Not the Same Sky (25 page)

The reasons for not remembering are that you could spend your life running after moments, trying to catch them, and then not being sure if perhaps they were just dreams. No, Teresa Furey and my brother were right—it is a wise thing to forget. So that’s what I did, sometimes more successfully than others. On my wedding day I felt a new beginning, not just like a normal new beginning, but the frightening one, the delicious one, the bright one, more an abandonment of my past, which I already had to fight for, now that I was coming out of the bad dreams. On that morning I loved the look of the land too, and I wondered if I had betrayed them all. There were some moments that were harder than others, births mainly, but then the baby would make so much noise and have to be attended to, leaving no time to be sad. And having once liked the look of the land it was easier from there on in. And so I looked to my future instead of to what might have been my future. Tenses are important.

The letter was not signed; perhaps it hadn’t been finished. The women stood, unsure of what to say. They looked at Teresa Furey, who was at a loss to know what to feel. She had never expected to hear herself described.

‘But who is it to?’

‘What will we do with it?’

‘I think we should destroy it,’ Cissy said. ‘If she didn’t say who it was for, then we need to destroy it.’

Teresa Furey thought it best she not express an opinion on the matter.

‘And also, it’s not finished, there are no
Ways of Forgetting
.’

‘Oh look, there’s a box here for us,’ she said.

Cissy poured out the contents on the bed. They would look now and see what there was to remember.

‘And an envelope for you, Anne.’

And others with names on them. They would read these letters and see what sense they made. Teresa Furey lifted the first letter and put it in her pocket for the moment, she would read it again in peace and then maybe give it back to young David, depending on what it said.

CHAPTER 30

2008, Dublin

Joy Kennedy got two more letters from Australia, and both intrigued her. One of them contained pamphlets, the other pieces of information, drops of history. It was not possible to put them away as if they were ordinary letters. After all, they did not carry an ordinary request, no more than her job was run of the mill. She would have to give them some consideration. But in the meantime she pushed them to the back of her mind. She had customers to see.

Joy’s customers come into her workshop. Usually they rang first and asked tentative questions about lettering and such. There might be a little shake in their voices. Then they would broach price, and invariably the tremor gave way to embarrassment. They might try to cover this up by attempting a matter-of-fact tone, as if this was a normal kind of monetary questioning. How much is that coat, love? And does that take into account the ten per cent discount? But she knew the problem—it seems such a mean thing to be doing, putting a price on the name of your recently deceased loved one, deciding what to remember and what to forget. So Joy helped them along, guided by the tone of their voices. Over the years she’d become good at this, her ears able to pick up the unsaid, and perhaps unknown, wishes.

By the time the customers came in to see Joy to discuss the lettering, they had usually overcome their initial grief and so they approached the stone in her workshop at least with reverence, and often with love, as if the way they treated this marble must truly reflect their feeling for the deceased. They sometimes fondled it, trying to rub their good memories into it, looking as if they were blind and rooted to the spot by the whistle of past things. There were three due that day. They were coming to get her to scrape out the memorial for their dead. They could just as easily buy their own stone, or find it lying around Liscannor, and chip out their thoughts themselves. But they don’t do this because there’s not always agreement among those left about what should be said, and using her as a go-between was a way to cut down on argument and lying awake at night. Let’s say there were four sons left—that’s four synchronised tossing and turnings, four grown ups reversing into the theatre of their childhoods, taking up their positions, the ones that got them through safely until they could leave home. One wants what he thinks is perfectly apt—information and a bit of love. Another snorts, ‘Sentimental balderdash. And on top of that you don’t mean a word of it.’ He has a different idea, a cool, clean, timeless comment. Finished. Clear. The third puts his hands over his ears, so he won’t hear the now inevitable sounds that will soon burst out, sparking into the air like fireflies without the beauty. He tries to do this surreptitiously, but they see him, which makes them even madder, always did. ‘Take yours hands away from your ears, you blooming sissy.’ When the dull thump at the end of the batted insults makes itself known to him through his still covered ears, he jumps in with a compromise, although he hates it himself. The fourth is sick to the teeth of the lot of them, always jostling for supremacy, or smoothing down, as if life could be put on an ironing board and de-creased. He’s the one who says that the stonemason will know best. And he gets out the telephone book straight away, and rings Joy because she’s a woman, and that will give those lunatics something to bang on about.

Nobody came to Joy by accident—they either stayed away from her because she was a woman, or they came to her for that same reason. Sometimes she wished she were a man, just for the straightforwardness of it. Different except the same, arguments happen if it’s women left behind. Different, except the same, if it’s a mix left behind. No argument if there’s one.

So to today’s three. Joy had them slotted in according to what suited them and her. She never saw more than three a day—acquainting herself with the relatives of three different deceased people was her daily limit. And she tried to have two days in the week when she saw no one, days in which she could chisel, smoke uninterrupted, and sing out of tune.

All three went well. And so did the difficult script she was finishing for one of last month’s stones.

And those Australian letters hadn’t come to her by accident either.

So Joy closed her shop and headed for home. Normally she cycled, wove boldly in and out of traffic, breaking the rules if need be. At Harold’s Cross, some of the motorists looked out for her in their rear-vision mirrors so they could give her a wide berth. But she was not cycling today—she had been too miserable that morning after a bad dream to have the air flying around her throat. And walking was better for thinking. She would have to do something about those letters … And here was her home.

