Gone

Lone Tree

I like it here. The space. The realtor looked nervous, shocked that I agree to buy the barn so quickly. There’s a small house too but it was the barn that attracted me. The place had been unsold for years. I know why Holfy was apprehensive that night I got back from Dublin. It wasn’t Ursula. It was the freedom the money from the house gave me. I had choice now and Holfy sensed I would be looking around, looking for a freedom she couldn’t give me. Ursula’s voice is leaving me at last. All the voices are leaving me.

On the distant highway, a car shimmers past. American cars have a way of being, a sense of movement that suggests their destination is unimportant; their function is to make the highway exist. Here, far from the cities, beneath a vast blue sky, cars are alien; an ugliness cruising across the plains. When I go into Lone Tree, people’s faces appall me; the pain of their lives glares like pornography. The isolation has made me too sharp an observer of misery. I need the starched blue sky I can run off into. A sea without wetness. Everything is bigger here. All the voices are nearly gone. Finally, life started when I left Holfy.

* * *

I have lost interest in working on the barn. At least temporarily. It’s too hot to work and it seems blasphemous not to be having fun on Independence Day. I am sitting on the broken porch. There is no breeze. The kitchen is the only place with an air conditioner and I move in there. The cicadas, the cacophonous cicadas, are screeching Ursula’s name. I see her walking away from me. Now, after the parting, her walk has an alienated majesty about it. I sit in the grim kitchen and read the book about the Baird murder that took place a mile away, some years ago. It’s badly written but I am hooked on the sloppy and conceited writer who is giving, as he puts it, a dispassionate and unbiased account of one of America’s most baffling murders. Whenever a writer claims to be impartial you can be sure he’ll be falling over himself to hide his little opinions, and a stupid writer, like this one, will fail. I wake with the book on my lap and the heat of the sun coming through the dirty windowpane. I’m looking for the reason why, with the answers dancing around me, I haven’t changed. The birds begin to compete with the cicadas, singing the night in. I drag myself up and begin drinking, drinking myself into stupor. Happy freedom of drunkenness. Mosquitoes in the house again. Waiting for me to go to bed to eat me. Fuck this country. A vodka gimlet. A loud bang across the fields sends a shiver through me. The Baird couple dead on the floor in front of me. Even the worst scribbler can set the mind racing. In the black sky a ball of light climbs slowly into the sky, opens and scatters its beauty, a cascade of reckless jewels fading away into darkness. Moths bash off the screen searching for an opening. There are no shortcuts. Only a sparkle ago I had my arm around Holfy’s waist and she had her arm around mine and we were leaning against the bridge along the Hudson River with thousands of others, watching the fireworks until we grew tired of the oohs and aahs and our necks hurt with looking up and we started kissing because we looked at each other and felt the same thing; luckiest people in the world to be together. Once upon a time, a long moment ago, I was down by the pond in Dublin, leaning on a bridge with Ursula, waiting for the train to go under and counting the carriages and writing down the number and we’d kiss if we agreed on the same number. Go home and study if we got it wrong. Waiting for the train to go under and we were so happy we didn’t think gravity could keep our feet on the ground. I am twisted with anger at the stupid bastard I was with her. And with Holfy. If only she had put up with a little foolishness from me. Put up with me, my mind whispers into a dead past. I am jealous of our past, of her present without me. God must have been this jealous when Eve and Adam first set eyes on each other.

Perched on the listing porch with the vodka and mug of ice, the ice melting with the night heat before I’ve reached the end of the drink. There is no forever, only the eternity of our little beginnings and littler endings. I finish the drink with its melted ice giving it a faint taste of wet cardboard. If I hadn’t got that call from Gerry. If we hadn’t bought that house in Bath Avenue. But I am lying to myself. The hardest lies to get past are my own. If does not exist. What happened? Nothing happened. Everything happened. What happened was I fell and didn’t see the fall. Ursula’s heart was no longer in it. She saw it long before me. I thought we were finding a new beginning. The night we were having the house warming before we sold it. I had called it a house cooling and she hadn’t laughed. We told no one we were selling as soon as it was finished in case the word would get out that we were being driven out. I wanted to make it a special evening, to tell people it was a symbol of our commitment to each other. But even then she was long past me. A chipmunk darts out of a crack in the porch. His tail flicks, bobbing in tandem with his fat-cheeked cheeping. He is full of nervous happiness for summer. My mind drifts around Ursula, around Holfy. Holfy never wore T-shirts. And she never let me wear them. The necks are disgusting. The tiniest things bonded us, made us insoluble. The way she glanced at me and her irony flashed off a roomful of people and landed on my lips. Men are such bores men are such bores men are such bores they take so long to realise anything. One could create the world while waiting for them to connect an apparently disparate idea. Men are such bores. Someone just had to say her name and my cock stiffened. She would glance at me across the room—a split second—and she would fuck me in that moment. And she would know. I had made mistakes with all of them. I was too young to know any different with Ursula, too lost to know any different with Holfy … I don’t know … too stupid to know Holfy was the one. The good thing. I write to Holfy with my address. Then I write another letter and include some of the bits I wrote in her darkroom.

Doors I had closed are flung open. Terror flies at me, yellow bats in the darkness, surprised by light. All my fears flap about, winged with a thousand cruelties. Desire runs through me faster than blood. I sit up in the bed sweating with the fierceness of a dream still racing through me. I imagine Holfy sleeping on her stomach, her hands tucked under her chest. The memory of her dispelling the nightmare. Her cunt tastes like butter melting on hot toast. When I am in her she squelches with joy. The sound of her lovemaking entrances me like the first time I heard corn crackling in its leaves in a July sun. She walks differently. When she moves, her legs are alive with knowing that I have been between them and will be between them again and again. I get dressed and go out and drive through the darkness. Every night sleep fails and I go out and drive the dirt roads as if it’s a job. How strange these back roads are, straight as book edges and cutting across each other like the grid of Manhattan but unpeopled. It is as if they are some grand abandoned scheme.

* * *

I am barricaded inside myself, a crazed bird on the floor of its cage, exhausted. I am driving off Howth Head. Ursula Ursula Ursula Ursula. There is no consolation in today’s wisdom over yesterday’s folly. I know too much now. I failed her and there is nothing. I watch the needle climb to one hundred. The car begins to dip and hurtle towards the sea of corn. Anything to force the sadness away. There is nothing at all happening between us, only the widening of the years. I wake in the bed before the car crashes. I lie down to sleep and in sleep move close to Holfy, smelling her hair, scent of oranges from her shampoo. What am I doing? What am I doing with this child of a woman? I wake and sleep and wake and the days pass and in the peopleless fields I lose sense of time, am no longer sure when I wake up if the dream of driving through the darkness was a dream or if I did get up in the night and am back in bed and waking.

* * *

I drive out onto the highway looking for a town. It’s impossible to tell from the highway signs what will be a town and what will be nothing. Everything is marked with the same democratic sense of importance. Next exit, wherever it is.

It turns out to be another nowhere. I stop at the first bar on Main Street. All these Midwestern bars are the same, only the hopeless inhabit them. I have stopped drinking. It wasn’t the drink I needed, it was the sight of humanity. A television in the corner. It’s so long since I have seen one that it has the appearance of a box of magical puppets. I stare at it with incomprehension. My eyes focus on its world. A woman in a smart suit talking into a chunky microphone; some kind of disaster behind her. Her voice, her gestures are inexorably ineluctable. I look down at my root beer and grin at the sound of Ursula quoting inexorablyineluctable as fast as she can, mocking constipated poet-words, words stuck on a page to say what does not need to be said, words to make up feelings that you never truly felt. The newswoman must have a number of tones, of looks that present all our tragedies, our follies. A man is standing talking with her. He too is a presenter of news. There is more subtlety in her plucked face. I walk out into the sunlight. Even this nowhere is too much for me. I go back to Lone Tree with its 401 inhabitants. I go back to the barn, to my wisdom. My nerves are much better. There is the tiniest pink hue in the sky, as if creation is approaching pleasure.

