A dreadful chapter of much melancholy and confusion
He’d never liked October, Mr Donelly. It was a dog’s breakfast of a month: rain and wind one minute, warm and settled weather the next. You never knew where you were with October. And now here he was, still receiving condolence cards, weeks after – that was typical October. The postman, Jerome Hegarty, did at least do Mr Donelly the courtesy of delivering to him first, as if the cards were exam results. Mr Donelly had known Jerome’s father, John Joe; he had worked with him at the printworks years ago and it was kind of Jerome to take the time and trouble.* Mr Donelly was feeling pathetically grateful at the moment, actually, which was not like him. He was all mixed up: it was October. He couldn’t believe how many condolence cards they were getting. It seemed a lot of people had only just heard, people they’d known all their lives. People right here in town. People who had missed the funeral and who thought they’d just drop a note instead, like cancelling the milk when you go away on holiday.
Times had changed. He remembered himself when he was young, if someone died in town, you knew about it pretty soon, if not immediately, because of course you knew pretty much everyone in town, and you’d notice if they weren’t around, and even if you didn’t know them, if they were just someone’s cousin, say, you’d still be happy to line the street with everyone else when the time came to give them a good send-off, and the men would take off their caps, and the children would be expected to bow their heads, and everyone would stand in silence. No one these days took off their caps, but then no one these days wore caps. It was baseball caps, if anything, and Mr Donelly doubted very much whether people took off their baseball caps as a hearse went by, he certainly hadn’t noticed them doing so. These days even old men, who should have known better, and who should have been wearing proper caps, might see a hearse approaching from a distance and not even pause to nod.
Shopkeepers actually used to step outside their shops, in the old days, when a funeral cortège was going past. They’d shut up shop, even if it was only for a few minutes. Of course, now all the shops have moved to Bloom’s and it was mostly charity shops on High Street and Main Street, so no one did that any more. No one cared. No one knew you anyway. Your passing away meant nothing these days to the community at large. Death was no longer a public event, unless it was a royal or a celebrity doing the dying, and then there was a ridiculous fuss about it, people making up for all their silence and embarrassment surrounding the subject the rest of the time. Death, Mr Donelly felt, had been rather diminished in dignity and stature recently. Death somehow no longer had the clout it used to. It was like everything else that wasn’t actually on the telly – it was no longer very important. It had become an amateurish, family affair, something you were expected to deal with all by yourself, and to clear up the mess after you. It was exactly the same with weddings. They’d been to the wedding of one of Mrs Donelly’s nieces a couple of years back and the minister, who’d been wearing a lounge suit and tie, had actually announced from the pulpit – had actually said this – ‘Please do not throw confetti either inside or outside the church. I’m sure you can appreciate, ’ he said, ‘it’s very difficult for us to pick up all the pieces.’ Well, no, Mr Donelly couldn’t appreciate it. He thought that’s what churches were for: to pick up all the pieces. But you could no longer expect other people to join in your celebration, or your mourning these days, not even the church. It was down to yourself. If you wanted to throw confetti, well, fine, but you were expected to do it in the privacy of your own home. These days, you have to smoke in the garden, wear a helmet when you’re riding a push-bike and cry alone. That’s modern life for you.
The children had all made it back for the funeral. The youngest, Mark, he’d come straight over, right away, from America, as soon as Mr Donelly had picked up the phone and told him. Mr Donelly had rung him before breakfast and, before he knew it, there he was, Mark, standing in the kitchen, larger than life, eating a cheese-and-pickle sandwich before the clock struck midnight, giving Mr Donelly a hug. It was unbelievable, really. He’d got the hugging from America. Molly, his wife, had stayed behind to look after the children: they didn’t want them upset. Mark said that Molly had told the children that Nana had gone to be with the angels. What Molly didn’t say was that when she told them they’d said, ‘Who’s Nana?’
