Bend for Home, The (25 page)

In an ironic piece some time ago in The Irishman’s Diary in the
Irish Times,
Kevin Myers wrote that out beyond where I live in north Sligo every few years Hy Brazil, like another Atlantis, rises. This was news to me. I have not seen it yet, but I think of it this morning, rising out of the sea like a whale, or resting gently on the bottom of the ocean, waiting for the next time.

I think of Hy Brazil as I sit in the living room with a terrible hangover, my mother asleep in her armchair, Nancy asleep in my room, Maisie perched by the radio in the dining room, the central heating going up into a whine. Lack of sleep after spending the night on cushions on the floor has made me start to hallucinate.

If I close my eyes I think I can see Hy Brazil, a little beyond Inishmurray Island, not exactly land, not even someplace eternal, but a place imagined by people long before me that I must imagine in my turn. Imagination hands on a duty to those who come after. So it is with Hy Brazil.

So it is with Hy Brazil. Because it doesn’t exist we wish it into being because someone else did in another age. Like a star that appears say once every two hundred years, you watch for Hy Brazil every seven years but in truth it has no definite orbit, no mathematics can accurately predict its appearance at a definite hour on a definite day. But you want to be there when it happens. Even if it never happened. Even if it never existed, you wish it into being. You wish for the language to recover it from the void.

I don’t have any books to hand here in Cootehill in County Cavan that tell me who the imaginary folk were who inhabited Hy Brazil, how they arrived there, whether it is like Tír na nÓg. Are they ageless folk who live there? Is it an island inhabited by heroes? Shapechangers? Is it where suicides go? Or has it been long deserted, and rises out of the sea as a reminder to us of another civilization that has long disappeared off the face of the earth. Did the inhabitants do
wrong that the island sank? Did a catastrophe greet them because of some terrible evil doing?

Is Hy Brazil the place we go to after we die? I don’t know, so I make up my own Hy Brazil.

But the minute I start imagining it, my mind refuses Hy Brazil. The language won’t budge. Instead I think of trivial things, irritations, domestic affairs; a dream of the previous night where an old lover, with astounding familiarity, visited, and a book that I can’t finish writing presented itself. Nursing. Drinking. How the smell of my mother’s waste made me retch as I cleaned her this morning.

But I suppose those who dreamed up Hy Brazil must have also known these irritations and mood swings. Mythology is full of sordidness. The fears of the storytellers are exaggerated in the tales. The unbelievable takes on a human presence. What has happened repeatedly turns into a ritual. What has not happened turns into the mystery. The island is peopled with our uncertainties. Peace is only allowed a certain passage of time before terror intrudes again.

So that is how it must be on Hy Brazil for those who live there, and how it must have been for the makers of Hy Brazil, the ones that dreamed it up and make it sink and make it rise.

It’s not the island that rises out of the sea but the observer out of the torpor of everyday. And on the Hy Brazil I imagine there is someone looking back at us, wishing that they might begin again, be trapped once more among all that human and domestic trivia. Someone out there would probably like to swap places with me, they’d like to hear human voices again, listen to human despair and laughter, wake to a new day.

By thinking of Hy Brazil I get homesick for my cottage in Sligo. I sit there thinking of the cottage in the same way I used think of Finea before sleep. I go up the road that was taken away in the storm. The asses roar. The sea is thumping the rocks. Beside me my mother sleeps with a cooing sound. She – despite infirmity, spasms and weakness – is on her own Hy Brazil. Next door Maisie calls for green grapes. On the TV, 7000 people gather in the Shankill Road in Belfast to mourn nine out of ten killed in an explosion in a fishmonger’s shop.

The tenth they will not mourn.

He planted the bomb.

Nancy staggers out of bed. She looks pale and wasted.

God, she says.

Nancy, I say.

I didn’t know where I was.

Can I get you something to eat? I ask.

No, thank you. She pats the air with her hands, I’m off solids and on a herring.

