“I always thought he wanted to be buried at sea,” said Acushla.
“You can’t be serious,” said Alma.
“That’s what he always said he wanted,” said Acushla, her words rising up and down the scale like notes on a piano.
“He said to it me too,” said Deirdre. “Many a time he told me he’d like a sea burial.”
They were waiting for the undertaker, the four of them sitting in the hush of the waiting room—they had turned down the offer of a home visit in favor of neutral ground.
“I did hear him mention it once or twice,” said Alma, “but I always assumed it was a joke. He used to say he’d like to be eaten by a crocodile, but I think it’s safe to assume that was a joke too.”
Nobody replied. Alma looked from one to the other of them, her eyes wide and unblinking as if to say, surely you agree with me?
Macdara coughed, to break the silence.
“I don’t remember him ever showing any interest in sailing,” said Acushla. “Does anyone remember him ever showing any interest in sailing?”
“No,” said Deirdre quickly. “Just sailors.”
Macdara leaned forward.
“If it’s what he wanted, we could always ask.”
The sound of his own voice was a surprise to him as much as it was to anyone else.
“We could always ask them,” he said tentatively, “whether it’s possible?”
As soon as he’d finished speaking, he sank farther into his chair, pulling his chin down on to his chest and his shoulders up to his ears. Alma leaned her head back against the wall, closing her eyes with a sigh, while Acushla propped an elbow on an elegantly crossed knee, wobbling her head encouragingly. His mother gave him a discreet wink, as if they were bridge partners and she was communicating something to him about their next move. Macdara was just on the point of venturing to speak again when the undertaker came into the room. He advanced with his arm extended to greet the grieving widow, who was already rising from her chair to accept his condolences.
“She’s describing herself as his wife,” Alma hissed as they were leaving. Her mother had disappeared back into the dark recesses of the funeral home in search of a bathroom.
“Well, technically she is his wife,” said Acushla, moving through the door Macdara was holding open for her. “They were never divorced.”
The three siblings formed a loose circle out on the pavement, assailed by a barrage of light and heat, along with the smell of chips from the takeaway next door.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Alma. “This presents us with a bit of a diplomatic situation.”
“What do we do?” asked Acushla, reaching up with a perfectly manicured hand to pull her sunglasses down over her eyes. “You don’t think she’ll want to sit in the front pew in the church, do you?”
“I don’t see any indication of her taking a backseat. As far as she’s concerned, she’s the grieving widow.”
“So, where does that leave poor Sam?”
“Right where she always wanted him,” said Alma. “At the mercy of her generosity.”
“Oh, pray,” said Acushla. “Pray she doesn’t use this as an opportunity to get her revenge on Sam. I wouldn’t put it past her to pull rank on him now that she can.”
“I’m afraid we’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Alma.
And they all fell silent again as they contemplated the rocky path that lay ahead of them. Macdara turned to see the undertaker ushering their mother out the door of the funeral home. Her hair had come loose of its moorings and her cape hung lopsided off her stooped shoulders. As she squinted into the glare of the sunshine, Macdara was struck for the first time by how old she had become. She had gone and got old without him even noticing.
It was always his mother Macdara was closest to. Ever since he was small, his mother had been his silent ally, the champion of his every idiosyncrasy. There was no aberration Macdara could adopt, no whim of his that his mother would not indulge. From his refusal ever to eat meat that had any bones in it, or fruit that had any seeds in it (apples, pears, grapes—Macdara had an unnatural fear of their offspring growing inside his belly), to his insistence on wearing wellies every day to school, his mother bent to every turn of his personality. Macdara’s clothes had to be washed a dozen times before he wore them because he hated the feel of new fabric. He had to have flannel sheets because he found cotton too scratchy. His shoes had to be weathered by the shoemaker, and his hair had to be cut at home because he would not go to the barber’s. On the rare occasions that Deirdre resolved to trim his fingernails, she would always have to ring the neighbors first, to warn them not to call the Guards when they heard the screams. When Macdara was sick, as he often was, his mother never forced him to go to school, allowing him to spend the day in her bed instead, reading detective stories. Some days he was allowed to stay in her bed even when he wasn’t sick. Some days he was allowed to stay in her bed just because it was raining, or because it was cold, or because he didn’t want to go to school.
“It’s very hard for Macdara to go to school,” his mother used to say, a phrase that his sisters pounced on and repeated ad nauseam. “It’s very hard for Macdara to go to school,” they would mimic, bobbling their sleek little heads from side to side as they performed the imitation. And Macdara would skulk away, withdrawing further and further into his own silent world, a world that only his mother seemed to understand. Because the truth was that it was very hard for Macdara to go to school. There were days when it was hard for Macdara to go out of the house. He was like a soft-shell crab, or a turtle without a shell. He seemed to have been born without any of the body armor that other people use to survive in the world.
