‘I think he’s in heaven, love. Oh, there’s no thinking involved – I know so. He’s up there with your mother, yes he is. Sitting on her lap while she plays rummy with Pauline, robbing her blind and cackling away. She’s up there all right.’ He looks up and wags his forefinger at the ceiling. ‘Now you take care of baby Sean for us, Gracie, you hear? She’ll be tellin’ him all about you, she will, about when you were a baby, about the day you took your first steps, about the day you got your first tooth. She’ll tell him about your first day of school and your last day of school and every day in between, and he’ll know all about you so that when you walk through those gates up there, as an old woman far older than me now, he’ll look up from rummy and say, “Ah, there she is now. The woman herself. My mammy.” Straight away he’ll know.’
The lump in my throat, so huge I can barely swallow, prevents me from saying the thank you I want to express, but perhaps he sees it in my eyes as he nods in acknowledgement and then turns his attention back to the TV while I stare out the window at nothing.
‘There’s a nice chapel here, love. Maybe you should go visit, when you’re good and ready. You don’t even have to say anything, He won’t mind. Just sit there and think. I find it helpful.’
I think it’s the last place in the world I want to be.
‘It’s a nice place to be,’ Dad says, reading my mind. He watches me and I can almost hear him praying for me to leap out of bed and grab the rosary beads he’s placed by the bedside.
‘It’s a rococo building, you know,’ I say suddenly, and have no idea what I’m talking about.
‘What is?’ Dad’s eyebrows furrow and his eyes disappear underneath, like two snails disappearing into their shells. ‘This hospital?’
I think hard. ‘What were we talking about?’
Then he thinks hard. ‘Maltesers. No!’
He’s silent for a moment, then starts answering as though in a quick-fire round of a quiz.
‘Bananas! No. Heaven! No. The chapel! We were talking about the chapel.’ He flashes a million-dollar smile, jubilant he succeeded in remembering the conversation of less than one minute ago. He goes further now. ‘And then you said it’s a rickety building. But honestly it felt fine to me. A bit old but, sure, there’s nothin’ wrong with being old and rickety.’ He winks at me.
‘The chapel is a rococo building, not rickety,’ I correct him, feeling like a teacher. ‘It’s famous for the elaborate stucco work which adorns the ceiling. It’s the work of French stuccadore, Barthelemy Cramillion.’
‘Is that so, love? When did he do that, then?’ He moves his chair in closer to the bed. Loves nothing more than a scéal.
‘In 1762.’ So precise. So random. So natural. So inexplicable that I know it.
‘That long? I didn’t know the hospital was here since then.’
‘It’s been here since 1757,’ I reply, and then frown. How on earth do I know that? But I can’t stop myself, almost like my mouth is on autopilot, completely unattached to my brain. ‘It was designed by the same man who did Leinster House. Richard Cassells was his name. One of the most famous architects of the time.’
‘I’ve heard of him, all right,’ Dad lies. ‘If you’d said Dick I’d have known straight away.’ He chuckles.
‘It was Bartholomew Mosse’s brainchild,’ I explain and I don’t know where the words are coming from, don’t know where the knowledge is coming from. From where else, I don’t know. Like a feeling of déjà vu – these words, this feeling is familiar but I haven’t heard them or spoken them in this hospital. I think maybe I’m making it up but I know somewhere deep inside that I’m correct. A warm feeling floods my body.
‘In 1745 he purchased a small theatre called the New Booth and he converted it into Dublin’s first lying-in hospital.’
‘It stood here, did it? The theatre?’
‘No, it was on George’s Lane. This was all just fields. But eventually that became too small and he bought the fields that were here, consulted with Richard Cassells and in 1757 the new lying-in hospital, now known as the Rotunda, was opened by the Lord Lieutenant. On the eighth of December, if I recall correctly.’
Dad is confused. ‘I didn’t know you had an interest in that kind of thing, Joyce. How do you know all that?’
I frown. I didn’t know I knew that either. Suddenly frustration overwhelms me and I shake my head aggressively.
‘I want a haircut,’ I add angrily, blowing my fringe off my forehead. ‘I want to get out of here.’
‘OK, love.’ Dad’s voice is quiet. ‘A little longer, is all.’
Get a haircut! Justin blows his fringe out of his eyes and glares with dissatisfaction at his reflection in the mirror.
Until his image caught his eye, he was packing his bag to go back to London while whistling the happy tune of a recently divorced man who’d just been laid by the first woman since his wife. Well, the second time that year, but the first that he could recall with some small degree of pride. Now, standing before the full-length mirror, his whistling stalls, the image of his Fabio self failing miserably against the reality. He corrects his posture, sucks in his cheeks and flexes his muscles, vowing that now that the divorce cloud has lifted, he will get his body back in order. Forty-three years old, he is handsome and he knows it, but it’s not a view that is held with arrogance. His opinions on his looks are merely understood with the same logic he applies to tasting a fine wine. The grape was merely grown in the right place, under the right conditions. Some degree of nurturing and love mixed with later moments of being completely trampled on and walked all over. He possesses the common sense enabling him to recognise he was born with good genes and features that were in proportion, in the right places. He should be neither praised nor blamed for this just as a less attractive person should not be viewed with flared nostrils and a media-obsessed induced smirk. It’s just how it is.
At almost six feet, he is tall, his shoulders broad, his hair still thick and chestnut brown, though greying at the sides. This he does not mind, he’s had grey hairs since his twenties and has always felt they give him a distinguished look. Though there were some, afraid of the very nature of life, that viewed his salt-and-pepper sideburns as a thorn that would burst the bubble of their pretend life every time he was in their presence. They would come at him, bowing over and hunchbacked, and taking on the appearance of a sixteenth-century black-toothed tramp, thrusting hair dye at him as though it were a carafe of precious water from the fountain of eternal life.
For Justin, moving on and change are what he expects. He is not one for pausing, for becoming stuck in life, though he didn’t expect his particular philosophy of ageing and greying to apply to his marriage. Jennifer left him two years ago to ponder this, though not just this, but for a great many other reasons too. So many, in fact, he wishes he had taken out a pen and notepad and listed them as she bellowed at him in her tirade of hate. In the initial dark lonely nights that followed, Justin held the bottle of dye in his hand and wondered if he gave in to his solid tight philosophy, would he make things all right? Would he wake up in the morning and Jennifer be in their bed; would the light scar on his chin have healed from where the wedding ring had landed; would the list of things about him she hated so much be the very things she loved? He sobered up then and emptied the dye down his rented accommodation kitchen sink, blackened stainless steel that proved a reminder to him everyday of his decision to stay rooted in reality, until he moved to London to be closer to his daughter, much to his ex-wife’s disgust.
Through strands of his long fringe hanging over his eyes, he has a vision of the man he expects to see. Leaner, younger, perhaps with fewer wrinkles around the eyes. Any faults, such as the expanding waistline, are partly due to age and