Mark had been a big help with the arrangements. His job with the hypodermic needle incinerator manufacturer had been the making of him. He was a man now, Mr Donelly realised. He was in management and he seemed able to deal with all life’s little difficulties: that’s what managers did, of course. They sorted things out: they brought people in and they laid people off, and it didn’t really matter if it was dealing with personnel problems with a junior employee in tele-sales or accounts, or your own poor dead mother, it was just the same. Mr Donelly had never been a manager himself, so he didn’t really understand how it all worked, or how you went about it, but he had to admit he was impressed. He could remember when Mark wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and yet here he was, making arrangements on the phone, speaking to the funeral director, Sid Rodgers, who’d always done everyone in the family, and the solicitor, Martin Phillips, ‘tying up the loose ends’ as he put it. Someone had to. Jackie, Mr and Mrs Donelly’s daughter, the nurse, she was there from London, but she was too upset to be of much use, and her and Michael just kept setting each other off, just the same as they had when they were children, tormenting each other with their sorrows. They’d always been the emotional ones. Tim had made it back too, but he was keeping his own counsel. Mark had managed to track him down in Thailand, Mr Donelly had no idea how, and he was too tired to ask.* He doubted he could even find Thailand on a map – he’d certainly have had to have a few goes – let alone find his son there. It was Tim who was most like Mr Donelly himself – the eldest, the quiet one, the drifter, fond of dogs, of alcohol and strong opinions. Mr Donelly had never really got on very well with Tim. But still, it was nice to have him around.
So there they were, all in the house together again, for the first time in years, getting through toilet roll and tea bags like there was no tomorrow. They’d finished a large jar of Branston pickle that would usually have lasted Mr and Mrs Donelly six months or more, and there was not a dry tea towel to be had in the house, and they were all thinking the same, and they were all confused by the same thought: that this was rather nice, actually, to be all together again, and it was a shame they couldn’t have got together for some other reason, because there was something missing now that spoiled the whole event, and just for a moment or two you couldn’t quite work out what it was, but then you remembered.
She wasn’t there.
They were without Mrs Donelly for the first time in their lives, and without her there was nothing and no one to hold it all together, and no amount of tea and sandwiches could put it right. This wasn’t indigestion and it wasn’t Christmas after all.
It’d been her, really, right from when the children were young, who’d made things OK, who’d made the whole thing work. Maybe that’s where Mark had got it from, his managerial skills, just from observing his mother. Mr Donelly had no idea how it had worked, their lives: he’d just lived it. It was Mrs Donelly who always made sure there were enough toilet rolls and tea bags in the house, and sandwich spread for the lunches, clean nappies and clothes, big piles of them on the stairs, he remembered, and presents for the birthdays. The parents’ evenings, the exams, the doctor’s appointments: Mr Donelly had no idea how all these things had happened. He’d never even really noticed them, to be honest. He just took it all for granted. He used to get up before the children were awake, and put on the clothes Mrs Donelly had bought and washed and ironed and put away, and eat his toast, brush his teeth with the toothbrush and the toothpaste she’d bought, and go to work, and eat the sandwiches she’d made him, come back home again and eat the tea, read the books to the children that she’d chosen from the library. At weekends he did his bit, of course, put in a few hours with the wee ones, but he still found time to go to the pub and he still went to the football. All his needs were taken care of.
He wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do now.
The first night they were all together, before the funeral, was OK. There were a lot of tears but Mr Donelly found to his surprise that he didn’t mind the tears. He was used to his children crying. He could still remember them crying when they were little. In fact, looking back, there were a lot of years, probably ten in all, the children spaced out the way they were, when the house had never been quiet, when there had always been the sound of a crying child: someone was hurt, someone was awake in the night, someone was sad. He could deal with that: reassurance, admonishment, a warm drink, a good night’s sleep.
It was after the funeral that things had started to go wrong. Mr Donelly’s head was reeling and his children were expecting him to have serious conversations with them, conversations about the future, and about them and about himself, that he found much more difficult. This was more like when they were teenagers, and he’d never known what to say to them when they were teenagers. He’d left all that to Mrs Donelly.
So he was glad when the time came for Mark to fly back to the States and for Jackie to return to London. Mark had always been Mrs Donelly’s favourite, her baby. There was a bond between them, the youngest son and the mother – that was just the way it was. She was devastated when he’d moved to America, although she never told him how upset she was: she’d always said he had to live his own life, wherever he chose, and the trouble is, sometimes children take what you say at face value, they believe what you say, and Mark chose to live his own life far away from her, across an ocean, which was only an eight-hour flight away, he always said, but an eight-hour flight represented a leap of faith and more than a month’s income to Mr and Mrs Donelly, and they were lucky if they saw him and the grandchildren once every couple of years. And the funny thing was, now his mother was gone, here was Mark trying to persuade Mr Donelly to come back to the States with him – he could come and live with them, he said. They had plenty of room. They had a guest room with a nice en suite and it’d be great for him to be around to see the grandchildren grow up.