Macdara’s father was baffled by him. With his boyish enthusiasm for life and his eternally optimistic view of human nature, Manus was at a loss to understand Macdara’s fears, fears that were born not of experience but of some pathological sensitivity his father was not wired to comprehend. But while another man might have forced him to engage in blood sports and eat spare ribs with his bare hands, while another man would no doubt have argued that Macdara’s weaknesses were all due to his mother’s indulgence and that it was his duty as a father to provide a counterweight, Manus was happy to let Macdara off. Like a dog and cat who are forced to share the same house, Manus and Macdara managed to live alongside each other quite happily for years, while ignoring each other almost entirely. When his father moved out, Macdara was surprised by the size of the hole he left in the house, a hole that was filled by the sound of his mother shouting, and Alma slamming doors and Acushla’s heartbroken sobbing.
Macdara had pitied his sisters then, because their loss was so much greater than his. And he pitied them again now, because they had lost the parent they loved more. For his part, Macdara couldn’t help but be relieved that it was his father and not his mother who had been the first to go.
It was his sisters who told him.
They appeared at the studio door, Alma with her head hanging down and Acushla hovering behind her. Macdara noticed straightaway how pale they both looked.
Alma took a deep breath in through her mouth. She had a strange half-smile on her face, more of a grimace than a smile, and her eyes were all red.
“Macdara,” she said. “I’m afraid Dad’s had an accident.”
“Oh, dear,” said Macdara. And he pictured the scene. He saw his father’s car standing at a jaunty angle in the middle of a major intersection with smoke coming out of all its orifices as a distraught woman motorist inspected the damage to her new Mercedes. “I hope there isn’t too much damage.”
His sisters looked at each other and it occurred to Macdara that they did seem afraid. They seemed afraid of him.
“Why are you afraid?” he asked, seizing on that one word Alma had used, over all others. A word with the implication of something that was still to come, something that could even now be prevented. “You both look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Neither of them spoke, and all of a sudden Macdara too was very afraid.
He held up his right index finger.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, taking sudden command of the situation. “Whatever it is, this thing that you were about to tell me. I don’t want you to say it.”
He turned away from them then, and walked back into the studio, leaving his sisters standing in the open doorway. Into his bedroom he went, and sat down on the end of the bed, with his hands cupping his knees. His mind was blank but his breath was coming hard and fast. He concentrated all of his attention on getting his breath back.
After they’d been to the undertaker’s, they returned to Macdara’s studio to draft the death notice. Leaning their upper bodies in through the open door with their feet still planted outside in the garden, they called to Macdara’s mind a pair of explorers surveying the interior walls of a cave.
“Come on in,” he said to them, gathering his papers up off the table and removing stray clothes from the chairs. “Sit down. Make yourselves at home.”
He filled a jug of water from the tap and poured some lemon barley cordial into it. He set three tumblers on the table, and out of the kitchen press he took a pack of Nice biscuits, arranging a generous supply of them in a wide fan on a willow-pattern plate.
“Why do I get the feeling we’re in an Enid Blyton novel?” said Alma, slipping her shoes off as she sprawled in a chair. “I feel like I’m one of the Famous Five.”
“The Secret Seven,” said Macdara, and despite the circumstances, he was aware of a feeling of great pride bubbling up in him, pride at having his sisters as guests here in his little house. “I think the Secret Seven are the ones you’re thinking of,” he said happily. “They were the ones who had a den.” (When Macdara was a kid, he used to read those books over and over again—it was the Five Find-Outers and Dog who were his favorites.)
“I was a Nancy Drew girl myself,” said Alma, and to Macdara’s great pleasure, she reached out for a biscuit and began to nibble at it. Her face was puffy with what Macdara recognized as the effects of medication. Her figure plumper as a result of all the gourmet meals Mick had been feeding her. A softness to her that had not been there before. For the first time in his life, Macdara was not scared of her.
Doyenne of a hundred fund-raising committees, Acushla took a pad of paper out of her handbag and a freshly sharpened pencil. Flipping the cover of the pad back on itself and positioning the pencil expectantly over the blank page, she looked up at the others.
“Okay, where do we start?”
“MacEntee,” said Alma, settling back into her chair and closing her eyes as she began to dictate the copy. “Manus. In his eighty-third year. As the result of a tragic accident…”
Acushla’s head was bowed down sideways over her page, the tip of her tongue probing the corner of her mouth. The sound of her pencil scratching away at the surface of the paper.
“Deeply regretted by…”
Macdara waited to see what Alma would say next.
“… his loving partner Sam.”
Scratch scratch scratch went Acushla’s pencil.
“His ex-wife Deirdre…”
Acushla looked up.
“She’s not going to like that.”
Alma threw her hands out in exasperation. Her poor fingers made Macdara wince. He couldn’t look at them without feeling pain.
“We can’t say ‘wife,’ as if they were still married,” said Alma.
“We can’t say ‘ex-wife’ either,” said Acushla back to her.
“I’ve a suggestion,” said Macdara.
They both turned to look at him, as if they had only just become aware of his presence.
“How about ‘wife of many years’?”
Acushla froze as she considered it. Alma dipped her head like a conductor guiding an orchestra into a quiet section of a symphony.
