The Fields (36 page)

After midnight, even with three Bronski Beat tracks in a row, the place is cooling off. The whole bar area is practically empty, except for a table of sleepy-looking Hens, and the IRA fellas. While the gays and O’Culigeen, who can barely see straight, are the only ones left in Billy’s section. And so, that’s when it happens.

You’ll want to see this.

That’s what Billy says, serious and whispery, as he whooshes past me and towards his section, in a mad manic march. I follow
at a distance and watch him skim by the gays and give Roger the nod before disappearing into the changing rooms at the back. Roger, Jamie and Soz suddenly stand up and, still half joking, knock O’Culigeen’s Santy hat off, lift him up from his seat and tell him that they’ve got something very special to show him down the back. O’Culigeen laughs out loud, and says that he knows all about what London boys want and makes a big joke about grabbing his own belt and pulling it tight, as if to protect himself from a big three-man mickey attack.

The gays do more laughing and pull and half grab at him. O’Culigeen laughs and wriggles and half smacks back. And then, somehow, at the exact same moment, all four men, with faces dropped to granite for the first time, have the very same idea. O’Culigeen tries to leap backwards away from the table but he’s easily pinned down by Soz’s heavy bulk. O’Culigeen doesn’t say anything at all, just struggles madly as they drag him, all three of them, towards the changing room. Again, I follow at a distance, and by the time I get to the big red door with the slim rectangular window, they’ve already got the blanket over his head. I don’t dare go inside, but I watch through the window as Roger hands out the baseball bats from Billy’s open locker and the men, all four of them now, get busy belting.

They make the maddest sounds, those hard wooden baseball bats, on O’Culigeen’s body. All clunky and thonky, from the meeting of wood with bones where O’Culigeen’s arms and legs are flinging and kicking about, up and down beneath the rug, hoping to block the blows, hoping to protect. But every now and then, when they make full contact with his head, there’s a loud and hollow thwock, almost like a pop, that lets them know it’s the jackpot spot, and to keep going. Roger mostly leads by example in the bashing department, and gets the most hits on target in the shortest amount of time. He says motherfucker a lot too, while he does it, and suddenly sounds real American. He gets at
least three whacks in to everyone else’s one. But they get a rhythm going in the end, like four fellas from the old days driving in a giant wooden fence post into the ground down the bog, taking turns with their sledgehammers, while one of them says motherfucker.

O’Culigeen says nothing at all while it’s happening. Not a peep out of him, from underneath that blanket, which is actually more of a picnic rug. It’s like everyone knows what they’re here for. Even him. By the time Roger moves to the side, and I, through the toughened glass, get a decent look, I can see that O’Culigeen has already collapsed completely into a surprisingly small heap on the floor. He is just a hand, already bloodied, sticking out from underneath a rug. The hand isn’t doing much, but I’d swear it was reaching out for forgiveness, and in my direction too. As it does I get a flash of O’Culigeen as a boy down the bog, getting picked on and beaten up by his older brothers, getting dragged to the back of the hay shed, getting punched, getting bashed, and getting this.

Billy collects the baseball bats and bundles them into his locker in a big nervy rush. The men then gather up O’Culigeen, all floppy now, but still in the picnic rug. Billy kicks open the back door of the staffroom, has a quick peek up and down the darkened alley, and then signals for his friends to leave. As they do, Billy leans into the rug and whispers something angry, something that makes his teeth flash, to the bones of O’Culigeen, who will be whisked out, and eventually dumped, somewhere, anywhere. A hospital doorway if he’s lucky. A Soho side street if he’s not.

I step away from the changing room before Billy has the chance to find me and ask me, in the nicest way, for a sign of my thanks. I walk, quicker than ever, through the restaurant, right past the IRA hitmen, and straight through the front door, still in my uniform.

I don’t wait around for the staff taxi either, but instead walk the whole way home myself, through drunken Christmas London. I’m in a walking trance, like yer man in
Kung Fu
, and move with the breeze along the outskirts of Hyde Park, in and out of the office parties stumbling around Queensway, past the late-night Notting Hill bars, and straight by, without even looking, the front doorway of Grace’s Angels, and up Ladbroke Grove, across the Harrow Road and eventually into Queen’s Park, Kilburn and to the end of it all in Glengall Road.

