A Mad and Wonderful Thing (16 page)

She is asleep again as I rise from the bed, wrap a towel around me, and walk across the landing to the bathroom. I shower and return across the landing in the towel. I dress into jeans and a T-shirt, and put on a black woollen pullover that Anna has sent for my birthday. Scattered on the long table are piles of books and notepads. I settle on my chair, open a notepad, and take a pencil from an Italia '90 mug. I clear a space on the desk. I sharpen the pencil, dropping the shavings into a wicker wastepaper basket. It is one of the simple joys of life: a sharp pencil. I take a clean page and begin a letter:
Station Road, Ennis, 6 June 1992
. ‘Hello Aisling, my friend,' I write.
Aisling has visited, too, but she cries every time. Aisling and I have a painful bond: though we are friends, our friendship does not exist as its own thing — it is a Cora thing. She's been good with her letters, too. They all have. They all make the effort. I reach over to a biscuit tin on the long table, open it, and remove a bundle of papers. I put them on the table before me.

Bella moves in the bed. ‘Are you reading those letters again, Johnny?' she asks gently.

I walk over to her, sit on the bed, and kiss her pretty face. I go down to the kitchen, my bare feet clammy on the cold tiles, and make tea and toast for us. Mick, another who shares with us, passes through on his way out. ‘Are you right there, Michael?' I ask. Mick is well tired of my old joke and grumbles ‘Morning' to me with an annoyed grimace. I take two mugs of tea and a plate of buttered toast up to my room. I put one mug and a slice of toast on my desk, and take the other mug and the plate over to the bed. She watches me in silence as she eats. I switch on the Philips. ‘A bit of The Cure to get the day going,' I say. When she has finished the tea and toast, she reaches from the bed and takes the T-shirt that I wore last night. She puts it on, leaves the bed, and comes over to me. I stand and kiss her, and feel her bare butt under the tail of the T-shirt. I increase the volume on the Philips on the opening beats of ‘Inbetween Days'. I dance through the intro and then I sing. She joins me, and we dance, four bare feet skipping on the wooden floor. There is a knock on the door. I open it.

‘Hola, Marcela,' I say. ‘Are you wanting a dance?' Marcela is a cousin of Bella, and is from Valencia.

‘She is here?'

‘Who?'

‘I know she is here.'

‘Nobody here but me,' I reply. ‘You have your chance.'

‘No thanks. But tell her who isn't here that her fiancé is to call this morning. And then what will we say? Eh?'

‘Nice fella, that Colin,' I suggest. ‘A sound bloke.'

‘Yes, he is,' she says with conviction, turning and marching off across the landing. She turns again. ‘But you two …' She searches for a word. ‘You two are … a disgrace.'

‘Well,' I say, turning to Bella as I close the door. ‘You ask a girl to dance, and all the abuse you get.'

Bella kisses me with a laugh and disappears out the door. I watch her go. I watch the movement of her arse below the T-shirt. She'll get a lecture from Marcela, but, like our promises to make each time the last time, it will make no difference. What was one of those triads of Ireland that Bob used to recite over the oil-store workbench? ‘The three deafnesses of this world: a doomed man faced with a warning, a beggar being pitied, a headstrong woman hindered in lust.'

Well, what now, Bob? What now, my old friend? This whole world is a total fuck-up
. I hold my head and push my hair back hard. I try to put it all out of my mind. I try to put Cora out of my mind. Sometimes it's easy, like it never, ever happened, and I'm fine and all is well, or it did happen and I'm okay. But it's not true, and later the whole thing comes down bigger and heavier and shittier than ever, and I just want to fucking scream.

I don't remember the fall; not really. I fell, so they tell me, and caught the concrete pavement with my head as I crashed out of the ambulance. I only remember Cora, the white sheet, and the red boots.

I lower the volume on the Philips. My birthday cards are still on the mantelpiece — I turned twenty-one a month ago. Twenty-one. I should take the cards down. I don't know why I left them up — I just did. I gather them and spread them on the table beside the letters. I sit, and one by one I read the cards again.