“Do you know,” she said, raising her head again. “That could work.”
“It’s brilliant,” said Acushla, scratching away furiously at the page. “Absolutely brilliant.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Alma. “Although since we’re being such sticklers for detail, I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to use the word ‘tragedy.’ It seems to me that ‘a tragedy in his eighty-third year’ is a bit of a contradiction in terms.”
Macdara brought his shoulders together to make himself smaller, and leaned in over the table.
“But it is tragic,” he said, fixing upon it as a point of fact.
Alma raised her eyebrows as she waited for him to explain.
“By its very definition it’s a tragedy. The death of a man because of a fatal flaw is defined as a tragedy.”
“I don’t understand,” said Alma. “What’s the fatal flaw?”
“Don’t you see? That stupid car was the fatal flaw.”
Alma smiled and nodded. Something dawning in her eyes, something almost like respect.
“So we’re sticking with ‘tragedy’?” asked Acushla, anxious to move on.
“Absolutely,” said Alma. “A tragedy it is.”
A tragedy was what it felt like to Macdara at times. The enormity of it taking him by the throat and tightening its grip on him until his eyes were watering and he could hardly breathe. It was in those moments that it seemed to Macdara that the world had stopped its turning, and it was hard for him to imagine that any other human being had ever been bereaved quite like he had been bereaved. That anybody else’s death could ever have had quite such a profound effect on the physical world, altering the taste of all the foods in it, distorting the look of a room when he walked into it, and bending the scale of the streets and the buildings outside so that everything he looked at appeared strangely but inexplicably wrong. Only the sounds of the world were unchanged, the noise of the traffic and the exploding roar of the crowd from the stadium, the babble of the football fans gathered outside the pub after the match had finished. Macdara felt like shouting at them as he walked past, “What are you laughing about? Did you not hear? My father died.”
At other moments, it seemed to him the most ordinary thing in the world that his father should have died. Doesn’t everybody die, after all? Why should his father be any different? In those moments it seemed to Macdara that it was a mistake to make too much of a fuss of this one ordinary old death. It seemed unseemly to make too much of it.
“At my age you don’t get sad when someone old dies,” said his mother. “At my age you see it as a cause for celebration when someone of Manus’s age dies.”
They were all sitting around his mother’s table, eating an Irish stew that a neighbor had dropped in. Nora had heated it up while Connie set the table. It was only when he began eating that Macdara discovered how hungry he was.
“You don’t really mean that,” said Acushla, looking at their mother with brimming eyes. Connie too had tears in her eyes. The expression on Nora’s face was more like disappointment. Even Alma appeared shocked.
“Manus lived a long and rich life,” said Deirdre, speaking with slow emphasis. “He had the good fortune to be whisked away before falling prey to decrepitude. Something you should all get down on your knees and give thanks for, since you’re the ones who would have ended up looking after him.”
Blinking her dry eyes, she stared brazenly back at them all, and for the first time in his life, Macdara saw something in her that he did not like. A ruthlessness that he’d never seen before. He found himself wondering when it had crept in.
Macdara’s father’s death was reported in all the papers, as you might expect, and the TV news even ran a pre-prepared obituary. How long had it lain in wait? Macdara wondered, before experiencing a pang of something not unlike jealousy at the thought that there would be no obituaries to mark the passing of his own outwardly unremarkable life. Unless? Unless. Macdara still harbored an intermittent but ardent hope that he might yet achieve something remarkable with his life.
It was in this spirit of hope that he had sent his book off to his father. Taking every care to preserve his anonymity, he had printed the manuscript off and parceled it up, despite the clamor of voices in his head telling him he was a fool. He had walked to the post office, tormented by those voices. Even as he was standing in the queue, they would not fall silent.
He’s going to hate it. This rubbish? Sure it’s hardly even literate… Self-indulgent crap… What kind of delusional freak would think this worth publishing? What a shameful waste of paper and ink… You’d have been better off using the paper to wipe your arse… And to think, you could have been out doing something useful with your time, instead of writing this pathetic crap. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic.
Ten, twelve times a night Macdara woke in the grip of a sickening panic, remembering with a physical lurch of his heart his wildly reckless act. What on earth had he been thinking, sending the book to his father? He would roll over on to his tummy in agony, burying his face in the pillow to smother the thought. He would contemplate for one wonderful moment the possibility that he had only dreamed that he had posted it, abandoning that fantasy with a despair that was almost hysterical. He would bang his forehead off the pillow over and over again, punishing himself for his own foolishness. Eventually he would turn over on to his back again, talking himself back to sleep with a flock of familiar reassurances, like sheep you might count.
At least he had not put his name to the book, that’s what he told himself. There was no way his father could have known that he was the author. His father probably hadn’t even had time to read the book before he died. If there was any comfort to be found for Macdara in Manus’s sudden death, it was in the realization that in all likelihood he must have died before he got a chance to read his book.
They decided to wake him in the funeral home. It was not the custom to have a wake at home anymore, not in the city at least.
