Notes from a Coma (16 page)

He was like a pale giant that evening standing in the kitchen, his thin face and narrow shoulders, his wrists sticking out beyond the cuffs of his shirt. For some reason I thought he was going to strick his head off the fluorescent light over his head and bring the whole thing down around his shoulders.

“Either you’ve grown or this ceiling has dropped.”

He reached up on his toes and tapped the fluorescent with two fingers. It stopped flickering, a steady light fell.

“That’s hospital food; everyone should have a spell of it.”

He dropped his bag and shoved it to the wall with the tip of his boot. “It’s good to be home,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe how good.” That was said for both of us and it was good hearing it.

After we had a bite to eat he sat back and looked around him like he was seeing the room for the first time.

“A lick of paint wouldn’t go astray on these walls,” he said. “When was the last time we took a brush to them?”

“Two bachelors, what do you expect? There are a couple of cans of emulsion in the shed, enough to do this room and ceiling. I suppose we could take a look tomorrow.”

So we did—or rather he did. The following morning he stood in the shed looking at the dribs and drabs in the bottom of the paint cans.

“Magnolia,” he said, pressing the lids back down. “There must be other colours in the world.”

He jumped in the car and was gone about an hour. When he returned the back seat was full of cans and a new roller. These colours you see here on these walls and throughout the house are all his work from those days. I suppose a change was what he wanted and this was what he came up with. It was the same throughout the house, the halls and the bedrooms; he changed the colour of everything. He did the outside too, the plinth and reveals, changed the colour of those as well. He must have spent the best part of two hundred euros on paint and of course he wouldn’t let me put my hand in my pocket. No, he said, I’ll do this myself. I knew then this was his way of taking his mind off himself and of course he threw himself into it the way he did everything. There was never any half-measures about JJ. It was as much as I could do to get him to take a break and put a bite of food in his mouth at dinner time or in the evening. I was afraid he would suffer some sort of a relapse so I used to go into his room at night and take the clock from beside the bed and let him sleep on into the afternoon so he could get some real rest. Of course he knew well what I was doing but he never said anything.

Frank called over to see him after a few days. He stood in the kitchen looking around him, passing the palm of his hand up and down the wall.

“God bless the work, JJ, you’re busy.’
^*

“Frank, good to see you.”

“Any man doing all this must be in the full of his health.”

“I feel fine, it’s good to be out of that place.”

“I’ll bet. It’s an awful dose.”

“You wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

“There’s some who would. You’ll do the outside as well, I suppose?”

“Might as well now that I’ve started.”

Frank nodded. “You might as well. Will he raise any hand to it himself?”

I motioned Frank to a chair. “I would if I was let, Frank, but he has to do it all himself, there’s no talking to him.”

“You’re right, JJ. Old fellas like that are more hindrance than help.”

Frank always had this soft spot for JJ. It was never anything he did or said about him, it was all in the way he talked to him—like he was his equal or like they had something between them that only they knew. Whatever it was it always gladdened me to see them standing around
together talking as if nothing had ever happened. That was Frank’s doing. After Owen’s death he did his grieving and got on with it and tried his damnedest not to let any bad feeling grow between our two houses. Without him things would have been a lot worse. Life is too short for bad feeling, he told me a few months after Owen was buried. You don’t get over these things but you learn to get around them. Move on, make the best of it. Anything else is a sin against life.

That was the first time I’d ever heard that and it made me wonder how many of us are guilty of that kind of sin.

“If there’s anything I hate it’s painting,” Frank said. “I leave it up to herself, it only leads to arguments.”

“There’s no arguments here. JJ’s doing it himself, that’s all there is to it.”

“There’s no rush, leave something for tomorrow. The man who made time made plenty of it.”

You could see JJ was satisfied the evening he finished. He put the cans and rollers in the shed and stood out at the gate wiping his hands on a rag.

“It’s a bit brighter anyway,” he said. “We should have done it a long time ago.”

“It makes everything else look bad,” I said. “We should
throw out some of that old stuff; it takes the look off your work.”

He shook his head. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s just the idea.”

Of course when he’d finished painting he was left with nothing but time on his hands. What was he going to do with himself then? There was no talk of going back to work nor did I want to hear any of it but JJ was never a man to sit around doing nothing. The first thing he did was pull the table and chair from his bedroom out into the yard and set up a sort of desk there. That’s where he sat most of his days, eating and reading, smoking and drinking water out of a plastic bottle.

