‘I promised him,’ she said, no matter what the doctor or the neighbours tried to say.
I know my father heard her because I saw his hands rise from the coverlet as if he wanted to applaud.
On the last day she held a cigarette to his lips for a few minutes and he tried to suck on it, and she poured a little shot-glass of whisky and smeared some of it onto his tongue. Then she put those things away and combed his hair and lightly sponged his face and held one hand, while I held the other, until Dad came to his last breath.
We sat frozen for a minute or two minutes, not able to believe the silence where his breathing used to be.
‘Open the door!’ she cried. ‘Quick! Quick!’
I opened the front door a fraction.
‘More!’ she commanded. She was standing up, her eyes coal-black in her white face. ‘Wider!’
Then Reeny came in. She gave me a kiss and said to Min, ‘Will I give you a hand washing him?’
Min hadn’t moved from where she was standing, and still looking at the door, didn’t answer.
At that age I was mad about boys, who were on my mind even in the hours after my father died. Though it wasn’t boys themselves so much as the intensely exciting world me and my girlfriends had discovered, where we watched and were watched by boys and talked about them all the time. I went up to this room, Dad’s old room, and I stood just inside the door and I tried to clear my head of everything but him and pray for him to rest in peace.
I could all but see grief sitting in the corner, beckoning to me, but my own life surged in and out of my mind. I was in the top gang of girls for the first time now that I was boy-crazy and they didn’t have to ostracise me for liking lessons. We hung around outside Colfer’s shop and the Sorrento chip shop and the back lanes, and the boys shoaled up and down and sat on walls and jeered at us as we passed with pink cheeks. And now that my dad was dead downstairs it filled me with anxiety that I’d have to walk around wearing black with everyone looking at me. And I’d be trapped in the house.
I heard Min come up the stairs. All my life she’d hop-skipped up and down them like a mountain goat, but today she was slow. I thought she was going to her bedroom, but she came into the room behind me and I think she rested her cheek against my back for a second.
‘We’ll have the removal tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and the funeral the next day. And then – you go out with your friends, Rosie. You were his pride and joy, don’t forget, and he wouldn’t want you to be stuck in the house.’
Then her voice got stronger. ‘He had a great life so he had,’ she said. ‘I know that’s not what it looked like, but it’s what he said to me a thousand times and he never told me a lie. And he’s happier now than he ever was. Did you not feel his spirit going out the door? Did you not feel how happy he was?’
I closed the window in Dad’s room again. To think – that day, the day we lost him, Min was only twenty-nine!
I went back past the bathroom to her room, where she was a lump under the bedclothes.
‘Is it OK if I turn on the light?’ I said. ‘OK? Listen, Min, I was having a think there about New York and it might just be a waste of money. I was really only going for one meeting. To tell you the truth, the meeting was with Markey Cuffe from out the back lane, and nothing might have come of it. So I’ve decided not to go.’
‘No,’ she was swinging her child’s legs out of the bed. ‘No,’ she said without looking at me. ‘You go. I should have said to you, go.’
‘I really can’t,’ I said, ‘unless you’ll stay somewhere for me.’
‘Choose me somewhere nice, then,’ she said.
If it had been our custom to hug I’d have crushed her. As it was, I gave her a lift to the pub because it was raining.
Part Two
New York
5
I splayed like a starfish in the Harmony Suites Hotel so as to feel as much as possible of the sheet, my heels and elbows slithering across the fine surface, before turning over to feel its silkiness on my breasts and on the fronts of my feet. I even relished the sound that rose up to the room, a distant roaring and grinding beneath the traffic noise, which the doorman told me was rehabilitation going on around the clock at the World Trade Center. He also told me that it was unseasonably cool for New York in early June. But even though I’d turned off the heating I was as snug as a baby under the soft blankets and extra comforter that I’d taken from the second bed. Not to mention delighted with the luxury of everything after the plainness of Kilbride.
And for nothing, almost! The room cost less, on a special offer, than the midtown places I’d stayed in when I’d come to Manhattan to attend a conference on Violence Against Women at the UN or to shop with Tessa. Those rooms had smelt of stale air-freshener overlaid on city dust with windows that looked out on walls a few feet away. But this room had a wrap-around window, full of the lurid, night sky over New Jersey and of the dour river below, jostling down towards the harbour.
I delayed the bliss of falling into jet-lagged sleep, turning the pillow to recover the crispness of an untouched side, and thinking how a person could give a party in a bed like this, like the couple in Evelyn Waugh who lived a busy social life in theirs…
How come I never thought of our beds in Kilbride when I was bringing Min presents? The sheepskin rug the man in the airport in Perth said would be
Oh God, I should have rung. But the Sunshine Rest Home doesn’t allow phone calls after 9 p.m. and in Ireland it’s … oh God, I’ll be a wreck when Markey comes if I don’t sleep.
I slipped across to the bathroom, then stood for a moment enchanted by the huge swags of lights in the office blocks over on the New Jersey shore. The enormous sky was pricked all over by stars but ragged, inky clouds were moving in to blot them out. Down below a fire flickered where someone homeless must be living, on the rough ground behind the hoarding across from the hotel.
My soul doth magnify the Lord, I began. But I never got much further than that before I forgot I was saying a prayer of thanks – I was always just too happy.
I waited in the silent foyer at half-past-five the next morning. Even the traffic noise had died away outside, the receptionist asleep in her chair behind the desk.
‘Shoes?’ Markey said, as he charged through the swinging doors.
I lifted one foot to show him a sneaker with such instant obedience that I could feel him laughing as he held my head for a moment.
‘Rose!’ he said into my hair. ‘Rosie Barry! It’s been much too long!’
At least he couldn’t see my face, which was blushing with shock. How, how on earth, had Markey Cuffe become so handsome? Cuffo – that’s what the other boys called him when they needed him to come out for a game – but it was Spiderbrain the rest of the time, because his arms and legs were so long and thin and because he was always reading; always ‘had his head stuck in a book’, as reading