“That’s a country thing,” said Alma.
“I don’t like the idea of having the body in the house,” said Acushla. “It gives me the creeps.”
“Think of all the tea we’d have to make,” said Deirdre. “We’d have to give people sandwiches.”
Macdara agreed that on balance it was best to wake his father in the funeral home.
In death, his father looked like somebody else. A generic dead person, all barely covered bones and waxy skin. With his eyelids closed forever on his magnificent eyes, he could have been anybody.
“Who is that?” asked Ernie, eyes wide with awe as he was led up to the coffin.
“That’s your great-grandfather,” whispered Connie.
Macdara could hear Ernie sucking this information into his chest in a raspy asthmatic wheeze.
“Here,” said Connie, rooting around in her handbag, “have a puff of your inhaler.”
Oscar was up on tiptoes, trying to see over the rim of the coffin. Connie pushed him and his brother toward their grandmother and stood for a moment by herself at the head of the coffin. Macdara noticed her hands fluttering loose by her sides. It occurred to him that she was wondering whether she dared touch the corpse or not. As he watched, she placed a hand on the edge of the coffin for a moment before snatching it away.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” she said, sitting down beside Macdara. He could feel the swell of her sorrow rising and falling in her. She allowed herself to tilt a little to the side, so that her shoulder rested against his. He reached out a hand and patted her on the arm. He couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“It’s okay,” said Connie. “There’s nothing you can say.”
On the far side of the coffin, Connie’s children had settled themselves on chairs between their grandparents, while Deirdre sat alone at the end of the row. Acushla was feeding the boys wine gums, dispensing the sweets straight out of her handbag one by one, while Liam tapped at the face of his phone. It occurred to Macdara that Connie’s children would forever after associate the taste of wine gums with their great-grandfather’s funeral. Those were the kind of things that children remembered.
The door of the room opened and out of the patch of daylight Mick and Alma materialized. Macdara noticed how Mick moved with practiced ease, working his way along the row of chairs to greet Acushla first, then Liam and finally Deirdre. Coming round the base of the coffin, he gave Connie a kiss on the cheek.
“Macdara,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He took Macdara’s hand and grasped the flesh of his upper arm.
“It’s all right,” said Macdara, sitting back down again too quickly. No sooner was he sitting down than the door opened again and Nora came in. She had Sam with her, along with some other fellow Macdara did not recognize. He felt a stirring of anxiety at the presence of this stranger.
“Sam,” he said, getting up and moving toward the door. He shook Sam’s hand, taking care not to stand too close to him. He was worried, as always, about his breath. Worried there might be a smell off it, he liked to keep his distance from people in case this was so. (In school once, someone had made a comment about his breath, and he had been worrying about it ever since, despite his obsessive use of mouthwash and mints.)
“Sam,” said Mick, closing in from one side. “I’m so sorry.” He pulled Sam into a half-hug, gripping his arm with one hand while the other went round Sam’s shoulder. Sam was wearing a highly unsuitable burgundy velvet smoking jacket and a silk cravat. On his bottom half, a pair of jeans and runners. Acushla hovered beside Mick, waiting for her turn with him.
“Sam,” she said gently. “Do you want to come over and see Dad? He looks so nice, I think you should see him.”
Sam allowed himself to be led over to the coffin. All eyes on him, he stood looking down at the face of the man he had lived with for more than three decades. Acushla stepped back a few paces to give him space.
“Do you think he knows what’s happening?” whispered Connie.
“Maybe it’s just as well if he doesn’t,” Macdara whispered back.
“I’m not sure it’s fair,” he heard Alma say, her voice coming from somewhere behind him. “It’s not fair to have him here.”
Mick’s voice came in reply to her, somewhere above a whisper.
“Poor bugger. He looks like he doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.”
And still Sam stood beside the coffin. The twin candles that flanked it flickered and puffed breaths of white smoke out into the dark air. A door opened and closed. A child tumbled off a chair. Macdara watched as Sam reached his hand into the coffin and fumbled with the clothes Manus was wearing. It looked like he was trying to undo the buttons of his jacket.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Macdara heard Alma mutter. “What’s he doing?”
They all watched as Sam slipped his hand inside Manus’s jacket, resting his palm on the place where his lover’s heart had ceased beating.
Macdara experienced a terrible rush of sorrow. For a moment he couldn’t bear the weight of it and he let his head fall down on to his chest. When he looked up again, Nora and the stranger were on either side of Sam. Putting an arm gently around his shoulders, Nora led him away, guiding him past Acushla and Liam and the little boys, past Deirdre (who reached out and grasped his wrist without rising from her chair) and around the foot of the coffin to a chair at the end of the opposite row. He was sitting directly across from Deirdre now, with the coffin in between them, a discreet white satin sheet obscuring Manus’s legs and feet. Was his father wearing shoes under there? wondered Macdara. Or was he just in his socks, or even his bare feet? Macdara’s mind roamed these corridors with curious abandon, like a dog off its leash.