Well, if Mr Donelly knew one thing for certain it was this: he was not going to be moving to the United States of America. He’d have had to leave the dog behind for starters, because Mark’s wife Molly didn’t like dogs. She was allergic. Mr Donelly had never met anyone who was allergic to dogs before – he supposed it was an American thing, she was also wheat-intolerant – but the dog was a good excuse and Mr Donelly was happy to use the dog as his excuse. Mark got quite upset about that. The bloody dog means more to him than his grandchildren, he told Molly on the phone. But that wasn’t true. The dog was just a dog, even though he was The Dog With The Kindliest Expression. Mr Donelly just wanted to be left in peace, to stay on in town, but he couldn’t think of a simple way of explaining that, and he didn’t really see why he should have to explain it, since it seemed obvious and so simple, so the dog became his explanation. The dog represented his life here, in a way, and if Mark couldn’t see that, well, fine, he was better off in America anyway, where he had his own life to manage – hypodermic needle incinerators didn’t sell themselves, after all – and Mr Donelly had his own life to get on with. Mr Donelly still had a lot of the friends he’d known since school, and there was always the Castle Arms. It felt rather like becoming a child again, actually, Mrs Donelly’s dying, like the beginning of the school holidays, but he could hardly have explained this to his children. He knew his friends in the Castle Arms would have understood, and the dog. He was staying.
Brona and Michael had been arguing. Brona had gone and had her tan topped up for the funeral, and Michael didn’t agree with that. Brona had said, ‘Just because your mother’s died doesn’t mean I have to go around wearing sackcloth and ashes.’ It did not, agreed Michael. On the contrary. But Brona had gone and bought a £300 black suit up in the city and she’d also bought the children new outfits – two little black dresses for Emma and Amber, with matching Alice bands and black patent shoes. Michael thought that was going a bit too far. He didn’t like the fact that Brona had turned the death of his mother into an excuse for more shopping.
Jackie, meanwhile, was angry that she hadn’t been told about her mother’s illness – she was a nurse, after all. Actually, all the children were angry about that. Why hadn’t Mr Donelly told them she was ill? He had difficulty explaining. He felt it was none of their business. But they obviously felt it was their business: Mrs Donelly was their mother. But she was a lot of other things too. She was his wife for starters, and she was his wife before she was their mother, and if the two of them had decided between themselves that they weren’t going to tell anyone about her illness, well, it was up to them, as man and wife. It was their decision. Of course, Mr Donelly didn’t say this to his children.
Of all the children it was Tim who seemed to be taking things hardest. Mrs Donelly’s death had come at a bad time for Tim. It had cut short his trip of a lifetime, which Mr Donelly had hoped might have given him some kind of a clue as to where he wanted to be, and with whom, and what he wanted to do with his life. By the time he was Tim’s age Mr Donelly was the father of four children, a man of responsibilities. Tim, on the other hand, before he went away, had spent most of his time listening to music alone in his room and going out with girls with multiple piercings, and had worked five days a week at McDonald’s and weekends at Oscar’s, the video shop, and had spent three years saving up to go away because he couldn’t really think of anything else to do, and so he did rather begrudge his mother’s death bringing him back home, and partly out of spite he’d got straight back into a routine of going out with his mates, drinking till the early morning and sleeping in till midday. He’d been secretly hoping that his trip away might have helped him to get his head together and he was disappointed that it hadn’t. He was still the same old Tim in Thailand, it turned out, which was a shame. He’d quite fancied becoming Leonardo DiCaprio.
Anyway, Mr Donelly was sitting up in bed, by himself, waiting for the post, waiting for further condolences, thinking about his children. Or, actually, he wasn’t thinking about them, because he never really thought about them. He counted them, rather, and wondered at them and was grateful for them: much as a man might enjoy his own butterfly collection, or his stamps, or his pet Pomeranians. Mr Donelly could not easily describe thoughts and emotions to himself, and had never really attempted to do so: thoughts and emotions that you couldn’t or chose not to describe to yourself you couldn’t feel; that was his theory, and it worked. Sadness, loss, doubt, depression – these were things that had never much troubled Mr Donelly. His refusal to give in to himself, his self-discipline, had helped see him through four children, and the usual ups and downs of a lifetime.
