The Visitors (13 page)

My father and Michael had identical alarm clocks. They bought them the same day, at the Market Yard in Tipperary town. Cheap clocks, enamel white, big-faced, with the round handle, two bells, and the little hammer sticking up between them. My father kept his clock on the bedside table. It woke him every morning. It didn’t wake my mother, who rose earlier and needed no clock. Every night, my father carefully wound his clock, and a few months after he died, Tess posted the clock to me. When I knifed the box open and saw what it was, I taped the box back up and shoved it into the farthest corner of the wardrobe floor.

Tess once flung that clock down the blue corridor. I was standing outside the kitchen door when the door of my parents’ room banged open to their angry voices and then Tess running out and flinging the clock, which bounced against both corridor walls, the left one first, before it spun and skidded along the floor and stopped dead at my feet. The alarm was going off and I picked up the clock, flicked the alarm off, and pressed the clock to my ear. It ticked away fine. Tess was back at their door, screaming into their room, words like they were not going to tell her how she was going to live her life. This was September, in the year they built the pump house, the week before I boarded the red school bus. The row Tess and my parents were having was about Kevin.

Michael gave Una his clock when she moved to Dublin. I remember it sitting atop
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
, on the windowsill beside Una’s bed. I bought that book at the Sinn Féin bookstore near
Mountjoy Square. I read it and told Una about it. She wanted to read it. I don’t know if she ever did, but I do know I never got my book back.

I wound that clock once. It was a Sunday evening, about eight or nine months after I first visited her. Earlier that afternoon we were walking the canal bank on the Whitworth Road side. A swan bobbed out of the reeds and spun into the middle of the water. Una and I remarked on what a thrill it was to encounter the swan, but in the spinning, we noticed the arrow below its left wing. Not a full arrow, but a shaft butting out about two inches. The feathers around the arrow were soiled black. We didn’t at first see the arrow, because the soiled feathers were below the water, whose surface was covered with plastic shopping bags, half-sunken and rusty shopping carts, bald tires, but also frog spawn, petals, leaves, and dust from the wildflowers and the trees that grew on the canal bank. We held hands on our slow and silent walk back to her flat, and the instant we got inside, she threw herself onto her bed, curled up, and turned her face to the window. She moaned low and steady. I shut the two windows, made tea, and sat on the edge of her bed, mug in hand. I would have said the tea would help, and that I’d ask one of the Dublin Corporation men in the bar if they might do something about rescuing the swan. She didn’t move, speak, or take the tea. I stroked her hair, and when she was asleep, I went to her wardrobe for a blanket that I laid along her and fixed around her shoulders. I slipped off her shoes and stockings and tucked her feet under the bottom edge of the blanket. I did it like I had seen my mother do with my father when he arrived home drunk and bitter from Tipperary town, on those autumn days he sold cattle at the market. And before I headed back to my own flat I poured the cold tea down the sink, rinsed the mug, pulled the curtains on her windows, wound the clock, set the alarm, and placed the clock back on top of my book.

She and I used to meet two or three times during the week. She made dinner. Grilled pork chops, tinned peas, and instant mashed potatoes. Spaghetti Bolognese every now and then. I washed the dishes and cleaned up things.

We visited the city center cinemas. I paid for the bus fare and the tickets. She bought the sweets. And we walked the neighborhood to the west of Upper Drumcondra Road: left on Milbourne Avenue, right on Ferguson Road, left on Home Farm Road, right on Valentia Road. We stood on the footpaths and admired the yards and the houses. We held hands and kissed when the streets and footpaths were empty, and we talked about living in one of the houses. Marble fireplaces and sunlit kitchens and glowing wooden floors. We took the 16 bus into the city center and stared at shop windows, and we sat silently for hours at this one café window on O’Connell Street. Rain and sun came and went, and all those strangers walked on by.

Not once in Dublin did I meet Kevin. When he first arrived in the city, he lived south of the river, but after their uncle Roger died, he moved north, to Phibsborough, where he bought the three tenement buildings with money inherited from Big Roger. Una told me that Kevin lived alone in a room on the top floor of one of the tenements. He and a few men he had hired were doing them up. The men drew the dole, and Kevin paid them under the table. And Una told me that some of the men were on the run from the law, and that Kevin lived without hot water or electricity. He taped sheets of cardboard over windows where the glass was broken. He’d a big problem with pigeons, but worse than pigeons were the rats that all his poisons and traps couldn’t kill.