Tea?

A cup I suppose.

Are you all right?

I feel dreadful. How do you feel?

Terrible.

What time did we go to bed?

About two.

God of almighty.

That’s the way.

Was I drinking brandy?

You were.

I thought so. She sat and laid her hands on her lap. Her chin shakes. And I’m eighty years of age.

I know.

Why do we do it?

I don’t know.

Neither do I. And those cursed radiators. The din they make. It’s like a hothouse. She gets up and looks into the mirror. Dear God. I better get home. Will you ring Raymond.

I will.

She looks at my mother.

Are the dolls all right?

Yes.

Poor Winnie, she’d drive you crackers. I did two weeks here by myself and I thought I’d never get home. No one called. I was demented. By the second week I thought of climbing up onto the roof like those prisoners. This place is worse than Strangeways.

You’re right, I laughed.

Strangeways, she laughed. God, she grimaces, I shouldn’t laugh.

I bring her a cup of tea.

And Maisie?

She’s inside at the table.

Did she eat?

A whole breakfast, I say.

How does she do it?

I don’t know.

And she’s over ninety. My God. Nancy drinks a little tea then lays the cups aside. And they ate the pizza.

They did.

That’s something, I suppose.

Maisie appears on her steed at the doorway.

Is that you, Maisie?

It is. I’m still here. You can’t get rid of a bad thing.

So I can see.

And how is poor Nanny this morning?

Don’t mention it.

Well, you can’t be told.

I have a head.

Oh, and last night we were on top of the world.

Don’t, says Nancy.

We were drinking brandy to beat the band. We were going to go courting again.

Stop, says Nancy, raising a hand.

It’s lilac time again,
says Maisie chortling.
It’s lilac time again
.

And she went away on her steed.

The minute Nancy returns to Cavan the mood drops in the house. Eileen is away so my niece Grainne stands in for me for an hour while I go to town to shop and have a drink. When I return Mother is ill but asleep and Maisie is vomiting. Maisie’s hernia has erupted. I bring her paper towels, a plastic bowl, and talk to her.

I’m destroyed, she says.

You’ll be all right.

I’m not well. Oh God in Heaven.

Drink this.

I can’t.

She sits with the bowl on her lap, and her hands on her knees. I turn down the TV.

And leave the TV on! she orders.

This goo, not from her stomach, pours out of her mouth. A latticework of blue veins clusters on her cheeks. Her eyes water. She gasps for breath.

Between bouts of this she says: You must be fed up with us.

No, I’m not.

This is terrible.

Never mind.

I hold her forehead. She’s sweating badly.

Oh God in Heaven.

Drink some water.

I can’t.

Do, please.

Then another fit of retching goes through her.

Get me to the toilet, she says.

I walk alongside her. From the toilet her cries carry out. In one hour everything has gone wrong. No one is right. And I cannot wish everything better. Maisie cries out again. I sit waiting. If she gets trapped in the toilet I’ll have to break down the door. With each cough of bile I hope for the sounds of relief. This is the ordinary – nobody caused it! – ordinary shameful everyday. It’s what Una and Eileen and the rest go through when I’m not here. I wait on the silence which means she’s getting well.

Why, she cries inside, had this to happen to me?

Terrible! Terrible! Terrible!

I hear the basin emptied, the plunge of water into the toilet bowl and relief pours through me as she appears.

Now, now, she says to herself as she goes a step at a time on her walking-aid.

Now, oh. Her voice that of a young girl.

She stops.

Where is it? she says to herself.

Goes on.

Now see, she says.

Stops.

Oh God bless us! she says.

I follow her into her bedroom.

Will I put the radio on? I ask.

Yes, she says, at least let’s have music.

Then I go to clean the toilet. You’d be surprised how quick vomit sticks to porcelain. Why am I recording this? Because it’s worth while telling that at the end of awfulness there’s always a generous spirit who says: At least let’s have music. The music would not mean what it does if we had not been in the bad places.