I have been running a long time and now I can run no further. The sky spreads out endless blue, denying God. I need a God today. I need someone to shake. I see myself putting a gun in my mouth. Baird put the shotgun against his chest and missed the heart the first time. The police car parked two hundred yards away, waiting, deciding how to approach. He discharged the cartridge and shot himself again. That ended it.

It was not days nor weeks nor months you were leaving—years you were leaving me. What I sensed, feared, for so long, was always happening. I had felt battered by your betrayal (I should say betrayals but there is only ever one) and disgusted by my innocence for so long that I had lost sight of myself. It seems extraordinary I stayed awake nights blaming myself; I fought so hard to keep you. I see the words shaping on your lips—when did I battle to hold on to it all, yes? You could never see it. You would not count the years of listening as loving. Listening to the great silence from you. Taking you in my mouth (yes, I never did like that and I shouldn’t have lied when you asked). So much I did in understanding you. Planting flowers. None of this was ever apparent to you. You would have expected it and not gloried in how much I cared for you. I had said words I thought I would say to no man. Do you know what was the worst moment? How sad it is to be so certain you have no idea. Certainty is a kind of death. You had the gall to look at me expecting a reconciliation after being inside another woman; it meant as little as that; you did not see it the way I did: when you were inside me, you were touching my soul—even the times I did not enjoy it, we were touching souls. Even now, although I care nothing for you, I feel like vomiting at the memory you were inside a woman and then came to me and put that part of you in me. How would you have felt if I had done that? It makes me sick to think that you may not have minded at all, that love does not hold such sacredness for you. I thought it was the end of me. It wasn’t. It was the beginning. After the steel chill of parting I feel what I had not even begun to consider—I feel freedom.

I drop the letter on the deck. The citronella bucket seems to attract as many mosquitoes as it keeps away. I light another cigarette. I touch the letter off the flame of the matchstick. I go down to the car and turn it on, blast the air conditioner way up. I turn right and head for the highway. The cassette player is broken; I turn on the radio. The world is still there, talking on the radio. The same eager and self-important American voices on each station. I come across a news channel: an explosion somewhere. Dreadful solemnity scarcely containing itself. I am sick of it all. It never changes. I switch channels … and with the support of listeners like you … I switch the radio off and listen to the air-conditioning. I turn onto a back road, dirt billowing into the sky. Fear twists in me; the fear that is always there in the gut. I stop the car and get out. My spectacles steam with the heat. I walk for a long time, pass a man with a dog. Two turtles hanging from each hand. Gun under his arm.

—Evenin’, he says.

I return his wary smile. Cornfields stretching for miles. Nothing but the eerie clatter of stalks, dry with the cruel August heat. They must be eight foot tall. Row after row of well-behaved corn. It stops with purposeful abruptness. It has the same effect that coming up out of the subway on Fourteenth and Eighth always has on me; space and light. The cornfields become hog-fields. Dozens of little A-frames. The hogs themselves are nowhere to be seen. At the edge of the field stands a man in a long robe, arms out, fingers spread: beseeching. He looks, for all the world, like an apparition. I look around. I expect to hear a snigger. It’s ridiculous to be frightened. I can hear for miles off. I walk closer. A statue. A stone plaque, a foot or so to its left:

JEAN BROUSSARD

A burgher of Calais

Auguste Rodin 1840–1917

I look around again. It makes no sense. A sudden breeze and the gentle rough clack of the corn leaves. Even the breeze carries suspicions. But there is no one to explain. There is no one to listen to questions. Only the sky, the cornfields, and the incongruous statue. I laugh at the stupidity of myself; there is nothing: nothing but a pile of broken images from a past littered with petty dishonesties; nothing left but a tangle of misunderstandings. I turn and run. I run and run, the corn leaves lashing my face, whipping with the fierceness of Holfy’s belt, the night my father lashed me for wetting the bed, lashing me in the face with the belt. Ruth screaming. I am running and running, the insanity of running frightening me, forcing me to run faster, to blot out the madness, to run as if I had purpose, and laughing and wet with sweat. Blood is running out of my nose into my mouth and I’m lying on the ground with the taste of blood and dirt in my mouth with the sky over me and I get up from the dizzy blueness and run again. I stumble, fall, pick myself up. Cornstalks whip and creak. I fall, my side sore with exertion. No sound but the sound of my breathing and my heartbeat. The sky is cloudlessly blue, makes me long for the greyness of Dublin. But Dublin is too long ago. Ursula is too long ago; my father loading the car with Ruth’s things; my hand lifting the bottle of Jeyes fluid to my lips as a dare with Ruth; the blink of time that was Holfy eating my kisses. There is no space for forgiveness. The corn clatters off itself in rebuke.

The earth, hot and sun-cracked. Alone with no one but myself. You don’t have a self. Holfy lied about her age. All this activity for a me that isn’t. A bird steps out in front of me. A pheasant. It could be a Martian for all the difference it makes. It stands stock still, staring into the stalks, has the appearance of some bizarre mirage shimmering in the humidity. Tear tracks burn into my skin. Bronzed feathers. Mottled with black and green. Roadrunner. Mee Mee. Its eye, deep in a fleshy red patch, swivels, takes me in, swivels back, and in two graceless strides it flaps into the sky, the breeze of its whirring wings convincing me of its presence, and is gone. Kok-cack, kok-kack, it screeches into the silence it leaves behind. There is a room that is empty of everything except regret. I will die some day and Ursula will not have walked in it. She will stand by my grave and think nothing happened: believe I did not know this place.

* * *

A thin white trail scratches the blue sky. The plane is so high it’s scarcely visible. Coming from somewhere far away, and going somewhere far away. Must make Midwesterners feel the insignificance of life here, of life happening elsewhere. The white line carves through the sky, bisects me. I am looking into myself. The end of the line fades. I was wrong about Agnes Martin. It’s everything stripped. It’s the opposite of ego. It’s finding the thing. I understand nothing. Life is fundamental accuracy of statement—not art. Life is. Then—only then—art. Martin was religion—that’s why she didn’t believe in it. One day the heart stops.

* * *

A child found me in the field. They were detasseling the corn. Three weeks pass in the hospital. I remember a man I don’t recognise come visit and I remember listening to him say the burns from the sun will heal and I will pull through. His name is Parizeh.

Two fat packets are waiting in the mailbox when I get out of hospital, both from New York. Depression is never darkness. Darkness is relief. Sleep is relief. Depression is the brightness of a sunny day, flowers fat in their blooming, two people greeting each other on the street and laughing. Depression is beautiful music that does nothing to the emotions. Depression is seeing this and knowing it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If there was someone to phone I would but there isn’t.

I am left looking at myself. I have always been unhappy. I look up at the sun and doze. The evening sun is as close as I get to content. Cars pass by on the highway in the distance. This is my life. It was my birthday today. Birthdays were such fun as a child. Playing with a Lego set. Red and green and white and blue. Where does life go? Where do the smiles go? Does someone else smile the smiles I’ve stopped smiling? I open the packets. A postcard spills out. Six words:

You imitate Durrell badly. Forget Durrell.

Then a PS: Still like you.

