hear the sound of a machine punching out felt disks. Martin’s father turned and pretended he was seeing Martin for the first time.
Need a hat?
I shop at Tyson’s, said Martin.
His father frowned. You know what happened to Jack Dempsey.
Usually on their walks back to the house, Colin Sloane would recount the events of the day to his son, but now he was quiet. In fact, as soon as he’d locked the door and turned onto Grafton, he seemed to have nothing to say. Martin took his hand, a little frightened, in the way that fear comes, slithering down a change in routine. They did not go down to Nassau Street and walk along the gateway of Trinity, as they usually did. Instead, his father turned left on Suffolk and again onto St. Andrews, where there stood a grey church called St. Alban’s. O’Neill’s, with its giant square clock, was filling up with men in black and brown suits. Colin asked his son if he could keep a secret. Martin looked around him. A little Citroën went bleating past. I don’t know.
You’re a big boy now.
Were they going to have a beer together? Martin wondered. He didn’t like beer, but he would be happy to share one with his father. I think so, he said.
Then I want you to come inside.
He meant the church. Martin reflexively pulled back on his father’s hand, and then let go. Churches were strictly off-limits. He had never been inside one before. Nor inside a synagogue. When his friends asked him which God he believed in, Martin didn’t even know what the options were.
I don’t think we should.
I know your mother wouldn’t want us to, but I can’t have my only son afraid of churches. Not in these times.
He walked uncomfortably under the stone buttresses, and it was dark there, before the door. Martin didn’t want to go through that door; it meant telling a lie, but his father was standing there, and then he was holding the door open, and the whole interior of the church gaped like a cave.
Martin, I’m not asking you now. Take my hand. He did, and they went in.
It was dusty and dark and white specks went pinwheeling through the air wherever the light was. The ceilings seemed higher than the building appeared from the outside, and huge wooden beams criss-crossed above the nave like swords. Some people were sitting alone in wooden chairs that had been placed along the stone floor; a few knelt with their heads on their clasped hands. Colin led Martin slowly into the great hall, their footsteps swallowed into the space above their heads. Martin placed his feet as quietly as he could. On both long walls, the stained-glass windows he’d always seen from the outside of churches glowed as if alive. The red and green glass panels looked like they had been lit up from behind, and a thick, lambent light filled the place.
Those are the stations of the cross, his father said. They depict the twelve places Jesus stopped on the way to the crucifixion. And these are graves — people are buried here, great people. This man was a bishop, you can tell by his hat. It’s called a simple mitre. Not anyone can make one. I’ve never made one.
His voice trailed off. Martin could hardly hear him over the roar in his ears anyway. He wanted to walk softly, invisibly, and he felt that if he touched anything but the floor his visit here would become a fact. They passed down the aisle between the two columns of chairs. Some people looked casually at them as they went by, some nodded. They were getting closer to the big cross at the front. A large table stood in front of it with vases to either side, and a spiral staircase rose to the right. Wooden pews faced into the centre of the space before the altar.
The priest prays here, this is the chancel, his father said. He was gesturing with his long, tapering fingers. He stands in front of the congregation and says the prayers, and then he leads them through the eucharist, when they consume the body and the blood of Christ. A reader stands here, at this lectern, and reads passages out of the prayerbook or the Bible. It’s a very beautiful service. The music is lovely. Your mother would love the music.
The body and the blood? Always these things became more complicated. He’d once believed the human body was like a confection of some sort, and now it seemed, at least in church, that it was. What would his mother say? Her face was rising in front of him and she was staring, her eyes white like the boy’s in William’s story. He saw her shake her head slowly, from side to side, her lips pulled up over her teeth. She opened her hands in front of him like she was going to grasp his face — how, how could this have happened? He looked away, and saw her again, but it was the statue of a woman under a thin light. Was it the Virgin? He’d seen the Virgin Mary before, but this one looked younger and sadder than the one outside the church on Cabra Road. He blinked at the figure. He heard horses going by on the road outside.
That’s her. That’s the Mother of God. See — it’s not so frightening.
His father took his hand and they walked into one of the transepts, and the horses passed close by on the other side of the wall. They were alone there. He kept his hands tight to his side.
This is a smaller chapel. Special services are held here. Private funerals, the like.