It takes me nearly an hour and a half of blank, mindless footfalls, and by the time I push my way, robot style, into Aunty Grace’s hallway all the lights are on, and everybody is awake and waiting for me. Everybody, that is, including my biggest sisters Sarah and Siobhan.

They stand silently in the sitting room, surrounded by Grace, Deano, Fiona and Saidhbh. Like the world’s quietest surprise party. They look at me with strange shifting expressions. Their faces, it seems, are torn somewhere between, ‘Bet you never thought you’d see us here?!’ and ‘Feck!’

It’s Dad, they eventually say, after an age of mad stares. It’s his time.

Me, Fiona, Sarah and Siobhan hardly say a word to each other on the whole flight home, even though it’s my first time on a plane. They let me sit by myself, by the window, and I spend most of the flight with my face pressed right up against the clear plastic bit in front of the glass. Inside I want to scream out loud, and go woooo-wooo during take-off. I want to laugh at the tiny matchbox vans in the airport car park, whizzing underneath us. And I want to go Jaysus Fecking Hell when the whole wing starts going bendy bouncy as we pass through the clouds. But I don’t dare break the silence.

Fiona, Sarah and Siobhan all order gin-and-tonics from the airhostess, who’s dressed head to toe in green – in case, I suppose, she gets lost in Heathrow and they have to point her towards the Irish area where all the green planes live with their green engines and green pilots. Gary says that his dad was always getting slagged by the British pilots because he worked for an airline called Aer ‘Lingus’. He said it was one of the biggest and longest-running gags in the international pilot’s joke-book.

He often heard his dad talking about it, and not finding it funny at all, and telling everyone how the pilots’ union were going to vote to force the board to change the name to Aer
Ireland, or Aer Eire, or just plain Eire Planes. Anything, they used to argue, other than Aer Lingus. The Brits used to fall around the place laughing every time Gary’s dad and his pilot mates would walk through the terminal building. Aer Lingus! Can you imagine it? they’d say. And then Gary would turn to me and go, Aer Lingus! It’s pretty embarrassing all the same, isn’t it? And neither of us would have a clue about which bit was supposed to be embarrassing. We decided once that Lingus was the name of a disease of the mickey that you get when you’ve been in bed with a prostitute. But it didn’t seem that funny. Of course now, because I know what it means, it gives me a giggle when I think about it the way the English would. Which is, to them, a bit like calling your national airline Aer Suck My Mickey. I guess that they think the Irish are so rubbish at sex that they didn’t even know Lingus was a sexy thing when they decided to name the company. Which is part of the joke. And maybe it was even an English company advisor, who was brilliant at doing sex, who whispered the name in their ears and they thought, Brilliant, yes, Lingus has a real planey ring to it. A bit like National Gaelic Titty Trains or Bus Bollocks of Ireland. Either way, I find it funny when I think about it, but only with my English head on. With my Irish head on it’s just what it is. A name.

Sarah and Siobhan’s eyes are red around the rims and the girls sniffle while they drink. Every now and then Fiona puts her arm around them in turn, and tells them to stay strong. And to think of what it must be like for Mam.

I want to tell them that they’re missing it all. And that they should look out over my shoulder at the sky, and the way that the winter sun is laying a pinky and orangey cloud quilt right across the horizon. And it makes me think of Mam too, and how she came back, after one of her first trips to Aunty Grace, with magical stories of the plane flight, and how the clouds looked like big candy-floss things, good enough to touch, if not to eat.
No, she said, correcting herself, always a stickler for foodie details, in fact they were like a big ocean of whipped cream on the hugest pavlova in the universe, just before you grate the cooking-chocolate lightly over the top.

I look down too through the cloud gaps, far below, into the Irish Sea and do a bit of boat spotting. Tiny dots are trailing ribbons of white on a blacky blue carpet. Trawlers, I suppose. And goods ships too. And I’d swear I see the B&I car ferry, chugging slowly in the opposite direction. And I wonder, by all the laws in Fr Jason’s physics, if there’s another Saidhbh and another me, heading out across the water, with another baby on the way, and another bucketload of choices to make, to go right, to go wrong and to bring us to another place, far away from the now and the here.

Of course, we’ve barely been up twenty minutes when I feel the plane tipping downwards again. The world’s shortest flight. The girls hand over their empties. My can of fizzy is done too. It’s Cidona, sent over by Mam especially for the trip. Sarah and Siobhan would go totally mental if they knew that I had been having booze whenever I wanted at Aunty Grace’s table. And Fiona’s certainly not going to tell them.