* * *

Life gathers in such phrases.

She’s written her comments on the back of my writing.

Let me put it another way: writing is like painting. You do it. Keep doing it. Feel it working through the brush. Writers have the advantage of never running the risk of going too far. There’s always the last draft. The stress in painting is one stroke too many. Why I turned to photography. Photography is definable. Not matter how many clicks there are, they are all finite. Then the magic of the darkroom. Processing is Christmas presents.

I came across this today: That for which we find words is something dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking. Nietzsche.

The first time I heard a woodpecker. He was inside a small trunk that was no fatter than a wrist. I climbed over the small fence and listened. Like a timid but insistent child he was, tapping. I tapped back and he stopped. Then tap tap tap. All the genius of creation stored in such a small and simple bird. There was a time I thought I would do anything for love. Thought that it was possible. That there would be a divine coupling. Someone who would see the world as I see the world. Such an atrocious assumption. I’ve kept the old rotary phone and got it hooked up yesterday. I sat there looking at it like it was the enemy for half an hour. Haven’t called anyone yet. The options they give: I didn’t know what half of them were, call waiting, call blocking, Jesus, she went on and on and all I knew is I didn’t want any of them. You have to pay to have people leave you alone.

* * *

The presents I bought my mother as a child. Dishcloths, delft, cutlery. Perfume with all the subtlety of disinfectant. Earrings that looked like toys hanging from her ears. Rigor mortis is setting into the tulips. Brilliance happens by accident. One day, sitting there and it happens. The woodpecker deep in the bowl of a tree. Pecking. Staring at it and listening and its mate lands on a branch and sings a warning and out it flies, a fluttering flash of feathers gone and nothing but silence left.

One day Holfy was not there and I wanted her to be. I was angry at her for forgetting but as I sat there and as I waited and waited for her something in me closed. It is unnameable whatever it is that closed. I danced that night in the apartment. For the first time in my life I danced on my own.

I felt the cold edge on our love when I didn’t run out after her in the morning when I knew she had forgotten to take the film out of the fridge. I felt it in the note I didn’t leave tucked in her bag to wish her luck on the job that morning in the Puck Building. I felt the coldness in the things I didn’t do for her, in the things that she had no idea I wanted to do for her. Love became not doing but loving her still. The curious thing is that she didn’t notice and then I learned something: people don’t miss what they don’t want.

* * *

Mr. Parizeh comes to visit with his son. He asks if I’d be interested in a couple of pups he needs rid of, looks out the window towards his truck away from any hint of kindness. I walk out to the truck and look in at the pups scurrying around the back of the truck, two sets of paws up on the tailgate. I lift them out and set them on the dirt. They run about yelping with happiness.

* * *

I go to the supermarket every day. I walk around the store the same way: carrots, potatoes, milk and butter at the end of the aisle, meat, bread, beer if it’s a Friday. Not that Friday exists in America. There are no patterns except the patterns we make. I fool myself into thinking I’m in Dublin sometimes. I have stopped exchanging the currency rate in my mind. I think in dollars. I am no longer surprised at how expensive it is to buy a deliciously red and tasteless tomato. I have learned to live in America through its supermarkets. No one told me what the stores were: Walmart, Econofoods, Quiktrip, Sams. There was no identity in their names. Their identity reveals itself through the people who shop in these stores. Even before I go inside I can tell by the cars in the lot who will be there and what they will be buying to create their dream futures, making worlds that will never exist. Paper or plastic, they say at the checkout. Do you want a paper or plastic sack to take your dreams home. Life is about finding ways to control. Shopping is control. I am a consumer now and I love it. It is as reassuring as a cigarette. It tells me who I am. This, more than anything, is what I need.

* * *

It happens slowly. One day you hear a name yelled on a street, called out in a film, the eye catches sight of it on an envelope in some office, and it causes no pain. There is nothing but a memory, faded like the sounds of childhood. There is nothing left. Her name is drained of meaning. At first, I thought it meant an emptiness akin to death, but I was wrong. The emptiness is something precious. It is the wisdom of finally knowing myself. The layer of need under it. Most men have it, a wordless, unadmitted need. I must sound cynical. I am, a little. For a long time I thought something was wrong with me. I wanted a woman that—I laugh at my stupidity—would be everything I wanted in a woman. How utterly ridiculous an idea I had. I couldn’t get a word processor that would do everything I wanted—how could I ever get it from a woman. How little good it does the soul.

I go about my business, smile at people, keep myself tidy, go to bed at the same hour, get up at the same hour. I maintain a surface of normality. I tell the pups when I feed them and they wag their tails. I have wasted so many years. The pups bark. They want to go out. Go out, I say, opening the door. They shoulder each other and rush through the door out into the forest as if the day will bring them something that it did not bring them yesterday. Pearl jostles Boogie and she barks viciously, and they go their separate ways. They stop and sniff the air, waiting. Then they run back to the screen door I have already closed. They sit and wait at it. The same tedious routine every morning. Every morning I wake up and know Ruth is dead. The loss of her grows every day. Him too. Life is tiring, just with trying not to hate the past for being here. I hang soap bars on the trees to stop the deer eating the leaves.

I go for days without talking. I don’t shoo the dogs out of the way. I am learning my place in the world. At night there are the cicadas. They deafen the night with their mating calls. There is an owl somewhere and her call is calming. The only sound in the house is the electric drone of the fridge coming on and off. Sometimes, when the silence builds, when it becomes loaded like a gun, I cough and the cough is enough to dispel the loneliness. It is a strange loneliness that has soaked into me because I am not lonely for people. For a long time I thought it was loneliness for Ruth and my life with Ursula. But that is not true. I am lonely for myself. I have gone away a long time ago and I have only just noticed. I have deserted myself.

I read in the paper that a fourteen-year-old swam out into Hoover Lake and tempted a swan out of the reeds with muffins. Then he beheaded the swan. The swan’s mate has not moved for six days. She stays by the murder spot.

The cicadas are screeching greedily in the night. I get so drunk I wet my trousers. I lift the telephone and listen to the tone. Vulgar hum. I list everyone I know. Imagine a conversation with them. Talking on it with Holfy. With deaddeaddaddy. With deaddeadRuth. With Ursula. With the fuck of a mother I once had. That time when the balloon burst and she lifted me off the counter and hugged me. There is no number to dial. Can’t think of a single person I can talk to without apology or disgust swallowing my words.

Everything is nonsense. It is the greatest nonsense of all believing I had to be alone, that I enjoyed the solitude. The phone rings one day and my heart races. I don’t care who it is, I am happy to hear a sound not of my own making. Then it stops before I pick it up.

Who knows what is true, what is accurate. It seems I have never been happy but I must have been. Is it that my mind is drawn only to the saddest moments? My parents arguing in the hall and asking us to decide which one we wanted to go with. The abject terror I felt. Where were we going to go? It was nighttime. We couldn’t go out in the bad night. We would disappear if we left the flat and went out into the night. I looked up at my mother and father and at Ruth. Who would pick who? I picked Franko, the man who used to come into the shop every night, because I couldn’t decide between them. I don’t know how it got resolved in the end. All I remember is that fear that I would not be with my parents. I don’t remember thinking about not seeing my sister again. Just the terror of the cold, black night and not seeing one or other of my parents again. I don’t remember if I had school the next day. I remember I had a coat on and I remember staring up at the door handle of the flat and wanting to reach up to it and have us all go in and go to bed.

