There was a small graveyard on a soft, descending field of grass, more a fall than a field, since it blended almost imperceptibly into the untamed wilderness of gorse and heather that led to the mound of Howth Head. This graveyard had an oddity about it, in that none of the gravestones were standing. There were no sandstone crosses tilted with age and ivy, no recent black-marble monoliths from the nearby monumental sculptor’s. There were even no mute, granite angels, arms crossed, wings chipped, eyes staring blindly at the sarcophagus behind or below. No, there was nothing to interrupt the view of the suburb of Sutton below and the flecked white wilderness of the Irish Sea, other than the souls that wandered through it, searching through the uncut grass for the flattened plinths of their loved ones, or bent in memory, whispering some version of a prayer, at the graves they already knew. Either by the diktat of the municipality or the parish, every grave here was an almost buried plinth, laid flat in the irregularly cut grass. All the accidental poetry of commemoration, beloved wife of, fondly remembered by, life everlasting, face to face, had to be read standing, gazing down, or kneeling, wiping the detritus of whatever season had passed, spring, summer, autumn, winter, from the plinth at the visitant’s feet or knees. And that’s where he saw her, his mother, standing first, a sad bouquet of flowers in her hand, then kneeling by the new marble slab which read: ‘James and Andrew Rackard, dearly beloved of Eileen . . .’
He was as surprised by the sight of his name, chipped by an unknown hand into the black marble, as he was by the sight of her, unseen by him. Andrew. And he wondered what anagram Mona would have made of that. No Dany now, no Ynad; only one rearrangement of the letters leapt out at him: wander. Which seemed, on balance, appropriate to what it was he had become. He would wander, he knew, from his carnie home wherever it settled, for a day, a bank-holiday weekend, a week, but if there ever was to be a return, it would only be to there. Or maybe to here, to watch his mother bend over that plinth in some kind of beloved remembrance. Her grief was, like most of her other emotions, succinct and contained. She laid the sad bouquet directly over his name but he knew from her dry eyes that she felt she had lost him a long time before. Before the Dewman, before the carnival cataclysm, before the death of her half-beloved husband.
But he knew, following on from that knowing, that that very fact meant he would never leave her. There was a robin, flitting between the buried gravestones, from flower to withered flower. He remembered his shapeshifting father, all the trauma of his battle, his fight, his warp-spasm with him, and he performed another warp and found himself inside that robin, in that carnie way, and skittered forwards on tiny, clawed feet. He took a leap then, from a fresh carnation on to her hand that was smoothing whatever leaves had obscured his stone of remembrance.
‘Mother,’ he whispered.
He saw her surprised eyes, looking down at the feathered interloper on her ring finger. And a tear finally willed itself from her grey eyes. It gathered from a dim mist into clear water and fell and touched his robin’s breast.
He would wander, he knew that, as befitted his new anagram, but could always return to her. In a daydream, one of those sudden fancies that happens on a busy street, she would turn and see an overhanging alleyway in shadow, and for some reason think of him. And he would be there. On the bus journey home, her hand brushing the fog of the breath-misted window, she’d glimpse a figure departing from the light of a streetlamp. And she would think of him. At night, most of all, tossing alone in her bedroom, desperate for sleep, through her half-closed eyes she would glimpse his blurred shadow. And she would find sleep then, and he would be there.