I went to see her on stage after all, in front of a massive audience. This is Aspen, not Ennis, were talking about, so they came from all over America to listen to her. And you know what, nothing changed, she said the same things all over again, word for word. She spoke even more forcefully, like she had only been rehearsing it with me in her room. She spoke like a woman who had never been given a chance to speak before and she was going to leave nothing unsaid this time. It felt as though she was looking straight at me and I was left with no right to reply. You could hear her inhaling. You could hear her mouth clicking. She said the loneliest person in the world was the person who could not tell their own story. And thats how it was for her before she began to write her memoir. She said you become locked into your own silence and its like not being alive at all any more. Until you write the story down and claim your own life back and stop being at the mercy of what happened to you.
I was at the mercy, she said.
She spoke about Don Carlo. She said she had seen it lately at the Met in New York. It was fabulous, she said. It was like the story of her own family. She said her father was just like the King, obsessed with his own power and his own fame around Dublin. Her father had no love for his son. Her mother had no love for herself because she became an alcoholic. As children they went to school with no love. Her little brother was the biggest casualty of all that. He was our Don Carlos, she said. My little brother, Jimmy.
She said love had to be passed on to you as a child. You see your reflection in a childs eyes. There is nothing in the world better than hearing a child laugh, nothing makes you happier than seeing food going into a childs mouth, she said. How could they send a boy out into the world with no love in him?
My brother, my reflection, she said.
You could hear the audience listening. You could feel them getting angry on her behalf, crying with her. You could sense them leaning forward and agreeing with her, that a person has to have love inside them to receive it, otherwise love would have no reason to come looking for you. You could feel every mother in the place wondering if they had something to answer for, some moment where they had withheld love from a child. Everything they had done or not done, without knowing what they had done. Fathers too, like myself. That fear of looking back and wondering what could have been done differently, even when its already too late.
She thanked the audience for listening to her life and bowed her head. And then, the big surprise came at the end, she sang a song. As she said herself afterwards, she murdered the song. It was all breathy and full of laughing, full of inhaling and coughing and lifting her voice up, as if she had to stand on a chair to get the notes down. It was a song about emigration. Everybody loved it. She forgot the words halfway through. All you could hear was her breathing up and down, like she was keeping the beat going. Then she remembered the words again and carried on all the way to the end, until her lungs were completely empty.
6
Were heading to the Botanic Garden and I get this mad phone call from Dublin. She has to listen to me saying hold it, Gerry, hold it. Im with somebody. Im in Berlin. She can hear me telling him that Im not in the least bit interested in going to a school reunion, its probably the last thing in the world I want to do. You can forget it. But theyre all depending on me to be there, so hes saying, as if they cant have a school reunion without me. I tell him he can count me absent, but then he continues trying to persuade me by reminding me of some of the funny things that happened at school. Do I remember the two Kenny brothers and one of them had a big birthmark on his forehead, they used to call him Star Trek. Yeah. Hilarious. This is exactly the kind of stuff I dont want to hear about. I dont want to hear about the Lynch brothers either and how one of them is bald now working in the Pidgeon House power plant, or was he always bald, he asks, which is a ridiculous question, how could he be bald at school? I dont want to hear another word, so I end the call as quickly as possible and she wants to know whats going on.
You need friends, she says, why not meet your old pals from school?
Why not? Ill tell you why not.
Dont be like me, she says.
She knows I dont like looking back. She knows Im always trying to put things behind me. She knows Im trying to forget as much as possible, particularly things you can do nothing about. She says Im still allowing my father to make my decisions for me. She says all my relationships with other men are copies of my relationship with my father. My father will be around for all eternity if I go on like this, she says, the world is full of men who are my father in disguise.
Be yourself, Liam, she says.
Im not sure what Manfred thinks of all this talk going on inside his car and if hes the kind of person who keeps driving and not listening to what his passengers are saying to each other, or whether he hears it all and is only pretending to be the driver.