The balloon. I was sitting on the counter watching everyone come in and out and buy their sweets and books. I was watching my mother and father take back the books and thumb through them rapidly with their fingers. The edge of their thumbs would tell them if a page was missing. Sitting up on the counter I could see how exciting the world was. You had to be as tall as a grownup to understand what was going on. Up on the counter I could see and understand everything. It was coming up to Christmas and I had a blue balloon in my hands. Sometimes I would rub my finger on its squelchy belly and my mother would tell me to stop. A man came in and bought a couple of books. He was smoking a dirty cigarette. He looked as wise as God must look, and as if he must know everything there was to know. He bought chocolate and packed up his books. Then he held the cigarette to the blue balloon and there a bang and the air snapped in my face. It was like a bad miracle. This is all I remember. Sometimes I think I remember the wrong things. I remember the plastic curtains that separated our shop from the flat we lived in. They were black and yellow and red strips of plastic that swooshed back and forth all day long and whichever side of them I was on I always imagined there was a magic cave on the other side that was full of riches and deep mysteries.

I would discover the pleasure and the laughter of being with a woman. There would be books and films and washing dishes and taking clothes to the launderette and our jobs to pay the rent but they would be the things we had to do until next we could be in bed together. This was the only reality. Nothing mattered more than the pleasure of our nakedness and the simple happiness of our warm bodies that surprised us with unceasing pleasures.

There is a hypnotic sense in this, as if I am leading towards some greater understanding, as if there is some inevitable truth that will reveal itself. There is not. Except perhaps the danger of nostalgia. Because it didn’t last with Ursula. We had six years together. An awful lot of time to arrive at nothing but a nut of bitterness and guilt. It is the insipid and insidious edge of niceness that cut into the truth and buried a lie. I did not want to complain about the sex with her. So I lied, and so did she. But desire ran inside me and flooded me in bed with her every night and I prayed for the desire to go away but it didn’t. I tried not to touch her. I tried not to bother her and slowly, when I began to realise that it was not getting better, that she might never get better, that I might not get better, I began to hate my desire. And the hours passed, and the days, and the weeks, and the months, and the years, and still nothing was different. I no longer blamed the desire. I blamed her.

* * *

Turn thoughts off. Turn them off. They’re no use. It’s done. That’s all there is to it. The drink is taking hold of me. I’m thirsty for it even as I drink it. I want to send my little Ursula a postcard, tell her everything. But no. The other way. Walk away. Get up and work on the barn, even with the heat. Work the only solace.

* * *

Lightning in the bright summer evening. It starts to thunder a little before nine and it goes on into the early morning. The electricity goes off. The sudden crash of wind lashing through trees in darkness. I stay up all night watching the earth showing itself its splendour. The sound of wood ripping, lightning strobes flashing on the fields. Rain. Rain so heavy I turn the radio off and listen to its thunderous assault. Loneliness gnaws at the deadness in me. It wrings my guts with a plea for company. Ursula. Holfy. Anyone. I could talk to anyone. The sky flashes, threatening me.

* * *

The end of marriage was a quiet, tree-lined street, waiting for spring. Trees are courageous without leaves. We were going about our lives talking intensely about everything except the end of it all. And then one night I say it as we are driving home.

We are stopped at a light in Blackrock, talking about her article. I look up at the large Santa Claus over the shopping centre and say I love you and you love me but it’s over and I don’t want it to be so but it is the truth and the light turns green and she says yes it is true and we drive home. It was tiny lies that lodged between us. Bindweed tightening around a tree. I am drinking a bottle of vodka a day now.

* * *

Winter comes bitterly. I go to the local flower shop to buy a potted green plant to celebrate. When the florist hears my Irish accents she perks up.

—It closes up at night, says the woman, joining her hands.

She smiles at my disbelief.

—It’s a prayer plant. That’s its name.

Then she mentions the Irish wedding and I make the mistake of feigning interest. When she invites me she sees my reluctance.

—I divorced two years ago. Being a florist makes a girl realistic. I’ve sold a lot of wedding bouquets in those two years and I’m sure glad none of them were mine. Name’s Moira.

She sticks her hand out just as a hefty woman comes into the shop, wide with a sweaty smile.

—Morning, Justine.

—I’ll phone you Moira the Realist.

I take her business card off the counter. Justine smiles at me, oozing suspicion.

—Whatever.

—Thanks for the prayer plant.

—You betcha.

She is already chatting with Obesity.

* * *

There’s an oil spill on the highway and the traffic is backed up for fifteen miles. We sit there, stuck in her pickup. Elijah is skating around in the back, barking. We are already too late for the church so we go straight to the hotel. White crooked letters on a blackboard spell O’Hara and Flaherty reception. Queuing at the buffet, a man nudges in front of me. I am shocked by his rudeness in this country where staying in line is a commandment. I turn, see he is a priest and am about to say something when he smiles at me and says in a thick Irish accent:

—Grand spread, isn’t it? And as grand a couple as ever I’ve married.

—You must be starving with the hunger.

He claps me on the shoulder, winks, the secret knowingness of the fickle Irish in America, playing it up for all its worth.

—Begob, he says, another Irishman. Nothing like a wedding Mass to put a hunger on you.

He nods and spoons meat onto his plate and looks at me again, long smile.

—Are you long over?

—Long enough.

—What’s the news from home?

How he says the word home. The faded rosiness of a place that no longer exists. I imagine that he is ten, perhaps fifteen years out of Ireland. Frank Patterson Irish leg-opener voice. Begob and musha and arra how are you.

—Brutal.

—But the North, he says, isn’t that on the mend?

—Yes, the church are staying out of it. It helps.

—You’re an awful man.

Impossible to insult him. He claps me on the shoulder again.

—Is there no roast beef here at all? he asks the server on the other side of the steaming silver pans. He’s wearing a grey wig with a hairline at the back that could have been cut with a garden shears.

We go to the Ace of Spades out by the lake, a lake made to enhance the nightclub’s appeal. Hardly needed. A lot, the size of a football pitch, is full of cars. We park and cut through the maze, pass a car shaking gently and pretend not to see it. The club is huge—as big as the Pontoon Ballroom my father painted in Mayo. A couple are dancing on the floor with theatrical precision. Euphoria in the middle of blue-collar nowhereness. The dancer’s hand slides up and down her body in tortured ecstasy. She runs her hands between her nyloned thighs.

—Choreographed sex.

—Know them?

Moira wrinkles her nose. The couple swirl, the woman mouthing the words of the song. Her mouth is losing its passion and her eyes close. I stop smiling at their spectacle. She is dancing with the man she had hoped her husband might be, the man she dreamed she married. I feel pity for his Travolta-like grimaces. A crowd comes in, noisy with their own excitement. The floor begins to swallow up the couple. I have no idea what I am doing here with this flower woman.

—Dance? You Irish still dance?

—Sure.

It’s all seventies music, Abba and the like. A slow set comes on. The skin on her palms is rough like a kitchen scourer. We are uncomfortable so close to each other, smile, go and get a drink at the bar. She tells me she needs some work done on the apartment she’s bought. It went for a dime. She asks if I know of a handyman. No, but I know the song. Moira breeds rabbits.

* * *

Surface is everything. I watch the sky. A hawk waits in the breeze. His wings are still, like a kite. Light plays with the leaves of the tree. He drops like a stone and just as quickly takes off with a prone creature in his claws. The land is exhausted here. Dust rises for miles. Years wasted. Regret is useless but it snaps at my ankle like a dog afraid of itself. A hundred years from now, what difference any of it. I go in and make tea, such as it can be, in this city of poisoned water. It takes a long time to see.

* * *

Moira and I are talking in bed, she’s listening to me talking and I’m happy to be talking even if it’s the worn-out past. It’s someone listening.