He let Martin take it in. The boy walked up to the black iron gate at the front of the small room. There was a book on a table open to a yellowed page. It looked like there were signatures in the book, faded signatures. The room felt like no one ever came into it and the table with the book on it was like the front table they had in their hall, the one that always had keys and circulars on it. His father was standing behind him in the doorway, watching him. He said quietly, Do you know what sin is?
Martin started from the book. It means doing something bad.
It’s something you do that’s bad, yes, even if you don’t know it’s bad.
How can you not know if you’ve been bad?
Because you’re human, his father said. You can only know you’ve been bad if God punished you.
His father came closer now and made as if he wanted to look at the book. He leaned over the railing and studied it for a moment, then looked at his hands and rubbed some dust off one palm with his thumb. It’s human to sin, he said. Everyone does it. But only God can decide to forgive us.
How do you know if He has?
We do our penance regularly and we cleanse ourselves. We atone even before we have sinned. Do you know what it is to be damned, Martin?
William told me.
Then you understand how important it is to be cleansed.
We should try to be good, Martin said, wanting to be helpful.
We can’t just try to be good, his father said. How do we know what’s good?
Martin shrugged slowly. Didn’t he know when he was being good? He knew when he wasn’t.
Only God knows what’s good, and when we’re being good. We have to say we’re sorry for not knowing. That’s what churches are for. To thank God for trying to show us the right way to live and to say we’re sorry for not knowing it, and beg Him to spare us.
An older couple came into the room. She ran a gloved finger over a wall sconce and he stood near the door, leaning in, but not wanting to enter. Martin’s father stopped speaking while they were there and it made Martin’s fear turn white. Why couldn’t these people hear about sin?
It’s not a very good one, is it, said the woman.
Let’s go, then.
I mean, it’s not even as impressive as St. Michan’s.
Well, let’s go then, said the man.
They left. Martin couldn’t think of anything to say. He wanted to leave. His father’s face looked wet. He began whispering, as if the people were still in the room.
Martin — we could die at any time. We could walk outside and get struck by a car, or a bomb could go off in the street. You got very sick, you know. You could have died.
But I didn’t.
But you could have. And you would have died in sin.
Martin stepped into his father’s shadow and put his face against him. But I didn’t, he said and he clasped his father to silence him. What could it matter what might have happened? He didn’t die. Many other things had happened that were bad, but he hadn’t died and that was a good thing. His father slowly put his arms around him and Martin could smell him: a sharp leather smell, and another scent, a kind of blossom.
Do you know the story of Jesus in the wilderness? his father said. Martin shook his head. God sent Jesus into the wilderness so Satan could tempt him. Forty days and nights Satan tested Jesus, to make him turn, but Jesus was steadfast in his devotion to God. Martin quaked against his father. Never had he heard him speak of these things, or in this tone of voice, which sounded like it was imparting serious and unhappy secrets. The way we live, as modern people, is like that wilderness, Martin. We are tested every day, and if we fail that test, we belong to that darkness. I want more for the ones I love, do you understand?
Martin nodded.
You’re entitled to God’s protection, no matter what your mother says, and refusing the gift of His love is as bad as succumbing to temptation. I want you to remember that for always. That’s something that’s between you and me and God, you understand, for always.
Now he was silent, and Martin held himself still, waiting for it all to be over, but then his father pushed him back abruptly and with a damp, hot hand on his shoulder steered him out of the transept. Martin could suddenly smell perfume, and there was the sound of music-stands being moved about: the choir arriving for its practice in the crossing between the pews. There was too much movement, too much happening, and Martin felt he had to sit down, and he even dropped his back as if he would, but his father’s powerful hand on his shoulder was sweeping him back through the nave. A woman dropped her purse as they passed her and his father lunged down to pick it up and hand it back. There were three sounds: the rough hiss of the purse’s brocade scraping against the floor, the heavy sound of the coins in the purse being clasped, and the faint slap of the purse being pushed into the woman’s hand. Martin heard all three sounds like they were being made separately, and it felt like everything inside the church was being divided into separate sounds and visions. There were two people walking slowly down the narthex, the sound of a book being closed, and the main door to the church being opened, admitting people and light. The door, the light. The door.