So I scour the bowl with Vim that’s handy and think:
Stop panicking. It’s not me that’s having an awful time here – it’s the two girls.
But I feel powerless. I ring Maura, the mother of my daughter, Inor. She lives in Cavan, nursing her mother, who is also ill.

How are things? I ask.

It’s hard going, Maura says.

I think I’m losing it.

Hang in there, she says.

A few days before this Maura and Inor had come to call.

Who’s this? asked my mother.

Inor.

Who?

Inor, I say. My daughter.

She peered at Inor and lifted her hand and waved as if she were seeing her from a great distance, waved very slowly with her fingertips while Inor smiled, uncertain of what to do; so she waved back – the two waved at each other – then Mother dropped her hand, and, dismissing us all, closed her eyes.

I put down the phone. Peer in at Maisie. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, with her head down.

Maisie.

What?

Get into bed.

I thought I might get sick again.

You won’t. It’s over.

You think so?

I do.

So can I have a brandy?

Why not.

I step into the mother’s room. She’s praying. Her eyes without her glasses on are weak and colourless. The room is boiling. Nevertheless, I pull the sheet round her.

Is that you, Dermot?

It is.

Was Maisie sick?

She was.

But you got her to bed.

I did.

Will you call me in the morning?

I will.

Don’t forget.

I won’t.

Because you see I don’t think I’ll be much longer here, she says. She turns her face to the wall. And leave the light on, she adds.

I bring Maisie her brandy. The lamp on the side table is dim. The room is dark. She’s in her blue nightdress.

Do I only get the one?

I’ll bring you another later.

Do, won’t you?

I will.

My God, she says.

Try a sip.

She takes a little taste.

And Nancy’s gone with Raymond.

Yes.

She’s good fun, Nancy is. And how is Winnie?

She’s gone asleep.

Poor Winnie.

I stand in the doorway a while longer.

She rests a hand on the side table, lowers her head and puts her two wrists together on her lap. She raises a hand to her thinning scalp, then puts her wrists together again, as if she were handcuffed. I wait a while. She doesn’t move.

Maisie?

What! she says startled.

It’s Dermot.

Are you still there?

I am.

Well I’m all right.

Are you sure?

Yes. You can go now.

Hy Brazil is a place that is hard to imagine inland. Sitting in the living room drinking Rioja I can barely remember the place I live, never mind imagine the impossible rising out of Sligo Bay, trailing seaweed and gravel. But standing at the headland of Dooneel it’s easy to imagine mermen strolling the rocks at night. It’s easier there for the weather and the rushing light to make an imaginary island before a storm breaks.

There is magic in the calm as far out black clouds gather. The swell rises into the air and salt lands on Moffit’s field. A wave strikes the rocks from some disturbance far out. But there are days you don’t even bother to look. You hang around indoors.

There are days Hy Brazil rises when you’re not there.

I push Maisie’s door ajar. She’s lying on her back piping breath into her lungs with her hands folded on her breasts. I put off the light. Then I tiptoe into Winnie’s room. Her eyes are open. The Sunday suit is hanging ready from the handle of the wardrobe. The blouse folded on the other bed.

I tuck her in. Her eyes follow me.

That’s right, she says.

What age was Somerset Maugham when he died? asks Maisie.

He was ninety-six, I think, I say.

Mother watches us. She’s wearing a blue cardigan buttoned to the neck. She looks away.

Was he indeed? says Maisie.

He was.

He couldn’t be got rid of, I suppose.

Mother studies her beads. She kicks. She sighs.

And Vincent Price died today, I add.

God bless us.

And he still, I said trying to make a joke, had all his teeth.

Some do, nodded Maisie.

Let me out of here, cries Mother, as she jumps to her feet. The girl has arranged to collect me in the car.

Stop where you are, I say, pushing her back into the chair.

But the girl is waiting, she complains.

There’s no girl.