I stopped saying Da at school. The boys used to go Daaaa and call me Sheepshite. Then they called me Shovelhead because of the shape of my face. I stopped lots of things in school. I stopped talking in school. I stopped talking and I listened and waited for it to be over. It would get better when I got into secondary school. It got worse. I was twelve years old. I told Daddy I was leaving after the intermediate exams. He told me I was not leaving until after my leaving certificate exams and that was all there was to it. I was told I was going to get a good job. I waited. For five years I sat in class trying not to look at the clock. For five years the clock crawled to five minutes to four and the bell rang and I waited for the teacher to tell me it was alright to pack my schoolbag. And one day I was seventeen and childhood was over and my father said now go out and get a job and I did—I went to work. I was seeing Ursula. I was a man. I went and sprayed televisions in Clastronix. That was the good job. I began to fall in love with paint. I began to watch closely. I watched the arc of paint fanning across the sheets of metal. I watched the others and tried to see who had talent and who didn’t. Gerry had it. Slowly, I began to realise the mistakes I made were not simply in the wrist. Mistakes came out of the crook of the elbow, and up through the souls of the feet, the bend of the knee, the blink of the eye. Mistakes came out of the whole body. Slowly, I understood my eye had little to do with it. Paint shot out of the gun too quickly for the eye to right wrongs. I began to relax more, and as the weeks passed, the muscle in my arm strengthened, my wrist ached less at the end of the day and my neck was not as sore when I woke in the dark winter mornings. Now, when I painted, I started to close my eyes, and I could feel the paint hit the sheet of dull plastic. I began to listen to the hiss of paint as it flew across the sheet, began to follow the rhythm of paint. I would fall into a trance and then, one morning, I heard the paint sing, paint delighting in its own beauty. When I had decided that I had it mastered completely, when I believed I could paint without concentration, I examined my work, and to my horror, discovered it flawed. Paint could never be mastered.

—You make factory work sound real poetic.

—Everything is poetry to the young idealist.

Every morning, as I changed into my work clothes and put on my gloves and mask, I would listen in a stupor to the crude talk on the floor. I pretended not to be interested. I probably even convinced myself that I was not listening, but I was rapt. Beyond the facade of silence and disgust, I loved it all. I discovered the beauty of paint. We all went out every night and got drunk and we all hated the work and we all loved being grown-up. No one called me Shovelhead anymore.

I was in love with Ursula. We married and I wanted a better job to show her I was better than anything she thought I was. We moved out of Dorset Street and into the place in Harcourt Street. We had parties in there all the time. I didn’t invite the people from the factory, not even Gerry. People from the Tribune came and got drunk. And they all tore strips off whoever the government was and were ferocious about the way the underprivileged were treated. It was the first time I heard people using the word underprivileged who weren’t talking on the radio or the television. I loved those parties. Mixing with the best of them. Loved hearing them talk shit about the working class, a class they themselves despised outside of the words coming out of their well-fed mouths. The most disconcerting moment about moving up the class ladder is realising your people are a pawn. I was of the working class unlike these masticating morons who were for it. I stop talking, turn to Moira and see she is asleep.

Winter passes slowly, then without much of a spring, summer erupts. I am painting the hall door a glistening black. NPR has a day dedicated to war: a debate about gun control. The usual banter. The sun crackles on the paintbrush. Moira drives by and stops and yells out the window that black’s a bad colour, attracts the heat, then drives off, laughing. The door shines with the importance of its new coat. I make a vodka gimlet and sit and admire it. The pain dries in minutes. Ireland is mentioned on the radio. I reach down and turn it up. Peace: now what? says an American voice, serious as granite. A look at a people emerging from decades of hate. Voices speak. Lap over each other. Irish voices. Snippets of opinions. Tired, angry words pop like surprised bubbles. I make another drink and sit back, happy to hate the autistic pit of the North. The sun is beginning to drop, still brash with heat. Ireland. Fuck them, let them kill each other.

I open my eyes to Ursula’s voice ringing in my ears. Sweat running down my spectacles. Her voice is speaking to me. I look around, terrified. Her voice is sharp as sunshine.

—I don’t believe that. It’s complete nonsense, she says.

I close my eyes and press my fingers against my lids.

—I don’t believe that was ever true about women. I don’t believe you are taking anything seriously in asking that question—

—But surely the very concept of beauty has been with us since the beginning of time?

Dead air.

—Has it not?

I stare at the radio, waiting for her answer.

—Not as long as stupidity, she says.

I fell in love with you many times, Ursula. The seductiveness of that voice. I laugh out loud at the fight in you.

* * *

I go into the city to buy some Christmas presents. Disgusted as I am by it, nostalgia gnaws at me. I buy the Tribune to ease the homesickness. It’s full of colour advertisements and friendly, fluffy articles. Large photographs of skinny models. I trudge through the heavy snow-laden streets and find a seat by the window in the Tobacco Bowl. I read an article about the decline of the microwave; one about Northern Ireland; I read what’s on television—Ireland shrunk into the TV page. A boxed review of a programme about abortion; the reviewer’s initials in the bottom corner: UF. I look up from the newspaper and East Washington Street shocks me with its presence; two snow ploughs scooping up hills of snow like ducks dredging through mucky puddles for food. People pass, hidden in clothes to fight the freezing weather. We can acclimatise to anything. I see Ursula’s face, flushed with the cold, in front of me, feel her slide next to me in the booth and hug my arm with her being. The smell of her perfume. There is no ending, she goes on forever. Reading her, even such a frugal snippet, is like being inside her. I can see her sitting at the kitchen table with the electric fire on, scribbling agitated notes. To know her so well and to have wasted it all. I hate all the days and nights I gave her. Hate all the fights we had trying to resolve everything. Hate all the times I apologised to her. Hate that I loved her once more dearly than anything or anyone in this world and that time is past.

Months pass. I walk for hours on the dirt roads that separate the cornfields. My mother’s breath on my face. The smell of lager off her, the excitement at the anticipation of her coming into me at night, kissing me and frightening me with her large eyes. A horse neighing somewhere. A dog barks back at it and then I see the house. It is in bad repair; the kind of house one expects an outlaw to be holing up in, waiting for the final showdown. There are three unkempt horses; one of them, the white one, large with foal. It takes me a long while to realise she is looking at me. Her stillness unnerves me. She is holding a paintbrush in her hand and she looks as if she is about to fire it like a knife thrower in a circus. I clear my throat. I heard your horses. My voice floats across the back of the grey pony. The fear in the air is mine; she is unafraid. I want her to know that I am friendly but the notion of my friendliness is probably absurd to her. I look around, expecting to see Holfy hiding somewhere. It’s too perfect: a woman painting in the middle of a cornfield. It must be a joke. She has the same build as Holfy and she is about sixty feet from me. I cough in warning as I approach her. She is older than she seemed from afar, strength in her eyes: a clarity. When she looks at me I can see she is not simply looking at me, she is looking at what I am. A lit cigarette between her fingers seems forgotten. The dog by her side watches me with the same mute lack of interest. She lifts her hand indifferently and takes a drag out of it. It is of no account to her who I am. She absorbs the air around me. Her eyes are unnervingly calm. Something else, too, but I can only sense it. The light perhaps. The sky falling off into blueness behind the shack. Old attachments. They pull inside and push me towards her. I am an abstraction to her. A shade falling beside a patch of sunlight; a splash of colour in her painting. My mother’s face on those drunken Saturday nights. The smell off her breath when she kissed me goodnight. The way she is holding the paintbrush. As if it is part of her. The ease she has with it as if the paint is coming out of her and not the brush. The rigid ease of her hand at work. The longer I look at her the more insane she appears. An old woman living here, alone, unafraid. As if to correct me I hear a clang, like the carriage of a train shouldering itself into silence. A youth is straightening a gas cylinder against the side of the house. He is blond, strong, unmistakably American. He runs a chain through the ugly torpedo shapes and locks them without once looking over. I lift my hand and start a wave. She watches me, waiting for me to go. I start off down the road, whistling. His appearance highlights her foreignness. Something about her is un-American. She is dark, Hispanic perhaps. The air is charged with my strained nonchalance. He is probably still not looking at me. He is no more than fifteen years old and yet there is a rude violence about his coolness. Of course she could not get by utterly alone; the heating would have to be brought in for her.