But as he lay there, holding on for as long as he could before the urge to go to the toilet became overwhelming, he found himself full of feelings and he didn’t know what to do with them. He didn’t have anyone any more to tell him what to do with them, or to annoy and distract him, to help him chase them away.
He pulled back the blankets and the sheet a little and looked at the space where Mrs Donelly had once lain. It was Mrs Donelly who’d always taken care of things in the bedroom department: as far as he could remember he’d never turned the mattress, had hardly ever made the bed, and after the necessary excitements of their first few years together he had rarely initiated sexual relations. He thought probably that Mrs Donelly had gone off it. He looked now at the imprinted outline of his wife’s body, her empty trough, and he thought: it might be useful for keeping the paper in at night and his glasses. The bedside table was too small – a glass of water and a lamp, that was all there was room for, and he hated putting things on the floor. He thought – and he was amazed at thinking it, but there you are – he thought, well, there’s always a silver lining.
He needed a wee.
He went downstairs and made the tea. Within just a few days, he’d found, he was able to remember to put out only one cup. He’d given up on leaf tea too, had gone straight on to tea bags. Mrs Donelly had opinions about tea bags. But tea bags were more efficient according to Mr Donelly. You could get at least three cups out of one bag. He was going to be making quite a lot of savings on his living expenses, actually. A lightbulb had gone in the hall yesterday and he’d put in a 60 watt rather than a 100, something he had been wanting to do for almost forty years. About a watt a year. To be in charge of the household after all that time – it was a strange feeling, like a retired captain put back in charge of his ship. It was power and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. He felt a little rusty.
He got dressed and went out back into the garden, into the cold and the dark, eating the other half of the Cornish pastie he hadn’t finished for his lunch yesterday, and he had another wee by the single silver birch which was supposed to shield them from their neighbours and which didn’t. It was only 6 a.m. and there was no one to tell him not to. Tim was the only child left in the house now, the others had all gone back to their lives.
As he licked the Cornish pastie crumbs from his fingers Mr Donelly stared up at the back of the house, at the boarded-up window. He was going to have to try to get that fixed. He needed to get himself organised.
The funeral had taken it out of all of them. Mrs Donelly had stated in her will that she wanted open casket. Sid Rodgers had advised against it, but Mr Donelly wanted her wishes complied with and they’d had her laid out on the dining-room table, a fine, mahogany-effect table that Mrs Donelly had bought on credit from the big warehouse showroom, Jackson’s Economic Furnishings, ‘Strong, Substantial and Elegant Furniture and Furnishing Requisites at Exceptionally Low Prices’, which used to be up on Moira Avenue. It had nearly bankrupted them at the time, that table – if you added up all the monthly payments you could have bought an actual mahogany table, or even an antique. Mr Donelly had polished it once a week ever since – his only household tasks being polishing, winding the clock and setting the fire – so you could almost see your face in the shine. They’d had to have the extending leaves fully out to accommodate the casket, but they had nowhere to put all the chairs, so it looked as if they were about to sit down to Christmas dinner.
Mrs Donelly had a look on her face when she was in the casket – it was difficult to say what it was. Not bemusement, exactly, nor perplexity, not amusement – it was a face of curious repose, as though she had recently been to the toilet. There was a smell, actually. It was a smell that reminded Mr Donelly of his own mother.
Mark had handled the oration very well. He was good at that sort of thing, what with living in America. He spoke a kind of middle management, which made it sound as though he were recommending some line of stock that was being discontinued. It was a nice talk, though.
And the burial itself was as burials are: so strange, so dramatic, that it managed your emotions for you. You hardly had to think about it.
Afterwards, Mickey had driven Mr Donelly back to the house for the wake and when he went to open the door Mr Donelly realised that he had no key.
Mrs Donelly had always looked after the keys – she looked after keys and cash and the bills. It was the way they worked things: he did the garden, the DIY, brought home the money. She did pretty much everything else. It was a workable arrangement: they had good clean gutters and the woodwork round the windows was freshly painted, and he didn’t have to check the compound interest on their savings account at the building society, but now the system had broken down.
Mr Donelly checked all around to see if he’d left any windows open. He had not. He looked in the front room, where until that morning Mrs Donelly had been, but now she was gone, with the house keys, probably, and he suddenly realised that’s what she was smiling about.
There was only one thing for it: he’d have to smash a window to get in.