Dear God is there nothing I can do? She holds the bag dearly in her lap, and kicks at me. They are outside! – she glares wildly – waiting for me!

No, they’re not.

Yes they are. The car is outside.

There’s no car. Una is in America. Helen is in Sligo. There’s no car.

She puts the handbag down, lifts her beads out of it, then lifts the bag again and slowly, bead by bead, trails her rosary back into it.

I have an arrangement, she says rising.

What are you saying, Winnie? asks Maisie.

Look, I shout, opening the curtain behind her, there’s no one, but Mother stares straight ahead at the sitting room door, the handbag over her arm.

There is no one,
shouts Maisie.

Who is that old woman? asks Mother pointing at Maisie. Who is she?
Sitting down again she throws Maisie a caustic stare. So I lift her up till her feet are off the ground and carry her to the door.

He’s abusing me, shrieks Mother.

I put her down. Arm in arm we walk out of the living room, along the corridor, past the mirror from the Breifne that now fills the hallway, and stop at the front door. I open the door and we step out into the cold October evening. Her fingers dig into my wrist. She turns her head scrutinizing what is out there.

You see? I say.
There’s no one!

Flowerpot, she says.

Yes, that’s the flowerpot!

Eileen’s light is on, she says.

It is.

She studies Eileen’s house for a moment, her head cocked as her eyes vainly try to focus on the familiar. Eileen’s house floats in the gathering dusk. Winnie turns away abruptly. She’s finished with all that. We come back slowly. Tour the rooms. Halt a moment in the kitchen. Return and stand before the mirror. She touches her hair. When we re-enter the sitting room she pauses and studies Maisie who smiles at her. I leave her back in the armchair. She dips into her bag for her beads. Lifts the Virgin’s prayer, puts it away. Rights her glasses and closes her eyes. Who was to collect her has not come. Roddy Doyle wins the Booker Prize on the TV.

Coca-Cola, says Maisie quietly when the ad comes on. She lies sideways on her right arm on the sofa. Another ad.

Persil, says Maisie, for a brighter wash.

And she chuckles when the next programme begins.

Arthur Daley, she says. I like that thing. He’s always chancing his arm.

Maisie loved the pictures. Her routine never varied. She went each night, except Saturday, catching every change of programme. It was the Magnet on Sunday night, the Town Hall on Monday, the Magnet on Tuesday, the Town Hall on Wednesday, the Magnet on Thursday, and the Town Hall on Friday. Each of my brothers and sisters, and all my cousins as they visited the Breifne, went with her.

On the wooden chairs in the Town Hall we sat in a pool of
Afton butts tipped with red lipstick and Yorkshire toffee wrappings discarded by Maisie. A latecomer went up the central aisle, and forgetting where she was, genuflected before she entered a row of seats. Aunt Maisie went to pieces. When an actress shrieked in terror Maisie’s hand would slap down on your knee. As Peter Lorre, one of her favourite actors, stumbled round a dark mansion her hand stayed put in the sweet bag. When the good guy got hit she’d crack her heel off the floor and shake her fists into her lap.

She loved gangster movies, period pieces, courtroom dramas, but prison films above all. Her favourite films were
Witness for the Prosecution, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, A Tale of Two Cities
and
The Birdman of Alcatraz.
Her favourite stars were Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Some have it, she’d say, and Stan had everything.

She learnt the patois of the gangsters and used it constantly in the shop. Channel-hoppers were lads who collected butts off the street. Easy Street was where no-gooders lived. Do you want to take a trip up river, she’d say to the house painter Brennan. We’ll soon be in Boothill. Doing time, that’s what we’re at, she’d say to Mrs English, as she handed her her scones.

In the Magnet cinema the tickets were collected by Catho Morgan while Mr Charlie McGriskin the manager and organist hovered about.

Good evening, Miss Slacke, Catho would say.

Good evening, Miss Morgan.