That was a good analogy, he thought, and he would have liked to write it down. But he had no notebook with him, no pen. No way of taking notes. Instead he sat studying the faces of his family lined up opposite him. He listened to their voices swirling around him. With his niece’s melon-scented perfume fighting against the heady smell of candle wax, and his grand-nephews aiming surreptitious kicks at each other’s shins while their grandmother turned to talk to her husband—with his mother and Alma sitting side by side now and absentmindedly holding each other’s hand, and the curly-haired stranger bending down to say something to Sam—Macdara found his head flooded with thoughts. Thoughts that swooped down on him like birds gathering in a great oak tree. Words, sentences, whole paragraphs of prose settling around him like crows at dusk. He had a desperate urge to hold on to them, to grab them and stuff them into his pockets, these maddening little morsels of inspiration. And it was then that it came to him. As he sat by his father’s coffin, wishing uselessly for a scrap of paper, or a sharp object that he could use to scratch words into the skin of his hand, it popped into his head. A sequence of words as beautifully jarring as it was perfect. As soon as it formed in his mind, he knew that he had found the title for his book. He knew also, with a crashing sense of defeat, that he would have forgotten it again by the time he had left this room.
You always think you’ll remember these things, but you never do.
The letter arrived the following morning.
It was the day of the funeral, and Macdara recognized his father’s handwriting immediately. He recognized the slanted, spiky script, executed as always in black ink with a thin-nibbed fountain pen. For one mad moment Macdara thought that his father was communicating with him from beyond the grave.
Cradling the letter in his open palms the way you might hold a wounded bird, he walked it over to the kitchen table and propped it up against a box of Alpen, taking a few steps back from the table to gain some distance from it. He needed time to think.
The address that had been handwritten by his father on the front of the envelope was the address of the PO box Macdara had hired at the local sorting office, at a cost of four hundred and seventy euro. The scheme for the hire of the PO box had been brewing in his mind for months. He had looked at it from every angle and it seemed to him that it was the only practical way to resolve the impasse in his head. The book was finished, had been finished for months, but there was no way on this earth that Macdara could even contemplate sending it to anyone until his father had read it. His father’s opinion was the only opinion that mattered to him. His father’s scorn was the only thing he feared. Because Macdara had written the book with only one reader in mind, and that reader was his father. It seemed to Macdara that there was something mystical about the way the letter had arrived on this of all days. He decided that he would shower first, and then he would get dressed, and only then would he open it.
The whole time he was in the shower, he was thinking about the letter. His mind like a wobbly weighing scale, one minute he was high on the hope that his father had liked the book, the next minute he had tipped over into the despairing certainty that he had hated it. As he dressed himself in his only suit—a suit he’d had for more than thirty years—it seemed to Macdara that he would be taking a great risk in opening the letter. If it was bad (as of course it would be), if it was as bad as he feared it would be, it would sully the day of his father’s funeral. And Macdara wanted to keep the day of his father’s funeral free of all worldly things.
He decided not to open the letter.
The book was three decades in the writing.
You do hear about this, don’t you? You hear about people for whom it took thirty years to write a book. Macdara comes across these stories from time to time and he finds them comforting. What he hates hearing are stories of prolific writers, people who turn out a book every year for forty years. In Macdara’s case, the writing is painfully slow, every sentence something to be worked and reworked, until eventually he is happy with it. Macdara has often spent a week on one sentence, a month on a single paragraph. And of course there have been mishaps. At one point a decade’s work was wiped out when the old laptop he was using died—it took him another year to recreate what was lost, and even then he couldn’t be sure it was quite as good. Other times it seems to him that perhaps the rewrite was better, and he wonders should he destroy all his work and reconstruct it from memory, the way his father burns his toast and scrapes it?
The desire to write has been in him forever. He remembers riding around in the back of his father’s car—he was six years old, or maybe seven—and there were trees going by the window, and Macdara was trying to find the right combination of words to describe them. Not to describe what they were, that was something that didn’t need describing. He yearned to describe how they were. Like the pilot of a plane who traces words across the sky with puffs of smoke, or a graffiti artist armed with a fresh can of spray paint, all of Macdara’s earliest instincts told him to carve out a place for himself in the world using nothing but words.
The first person to encourage him was his secondary-school English teacher. Macdara had landed into the school in fourth year, a refugee from the wreckage of his parents’ marriage. It was thought that a bit of distance might put him out of harm’s way, but the school was only a hundred miles from Dublin, and news traveled fast. By the time Macdara had unpacked his suitcase and stowed it under his bed, his story had done the rounds of the school, and by some unquestioned homophobic logic that was traded around the locker rooms along with ten-packs of Carrolls cigarettes, he had been labeled a bender. His English teacher encouraged him to pour what he was feeling out on to the page, which he did.
“Macdara is a great man for the use of the mixed metaphor,” said the English teacher, closing in on Macdara’s father at the parents’ day at the end of the year.
The English teacher was most interested in Macdara’s father. In particular there was the matter of a creative writing competition, which he was hoping Macdara’s father would agree to judge.
