‘I will ask God to guide you, Johnny.’
‘Don’t. Don’t,’ he would say.
I would see fear in his eyes, and sometimes his anger would subside.
‘God loves you, Johnny…’
‘Don’t.’
‘He wants you to put down your anger towards him…’
‘No. Stop…’
‘It doesn’t have to be this way…’
I would watch from the top of the stairs as this big man was made small by my mother’s words. His arms would fall from my mother’s shoulders and he would stand there like someone under a hypnotist’s spell, his body swaying from the booze, and the soft murmur of my mother’s speech.
‘He knows you try to be good…He knows your heart is wounded…Just as He was, Johnny…Just as He was…’
‘I’m no good…I’m no good.’
‘There is goodness in everyone…’
‘No.’
I remember sitting there in the dark, drawn by the noise, watching as my father struggled with the blackness that sat across his soul. I saw how my mother’s heart was reaching out to his, asking it to join her in the sunlight that she had found. There was something else in that moment when they held each other’s eyes, a moment when something hung in the air between them. It was as if my mother was waiting for him to complete a sentence he had started, to get to the bloody meat of what was bothering him. He never did. Those moments when he let her in were rare, and then he only did it partway. Most of the time though he would tear himself away from her gaze and stumble away like a man who had just been blinded by the truth of something.
‘God’s love is stronger than any metal,’ she would say. ‘Stronger than stone…Stronger than pain…’
She had to choose her moment to work her way around my father’s moods. Once he picked up a glass full of milk and hurled it at the kitchen wall as we were seated for dinner one night. My mother had suggested that she help out at the church on Sunday mornings, handing out communion. Without a word my father had stood and lifted the glass and smashed it above the heads of my sister and me and then calmly sat down again and continued eating.
Sometimes she would come and sit with me, and pray over me as I drifted off to sleep.
‘Close your eyes,’ she would say. ‘They are all around us…The saints…God…Can you feel Him?’
I would nod, but it was a lie.
‘He loves you, Gabriel…He loves you…God adores you.’
I would squeeze my eyes shut and beg my mind to make them appear to send them from her heart to mine, these warriors, these guardians from the gates of heaven.
‘Close your eyes, Gabriel…See them there the host and soldiers of our Lord.’
Try as I might, wish as hard as I could, all I could see was darkness; a black endless emptiness that I knew was waiting for me when my time on this earth was done.
‘Your father doesn’t understand…He said he did…Once…He told me many things…Soft things…That make a woman feel special…’ she said almost to herself. ‘He’s had a hard life…It was tough for him…’
‘Mammy…’
‘Ssh…Concentrate…God needs patience…needs gentleness.’
She had been beautiful my mother, but belief in God had made her ugly. There was plainness to her, and greyness in her eyes as if she was weary beyond words. She became smaller when my father was around; she shrank as if his presence ate into her spirit. I watched her skirt him, trying to double-guess his moods from the shape of his shoulders or the look in his eye. It took me a long time to realise that my sister Ciara and I did the same thing, that we were stunted, that our hearts cowered when he was in the house.
I knew that the black dot of pain that lay in the centre of his eyes also lay in mine, and that it was a stain that no amount of washing or praying could shift. I think of my loneliness, how it coils around the centre of my being like a long thread of steel and realise that he must have been the same, he stood on the outside of our family condemned as an ogre, just as I do now.
They were telling me to calm down. I watched as they moved about me. It was my second or third night there, I can’t be sure. I was doing quite well until I dreamt about you. There was sorrow in your eyes and you turned me away. I stood there and pleaded with you but you walked away and kept walking until the horizon claimed you and you were gone forever. I woke up screaming and in a moment I was surrounded by nurses and doctors. I think that I fought them, I can’t be sure. I remember how they smothered me, laying their bodies across mine and I was sure that my heart was going to explode through my chest, spewing blood across the pristine sheets. I wanted to tell them that I wished them no harm, that I was dying from a lack of love that’s all. But they weren’t in any mood to listen.
There must have been four of them, all men and though they were being physical with me, they kept talking, whispering reassurances, saying things like relax, Gabriel, try and relax, we’re here to help you.
Needless to say I didn’t believe them, and somewhere I didn’t trust that I was awake, and then I thought that maybe you had sent them to make sure that I stayed away from you and our child. That made me cry, and for a moment everyone stopped and waited.
‘It’s okay,’ one of the younger nurses said. ‘Everything will be alright. You’ll see.’
Part of me wanted to believe him but all I could see was everything that I had thrown away. I needed the one thing that I knew they wouldn’t give me, the hot fire of whiskey on my throat. It was the only thing that had the power to burn the memory of you from me. It was then that I saw the syringe and I began to fight them again. The young woman doctor had it in her hand as she made her way to me.
‘I need his forearm,’ I heard her say. ‘Quick. Quick.’
Someone else speaks. I hear the words sleep and trust, but my hearing is going, it is mixing with sounds from the past, my first baby words, and my mother’s voice, as soft as surf spilling onto a beach, plates being stacked, the hollow chime of our hallway clock, my sister’s laugh, and then my father’s hard bark like a seal demanding fish.
I watched as he patrolled the house, his eyes flicking periodically in my direction, sizing me up, daring me to shatter the silence he had spent the best part of the morning setting in place. It began with the way he responded to my mother’s request that he run her into town. He stared at her as if she had just insulted him and then walked the length of the kitchen and looked back at her, disdain in his eyes. She knew better than to say anything, that she had to let him posture and sulk his way through this latest mood otherwise there would be war.
From her he moved on to me. I remember I was drawing at the table, it was the picture of a bird in flight, a red bird with bright orange flames for wings. I had spent most of the morning on it, enjoying the feel of the crayons between my fingers. I could feel the heat of his presence as he stood over me; I could smell tobacco and diesel and hear the sharp running of his breath.
I recall sitting there, my hands frozen in the middle of their task, my brain desperately trying to read the situation. Should I look up at him and smile, careful not to make it too