I knew that they were shaping me for the community, and that there was concern for me in that. But I kept the card my friends at the Information Unit in Brussels had added to the binoculars they presented me with, at a farewell feast in a Flanders tavern, where we danced all night to waltzes from a mechanical organ. ‘Thank you for all the fun you brought into our lives,’ the card said. There was a promise in the words. I might be a bit down now, but I had been up, and I would be up again.
I talked to the cat.
‘Ulysses was away for twenty years and his dog waited for him. Did you know that? Argos, the dog? He was so old he’d turned white but he waited for his master and when at last he saw him come home he allowed himself to die. ‘Thinking of dying, Bell, now that I’m back?’
She looked up from licking her fur to flick me an insolent look.
Apropos of dying, the insurance man wanted to know, did I want to top up Min’s funeral insurance? For the first time, money began to worry me. Then the bill for the new central heating came. Then one day Min remarked, in a voice with genuine longing in it, how there were lovely legs of lamb in the butcher’s, but at a terrible price. I had some substitute work in Kilbride Library every week that brought in a little cash. And I had enough savings for another year at the rate we were going, even though I’d bought a small second-hand car to take Min around in – not that she’d yet agreed to be taken around. I had a bond I could cash, even, to have the backyard glassed over and tiled if she ever said ‘Yes’ to the plan. If the yard was really nicely done, maybe she wouldn’t go to the pub so much.
Not that she drank more than a very little at her lunchtime session, as far as I knew. But she’d have changed, all the same, by the time she came home. She’d be ever so slightly wrong. And sometimes something would bother her and she’d stay up at the Inn longer than a couple of hours. Then she’d come home and start doing something around the house, full of false elation, and my heart would be in my mouth, seeing how clumsy the drink made her. And a few times she came home and went to bed in the afternoon but got up again later and went out, and when she came back she had a smile like a grimace. I couldn’t look at her. She had only done that three times to date, which was nothing compared to Mrs Beckett two doors up who was an alcoholic, not to mention a whole lot of the local men. But the thing was, I never knew when it might happen.
At the beginning, I sometimes went up to the Inn whether she asked me to or not. From the door I’d see her on the other side of the lounge, across a floor full of empty chairs and tables. I’d see the outline of her wild hair against the window there that she opened whenever she felt like it, as if she owned the place. She pulled an invisible space around herself in that big room, as if she was in a car and going somewhere. But she wasn’t going anywhere. She had nowhere to go. It shocked me to see her, so that I was already hopelessly full of emotion as I crossed the greasy carpet. Even before she’d look up with her child’s face.
But she didn’t want me there.
The only time I caught a glimpse of her inner life had been in September, when there was a Mass of Commemoration on the first anniversary of 9/11. For the few days before it she talked a lot, telling me about that dreadful day and how she glanced at the television and thought the plane flying into the tower was a game, and she couldn’t find Reeny’s number in Spain, and the stew she had on was burnt so badly that she had to throw out the saucepan, and Andy Sutton brought down the bedroom chair and went over to get Mrs Beckett because she only has RTÉ One, and Tessa came in after her work and made chicken sandwiches, and Andy went up to the Kilbride Inn for a dozen beers and a bottle of vodka because people were calling to the house all night. And all along the terrace front doors were open and you could hear the blare of television sets, and Enzo’s son brought down fish and chips though the Sorrento didn’t normally deliver, and then the boy stayed, watching the television with his mouth open.
‘I had a terrible fright right at the beginning,’ she said, ‘when I remembered Markey Cuffe, that was your big friend when your nose was always stuck in a book, Florence Cuffe’s boy that went to New York. I was asking everyone where did he work; he grew up out our back lane and he easily could have been dead; a lot of people around here had people over there they were mad with worry about and there was nothing they could do, the phones were all clogged up, you couldn’t reach America. But then I found the cards I’d put away since last Christmas because he always sends a big one with gold on it and the address of his business, and it was in Seattle. Sure I know all about Seattle, Reeny and me used to watch Frasier.’
The whole of Kilbride, apparently, was going to the Commemoration Mass, and Min was ready early. She put on a moleskin coat so ancient that I could remember it on her coming into the Pillar Store when I started there at age sixteen.
‘Min,’ I began, but she cut me off.
‘That coat cost hundreds of pounds,’ she said grandly. ‘That coat was in your father’s mother’s wardrobe when I was clearing it out, and it had hardly been worn.’
‘But, Min—’ intending to point out that it also smelled strongly of mothballs.
‘And you,’ she said, looking me up and down disapprovingly, ‘you’ve a chance to wear your good skirt. Go on up and change. Throw us down the high heels and I’ll give them a polish.’
In the church she was crushed against me by the crowd. Her eyes were closed and she took no notice of the liturgy. Instead – I was so close to her that I couldn’t help but overhear – she prayed and prayed under her breath. ‘Lord, Lord,’ I could hear. ‘Lord have mercy. Our Lady, help them.’ I never knew anything like it from Min. Imploring was the very last thing she ever did.
The point she returned to earnestly, as if she said it often enough I’d understand, was that they were ordinary working people, the dead. ‘They weren’t doing any harm,’ she’d say, looking at me, still baffled at the injustice. ‘They were doing their best. They were going to work.’
But as the winter set in she went out less and less.
‘What’s wrong?’ I’d say. ‘Would you not get up?’ I’d say to her. ‘The car is outside the door, will I give you a lift up to the pub?’ I asked her would she like to go to the Canaries, to take a bit of sun. To London. We could look at the clothes in the sales. I said, Will we buy a dog?’
She sprang into life. ‘Certainly not!’ she said. ‘Bell hates dogs.’
‘Bell!’ I said, bitterly, as Bell’s striped face with its level, golden eyes peeked out from the blankets under Min’s chin. ‘I think that cat is telling me to go back where I came from,’ I said, but Min said nothing.
I dropped the idea of doing up the yard and took out private health insurance in case Min needed hospitalisation. But all that did was disqualify her for the services of the welfare psychologist who used to come to the house. When we found that out, Min was for once delighted with me.
‘Good girl!’ she said approvingly. ‘I didn’t know how to get rid of her. It’s her that needs her head examined, not me.’
But that meant we were doing nothing at all about the situation. So I went in to town to Eason’s bookshop and went through the self-help section – a place I’d never been before – looking for something that might help us. I brought home Listening to Depression: How Understanding Your Pain Can Heal Your Life and Depression: the Mind-Body Approach. For a while I read them to her every night, and she’d say they were great books, very interesting. But she’d go asleep after a few pages.
Our Christmas was very quiet and New Year’s Eve dragged a bit, too, though there was wild good cheer on the television. Min was in bed and I sat at the kitchen fire and did my best to laugh at myself. Why couldn’t I have been Angela Gheorghiu, the Romanian soprano? I muttered to an imaginary audience. To take just one example. Why was I born in goddamn working-class Dublin? Why couldn’t heiress Doris Duke be born