“Macdara is very earnest in his writing,” he said, with a nudge in his voice, one eyebrow raised to suggest a shared joke. “Sometimes a little too earnest,” he said. “I’m trying to introduce the concept of creative restraint.”
Macdara’s father fastened his famous blue eyes on the teacher and stared at him glacially as the mechanics of the proposed creative writing competition were explained to him. To Macdara’s infinite relief, his father had dressed for minimum effect, in an almost-normal single-breasted tweed suit and a silk cravat, worn inside his open shirt.
“I wouldn’t give you much for our smarmy friend,” he said to Macdara afterward.
“He’s an idiot,” said Macdara, using great heat to disguise his colossal sense of betrayal. “The guy’s nothing but an idiot.”
He was mortified that his work had been ridiculed. Sick with shame that his most solemn efforts had been made fun of. It would be more than three decades before Macdara dared to show his work to another human being, and even then it was under a thick cloak of anonymity.
“The word ‘paradise’ comes from the Persian word for garden,” said the priest. “In ancient Persia the greatest honor the king could bestow on one of his subjects was to invite them to walk with him in his garden in the cool of the evening.
“This is how we imagine Manus now,” said the priest. “Wandering the gardens of heaven, deep in conversation with the Lord. And Lord knows, they must have plenty to talk about.”
Laughter broke out in the church, along with a gurgle of delight at the subversive nature of the joke. The priest was an amateur poet and a fellow Kildare man. An old friend of Manus’s, at the end of the Mass he led his coffin out of the church with great pomp, holding the huge gilded cross high for all to see. Propping up the front right-hand side of the coffin with his left shoulder, Macdara fixed his eyes on the shuffling ruffle at the bottom of the priest’s vestments, so as to avoid looking the mourners in the face as he passed. There was something touching and sad about the priest’s sensible rubber-soled shoes, walking along under all those ruffles. Macdara always found people’s shoes very touching and sad.
From the balcony, the soloist was singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which made Macdara even sadder.
Outside the church, the sun fell down on them in warm yellow flakes. The little boys ran wild loops of the churchyard, like horses turned loose in a paddock, while the adults in the family were islanded by well-wishers. Macdara shook hands until his arm ached, and eventually the crowd began to thin. He could see his mother now, arching like a pergola over another old lady. His sisters, heads held high and laughing; they were both of them dressed up to the nines. He could see Sam being led to a car by Nando. (Macdara had been introduced to Nando outside the funeral home, and had judged him on the face of it to be a most trustworthy person.)
His father was to be cremated right after the funeral. The sea burial had turned out to be too complicated. To carry out a burial at sea, you had to have a special license from the Department of the Marine. You had to modify the coffin, by inserting a zinc lining and drilling holes into it, otherwise it would only float; there was even a question of weighing the body down. All things considered, it had been decided that it would be wiser to have Manus cremated, and to scatter his ashes at sea.
Macdara sat beside his mother in the crematorium. Sam was with Nora and Nando, while Acushla and Alma sat side by side at the edge of the pew. As the curtains closed in on the coffin, they clung to each other, sobbing audibly. Macdara found their sudden outpouring of grief puzzling. It seemed like only a moment ago that they had been laughing. From some unseen speaker high up on the wall came the sound of music. Louis Armstrong, singing the mourners out into the sunshine.
After the cremation, they all went to the pub. Acushla had wanted to put on a reception for everyone in her home and Alma had argued for a hotel, but Deirdre had insisted on going to the pub. She had insisted on the pub where she and Manus had met all those years ago, and where he and his friends had held court on so many a night. Nothing would do Deirdre but to have the reception upstairs in McDaids.
There were trays of sandwiches laid out on the bar when they arrived. Yellow light coming through the stained-glass windows. On the walls, black-and-white pictures of Manus and his cohort as young men. Macdara ordered a pint for himself, and one for Sam and Nora. Nando would only agree to having a half.
“I’m a useless drinker,” said Nando apologetically.
“An excellent quality in a person,” said Macdara. “I wholeheartedly approve.”
He raised his glass, making sure to catch Nando’s eye before drinking from it—someone had told him that it was deeply offensive to other cultures not to make eye contact while toasting. Macdara felt shy in the presence of Nando, as he often was in the company of anyone other than family. He began to long for an opportunity to escape the circle he found himself in, an opportunity that came soon enough with the arrival of a steady trickle of his father’s various acquaintances; in twos and threes they came, clattering up the rickety stairs. From literary compatriots to country relations, from genuine friends to phoney hangers-on, they kept coming until the little room was heaving, the noise gathering like fumes under the glossy ceiling as the extractor fan in the wall whirred away inadequately. The temperature in the room was such that the men began shedding their suit jackets and ties, and opening up the buttons of their shirts. The women bared their tanned arms, giving the gathering a most un-funereal aspect. After three pints, Macdara could feel himself getting drunk, but that didn’t stop him going to the bar to order a fourth. It wasn’t often he had the opportunity to get drunk.