He was lucky the weather was so fine, blue skies every day and the yard lit with the sun reflecting off the white walls. They were the type of days that open your eyes to just how beautiful it is around here—something that’s easy to lose sight of during the winter months when the sky is down on the ground and the wind cuts in from the sea. But when the sun is shining and those hills are out from under the clouds you wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else in the world. We’re lucky up here on this height. On a clear day you can see up to Lachta in one direction and out to Clare
Island in the other—the only thing between ourselves and America. If you take a walk into the fields you have a clear view all the way up to Inishturk; with a blue sky over your head you wouldn’t believe the world could be so big. When we worked together in London, Frank told me this was one of the things he missed about this place—this openness, this sense of space. Of course at the time I didn’t know what he was talking about—I’ve never had a feel for these things. But some days now I walk out and I begin to understand a little clearer what he was on about.

You wouldn’t think it but JJ made a good convalescent. He read outside and took his meals at the table and didn’t move to turn his hand to anything about the place. I was glad of that. By that time the silage was wrapped and the few loads of turf we needed for the winter were in the shed; all the heavy work was done. But, knowing JJ, if he had wanted something to do he would have found something. He didn’t. He just sat there and soaked up the sun and it was only when I saw him with a book in his hand that I remembered I hadn’t seen him reading in the longest time. Again, it was only a small thing, but it made me happy to see him doing something like that. I would have been happier still if he had given up the fags. That was
something I worried about. I jarred him about it one evening at the table.

“Mark my words those things are doing you no good.”

He smiled and tossed the match into the ashtray. “This was the first thing I remembered after I woke up—the fact that I smoked. I never knew I was that fond of them.”

“All I’m saying is that you have to look after yourself. The only other man to smoke in this house was my father, your grandfather, old Tom, as everyone called him. I knew he was dead the night he stopped smoking.”

“I thought he died in his sleep.”

“He died in his bed whatever about his sleep. He was never a good sleeper. He’d wake in the middle of the night and smoke one fag before turning over to get a few hours before morning. He’d have it rolled on the table beside him so he could reach out and find it in the dark. I used to go up to him every morning with a cup of tea. That morning I went up the first thing I saw was the fag; it hadn’t been smoked. I didn’t even look at him; I pulled the door behind me and drove into town. As luck would have it Mattie was crossing the square as I pulled up. I told him the craic and he said not to worry, he’d take care of it. I had three quiet pints in Conlon’s on my own and when I got back Mattie had him laid out, candles and flowers and everything.”

“But he lived to a big age.”

“He might have lived to a bigger age if he hadn’t smoked. All I’m saying, JJ, is that you have to look after yourself.” The sun had dipped behind Clare Island and there was a sharp chill in the evening. “Are you not cold sitting here? There’s a heavy dew falling, the grass is covered in the morning.”

“I’m going downtown in a while. Sarah is working. I’m going to have a few pints in the hotel. Are you going down?”

“I was thinking of it. You’ll be in the hotel so?”

“Yah. I’ll be there till she gets off. Call in, a few of the lads will be there. There’s a game on the box.”

“Maybe.”

“Do. Sarah will be glad to see you.”

So I did go down and I was glad after. I had two pints with JJ, two quiet contemplative pints as he put it himself, and Sarah stood me another at the end of the night when she came outside the bar.

So how then did it come to this? How did he go from convalescing in the sun to lying on the broad of his back out on that prison ship? If you’d seen him during those days you’d have seen a young man on the mend, someone who was sensibly looking after himself, gathering his strength up there on top of that hill. There was something about him during those days I’d never seen before, something I liked but which made me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about him. This stillness came over him, he barely moved. From the bed to the kitchen to the backyard, by and large that was the extent of his world. It was like he was tethered there within some boundary visible only to himself and beyond which he was loath to stray. His strength was going to converge on that spot and he had to be there to gather it in when it returned. But he was a joy to be with during those days, more attentive towards me than he’d ever been. Learning to cook was one of the things he did with this time. Before that he’d never shown any interest in food but now, with time on his hands, he began doing things with woks and shellfish and artichokes. He was in two minds about this new skill and I teased him about it.

“It will be happy for the woman who gets you,” I used to
say whenever he made me sit down to eat some new meal he’d prepared.

“It’s a sure sign of a man with too much time on his hands,” he’d reply. “A man with no proper work to go to.”

After we’d eaten we’d go and lie down in his room for an hour or two, draw the curtains and make love in the green light which played across his bed …
^*
All this made me hopeful. Lying in each other’s arms I thought we were home and dry, coming into the finishing straight of a bad time. The future didn’t exactly come into focus for me there in that green light but I could have sworn there were blue skies and sunshine hanging over it.
^†
Of course I never guessed that all that stillness was part of the thing that was beginning to haunt him.