The Magnet was up market. She would be steered through the dark to her seat by the light of a long torch held by one of the O’Rourke twins. We saw
The Robe
there and
Dracula
. Across the road Mr McKiernan ran affairs in the Town Hall. They showed black-and-white thrillers and cowboy films. His man on the tickets was Packie Cullen, who also maintained the Town Hall and kept cattle in the Market yard. He’d lead Maisie to her seat and wait in the aisle till she was seated. We saw
The Five Fingers
there.

Between reels the film would stop and the audience clattered the floor with their feet.

The Gods, Maisie would say, are angry.

The house lights would come on. Packie would patrol the space.
Courting couples on the balcony withdrew their arms from round each other. Elder citizens looked about them with disdain. People raced to the toilet. Mr McKiernan called for order. The lights went down and numbers raced across the screen till we were back where we left off, at some moment of horror. The Half Acre folk in the front went quiet and grew mesmerized. Maisie, cigarette slanted, suddenly gripped my wrist when the Five Fingers were thrown into a roaring fire. Peter Lorre, eyes rolling, backed off. The hand came out to get him. It got him by the throat.

Maisie squeezed me tighter.

When Peter Lorre got free of the hand she relaxed and tapped her Afton politely on the floor. No one moved till the final frame had dissolved. The curtains came across. We left regretfully and walked up Town Hall Street, not in this world at all, through the bristling cold nights of winter. It was like walking home after Benediction on Wednesdays. And the next night there we were again, midway up in the Magnet, her Afton tilted, the Yorkshire toffee bag in her lap.

Nowadays the Magnet cinema is totally forgotten by the ladies. All those nights in the dark might never have happened. And the strange thing is the Magnet was run for a number of years by Eric Kinane, Nancy’s son, and later by her other son Ernie. Eric had seen his first picture with Maisie. Films entered his blood, and one of his jobs was as a projectionist in London.

He worked in the Academy in Oxford Street. It was a privately owned cinema that for two years ran
Ulysses
. By the time it finished Eric knew the dialogue by heart. He worked in the Classic in Chelsea where I got in for nothing to see
Repulsion
by Polanski. As the demented hairdresser in the film walked down the King’s Road she passed the Classic cinema in which I was sitting. I got an awful land. It was a special effect Polanski would have been proud of. Eric became manager of the Paris Pulman in Drayton Gardens in South Kensington. Here I saw many of the classics – by the Indians, the French, the Russians, the Italians. The three cinemas are now gone, I think.

By the time Eric came home and set up in the Magnet, Maisie’s days at the cinema were over. She made, I think, one excursion down
to see her nephew at work. But it was not the same. She went blind, the cataracts bloomed, while Eric, her protégé, sat in a spill of phosphorescent light on a tall stool by the spinning reels in the high-up projection room, tapping tobacco into a roll-up while voices boomed round him.

At Midnight Mass at Christmas an epileptic screamed. From the organ loft I saw a man carried out. It terrified me. But the walk home afterwards through the dark expectant town was magical. The happy voices on the street. The cheerful drunks calling out greetings.

Tiredness exalted you.

In the Breifne they were all transformed. There were brandies, ports and a big fire. Two trees in the mirror. Maisie was courteous. All the Christmas cakes and boxes of expensive chocolates had been sold. Uncle Seamus began performing. Mother sang. She waltzed with her brother. My father gave me a taste of his Guinness. We were up till all hours.

Neither Maisie nor Winnie are nostalgic for those times. Cavan is only mentioned in passing. An earlier Milseanacht Breifne, when it was governed by their Great Aunt Jane McGloughlin, one of the founders of Fianna Fail, is more often recalled. It was a time when the two girls served tea to groups of Republicans who sat up with Aunt Jane till late in the café – Paddy Smith, who had faced the death penalty after 1916, Countess Markievich, done up in a veil and quite lah-de-dah, and the chief, De Valera, who was like a turkey, Mother said.