The day after my mother’s burial, Tess and I, hungover as fuck, and still wearing our funeral clothes, took a walk in the fields behind our house. We talked about the names we gave the cows when we were young. When a new cow came along, our father asked us to name it. Tess and I went through the fourteen names. We laughed and argued over which of us invented what name, and we walked over to each cow and said something kind. Then we crossed the ditch onto the road. Big Johnny drove past in his tractor. He pulled into the headland, got down, shook hands with us, and said he was sorry to hear about our mother. We thanked him and inquired how his son was doing, and
how his daughter was faring out at medical school in Dublin. Never better now, lads. Big Johnny got back on his tractor. Tess and I went on walking, and I was about to tell her about Una. It was at that place on the road where the tall elms on the ditches give way to sky and light and open fields, and a few miles ahead, the hill where Auntie Tess, Auntie Hannah, and my father were born. Tess had stopped walking. She was staring at the hill.

—You and me will always have each other, Jimmy, won’t we?

—Yes, Tess, always—

—Always be like we are, won’t we, Jimmy?

—Yes, Tess, everything like before—

—We’ll look after each other and talk to each other like always—

—We will, Tess. We’ll always be that way.

I couldn’t tell Tess then. Couldn’t tell—but the mind constantly stumbled toward Una. Such luck to be in love on that day. Love like that will smother all your other pain. And I did not stare at that hill the way Tess did. Her head raised. Eyes wide open. Like she was about to kneel on the road and adore it. Its top fields were ablaze with evening sunlight. Their miserable hill—but why did Tess have to talk like that? Ask you those sorts of questions? Cheat you into words you could not then and would not ever honor. I wanted to be lying beside Una in her single bed, making up stories about the voices passing on the footpath, reading Kafka and Blake to each other, blowing cigarette smoke at the open window, the smoke wandering across the ticking face of her father’s enamel clock, then me slipping out of bed to boil a kettle of water for tea, boiling eggs, and placing the scalding eggs in the two yellow eggcups, with the hairline crack in each. Una had brought the eggcups with her the day she left home. She said the eggcups got cracked on the train on the way up, but you knew to look at those cracks that they had been there for a long time. Those were settled cracks. And boiling kettles of water for late-night baths in her tiny bathtub, washing the sticky hairspray out of her black hair. She cried every time I washed her hair. And I never asked her why.

This is how it more or less ended. It was five or six months after the swan, so seven or eight months after her uncle Roger’s death, nine or ten months after my mother’s death, and I forget how many months after she gave me those ugly shirts. Una had written a poem. It was lying facedown on the table: eight short lines, written in pencil, titled “My Wounded Swan.” The petals, the frog spawn, the shopping carts and bags and bald tires with big holes were in the poem. Bombs made the holes in the tires. She was in the toilet when I picked the poem up. No. She was gone downstairs to see if the postman had arrived. Her soft footfalls in the doorway. She entered the room, dropped the post onto the floor, snatched the page from my hands, ripped it, and cast the pieces up in the air the way a magician might, like the pieces might change into pigeons, swans, cows, rats—whatever it is you want. Then she picked up her purse and walked briskly out the door. She did not close it. I ran after her and leaned over the banister. She was already in the hall.

—Sorry. Would it suit you better if I was not interested? I shouted.

Her windows shuddered when she banged the hall door. I went to her kitchen window to see if I might see her on Drumcondra Road. See her fine arse shifting in those high heels she wore on her days off work. But she had gone up Dorset Street.

I lay on her bed. The second hand moved on the enamel clock. Life going by. Shit floating down a river. Then the room was dark expect for the lit-up hands and numbers. And I don’t know if I was dozing or watching the face of the clock when the sound of her key in the lock brought me back to them. She switched the light on. I got off of the bed, stood beside her, and asked why she had ripped up the poem and vanished in a huff.

—You wouldn’t understand, she said.

Her spiked hair was stiff from the cold. Her face glowed.

—Look who you are talking to, I said.

—You don’t understand, she said.

—I understand, I said.

—You don’t, and you should go, she said.

—I’m not going unless you tell me what the fuck it is that I don’t understand.

—You just don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have to ask, she said.

—You owe me to tell me what it is I don’t understand—

—I don’t owe you a thing, and none of what we’re doing is going anyplace. You should go, we are wasting each other’s time—

—I’m not going anywhere. We should save for that house we like on Valentia Road. Get a loan for that, we should let people know about us, I’d murder a dragon for you!