He found himself standing facing Acushla. Her face flushed from the heat, she wore her cardigan draped elegantly over the shoulders of her sleeveless black dress, and she was holding her glass of white wine out in front of her like a model displaying some kind of kitchen product in an advertisement. Her husband was standing beside her with his arm wound around the small of her back. Liam had his face turned to one side while he talked to someone behind him.
“You know that Daddy loved you,” Acushla was saying, her voice pitched higher than usual.
“Of course,” said Macdara, stumbling forward as he leaned in toward her. She put the palm of her free hand flat on his chest to stop his fall, leaning in to shout into his ear above the noise of the room. “I know you weren’t as close to him as me and Alma were, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love you.”
And Macdara was about to tell her that he had never imagined this to be the case when he stopped himself. Acushla’s reassurances had raised a question in his head, a question that had never existed before. He frowned as he contemplated it, swaying a little on the spot where he stood. Stepping to the side, he set his half-drunk pint down on the bar and made for the loo, aware only of a desire to get away from the noise and the people so that he could think.
The men’s room was empty, but even so Macdara made for a cubicle. He had never been able to bring himself to use a urinal in a public toilet, preferring to lock himself into a cubicle so that he could sit down. Letting his suit trousers fall toward the wet tiled floor, he sat on the toilet, half closing his eyes to bring the graffiti on the back of the cubicle door into focus. There was a burst of noise as the door outside opened and closed again. In the conversation that followed, he identified his brother-in-law’s voice, along with another voice that he didn’t recognize. Desperately, Macdara strained to restrain his bladder, unable to bear the indignity of being heard to urinate.
“Well, we won’t see his like again,” Mick was saying, with drunken emphasis.
“You said it,” said the other man. “They broke the mold when they made old Manus.”
Macdara heard a stream of piss, and then another. He listened out for the sound of the taps being turned on for them to wash their hands, and the warm-air hand drier being used to dry them, but those sounds never came. Instead he heard the door hinge opening, and a burst of noise from outside as they left. Only when the door had closed behind them again did Macdara finally let go of his bladder. He washed his hands carefully outside before emerging furtively from the men’s room. Grabbing his suit jacket from the hook in the hallway, he left the pub without saying good night to anyone.
The letter was waiting for him where he’d left it. Like a small stone that finds its way into your sock, or a scratch on the lens of your sunglasses, he had been acutely aware of it all day. He had been forced to apply great concentration to the ignoring of it. Now here it was, sitting patiently on the table. Another moment and he would be sitting down, reading its contents.
He took two steps back from the table and turned toward the fridge, postponing the decision momentarily while he searched for something to eat. There were two cold sausages that he had stowed earlier on the top shelf; they were glued to the china saucer by a pool of their own congealed fat. Macdara withdrew the saucer from the fridge and put it to rest on the kitchen counter while he dropped two slices of bread into the toaster. He peeled the sausages off the plate and split them each lengthways with a knife, revealing the globby sausagemeat inside. When the toast popped, he buttered it generously. He tiled one slice of toast with the cold sausages, using the other slice as a lid. Taking the sandwich in both hands, he began to eat it, marveling at the deliciousness of this thing that he had made. For a moment there was nothing in his mind, only the deliciousness of the cold sausage sandwich. But then the letter caught his eye. He realized that he did not want to open it.
As long as the letter went unopened, Macdara’s world remained unchanged. But once he had opened it, once he had read its contents, he would be brought down one of two paths. Either his father had disliked the book (and the likelihood of this was very much uppermost in Macdara’s mind), in which case Macdara would have to live forever with his father’s disapprobation, a burden that would weigh heavily on a father-son relationship that had up until now managed to remain miraculously unconfrontational. In the unlikely event that his father had liked the book (and it occurred to Macdara that this outcome was almost as terrifying as the prospect of his disliking it), well, that brought with it a whole new set of problems. If his father had liked the book, then there was never any reason for Macdara to have feared his scorn, and no need to have kept his writing a secret from him. If his father turned out to have liked the book, then Macdara would see that he had squandered the opportunity of a friendship with Manus, one based on mutual respect and the pursuit of a shared craft, rather than the pact of mutual misunderstanding they had observed with each other since Macdara was a child.
It occurred to Macdara now, as he licked the last bit of melted butter out of the corner of his mouth and burped a dry bubble of sausage-scented Guinness fumes out of his belly, it occurred to him that there was nothing to be gained by opening the letter. By not opening the letter, he could maintain forever the equilibrium that had existed between him and his father. An equilibrium that had lasted until the final whistle (or the final gasp of a dodgy handbrake). There was no point in revisiting it now. Revisiting it would only bring trouble.
With this thought in mind, Macdara took his father’s letter and tore it in two. Observing glimpses of black ink where the envelope and the letter inside it had been rent, he resisted the temptation to peek, tearing those halves in two again, and those halves in two, and those halves in two, until all that remained were small flakes of writing paper and small flakes of envelope, like homemade confetti. Macdara swept them off the table into his cupped hand and dumped them into the trash can.