* * *

I am a mile or so from the house. I wonder about passing it today. She might shoot this time. America is trigger happy, and here in the Midwest the lock and load neurosis roars though silent fields, the perceptible sound of gunfire itself. I walk on; stop. I don’t want her to know I am curious. I am no threat, too slight to be a danger, even the kid could take me on. She is feeding the horses. She puts her bucket down and walks to the gate.

—What do you want?

Her question is so direct, the flatness of a worn stone on a beach. Stillness at the centre of her stare. Ruth skimming stones, three bounces, four bounces. Once, she skimmed eleven bounces. Our world record. Sacredness is unaware of itself. The woman turns away from me. She is not impatient for an answer, she is uninterested.

—I don’t want anything.

My voice is unexpectedly indignant. It shivers in the cold air. She pauses with her back still to me; nods her head as if that is explanation enough, walks slowly back to the munching horses. To say hello, I shout across the field. My voice waivers between friendliness and irritation. But already she is absorbed in her work. I think about stepping over the low rusted fence. Confronting her. But she has done nothing except ignore a busybody. I walk for about an hour, feel their presence behind me but know it’s my imagination. I turn back.

As I pass her house I think of some ruse for approaching the door, a question of some sort if the boy is in. But there is a blind look to the house that warns me off. I meet her a mile down the road. She is walking with the dog. She beckons for me to follow her.

* * *

—I wanted a home here. I like the bleakness. It leaves the mind open. This place was for sale. No one wanted to buy it. Like your place. The farmer shot his wife and his daughter-in-law in the kitchen.

—This is the Baird farm? I thought it was on the other side of the highway.

—This is it. They were chopping potatoes: the wife’s belly and the bones from her back hit the wall. I hang Frida Kahlo there. Big joke. No one wants to buy a place where death is. They left the pig houses, they left everything. The murdered farm, I call this place. People say it’s morbid. They spend their lives dead and they say morbid.

The door opens from the only other room. The boy comes out, the corner of a wardrobe visible behind him. She sees my mind working. She smiles at the shock I’m trying to hide.

—Why did he kill them?

—Ronald Reagan. The banks shut farms.

It was for sale that long?

—People are afraid.

—Of what?

—Who needs a what? My name is Toscana.

* * *

I lie in bed thinking of the old woman lying in her bed. The boy must have parents. The noise of the fan keeps me awake so I get up and go into the kitchen. I pick up a plum and squeeze it for freshness. Juice breaks through the skin. Ursula would write a sensuous poem about such a plum. I hate knowing that I hate being alone. Holfy doesn’t answer my letters. No matter. I get up and make coffee. Toscana is just some crazy woman but at least she’s content in her madness. I can’t bear this middle of nothingness any longer, can’t bear the idea of another winter, this living without purpose. I finish the coffee and go to the Hawkeye and buy a ticket for New York. Moira agrees to take Pearl and Boogie but she will not be held responsible if Elijah eats them. She’ll see to the sale of the barn if it ever sells she says. Great at telling it as it is are Midwesterners.

* * *

Manhattan is frozen with heat. Not even memories are left in New York. Life moves too quickly there to let memories gather anywhere. Street signs still the same: Jane, Horatio, Little West Twelfth, Bethune, Perry, Ninth Avenue. Pearl, Fulton, Canal, Elizabeth. Lafayette, Dominick, Cornelia, Bedford, Commerce, Barrow. Gansevoort. Restaurants with their cluttered greedy tables. Small bricks that give the buildings their quaintness. Turn a corner off Seventh Avenue and find a quiet step to eat one of those Middle Eastern take-away thingys. And it’s early morning and sleepy workers hose clean the sidewalks all over the tired and dirty city. A Mexican sitting on the corner by the flower shop. His shirt. Welcome to America. Now Speak English.

Gone with the rush of the subway. I thought there was some sense to the way I was living, something unique about it all and that one day I would be rewarded and my choices—even the callous ones—would make sense. There is nothing left now except the bad decisions and the indistinct path of words leading the way to a semblance of integrity.

The meat shop is gone on Gansevoort Street, magically converted to an architect’s office. I peer in through the shutters. The old hoarding that advertised the butcher’s wares hangs inside the new trendy office, a hip relic of the past. Someone will pay money for it one day. I go to Florent for coffee to steel myself. But Florent is closed. I walk to the Serivalli playground on the corner of Thirteenth. The sound of a car passing on Eight Avenue. Even the Empire, lit with red and green, seems deserted. I go back. I have to face her.

I ring the bell and wait. His name still on the door. Robert Tansey. RIP Robert Tansey. A garbage bag moves in the doorway and I leap back looking for a rat. A hand touches my knee and a frail voice asks for change. I stare down at the darkness. The smallest I have is a ten. Have a good day, says the voice. Music from the top of the stairs. I decide to use the key. A black man, immaculately dressed in a black suit meets me at the top of the stairs. The hallway has a new smell. Ray Charles singing with that smile of his.

—How can I help you?

—You can’t.

—You rang my bell.

I stop on the stairwell and look at the man and point past him at the open door.

—I rang that bell.

—Right. You rang my bell.

I try to look beyond him into the apartment.

—How did you get in here, Sir?

I hold up the key, a black man and a white man facing each other. America’s defeat.

—You have a key to my apartment?

His blackness soaks into me. He appraises me a second longer.

—Just a minute, Sir.

He closes the door quietly. Suddenly her absence is apparent. She is gone. The apartment as it was flashes through my mind, the bed up against the window, the scattered books, the night I awoke to her watching the video of her wedding, the first time I was making tea and reaching for the blue jug with sugar in it. I run down the stairs and out into the street, I run until I am breathless at Thirteenth Street.

I think of Kahlo dying on the veterinary table and my crack afterwards about the N word and wonder if she rented it to the black as a last joke. Gerry might know where she is. I phone from the street. No answer there. No one will be around. Bill. Bill might be in town. Bingo. Bingo Bill. I ring information to find somewhere to rent a car. It takes twenty minutes in this 24/7 city to find somewhere that can rent me a car. I have to take the train from Grand Central to White Plains.

People want to help, that is part of the problem. We are insane, all of us. I feel insanity flowing through my veins, the insanity of being human. The painter living in the Baird house. That was what she was and happy in it. She needs nothing from the world, the purest form of madness. Then there are those on the periphery of it, those who sit and drink on porches. They are close to it, feel it in the July heat, smell it in the corn, hear it in the clacking of the corn leaves but they do nothing, they neither welcome it nor dismiss it, they sit paralysed with their own awareness.