We find out later that Gary’s dad organised all the flights for free. When he heard about Dad he just said to Mam, leave it with me, Devida. And he popped the tickets through the door the very next morning. I didn’t have a chance to talk to Saidhbh about it, or about our Christmas flights, or about how much money I still owe Pika. She was gone by the time we left for the airport. Out with Toby at the crack. I shuffled in towards her bed. I wasn’t going to do ‘Good morning! Good morning!’ or anything like that. But I would’ve said something. But her sheets were kicked back, and she was gone from me already. In every way.

There’s no one to meet us at the airport, and we have to get a taxi home. This is serious, and it makes Sarah cry, because it means that everyone’s gathered round Dad’s bedside, on the final watch.

When we pull up to the house the signs aren’t good. The taxi man’s been talking all the way from the airport, comparing Dublin to London and telling us which one’s better at what, and why. He says that Dublin is full of great ‘characters’, and you don’t get that in London. He says that he’s a bit of an aul character himself, and gives us lots of stories about his time in London, working on the building sites, and going mad on the Kilburn High Road. He jokes about me and Fiona coming home because we missed our mammy’s cooking, and tells us that he could never get used to cooking for himself, alone, in London. And that, swear to God, is why he came back. And sure it didn’t take him long to meet a grand Dub woman too, and she’s responsible for this old thing, I might add. He pats his belly when he says, this old thing. He’s still blabbing away as we leave the taxi. Fiona shoves a wad of notes into his hand and the girls race up the driveway.

I’m the last one to move, and not even out of the back of his taxi when there’s this big mad groan from the front door. Like Mam has just run out on to the welcome mat and stuck a great big carving knife into her own stomach. Sarah and Siobhan start going, Oh Mam, Oh Mam, and they pull Fiona into their big teary hug and Mam tells them all that the ventilator’s been switched off. Whatever the feck that means.

Mam sees me over the heads of the girls and she shakes her own head madly, and holds her hand out like a stop sign, like it’s all too much, and there aren’t things you can do, let alone words to find, that can tackle this level of pain. The three girls half carry Mam back inside, over the threshold, and they plonk her on a chair that sits alone between the Christmas tree and the low
phone table. She tells the three of them to hurry, to be strong, and to say their goodbyes.

The house is already full of friends, relations and sad people. Some of them are crying. Some of them gather round the tree in the hall and stare silently at the shining decorations and flickering fairy lights. Claire and Susan have been taken to Brenda Joyce’s in Ballinteer to play with her Girl’s World, because they’re too upset, too confused and too young to understand death in the way that everyone else is supposed to. Tim Connell the pilot has taken charge for the moment, and he gives me a hug when I step through the door and tells me, like he’s only meeting me for the very first time in his life, that he’s sorry for the way that this has all happened. He drags me past Mam into the kitchen, where the coffee women have made loads of mince pies and have put slices of Christmas cake out on a plate, just in case all this approaching death gives us a fearsome appetite for Yuletide snacks. They all call me a poor pet, and pat me on the shoulders and tell me that I’m the man of the house now.

Tim tells me that Dad’s been going this way for weeks, for months even, and that it has taken a terrible toll on Mam, but nobody wanted me and Fiona to be too worried, knowing that we were over there in London, and unable to do anything about it. He says that everyone thought that Dad would last until the holidays, but unfortunately it’s not to be. He says that with the ventilator off, my dad’s only got a couple of hours of breathing left in him. And he certainly won’t make the night. And then he tells me that the fire’s going down and so he better leave me and get some more briquettes from the garage.

Mam appears at my shoulder. She’s in bits and is handed over to me by the coffee mams. She finds the strength to call me her love and stroke my face, and then she falls into a big floppy hug
on my shoulders and says that these are terrible times. Terrible times. She looks about a hundred. Her face is red, with a million lines, and wet with tears. He’ll be free soon, she says. Free of it all.

She tells me to say my goodbyes, and says that Aunty Una is with him upstairs, keeping watch. She then grips me firmly by both arms and asks me if I’m sure I’m ready for this. Are you strong enough? she says, and then she warns me that it’ll test me, and it won’t ever leave me.