—You don’t have that in you. Don’t be fooling yourself. And we are not saving for anything. And we are not going to tell anyone anything. I don’t want to stay here, I don’t want to be a stupid accountant for the rest of my life, I want to get away from here, I hate living here. You don’t see it, you have no idea, you are insecure—

—I see it. You’re the one who’s insecure, and you’re mad! Utterly and fucking mad!

—Well, if I’m so insecure and so utterly and fucking mad, why are you here, why don’t you go, why aren’t you gone already!

A creak on the stairs beyond the door made us stop talking. Footsteps moving to the next floor. She looked toward the door. The spikes in her hair were trembling.

—I’m sorry, Jim, she said.

Then the creak on the ceiling, where she now stared, and clenched her fists.

—But I am sorry, Jim. I am.

—Sorry for what, Una?

The sound of a television upstairs and someone telling the evening news. A toilet flushing upstairs. I looked from the ceiling to her. She looked away, her fists still clinched.

—Fuck you, I said.

I banged her door and the hall door when I left. Of course I did.

We did not talk after that, but every night on my way back from
work I stood at the hedge for I now forget how many nights and stared up at her two windows and his two above hers. The curtains on the four windows were drawn, and each time her shadow appeared on a curtain a shock galloped through me—like when I was young and I gripped the electric fence wire that kept the cows in. Dare you to grab it, Jimmy, Tess, Hannah, and Stephen shouted and laughed. Dare you! Dare you, Jimmy! Jimmy’s a coward! Jimmy’s a coward! And the waves of electricity flowed through me and the warm piss flowed down the inside of my leg—but I knew which shadow was hers, and which one was his, but not once did I let myself imagine them together. No. I imagined her standing alone at her sink, washing a cup, a plate, putting the eggcups on the rack, shaking the water from her hands, drying her hands and heading to the toilet to change into her nightdress, her underclothes in a pile on the green linoleum floor. And when the light was quenched at her sink window, and the light next to her bed was on, I knew she was in bed. She’d wind the clock the moment she was under the covers. She’d read for half an hour. I stood and stared for exactly fifteen minutes. Then I headed back to my flat and lay on my bed in my underwear and listened to the records I bought on Saturday afternoons at a record shop on Henry Street.

About twenty or thirty times I followed them into the city center, on Saturday afternoons, which was the day and the time that she and I used to go. I’d wait at the corner of Grattan Parade. They’d come out from the hedge. She first, then him. He’d latch the gate. I’d duck down Grattan Parade. They’d start walking. Not once did they take the bus, though she and I took it every single time. That, I insisted upon. It was the speeding bus rising like a chariot over the arched canal bridge, charging up Dorset Street, past the spruced-up, mad, brave, violent, funny, cowardly, thieving, big-minded, bitter, foul-mouthed, small-minded fuckers, past the shops, the steel curtains, the shitty bars and chippers, left at North Frederick Street, where at the far corner the paperman’s fingertips were blackened with ink, where a big clock hung above the bar, past Walton’s music shop and the line of red buses
parked face-to-arse, then past the Garden of Remembrance and the Ambassador Cinema.

I walked behind them, on the opposite side, and only once did I run into them. It was on Henry Street. I got waylaid in the shopping crowd. They had stopped at a shop window. She thought it was a coincidence. I know by the way she acted. She was wearing a long and loose khaki coat with straps and buckles. A coat I’d never seen her in before. It didn’t suit her one bit. He would have bought it for her. And she introduced me to him. I shook his hand. He was taller than I was. Four or five years older. I bowed a little. I could do that. Parents and teachers were toppers at teaching you how to bow. He had the blond fringe swept to the side, like the lead singer dude in Spandau Ballet. The pleated slacks, loafers, white socks showing, a sports coat, with three buttons of the shirt open. Yes. I was so polite. And she acted like we were these neighbors from home who happened to meet in the middle of this Saturday shopping crowd, buying their potatoes, their peas, and their pork. Like I had never washed that sticky, hideous hairspray she bought in one of those big shops out of her hair—and his sports coat was checkered, I remember it, the sort wankers might wear to the horse races. He did not strike me as mean. He was dull. Certainly that. And his teeth were crooked, though I suppose he was tall enough that you wouldn’t notice. When she said Hello, Jim, he put his arm across her shoulders and pulled her to him. She fell gamely into him. She had told him nothing about us. I saw that in their faces. And all this love and hate for her made me feel so miserable but so brilliantly alive. The country was in bits: unemployment lines, the North, strikes, riots, bombs, immigration, divorce, women’s rights, gay rights, inflation, and the price of everything—oh, the woeful price of everything.