But instead of turning left and leaving the church, his father turned right, and Martin saw a man dressed in black robes standing at the back, near some blocked doors. He came forward and greeted his father:
Peace be with you, Colin.
And his father replied, his tongue dry against his teeth, And peace be with you.
I’m Father Stirling, said the man. I’m the priest here. I’m like a rabbi, you see?
I don’t think he’s seen a rabbi. Have you?
A picture.
Your father asked me to come and say hello and welcome you to St. Alban’s. Do you like our church?
Martin said it was large and dark.
Dark to allow people to be with their thoughts, and large so God can get in. The sun was so low now that some of the slits of light were coming sideways through the air. He watched Father Stirling’s face move through one of the white bands, and the dust was like starlight in a morning sky.
His father and the priest shook hands, and Father Stirling walked toward another transept behind him. Martin’s father took his hand and they followed. This transept had a stone birdbath in it and Father Stirling swirled his finger in it and gestured for Martin to come to his side. He told Martin again that he was welcome to St. Alban’s. He touched a wet finger to Martin’s forehead and to his chest.
You’re a good boy, I can tell, said the priest, and he and his father shook hands again, although now the priest was not smiling. Father Stirling crouched down in front of Martin.
I know you’re leaving for Galway in a matter of days, son. But there are churches there should you ever want to talk to anyone about anything. Your dad will know which ones you should go to, if you like.
I’m both, though, Martin said. I’m Jewish too.
God will recognize you.
They walked together out of the church and Father Stirling wasn’t standing there when Martin cast his eyes back into the dark space. People continued to swirl in and out, many of them were old ladies with soft faces and black eyes. Outside the air was much fresher and the streets were bustling, although it had begun to get dark. The sun between the buildings was airy and seemed filled with a green light, like the afternoon light on a lawn. His father let go of him and wiped his hands on the sides of his pantlegs. He said they would have to get home quickly now. A man who knew them called out hello, and when his father lifted his hat, Martin saw that his hair was stuck down to his head, gleaming and damp. Then he put his hat back on and turned to Martin, the blacks of his eyes wide as pennies —
I left it on the whole time! I left my hat on the whole time we were inside the church. He laughed to himself, like it was the strangest thing a person could do, and he blinked a drop of sweat off his lashes. Then he drew his fingertips across his brow and rubbed them against his thumb. Martin touched his own forehead — it was dry. The water had already been absorbed by his skin.
On May twelfth, the day of the London coronation, they woke for their last day in the house on Iona Road. For the last time, they ate breakfast at the table (the one someone had purchased and would pick up by lunch), and for the last time Theresa went to school, glaring at Martin by the door. Tomorrow at this time, they would already be in the car, eating scones their mother would pack before they left. The scones were baking right now, and the sweet, sweaty fragrance came up the stairs to where Martin was sitting.
He had already been taken out of school. He’d missed so much with his illness that he had been removed from his classes. He would begin third form again in Galway. Through the fanlight above the door he watched Theresa cross the road toward her school on Connaught Street. She joined a pack of girls there and they enveloped her. It began to rain, just a little.
His parents were moving slowly around the house, not speaking much, although sometimes passing him on their way to a half-filled box, one of them would smile or touch him. Every time his mother or his father offered him a weak smile, he wanted to leap to his death from the top of the stairs. The morning seemed to last hours and hours, and although he was supposed to be helping (or at least packing the remains of his own things), he did very little but sit on the landing between the main and second floors, watching his parents go up and down. Around noon, his mother called him downstairs where his father was sitting beside the radio, and they listened to the broadcast from Buckingham Palace.
And now we hear the voice of His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury as he enters into a solemn dialogue with the new king. They are standing twenty deep along Whitehall listening through the loudspeakers. There are the trumpets! The next voice you hear will be the Archbishop of —
Will You solemnly promise and swear to govern the peoples of Great Britain, Ireland —
Right! shouted his father.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa, of Your possessions and the other territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, and of Your Empire of India, according to their respective laws and customs?
I solemnly promise to do so, the prince replied.
Do I have a bollocking choice? said Martin’s father.
The archbishop continued, his voice tinny and small in the radio, Will You to Your power cause law and justice in mercy to be executed in all Your judgments?