I nod yes, and shuffle quietly up the stairs. It’s mad, that in this house where I lived nearly all my life with my family, I am about to do this thing, this final farewell. Fiona, Sarah and Siobhan are standing outside, staring wordlessly at the carpet, with the big bulgy eyes and red slap-in-the-face cheeks. I knock on the door to the bedroom, and Aunty Una appears in seconds, with a crazy calm smile on her face, super-chuffed to be doing the most important job in the house. She goes all wincy when she sees me and tells me that everything is just awful, and then hugs me close while yanking me inside the room.

I’ll leave you alone with Matt, she says, and kind of rolls me towards the double bed, while nipping out of the room in the same slinky movement. I come to a halt right beside him, and stare down. He’s pale as feck, and skinny too, skeleton skinny, with his mouth half agog, and barely a puff of breath going either in or out. His head hair is in tiny wisps, and he’s still wrapped in his beloved scratchy grey dressing gown. The bed covers are pulled up to his stomach, but the dressing gown is open wide, showing a tiny bony body-cage with three shaven circles scraped into the skin where the ventilator suction pads would’ve lived. The ventilator itself, which is a big white box with a row of eight buttons and a smaller white TV-style box on top of it, sits uselessly by, on the top of a bedside table.

Dad’s eyes are shut.

There is no one at home.

I nod to myself. I know what I must do.

Calmly, I move away from him again, walk towards the door and turn the key in the lock. I shove a bedside chair under the handle just in case. Aunty Una is on it like a shot and starts knocking quietly on the door, asking if I’m all right in there and do I want her to get my mam and my sisters. But I’ve already got my legs open at this stage and have plugged my Hara line right deep into the very core of planet Earth itself. My breaths are fecking huge, and with each intake I feel my whole body tingling and filling up with all the crazy and unthinkable and unknowable energies that span all the realms of life, space and beyond.

I raise my hands out above him and I know that this is right. I let them fall towards him, but his field is gone completely. Just an echo of the life that was there. I try to sense his chakras, but they’re gone too. Not a single spin in sight. Undaunted, I grab another huge breath, and go for some Third Eye Seeing. I’m trembling all over, but there’s still nothing in front of me.

The knocks on the door get louder now. It’s Tim Connell, with the girls behind him. He says that I should open the door now, because I’m freaking the family to Jesus. He wants to know what in feck’s name I’m doing in there.

I’m in the zone. My body’s rattling like mad. But this time I’m using it. Like every maddening spazzy trembly fit I’ve ever had is welling back up inside me like a massive mental volcano, but in a good way. I tell myself that I’m just a vessel, that Helen was right, and that I’m an aerial for the entire cosmos, that there is no me, there is no time, there is no before and after, and there is no life and death. Just energy.

Dad doesn’t move. Nothing. But I haven’t lost hope. I will speak to his cosmic essence. I try to use the stupid Goddy ghosty voice, complete with bible-style commands, but it’s not right.
Nothing. Instead, with my arms outstretched, my Hara line on fire, and the cosmos pumping through me, I speak in my own voice. I say, Dad, how are you? I say, Dad, I’ve missed you all my life. I say, I am your son, your best boy, and you have my heart so completely that I sometimes don’t know where to look. I tell him that it’s all for him. That, all along, everything, all of it, was for him. And that my life is his life, my soul his soul.

I give sacred thanks too, for what he has been to me, and I tell him that I miss his arms, and his strength, and how he made the world feel when he was in it. I miss us together watching
Benny Hill
on the couch, I say. Me looking up to your huge body, your legs crossed, your hands over your stomach, and your whole form rocking on the spot from the laughing at Benny doing the A-Team. I miss the looks you’d give me at the dinner table when the girls were being crazy loud. The looks that said that we were in this together, just you and me, for the long haul, and made of the same stuff. And I miss our walks most of all, Dad. I miss me asking you questions about sharks, about space, and about life. And you patient as ever, quietly, softly, having all the answers. I miss my hand in your hand. And I miss knowing deep down inside that the world was safe with you in it.

The knocking gets even louder. Sarah’s at it too. She says Mam’s panicking downstairs. Wants to know what in feck’s name is going on.

I tell Dad that this is it. Still using my normal voice, I say that it’s shit or get off the pot time. My body goes into super spazzy mode, and I feel my heart chakra spinning like a mad man. I take one last breath, crack open my own auric field from the inside and boom – a super-directional energy bomb is blasted right into Dad’s body, point blank. No mercy.