Mr Donelly didn’t want the embarrassment of all the mourners seeing the smashed window, so it would have to be a back bedroom window, where no one would see it unless they were out in the garden for a smoke.
Mickey had gone off to start ferrying everyone back, so Mr Donelly didn’t have long. He was going to have to climb up himself. He didn’t want to trouble anyone else with it.
Mr Donelly hadn’t climbed up a building in a long time: fifty years probably, since he’d climbed on the roof of the Assumption with his friend Big Dessie, and they were beaten for it by a priest who came in specially once a day to beat bad children – strange job, when you thought about it, the priesthood.
Using a combination of windowsill, coal bunker, fence and the next door neighbour’s flat-roof extension, he managed to reach the first-floor windowsill, but he’d forgotten that he’d need to smash the window so he had to climb down again, take off his shoe and then climb back up. It took just a couple of knocks. He was glad they’d only double-glazed the front. This was easy and it was quite good fun – it wasn’t something Mr Donelly would have wanted to take up professionally, but he could see how someone might begin to enjoy it. He reached in for the latch, opened up the window and climbed in.
The house looked different somehow. Coming in at a window changed everything: it was a bit like those aerial photos you sometimes see of people’s houses. There was a company that did them. They took the photos and then came round selling them door-to-door. Dessie had bought one of his house: it didn’t look like Dessie’s house at all. It looked like an open prison.
Mr Donelly went downstairs into the kitchen to find the front-door key, but it wasn’t hanging with the others. Then he checked the jar in the front room, where the many sausage rolls and quiches and tarts that Mrs Donelly had pre-prepared and frozen were now sitting ready, gathered in and fully defrosted from the many freezers of friends, on the mahogany-effect table, in place of the coffin.* But no keys there either.
She did sometimes have the keys in her purse, though, which she kept in the bedside drawer, so Mr Donelly went back upstairs to try.
Mrs Donelly’s bedside drawer had remained a mystery to Mr Donelly for years. Privacy had been very important to them, largely because they did not have that much to be private about, or much space to be private in. His shed, for example, was sacrosanct and Mrs Donelly was in charge of all the cupboards. So he was a bit nervous about going into the bedside drawer. He was worried what he might find in there.
He was certainly surprised to find a boxed set of black silk underwear.*
But he was even more surprised to find a birth certificate for Mrs Donelly’s eldest son.
The boy’s name was Colin.
* But then that’s the kind of person he is: Jerome is a gentle giant and an absolute dear, according to the many older ladies on his round, for whom and with whom he always has a kind word. He is a born-again Christian, Jerome, and he works as a postman because it means he can share with his wife Marion the considerable burdens of home schooling their five children, maintaining their tumbledown house and half-acre smallholding just off the ring road, and fixing up their perpetually leaky VW combi-van. Jerome and Marion are not hippies, but they take the Sermon on the Mount at face value, which amounts to pretty much the same thing, although without the need for tie-dye or the Grateful Dead. (Jerome, for example, favours corduroy and the music of Keith Green; Marion wears no make-up or adornment; and their children are not much good at queuing or putting up their hands but they are very good at reading; Daniel, their youngest, who is only four, can recite large parts of Doctor Seuss unaided and several poems by Robert Frost, and Genesis chapter 1, in the Good News translation of the Bible.)
* Mr Donelly is pre texting and e-mail, and is not even that keen on the phone. Nor does he send postcards, or write letters. There is a strict limit, therefore, to his understanding of how modern communication works. He gets all the information he needs from the Impartial Recorder and gets to have his own say in the Castle Arms, and pretty much everything else is waffle, according to Mr Donelly. He might benefit from the new Senior Citizen ‘Pop-In Introduction to IT’ at the library, or even perhaps one of the many part-time Media Studies courses at the Institute, except he’s not a great one for classes.
* There was a nice lattice-work apple pie, however, conspicuous by its absence, which had been in Mrs Donelly’s friend Pat’s freezer, and which Pat and her husband Henry had eaten by mistake one night some months previously. Pat had tried to make up for it by substituting an apple pie of her own, but she never really had the hand for pastry and you could tell, even from a distance, that it was not one of Mrs Donelly’s.
* From Frank Gilbey’s ‘Romance’ range – camisole, knickers and bra, a set – available from all Gilbey’s ladies’ lingerie shops and by mail order (catalogue available, £3.50). See p.39.