I will, said the prince.
Then he was crowned and they could hear the static of the roaring crowds. His mother’s eyes filled up with tears but his father got up and unplugged the radio, then put it into a box.
There. You’ve got a new king.
Don’t tell me you didn’t find it interesting, even just a little, his mother said.
I find it interesting that the English royalty advertises its inbreeding even down to the fact that they have only two or three names for their kings. You get to be George or Edward. Or James.
Henry, she said.
Not for a very long time. William, maybe. He kissed her, conciliatory, but he was grinning. Well, congratulations to us all. We have a new king. When he left with the box in his arms, he was chuckling a little.
Martin’s mother turned to him. I hope you’ll not show that kind of disrespect when you get older. Martin knew he wouldn’t. The fact was, he loved the idea of kings and queens. He couldn’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t.
For king and country! his father shouted gleefully from upstairs. May the sun never go down on the Empire! Whoopeee!
Jesus H. Christ! she shouted back, covering Martin’s ears. Blasphemy was the only possible revenge.
Eventually, he went to his room and stood at his window, looking out onto the sight of Dublin, the grey church stone in the distance and the tops of the houses leading down to the city centre. The steeples that rose up here and there seemed a little sinister to him now, as if the ivory-coloured clocks in the towers were eyes that could see him from anywhere. He was now not certain what gods had claimed him (which ones would even want him?) or how many more gods would vie for his soul from this time forward. The steeples spread over the sky like sticklebacks on the tail of a lizard, winding along the streets and quays. Above, the sky did look dim and dusty to him now — the move was so inevitable that he had begun to see things as they were. It was not a nice place to live, if you were a boy who had trouble breathing. But it was still home, and that was what was hurting.
He gazed down onto the grey-red cobble in the street, the cracked stones he knew like they were the creases on his own palm. He knew how that road looked darkened by rain or made pale by a rare whole day of sun. He could tell what the weather was by listening in the dark to the sound of a car driving by under his window. The hiss of tires in rain, the smooth black rubber sounding over a hot road, the soft tread of a car driving carefully on the occasional snow. Panic rose again in him, as it had for two weeks now, and he clenched his eyes to calculate the hours left — only sixteen. The trucks would come at seven in the morning. He turned to his room as if the time remaining was something material that he could feel draining down a hole in the floor. He looked around the little space. He had spent all his life here! The hollow feeling of terror sank into his stomach. It wasn’t possible that they were leaving. Not to come back? Never to come back here? How was it possible?
He threw himself on the bed. Three more minutes had passed in despair. He would not squander the rest of the afternoon. He thought if there was a south-facing bedroom in the new house, that he would be allowed to have it — but he would have to ask his mother first. A brief euphoria ran through him like a charge.
Most of his books and clothing were stacked in crates around his room and in the carpeted hallway outside. A grey trunk with the word britannia painted in white held both his and Theresa’s shoes and coats. It had been his grandfather’s trunk when he made the passage from Portsmouth (via Dublin) to Montreal to start a watchmaking firm. His mother’s life was to have started over there — Martin had heard the story so many times — but she met the man she was to marry on that ship. Your father’s nose is the reason you’re here today, the story would always end. Your Zaida Mosher thought Daddy was Jewish and invited him to dinner in our cabin.
Martin thought about the trunk that had travelled over the Atlantic twice, and his troubles seemed as vast as that distance. Dublin to Galway!
And how terrible that his mother had said goodbye to everything all for nothing (well, except for marriage and children). She had left her home in England at the age of twenty-one and travelled all the way across the ocean to live in a place where the people spoke French, only to meet her future husband on the ship and turn around. Except that she was coming to Dublin, not going home. Talk about floating off course. (Maybe, thought Martin, it would happen somehow that they would have to come back right away too.)
He remained rooted to the bed, unable to decide in what order to put the few remaining things away. He hadn’t much time — William, Devon, and Ian Shoemaker, whom he didn’t really like, were coming to dinner. Theresa’s friends, who were somewhat more numerous, were also coming. There was the red-haired Mary, a Jenny, and little Celeste Shipley, whose mother always nervously speculated on her daughter’s much-hoped-for growth spurt. Then there was Theresa’s best friend, a nasty girl called Kelly. Kelly had once cornered Martin and asked him to remove his pants, which he felt compelled to do, since Kelly was much bigger than he. She had approached him with a small twig and stirred the front of his underpants with it. When nothing happened, she’d said, with great disappointment, It’s all a lie, and stalked off.