But little is recalled about the days when the responsibility for the Breifne became theirs. The Milseanacht might as well have never existed. It is as if Cavan was an aberration that occurred after they left Finea in their youth and before they arrived in old age in Cootehill.

By coincidence, Una married Joe Smith, who was from Cootehill, son of Paddy Smith, a frequent minister in De Valera’s government. So after the Breifne finally closed down for good, the pair moved to be beside my sister Una in Cootehill. By then both ladies were approaching eighty. In between, the business had made a cruel bonding between the two.

My mother was servant to Maisie for all that time. Wherever she went she worried about her sister. When the business was left equally between the pair, Aunt Jane said:
Look after Maisie, Winnie, that’s all I ask.
And so she did. I cannot remember Maisie ever making dinner for herself. It’s maybe twenty years since she made a cup of tea.

Now, because of my mother’s state of mind, that bond has been severed, and both parties are unsure what relationship remains. It’s Maisie now that worries about mother. She tries to remember for her a past which is quickly escaping. She gives off to me if I’m angry –
That’s your mother you’re talking to,
she says.
That’s your mother!
She slaps the table. The impatience I sometimes feel at Mother’s sighs, her stubbornness, her complaints fills me with shame. The faults she has are exaggerated by the disease while her goodness is being daily eroded.

She is no longer the sedate lady people speak of. But it remains somewhat in the delicate way she folds a towel, toys with a bracelet, pulls a comb through her hair or hangs her Sunday suit. They say that if someone you love is mentally available, then your self-image is enhanced. If they are not, then your identity is belittled. You’d be surprised how much you once did was, in fact, a charade to meet with the bestowal of her favours. Now praise is not forthcoming. Looking after Mother is like watching language losing its meaning.

Then sometimes out of the blue she unearths a newspaper clipping from an old
Anglo-Celt,
brings it into the sitting room and deposits it in my lap.

Read that, she says.

And there is Una dancing at various
feiseanna,
or Miriam performing in pantomimes, Tony sitting in the sun in Aden, or myself claiming to have written a play for ITV. Out come photographs of herself and Aunt Bridgie at the Niagara Falls. She points at a photograph and smiles.

Bridgie, she says, fondly.

Then looks at me.
Straighten your back, you bugger you,
she says, and starts laughing.

Once when I lived in Pimlico in London an astrologist on a grant from some esoteric group in America moved into a room on the third floor. He had an aggressive mind. He was seeking the mathematics of
mystery. I met him on the stairs at various times and soon we became vaguely acquainted. He was interested, he said, in the Irish psyche because of its waywardness and femininity and confusion.

So I sent him off to a Beckett play in the Royal Court.

He left disturbed at half-time because he kept seeing me on stage. That’s why you sent me, he said. No, it wasn’t, I told him. How was I to know you’d start seeing things? You knew, he said. Then bit by bit I began meeting him everywhere. I worked as an underwriter at Sun Alliance Insurance in Soho, and when I’d leave the office in my pinstripe suit, he’d step out of a shop doorway on Piccadilly to greet me. I met him outside the police barracks in Rochester Row. He fell out of the crowds in Victoria Station. Then, one evening, I found him waiting for me on the landing outside his door.

He said we should all go round the following evening to see this woman in the House of the Mediums in Eaton Square. She – as a medium for various dead composers, Beethoven among others – was able to play compositions the composers might have written or left unfinished. So we agreed to meet him there some time before seven. The next evening John McCaffrey, Becky and myself found ourselves entering this white Victorian five-storeyed house which was perched among various embassies. We arrived at a minute past seven. We told the receptionist where we wanted to go.

You’re late, she said, I’m afraid.

Only a minute or so, I said.

But you see, she explained, Mrs — has already begun.

Oh.

And you can’t go in once she’s started.

That’s a pity.

I’m dreadfully sorry.

We were about to go when she added: But you could see Mrs — at seven-thirty.

We could?