I was raised on lies. There are none more powerful than the lies of the mother. My mother’s lies were as natural as her milk. She lied about everything. It was her nature. Fear made her lie, and cunning made her successful at it. She never hid her lies from me; I was her conscience as she was the conscience of her mother. She didn’t like her daughter, Ruth. She preferred the company of men, unlike most women. She knew Ruth would grow into a woman she could not trust but she knew my loyalty was unshakable. The blind trust of the son. I was seven when I saw her come out of the Carlton cinema with the man. I was on the mitch from school. She looked happy. I didn’t understand why she was coming out of the pictures with a strange man but I thought of my father at work reaching into a corner to finish a ceiling. I knew it was wrong and I knew not to say anything. I had no mother from that day on. I looked at her like she was a movie star, observing her. I watched her live an automatic life at home. I watched her work and talk. My mother talked endlessly. But she was not living in our home, she was acting a life she had constructed and it was flawless. I never hated my father for his stupidity but I couldn’t feel sorry for him either. Without bitterness, I felt he was living the life he deserved. I learned the value of silence and observation. Rarely is there a need to ask questions. Words can say whatever they like but bodies can’t, bodies can never lie with any conviction.

I was sure my mother would be caught, or that she would be killed in an accident but that didn’t happen. She simply left. I remember hearing the famous story of the woman on the radio saying her husband went out for cigarettes one night and didn’t come back. I didn’t believe her, it’s one of those stories that exist forever. The woman was in love with her story, in love with the rejection. My mother didn’t smoke. She just left. I was sure, too, that my father would meet someone right away. Men don’t like to be alone. They always meet someone. He didn’t. He just kept working and Muriel helped with us. He never lied to us. She isn’t coming back I don’t think, he said, but I’m not sure. We’ll just get on as we are. There was a programme on the telly my mother liked called Quicksilver. I loved watching it with her. The man who did the program was called Bunny Carr and my mother said he looked like a rabbit. He didn’t but she knew it made me laugh. Give yer man a carrot will ya, she would say. Jaysus, RTE must pick out the most stupid cunts in the country for that quiz, they never have to give much away. Coinín Gluaisteán she called him. I always thought she would write me a letter. Dear Stephen, you understand. I know you know about the world and you know about your own mother and it doesn’t matter about the rest of them.

She wrote no letter. She thought I was as stupid as the rest of them. Women work on the assumption that all men want is a fuck and that listening to men and nodding at men is enough. But I could see through women and had none of it, none of the learned ignorance, the convenient confusions they propagate.

My father painting. I was devoted to him. The grace of him on a ladder, reaching up to dab paint into a cornice. There was always the right amount of paint on the brush. I would foot the ladder for hours watching him, waiting for a drip to fall from the hairs of the brush. Drip, I would say on the few times it happened. I didn’t know the word perfection but perfection describes his work. He measured a room for wallpaper simply by walking into it, and when he papered it he only ever measured once with the first length, then he would cut the rest with the large scissors without even looking at what he was doing. It was as if everything was in his fingertips and not his eyes. Ruth didn’t see the work he did with his brushes. He used wallpaper and paint to cover ugliness in the way my mother used lies.

* * *

I am the last one to drive onto the ferry. There’s a salty freshness in the air; it seems hard to imagine it’s still New York I’m breathing. A loud colourful crowd playing Frisbee. Another crowd playing croquet. Everyone seems to know everyone else. Adirondacks scattered on the sloping lawn like tired swans. A redhead threatens to throw the Frisbee to me and I turn away before her gaiety forces me to join them. I sit and watch, memories of customers running through my mind. That Jewish woman who kept changing the colours just so she could devour Gerry with her eyes for an extra couple of days. A waiter asks what I’d like. A bucket of stout, if you’re paying, Muriel used to say. Wine glasses stand on the arms of the abandoned chairs. Too hot for wine.

—Lemonade. No ice.

Each choice is a battle. Why New York is impossible. I regret the prospect of the lemonade. I could handle a vodka. For the sake of calmness. He comes with the drink.

—What is so difficult about remembering lemonade with no ice?

The waiter nods without apology.

—Tell you what: why don’t you trot back and bring me a Pimm’s cup.

—Ice?

His voice is friendly, his expression unreadable. I can do nothing but admire his polite rudeness.

—It always has ice.

I look away. I hate this kind of money, people on the edge of the really big money. I regret coming. A hammock is swinging between the trees. A woman’s leg trailing to the ground. A Silver shoe at the end of a slim leg. Fireworks go off suddenly but she doesn’t move. I scoop the ice out of the lemonade and take a gulp. A young child spread-eagled on her chest. She scratches his back and he giggles. His head hides her face from view. He giggles again. The ruby ring on the finger. I swallow the rest of the lemonade. I feel caught, naked. Florent has teamed with the redhead in croquet. He laughs too much. He waves a welcome to me as if he only saw me the day before yesterday. The weekend is elaborate foreplay for him. As soon as the waiter comes with the Pimm’s I take the drink wordlessly and walk away, over to her. Halfway over to her I shout back to the waiter, Hey. Good Pimm’s, more as a warning to her than as an apology to him.

I stand between her and the sun, my shadow falling across them. The child lifts his head and scowls at me. She smiles, as if she knew I was coming.

—Have you noticed the grass is so green here? Shamrock green. Emerald green. Paddy green. Green as the Irish themselves green. Take a seat.

The playfulness of her tone is so disarming that I almost believe she has expected me to arrive at this very moment, as if everything has been leading to this. I sit in the adirondack beside them.

—Coleman and I were just discussing that, weren’t we?

Coleman, child runt, nods his skinny head resentfully.

—There are only two homes on the island to ignore the summer drought laws. The guy who owns Victoria’s Secret and our host. What does that tell you?

—People come here to feel decadent without having to actually do anything. Fallout from the AIDS generation.

—Concise and comprehensive. Who knew? Thanks for the explanation, Stevie.

—How are you?

—I’d love a cigarette.

I take my jacket off and take a cigarette out of the pocket.

—Ugh. Not Parliaments.

I put the cigarettes back in my pocket and drape the jacket over the arm of the chair.

—It was a joke, Stevie. Remember irony.

—Sister of bitterness?

She smiles and tickles Coleman. He giggles into her neck. She picks up my jacket and takes out my cigarettes. She caresses the fabric of the jacket and nods approvingly. She taps the cigarette box on the child’s head and takes one out. I try again.

—So. How have you been doing?

—I’ve been doing. Y’know, New York. You have to keep doing. How have you been doing? Sorry about your sunburn.

—One layer burns off and another appears. You know the way I am.

—No. I have no idea the way you are.

Coleman tugs at her.

—Can we go for a ride in your car Auntie?

—Coleman, why don’t you go and see how long you can hold your breath in the pool?

She glares at me and clings to the child. Auntie. I wonder is he related, if her family are here. I didn’t even know she had a nephew.

—Go away, handsome.

—You left Gansevoort Street?

—This is true.

She looks at me, waiting for me to go. I wait. Silence was always the best question with her.

—It was time. Listening to the hockspit of prostitutes lost its charm. It just seemed to get complicated—living there. I’m gettin’ old kid.

I could have had a life with her. Anyone could see that. And a decent one. She wasn’t tied to Gansevoort Street after all. She just needed to be pushed. I could have done that: opened my mouth and demanded it of her.

—I think we will go for that ride, Coleman. Hey, Stevie, hold our hammock?

She winks at me.

—Chill out. Once around the park is better than nothing. Always too serious. Your stuff is boxed in Claremont if you want to pick it up. I was tempted to dump it but I couldn’t do that to the books, even your books. I told the doorman there might be some Irishman coming by one of these days.

—In Claremont Avenue? You’re with that dealer guy?

—Nope. I’m not with anyone. Claremont is mine sweetie.