He was not looking forward to the dinner, which was to end with the presentation of gifts that had surely been chosen by the parents. He did not want to sit and eat with people he was never going to see again. He’d already said goodbye to Devon: they’d gone to the flats behind the cigar factory and burnt an entire book of matches one by one to mark all the great times they’d had. Then they’d awkwardly hugged, the way they’d seen their fathers hug other men, even clapping each other on the back. William hadn’t spoken to Martin since three days earlier, when they’d gone to the canal and tossed daisies into the water. He wanted to say goodbye, but not in front of everyone. And yet, maybe he and William had already said their farewells.
He wasn’t sure that any of Theresa’s friends had much use for a final gathering either. Maybe it was important for all the parents to see them together, and take photographs and give gifts. Maybe that’s how adults say goodbye to other adults, he thought — by watching their children say goodbye.
There were three hours to dinner. In the last two days, his mother had finally succumbed to Martin’s stubbornness and packed his entire room herself. But on the desk beside his window he had placed the dozen or so keepsakes and objects that he didn’t want her to touch, and, exasperated, she had told him anything that was left unpacked come dinnertime was going to be thrown away. He had by now cleaned out what was unnecessary from his cigar box (a few piles of coins and a cumbersome cloth monkey), and into it now he placed a few crucial things that he felt he might want easy access to: touchstones of his life. There was a small folding landscape of trees that his father had made. The black cardboard accordioned out into a line of carefully carved willows, oaks, and pines, and when he’d been much smaller, his father had put it in his window so at night the lights of the street would throw a forest against his wall.
This he placed flat against the bottom of the box. Then he put a miniature bed in. He had purchased this with his own money only last year, and for some reason he didn’t know, it had become one of his prized possessions. He could hardly understand why, but he knew the little bed, or the line of trees, or the empty matchbook held some of his emotions with the full and perfect speechlessness of things. He would sometimes glance at this bed and peacefulness would flood through him. Beside it he placed one of his mother’s thimbles, as if it were a glass of water for the tiny sleeper, or a basin to wash his hands in.
Then, using his penknife, he pried open a slat at the front of the box and revealed the open space under the main compartment. It had been the original bottom, but when he discovered that the lid of the box had been made in two layers of thin cedar, he pried the bottom part away and laid it in about an inch from the bottom of the box. Then he cut a slat off the outside to make a door into the false bottom. With the little bit of light seeping into the thin space, he could make out the original manufacturer’s label: Linwood Cigar Company, Dublin. And a picture of a lady in a red hat, winking. In here he usually kept bits of chocolate or paper money, but it was empty now, and he placed in it a gift his mother had received from her grandmother when she was a girl, and which she had passed on to Martin without Theresa’s knowing (for Theresa would have wanted it for herself). It was almost a hundred years old, and had gone smudgy from handling, but it was still recognizable as what it had been when it was new: a small naked infant cast in hard rubber, its features rendered in detail. There was its fine nose and its small puckered mouth, ten fingers and toes with tiny nails, and hair wrought in thin lines along its scalp. The infant lay on its side, fast asleep, its hands tucked under its head, and it was the size of a robin’s egg. There was no way to tell whether it was a boy child or a girl, but Martin believed it to be a boy. He placed it in the secret compartment, and it lay like a seed under the trees and the bed and the thimble. Then he pressed the slat back into place and closed the lid of the box. It was complete.
He looked at what was now left behind: a model car, a tiny plastic flute, the cloth monkey, and an array of smaller objects, corks and bottle tops and buttons. These he put into a paper bag and tossed into the steamer trunk with the coats and shoes. Then he put the Linwood box on top of the steamer and stood back, regarding the emptiness of the room, which was now total. He went over to the window and looked out again. Somehow all of this had taken half an hour, and he could see that the sun had moved over a little. It would soon go down. He looked over the way, and through the window in William’s bedroom, he could see his friend pulling on a pair of socks. William tugged them on and then stood and turned, seeing Martin standing at his window. The two boys stared at each other over the expanse of street that had been their territory for their entire lives, but neither of them waved or acknowledged each other, only stood like sentries at their windows. Then William nodded slightly and turned away. Martin saw his back when William left the room on the other side.