Joy opened the door and Oscar came out from the back corridor. They usually made dinner separately, one either throwing scraps together or starting from the first onion, the other hovering in the loops of the conversation. It was Oscar’s turn today, but she didn’t join him in the kitchen or hang around the table, instead she sat on the sofa and wondered. What was it about her work that she liked most? Was it the noise, the shapes, the dust, the customers, the people who worked on the half street with her? Or was it that she was tough enough to handle this business of memory. And for every single bit of it she had one teacher to thank.

At school when Joy was coming up to seventeen she got fed up with the decisiveness of her classmates. It was as if every day another traitor came in, all flushed, saying ‘Miss, Miss, I know what I want to be.’

She sat at the back of the class and twisted bits of hair around her ear. The career guidance teacher sent for her. Joy had not been party to any discussions that may have taken place between her and other teachers before she obeyed the summons. She did not know if the teacher’s tongue was in her cheek as she outlined all sorts of options and flattened her expression as Joy turned down the notion of all the jobs she could possibly bring to mind. A teacher. No way. The guidance person had put that in because it was
de rigueur
to consider it, she did not for a moment think that Joy had what it took. Next up was nurse. But it was clear to her that Joy had no interest whatsoever in tending ailments, far too flighty for that. It was even clearer to Joy. Secretary? ‘Oh no, I couldn’t work in an office,’ she said, completely startled by now. ‘Really?’ The stalling at this suggestion may have been the point at which a noticeable barb entered the teacher’s voice. There was silence while she regrouped. Joy wanted to be helpful. She did. She almost said she would like to be a poultry instructor, almost asked for the appropriate form, just to get out of the stifling room. She didn’t know if there was still such a job, but she’d had an aunt who had been one before she died. She had travelled to farmers’ wives, after they had day-old chickens posted to them, and she had advised them on feed, and what to do with sick chickens and how to diagnose diseases. But Joy thought it would be an insult to such a specific profession to feign interest in it. And presumably that job was long gone—there would be leaflets now and men in cars, or men ringing up, or maybe you just reared chickens yourself and hoped for the best.

The career guidance teacher had twenty-seven possibilities, and Joy couldn’t bring herself to say yes to one. She did have a respect for the professions. Her reluctance to be flippant about them surely proved that.

The teacher told Joy to go away and at least think.

She must have reported back to the other teachers because the next day, when Joy was staring out the window again, the mathematics teacher sighed as she battled against the spectacular lack of interest being shown in her subject. She thumped the desk and declared, ‘Joy Kennedy, the only thing you’re any good at is hanging around waiting to fit under your own headstone.’

It was getting close to The Leaving Certificate.

Joy said, ‘Thanks.’ The mathematics teacher said, ‘Don’t be so smart.’

The following week Joy went to the career guidance teacher. She wanted her to be the first to know. She had not come into school and burbled about it, she hadn’t wanted it to be sullied by puzzlement. The teacher thought for a moment and said, ‘How did you get to be so modern?’

Joy then told the mathematics teacher, and even how she had contributed to the decision.

The teacher said, ‘Well, I’m glad if I’ve been of some assistance in some way, because I have certainly failed to be able to teach you any trigonometry. And another thing, could you stop talking out of the side of your mouth like that, you’ll tighten it and then you’ll never be able to have a conversation that anyone will believe.’

So Joy had made up her mind. Her mother began to make enquiries about how a person could become a stonemason—part of this pleased her, the unusualness of it, but another part irked her slightly. Could her daughter not have been more normal? Less modern? And she would not be able to force her into conversation about her work when, or if, she did make it. She would have no common reference points, and feared that perhaps this was exactly why Joy was interested in such an odd job. She had always been a child more interested in what was not in front of her.

When it came time for Joy to leave home, she refused to think about what her mother might be thinking. She had already deserted her.

Joy entered the workshop of Bracken, O’Neill & Company and proceeded to learn her trade. She went to classes two mornings a week where the history of the work was explained, though in truth she preferred the work itself. She quickly became aware of the standoff between the new sandblasting and the old chiselling. She built loyalties in her work. At the quarry she learned the temperament of stone—some was so delicate that the slightest tap of a chisel along its nervous vein could split it in two, some was robust and seemed to say, come get me.

After three years with Bracken, O’Neill & Company, it seemed the right thing for Joy to branch out on her own. She acquired a workshop close to Mount Jerome Cemetery at Harold’s Cross. She had a look at it, and then at Glasnevin, and formed the opinion that the type of person using Mount Jerome would be more likely to choose her services. In Glasnevin there were too many people belonging to the unchanging part of Ireland. And she dismissed the idea of setting up near any of the newer or outlying graveyards—the suburbs would not have suited her, and she would not have suited them.

There was a block of busy little places beside her new premises. A bakery, a butcher and a florist, of course. And across the road was a café and pub. In no time at all, Joy had fitted in and found a companionable rhythm with the other businesses. It was nice, the baker said, having a woman about the place.

Joy lifted the Australian letters again as the smell from Oscar’s cooking became more settled.

The bones of the story contained in the reading material—a considerable enough bunch of papers—had a way of drawing her in. She had been looking at them for weeks now. She had no idea what the information had to do with her, but she was still hooked. It made her heart catch sometimes before she went to sleep so that she dreamed dreams in several colours. Sometimes, too, what she learned of these girls brought her near to tears, being unable to forget them, no matter how she tried to see them merely as passengers from one place to another. At times she became aggravated because the story was too dreadful, it had nothing to do with her. Nothing whatsoever. And hadn’t they fared well? Well, most of them. Surely we would have heard if they hadn’t. She would write to Simon and tell him there were lots of Kennedys in Ireland. And out of it too.