She smiles as she lifts him off her and swings herself out of the hammock, smiles like a chess player savouring checkmate but it makes no sense unless it is a game, as if life is some game to her. I grew up with screaming. New York is lost there and then with her walking towards the house with the child’s hand in hers.

I sit in the car with the door open. Ruth and me sitting in the car on Dollymount strand. I have not thought of her in a long time. Maybe I have been playing a game without fully knowing it. There is a knock on the passenger window and I jump, expecting to see my dead sister. Holfy walks around to my side of the car. A reprieve. A confession that she was joking.

—I stole your cigarettes. By accident. Good luck, Stephen. We’ll be long enough dead and gone. Live well.

I say nothing and don’t look at her when she walks away, don’t want that to be the last image of her. I pull out the pack of cigarettes. I’ll have to stop smoking. In the cigarette box is a card with a scribbled note.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

I close the door and start the engine. There is time still to make the five o’clock ferry.

The apartment on Claremont Avenue is paintings and light. Nine rooms. I wander through it as if it’s a deserted film set. The boxes are in one of the back guest rooms overlooking Grant’s Tomb. I open one, then another. They are packed neatly, too neatly for her to have done it and my temper rises at the idea of some stranger filing my tastes away, fingering my life, evaluating it, drawing a picture of the personality that made these decisions. I am leaving New York, have left it already. The film is over, the theatre empty. Everyone has gone, getting on with their lives. Catholicism. No, not that, too easy to blame it all on that. There is no one watching. God’s bitter joke. Acting a life as if there is someone who cares as much as you do yourself. I phone three thrift shops but none of them will come collect. I take the elevator down and ask the doorman if he has any use for some books and clothes. He eyes me, looking for the catch. Explain it’s either that or the trash can, none of it’s going to Ireland.

* * *

Getting off the train at Crewe I walk over to the timetable to see what time the connection to Cardiff is and laugh out loud when I realise Crewe is not in Wales. I had promised my father I’d never set foot on English soil. He’ll forgive the accident. I have to speak to her, to lay eyes upon her. Too long have I run from it. I imagine what every abandoned child must imagine, I imagine the conversation. The confrontation, the reconciliation, the settling of the score, the rejection, the emptiness when nothing comes of it.

On the connecting train I stare out the window to see signs of England fading and at last glimpse a motorway sign in both English and Welsh, a reminder that like Ireland, England has conquered but lost, that tribes outlive their oppressors.

Cardiff is full of rugby fans, drunk and singing. I get a room in a small B&B only when the owner is certain I’m not a rugby fan. Mr. Parker tells me I’m far too late for supper but recommends a local pub. I walk down the street and find the bright depressing place and have a pint and a sandwich. I go home and sleep well with the tiredness of the journey in me. In the morning I get up and go and buy a map of Cardiff. I could ask Mr. Parker but his friendliness decides me against it. Too many questions. I have the address, it’s only a matter of finding it. I decide against a taxi, wanting instead to walk, to feel the streets she has walked for over thirty years without us. I expect to meet her every time I turn a corner. The house in on a decent street and my heart lifts that she hasn’t fallen back into the poverty that she climbed out of with my father; then disgust. She has done well, lives comfortably, happy all these years without us. It’s a terraced house, small garden full of flowers. I hope she answers the door so I won’t have to deal with him, hope he answers the door so I’ll get to see what was so much more attractive than her family. I will ask for her by her first name if he answers, be as casual as possible.

I push in the iron gate, close it behind me, stand on their welcome mat, stare at the door, breathe deeply, look around to see if anyone is watching but the street is empty. They’re all either at the rugby or watching it on television. Maybe he is at it, a big-bellied Welshman cheering his team. I lift the door knocker and rap gently and then see the doorbell. I stand back, waiting. Footsteps on a hard floor. The door opens and a man looks at me smiling. He is plain but gentle looking. Unimpressive. About sixty. Full head of grey hair.

—Is Lily in?

I expect a question, a rebuff, but he smiles and turns calling her name in a strong Welsh accent. She comes out and suddenly it’s happening too quickly. I expect her to be wiping her hands on her apron, the smell of cooking behind her. She’s wearing jeans and a jumper, hair still red, and she is smoking and this startles me more than anything. I never remember her smoking and the cigarette, more than the years on her face and in her movements, alienates me. She smiles, frowns, smiles again, then recognises me. She looks back at him walking down the hall into what must be the kitchen. She walks towards me, puts her hand on the edge of the hall door and tells me to come in, the accent tinted with Welsh. She closes the door and we are standing close to each other, close enough for me to breathe her in. She walks ahead of me into the sitting room. Thickened with age.

—I’ll be back in a minute. I’ll just get him to put the kettle on.

She leaves, closes the door behind her. I look around the room, glad I dislike their taste in gold-lined wallpaper, heavy oak furniture, and floral carpeting. Cream embroidered doilies on the arms of the sofa. They deserve ugly taste. I imagine her telling him who I am and his worry. She comes back and sits on the sofa, facing me.

—How are you?

It’s as if the minute outside has given her enough time to recall exactly how she planned to handle this if it ever happened.

—Grand. Daddy died last year. Ruth two years before that.

I didn’t mean it to come out as badly as that and suddenly the obvious hits me, that we are the last two and I want to rush on and tell her that I am no orphan returned but I bite my lip. I suspect she must have heard. She looks away to the door and back at me.

—I just wanted you to know. I don’t know why. Just so that you’d know. She had cancer. I just wanted to tell you so you’d know. I’ve no bad intentions. And I wanted to see you and ask you why you left. That’s all.

—You’ve got an American accent.

—You’ve got a Welsh one.

—I left because he bored me. He was a good man. It’s not a very nice reason but it’s the truth. There’s more than that but if you want the short answer that’s it. I couldn’t have handled raising the two of you on my own. I knew he’d do a better job, that he’d meet someone else.

I nod, deciding not to tell her, prefer my knowledge of him over her ignorance, prefer that to flattening her with the guilt of the truth. She didn’t deserve him.

—So what about you? Did you marry? Have you children?

I shake my head, want to tell her nothing; in my desire to lie to her I realise I haven’t the strength to make the effort. I feel too much disgust. A phone rings softly and is picked up. His voice is quiet as if he is talking in a morgue. I abhor this other lived life. She has had two simultaneous existences, the absent presence that lived in our home, and this one here across the water with this Welshman talking quietly on the phone. It’s all so pedestrian, so banal. Tedious details that add up to nothing. I stand up as he walks in with a tray, she looks at him, says nothing and he, in return, is silent. He steps further into the room, enough for me to pass him. I walk out into the hall, walk across their tiled hall floor, open the door and turn to them both.

—All the best, Lily.

—Goodbye son.

—Goodbye mother.

Walking up the street I resist the urge to turn around, and as soon as I reach the corner I turn sharply and walk quickly. I walk for about twenty minutes until I find the city centre.

* * *

The ferry back to Dublin is quiet. Standing at the back on the viewing deck I stare at the ferocious wake churning in the sea. Son. Son she said. Bit late in the day for that. I search for a cigarette, jostle the keys in my pocket. Evenings when she lit a cigarette and perhaps wondered about us. I look at the keys, remembering each one: Bath Avenue, An Tigh Bocht, Gansevoort Street, Lone Tree, my father’s house. Homes everywhere and nowhere. Already hot in my palm I finger the silver fish on the key ring. Lobbing the keys grenade-high into the air I wait to see them splash on the surface, but they disappear in the widening sea furrow, too quick for the eye to catch. I imagine the metal cooling on impact and sinking slowly through defiant waves, sinking, settling on the seabed.