Down, down into the streets and parks, along the river, past the churches and squares. Down Phibsborough over the canal bridge to Circular Road, where the statue of the soldier was, and down to Berkeley Street, past the Mater. St. Joseph’s over there, where his father had wanted to go in and thank the Virgin. He was running, past Eccles Street, past Mountjoy, and his chest began to ache. He slowed down, guilty, but realized no one would think it strange, the Sloane boy on his own walking down streets he’d walked many times. He passed Goldman’s and even waved to Missus.
It was the night of May twelfth, Coronation Day, and now his friends and his parents’ friends were walking up the street to their house to say goodbye and offer their farewell presents, and he was not there. He had slipped out of the mudroom door and gone along the back gardens until he’d hit the main road, and now here he was, with the failing light and the sounds of the city. Now seeing was more than an absorption of things, it was an action. He saw the streetlamps and the pubs, the shopfronts with their painted signs, the bright lights in the windows of Walton’s School of Music, where he’d canoodled on a wooden concert flute on Mondays between the hours of five and seven only last year. He passed McCann’s on Frederick Street, although they were closed now. His mother wouldn’t shop there because they charged them as much as they charged people who weren’t their neighbours. His mother figured living on the same street gave them a different status. She figured it would have if they’d all been Catholic.
The road turned here, angling into its midtown longitude, and the character of the street changed. It was no longer Phibsborough or Old Cabra, where the houses were tall and the commercial streets full of fruit and vegetable merchants, and nice pubs with orange fires going once you stepped inside. It seemed a little ruthless here between the outskirts and city centre, this was the corridor where people passed through and grabbed something, rather than lingering. There were twelve pubs between Dorset and Denmark Streets, and they looked black inside, their windows featureless and buff-coloured. No one went into them or came out. It was as if they had tenants, not customers. And above them rose the flat-faced buildings on either side, which were on the verge of becoming tenements, or rather, reverting. His parents had warned him that Frederick Street was not a place to go alone. Some of the casements above his head were even barred. The only thing that was nice about the street today was the bright Union Jacks hanging out of one or two of the windows. Strange to see them, his mother’s flag. You never saw that flag.
After Frederick, it was nicer; he heard the sounds of a tin flute and someone banging a table with the flat of his hand. A voice was saying, It don’t make no bit of difference! It’s the same bloody thing. And a voice replied, Get him another one of these! Keep your blood up!
Three men in suits were coming out of the St. George Hotel, laughing and singing,
God Save the King,
A ring a ding a ling!
At the bottom of the park, the street turned into O’Connell, and here the double-decker buses careened into their stops and roared off again into traffic. It was even louder now, and he crossed carefully to the meridian, looking both ways. People kept bumping into him, and he grasped tight to his pants pocket, which held a handful of coins he’d brought from the house. He bought a bag of hot salted groundnuts from a man with a cart and then stood, staring down the great street from the island in the middle. There’d been a big row that started at the post office, down there, on the right. There had been blood in the ruined streets.
It was beginning now to get dark. Martin lifted his face into the lights and the noise, into the smells of the city, and walked slowly along the grass as the traffic sped by on either side. He’d been down here first in his pram when he was an infant, then probably once or twice a week they’d been down here, walking or going to a restaurant. They’d taken high tea in the Gresham Hotel, here on the left. Expensive, his father had said. Martin kept his eyes open only slightly and let the layers of time and memory swim down into the street. His whole life. His whole life had happened here, against these buildings, against these streets, and he was leaving it. Nelson’s Pillar was here, towering over everything, its massive length lit up by lights in the grass. At the top, Nelson himself gazed down on the rest of the city, perhaps on the statue of Sir John Grey, who would have been jealous to learn he rated a pedestal only twenty feet high. Martin stared up through the trees at the Trafalgar hero and walked backwards around the column, taking nuts from the bag and cracking them in his teeth.