I tell her that I have no intention of going to a school reunion. Myself and my brother both wore the same coloured jumpers, given to us by my father, identical. They couldnt tell us apart. They thought I was my brother. They beat him up thinking it was me. I used to hate my brother not standing up for himself. I hated him because I loved him. I loved him and I hated him and now I love him even more because I had to pretend he was not my brother.
There is absolutely no way that Im going to spend thirty euros on a dinner in the Camden Hotel, sitting down with those savages, pretending its all in the past. Even if it is in the past. The reunion of savages. Everybody laughing like savages and talking about how far theyve come up in the world and how were not savages any more.
Calm down, Liam. Youre in Berlin.
I am calm.
She wants to know what my brother is doing now and so I fill her in on my family. Peadar, my older brother, is married and living at home and hes got a problem with water hammer. She has no idea what water hammer is, so I explain it to her. Its something my brother has inherited along with the house, it has to do with the old pipes, the old plumbing. Water starts hammering like a hammer due to air locking, if you run water or flush the toilet in two different places in the middle of the night, for example. It can wake up the whole house. It used to drive my father mad. Its virtually unheard of nowadays, a thing of the past which happens mostly in old houses.
I tell her that my brother has hardly done a thing to the house in the meantime, hes kept everything the way it was, unchanged. He wants to preserve it all according to his memory. He still has the same problem with mice that my father used to have. My brothers father is the same as my father, no difference, only that everybody has their own father to deal with. I still believe my father is after me. Even in the hotel sometimes, when I hear a door opening at night, I think hes coming to get me even though hes been dead for years and it cant be him, I checked. It was somebody who got the wrong door. Swedish tourists, I think, who thought I was in their room by mistake. And every time this happens to me, I discover nothing new, only that my father has better things to be doing than following me around for the rest of my life. Ive been imagining him, thats all. Its only now that I know what Im dealing with.
Liam, stop it, she says.
Also. The yellow door. The door Ive been afraid of since childhood is not the door of the place where my father brought me when my mother was in hospital and I thought she was never coming back, the yellow door that still gives me the taste of custard at the back of my throat every time I pass by, and its not the blue door of the school either, because the colour is irrelevant, so Im told, its not any of those doors but the door of my own home when I was a child that I should be coming to terms with and walking into without fear, whatever colour it was, dark green. A kind of deep green gloss that people had on doors in the past but which is not in use very much any more now.
7
There was a moment of sadness in the car from time to time that kept us from saying anything. We stopped talking quite suddenly and were silent, back to our own thoughts, looking out the window, arriving outside the gates of the Botanic Garden. As if there were no words left in the world, only the sound of the electronic door sliding back and the sound of traffic and the sound of Manfred getting out the wheelchair. All I could think about was how short the time was and how she would be dead so soon after that. You do your best not to think like this, but you cant help it. Its at the forefront of your mind, even when you think youve forgotten it and it seems like nothing is going to change, were all going to live forever. There were occasions during the trip when she was close to crying and I wanted to cry with her, but I couldnt let myself. I wish I could. And Im not sure sadness is the right word for what I felt as Manfred was helping her out of the car, getting her into the wheelchair and she was saying, thanks Manfred, youre a pet. It was bigger than sadness, I think. Something else, maybe the feeling that things were not quite as sad as they were meant to be, as though I was yet to discover what sadness was about and we had only briefly stepped outside normal time, waiting for real time to catch up again.
To be honest, I had no idea how to be sad. I couldnt find the words to describe what I was thinking in that kind of situation. What do you say when somebody is dying? What are you meant to talk about? You talk about nothing to do with dying, isnt that so? You say anything that comes into your head and pretend its the furthest thing from your thoughts.
She was not afraid of talking about death and what it does to you. She said it took all the goodness out of life, hearing that it was over. Everything went black, she said. What was the point of it all? What was the point in all that knowledge inside her head coming to nothing? All the people. All the stories she collected. All the books she read. And what about all the good times? Did they all come to nothing as well? Or did they remain good times?