Charlie. I think I knew, even at eight, that you can say goodbye all you like, but when someone is dead they’re not going to say anything back, so Liam had to stiff-arm me up past the neighbours reciting the rosary on the stairs. My memory has them all bundled in shawls; Ada’s back ascending in front of us corseted in black taffeta. But this was 1968: there would have been patterned headscarves and big-buttoned coats that smelt of the rain. Ada would have worn her navy Crimplene with white piping, that came out for all occasions, with a matching navy bolero jacket and one of those hats that look like a bubble of felt, punched in on one side.
The neighbours’ feet stuck out a surprising distance from the step where they each knelt: their shoes waggled midair, and there was something tripping and wrong about this other ladder, made of shin-bones in support tights, at cross purposes to the staircase we were trying to climb.
A very loud woman was praying on the return. She saw me giggling with Liam and rolled a sad eyeball, like there are some things beyond rebuke. I remember that, all right; the slow-motion feeling of being utterly wrong-minded and unable to change. I did not, I realised then, want to go into my grandparents’ room. Not at all.
A few more kneelers cluttered the second flight, and then, through the open door, I saw the end of the bed and the still, uneven lump of Charlie’s feet. I remember the straightness of his legs as revealed through the expanding door frame, the horrible little peaks of his knees, then the merciful swoop of the eiderdown up his fantastic belly’s rise. His hands were on his chest, knotted, and complacent, and tied together with rosary beads.
The beads looked too tight, they looked like they were digging into his flesh. These little fierce formalities at the end; a sort of revenge on him, for being dead.
Ada looked to check us behind her, and then moved out of the way to give us a better view. It was a view that I did not want to take.
Charlie did love to leave.
‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ You never knew where he was going. He left in a fug of explanations that explained nothing at all. So Ada was proved right, at last–he was a most annoying man. You could tell by the way she twitched towards him as though to swat the dandruff from his lapel. And in fact there was something there–a fly crawling on the side of his neck. I thought it had come out from under his collar and I was much bothered by the idea of maggots–from that day on, really. It stopped my awful smiling at any rate, like Ada was going to swipe at me, and not the fly.
She watched it rise and shift away from him, and hit the roller blind, once, twice. Then it came back to the bed. I was standing behind her; I could feel the still, raw rage as she saw it circle, and scoot away, and then come back to settle again on Charlie’s dead neck. It landed and ran across the skin, not bothered by the deep creases in the soft flesh, or by the few high strands of hair. Ada moved, or went to move, and the fly lifted and repeated its escape to the roller blind, this time finding a way around the bright edge of it to hit the window pane, where it buzzed and thumped. We listened to it for a while; the sound of the rosary outside, and the sound of the fly battering the glass. Ada was mortified. She looked to the corpse. She could not move. Then, of a sudden, she seemed to realise that this was her own bedroom, with her own husband in it, dead or not, and she simply walked around the bed. When she reached the window, she raised one hand and pressed the blind flat. The buzzing stopped. Ada the housewife, with a terrible spot on her blind. We children now exposed to Charlie’s bald head, naked in death.
You might think there is something light about the dead–our lives feel so heavy to us, sometimes–but the dent Charlie’s head made in the pillow was living and deep.
I remember him lying down in the Phoenix Park, his head like
The neighbours’ feet stuck out a surprising distance from the step where they each knelt: their shoes waggled midair, and there was something tripping and wrong about this other ladder, made of shin-bones in support tights, at cross purposes to the staircase we were trying to climb.
A very loud woman was praying on the return. She saw me giggling with Liam and rolled a sad eyeball, like there are some things beyond rebuke. I remember that, all right; the slow-motion feeling of being utterly wrong-minded and unable to change. I did not, I realised then, want to go into my grandparents’ room. Not at all.
A few more kneelers cluttered the second flight, and then, through the open door, I saw the end of the bed and the still, uneven lump of Charlie’s feet. I remember the straightness of his legs as revealed through the expanding door frame, the horrible little peaks of his knees, then the merciful swoop of the eiderdown up his fantastic belly’s rise. His hands were on his chest, knotted, and complacent, and tied together with rosary beads.
The beads looked too tight, they looked like they were digging into his flesh. These little fierce formalities at the end; a sort of revenge on him, for being dead.
Ada looked to check us behind her, and then moved out of the way to give us a better view. It was a view that I did not want to take.
Charlie did love to leave.
‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ You never knew where he was going. He left in a fug of explanations that explained nothing at all. So Ada was proved right, at last–he was a most annoying man. You could tell by the way she twitched towards him as though to swat the dandruff from his lapel. And in fact there was something there–a fly crawling on the side of his neck. I thought it had come out from under his collar and I was much bothered by the idea of maggots–from that day on, really. It stopped my awful smiling at any rate, like Ada was going to swipe at me, and not the fly.
She watched it rise and shift away from him, and hit the roller blind, once, twice. Then it came back to the bed. I was standing behind her; I could feel the still, raw rage as she saw it circle, and scoot away, and then come back to settle again on Charlie’s dead neck. It landed and ran across the skin, not bothered by the deep creases in the soft flesh, or by the few high strands of hair. Ada moved, or went to move, and the fly lifted and repeated its escape to the roller blind, this time finding a way around the bright edge of it to hit the window pane, where it buzzed and thumped. We listened to it for a while; the sound of the rosary outside, and the sound of the fly battering the glass. Ada was mortified. She looked to the corpse. She could not move. Then, of a sudden, she seemed to realise that this was her own bedroom, with her own husband in it, dead or not, and she simply walked around the bed. When she reached the window, she raised one hand and pressed the blind flat. The buzzing stopped. Ada the housewife, with a terrible spot on her blind. We children now exposed to Charlie’s bald head, naked in death.
You might think there is something light about the dead–our lives feel so heavy to us, sometimes–but the dent Charlie’s head made in the pillow was living and deep.
I remember him lying down in the Phoenix Park, his head like
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