He’d already gone past the Savoy Cinema, and across from it, the Carleton, both with people lining up for the early seatings, their light coats on. There was John Keys, too, Tobacconist, where his father bought his cigarettes and the occasional cigars. Mr. Keys himself had given Martin his cigar box. Some of the street seemed to shimmer, unreal, like it was a memory already, shifting, insubstantial.
In-ep-IN-en! Read about the London coronation!
When he got to Grafton Street, the shopkeepers were noisily drawing down their gratings. Motorcars drove slowly down the thronged street, and Martin was thrilled to see the horses so close, the carriages with their giant wheels clattering by. Would Galway sound like this? He worried there would be nowhere to go to vanish into the sound and the activity. He was worried you’d always be able to hear the wheat growing in Galway. To be that alone!
He threw the empty, oily paper bag into a bin and sat down on a pub-barrel across from Mitchell’s to catch his breath. There, in the window, a girl poured a long tray of sweets into a bag. He couldn’t imagine anyone would throw out that much confectionery. The girl put the bag down and leaned on the empty countertop, looking out the window. She pushed the inside of her arms forward and yawned. The light mounted in the window turned her skin a bright yellow.
He was getting tired now — usually this walk would take him thirty minutes at the most, but he’d left the house over an hour ago. Stopping and taking everything in, storing it, was tiring him out. But he forced himself up and continued along Grafton, noting only momentarily the For Let sign in the window of Sloane & Son. The shelves behind the sign were still full, though his father’s assistant, Old Morris, wasn’t there.
The crush of pedestrians carried him across the street and he stood on the sidewalk at the northwest corner of the green. He entered there, and quickly the trees absorbed the sounds of the world outside the park and a hush floated down. It was sudden, the silence, and sensuous. The delight of it surrounding him. He heard the clicking of a woman’s heels and the plashing of wings hitting the water in the pond. He slowed, letting the scent of lilac and lavender draw him into the middle of the green. Every time he came here, he saw men and women who looked like they lived in the park. They walked in measured circles, like a dance, the woman’s arm on the man’s, his face tilted down to hers. Martin pictured himself and Nuala ten years from now. He’d come back to Dublin to live, and find her through her parents in Clontarf. Then they’d come here, and walk slowly back and forth along the paths, talking quietly to each other.
He went through the trees, where it got darker, and came out on the other side of the copse, and there, at the top of his plinth, sat King George II on his horse, the iron hoof of the steed rearing up with the king in the saddle on top. King George II, a brave king who almost looked good on a horse. This was all Martin knew about this king. It was all he knew about most kings, but it was enough to inspire him. The first stars were coming out just below George’s finger, pointing out across the river as if to direct his troops onward, into the night. Martin walked closer to the monument. After tonight, he thought, everything here will vanish behind me, and everything that happened here will go with it. Now he earnestly believed in the reality of the body. Curses always had a kind of logic to them. It was no wonder he’d been resistant to the idea of hearts and spleens and stomachs: they held the key to his fate. Why would he want to know about his own death, lying in wait under his own skin?
“Who’s the king of Ireland?” a man behind him said, and then laughed, clapping Martin on the shoulder with a glove-clad hand.
Soon it was very dark. The world seemed to be concentrated here for him. The statue was a representation of a real person, but it was much larger than that person. However, so far away, on top of its huge pedestal, the king looked as though he could fit into the palm of Martin’s hand.
He went back out onto the street. Instead of waiting for the light to change, he walked up to a policeman and pretended he was lost. Fifteen minutes later, he was dropped at his door and left with his parents, a warning not to let him out after dark offered to them.
His mother’s face was white, but he would not answer her questions, and when his father told him how worried they’d been, he simply said he was sorry and went up to bed. The house was empty of guests and their practical gifts with their sad ribbons lay unopened on the settee. He closed the door to his bedroom and changed into his pyjamas. He could hear Theresa crying in the darkness of her bedroom.
Across the street, the lights were off in the Beatons’, but the whole of the city was lit up beyond Iona Road. He felt as though he had strung those lights himself, and that each one marked a place for him. One light for every day of nine and a half years. He climbed into his bed and pulled the covers up, falling asleep almost instantly, and down in St. Stephen’s Green, a man strapped a bundle of gelignite to the belly of King George’s horse and blew the statue to bits. It was in the papers the next morning. They read about it driving west.