As he climbed into bed in his vest and underpants, having given himself a special amnesty from flossing and brushing his teeth, his head was spinning from the drink, his stomach unsure about the sausage sandwich, but his mind was untroubled by worries of any kind. He was asleep within seconds.
Oh, Jesus, the letter. Macdara sprang out of bed and lurched through the kitchen, headfirst into the bin. Fingers scrabbling through butter-smeared paper and coffee grounds and melon pips, he began fishing out the scraps. There were fewer of them than you would imagine, and they had found their way farther down into the bin than he would have thought possible. He had to turn the contents out on to a newspaper on the floor, pawing his way through a soggy potpourri of eggshells and breadcrumbs, a melon half-shell with its reduced sticker still clinging to it, a toilet roll tube that he had neglected to recycle. Somewhere amid all this waste were his father’s last words to him.
Macdara laid the fragments out on the kitchen counter like pieces of a jigsaw. But what he had before him was more of a mosaic. Tiny shards of paper stained with ink that was no longer black but all the colors of an oil spill. Whatever it was that was wet in the bin, it had made of his father’s script a watery batik. As his hangover swarmed noisily around his head, as the fact of his father’s death uncoiled itself inside his belly, it became clear to Macdara that it was not going to be possible to reconstruct the letter.
He closed his eyes and let the tears slowly squeeze their way out of him. Tears that had been years in the forming. It was a surprise to Macdara what a relief it was to let them finally seep through.
It was a few weeks before they got round to going through his father’s things.
In that time, it had been agreed that Nando would sleep in the apartment at night, so that Sam would not be on his own. The meager resources of the state would be called upon to provide carers for Sam during the day, with the family filling any remaining gaps between them. On the whole, it seemed to Macdara a most satisfactory resolution of the rather precarious situation Sam had been left in by Manus’s death.
Sam seemed largely unaware of Manus’s absence, and when on occasion he did comment on it, he seemed to absorb without emotion the explanation that Manus was dead. He showed no signs of being distressed, expressing only vague regret, as if it were the death of someone he hardly knew. “Oh, dear,” he would say, whenever he was reminded of it. “Oh, dear,” he would mutter, with mild surprise. “That’s very sad.” It was only when Acushla went to clear out some of her father’s things, only then did Sam become upset.
“We’ll have to do it behind his back,” she told Macdara. “The next time the carer takes him out, we can all go round. It will be nice for us all to do it together.”
Macdara arrived first, followed within the space of a few seconds by his sisters. Wearing their sunglasses on their heads and carrying empty wine boxes and rolls of trash bags, they looked like aging film stars who had been sentenced to community service. One silver-haired, the other crowned a pale wheaten gold.
“Why don’t we make a start on the clothes,” said Acushla, tearing off a bin bag and handing it to Alma. “Three piles,” she said, pointing out spaces on the bedroom floor with a manicured fingertip. “One for the bin. One for the charity shop. One for things we might want to keep.”
Alma nodded, and it occurred to Macdara how odd it was to hear Acushla telling Alma what to do. Stranger still to see Alma doing it.
While his sisters worked their way through his father’s wardrobe, Macdara made a start on his desk. Into a trash bag he tossed all the old matchbooks and swizzle sticks that he found in the middle drawer, all the paper clips and leaking batteries and dried-up pens. Checkbook stubs going back decades and business cards belonging to publishers long swallowed up by conglomerates, all of them went into the bin too. His father’s much-stamped old passports he put aside as a memento, along with a box of slides that appeared to have been taken at somebody’s wedding. Macdara held one of them up to the light and saw a clutch of women wearing sixties-style clothing; the images were too indistinct for him to recognize any of them.
In the side drawers, Macdara found his father’s correspondence. Folders of documents relating to bank accounts and insurance policies. His father had filed and labeled them all meticulously, for fear of anything falling by the wayside. The documentation relating to his work was limited to a single drawer containing a sheaf of annual statements from his publisher. (The manuscript of his father’s book, and most of his personal correspondence, had long since been donated to a university archive.) The previous year’s royalties amounted to less than a hundred euro, something Macdara found very poignant. But his sadness was banished in an instant by his discovery in one of the drawers of a Time Out bar. Macdara laughed out loud at this joke from beyond the grave.
In the left-hand bottom drawer, he found what he was looking for. His own unbound manuscript, held loosely together by its original twine binding. On the first page, his father had inscribed in slanting capital letters his suggestion for a title. Turning the pages, Macdara could see that his father had peppered the margins with handwritten notes. As he breathlessly leafed through them, he was aware of the invisible dust of his father’s final movements falling out from between the pages.
Before he left—with the manuscript of his book carefully stashed in a supermarket carrier bag and his father’s passports tucked away in the pocket of his jacket—Macdara helped himself to a small selection of his father’s more flamboyant clothing. Now that his father was gone, it seemed important to Macdara that his heirs adopt a little of his eccentricity. Otherwise the family would only sink back into the ordinariness whence they came, something Macdara was determined not to allow to happen.