‘We hope you are managing well'
,
says one from Mam and Dad. Well, they are not for long statements. They struggled with the accident; they struggled to find a place for it. Up until that evening, the mantra of ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways' was used with abandon to cover all that life threw at us. But that just didn't hold for Cora. In the hospital, it was all doctors-this and tests-that, but the best Dad could manage when Cora was mentioned was to blow hard, shake his head, and turn away. They were afraid that I might be damaged after the fall. ‘Will he be all right?' I heard Mam ask when she thought I couldn't hear. ‘You never know with head injuries.' They have been unsure since.

Another card is from Aunt Hannah. It came with a package for my birthday. The package was a blue scarf. ‘Time to trade in that old rag', Aunt Hannah wrote. I gave the new scarf to Bella. I'll keep the old rag.

I lift a drawing from Clara. It is of a tall man in a long, dark coat. The man is holding the hand of a small girl. The sun is shining, the grass is green, and around the man and the girl there are flowers and trees. On the man, a blue scarf flies in the breeze. Clara was such a great girl after the accident, overlooking the chaos, ignoring all the hoo-ha.

I lift a card from Anna. It also came with a package — it was the black pullover. It came, as usual with Anna, with a list of dos and don'ts: mind your head, keep warm, study, take me to Galway soon, don't miss the tests, don't drink too much, don't do anything silly. Anna worries about me. She knows I got broken, and she tries to fix me.

I was afraid after the fall that I might have said something, have let something slip, and added chaos to the tragedy. Delaney kept a watch from the sidelines. In the end, the secret survived, and I ended up with a broken skull, a bad eye, a new look, and no Cora. The ambulance that waited at her gate that dark evening took us both to the hospital. I lived. She died.

I move my hand across the table and lift the letters from 16 Níth River Terrace. It was a difficult decision for the Flannery family — what to do with Cora when she died. All who knew Cora knew about her love of Cúchulainn's Castle, but it went against tradition and expectation — and it went against the law — to dig and to bury her there. There were only two choices: the cold earth at Dowdallshill, or the hot furnace of a crematorium. They held her ashes until I was fit to leave the hospital, and we ignored the law and buried her below the single oak as fallen leaves blew around us in a winter breeze. Aisling sang ‘
Táimse i m' chodhladh is ná dúisigh mé
'
into the cold air. When we are young, we think that death comes only at the end of life. We are wrong. I should have known better.

I put the letters and cards aside and finish my own writing to Aisling, and I write a letter to Hamburg to confirm a teaching placement for summer. I step into a pair of black trainers before reaching into the Dunn & Co and pulling the collar up around the blue scarf. I take a walk through town. I slow up while passing the shoe shop. I tap on the window. Inside, Dervla Kerrigan raises her head of red waves from where she attends the feet of a customer. ‘Hello, Jezebel,' I mime as I blow a kiss across the boot-and-shoe display. Still on her knees in the shop, she straightens and shuffles her shoulders, tossing her head back. I look on her. Dervla Kerrigan has a chest that could stop an army. I nod an intention through the glass, and she receives the proposal with that dirty smirk of hers. Dervla Kerrigan is a girl for fun. Her only morning choice is silk or lace, and she carries her lingerie as easily as early summer can carry hope.

The first night, after we met in the bar of Brogan's Hotel, she took me to her house. We were still in the hallway when I pulled the clothes from her and she pushed me down onto the carpeted steps of the staircase. She lifted me out quickly and forced me between her breasts nested in the black lace. Then she swallowed me, her head bobbing below the red curls. I was rushing to a finish, unable to stop or slow an emptying, and she held her tongue wide to catch me. ‘Thank you,' she said, as she looked up when it was over. The second time, we made it to her living room, but only just. I leant her over a couch, her back resting on the arm of the chair, and the front of that body arched towards me and offered as I pushed the dress up, the two white cylinders through the taut suspenders, the sheen of the black triangle, a sliver of silk before the inveigling chalice, inviting, enchanting, the slipway to oblivion. The third time, we made it to her bedroom.

I post the letters and I stop in Brogan's Hotel in O'Connell Street. Maggie is on duty, and I chat to her for five minutes before I take one of the dark, wooden booths. Over the course of an hour, Maggie brings me two large coffees with fresh cream, and I read the
Irish Times
. When I finish the newspaper, I return to my room on Station Road and read through my coursework
for the rest of the day. Later, I reach into the biscuit tin and remove a sheet of folded paper. It is the poem that she wrote for me — the poem that she promised me on our walk on the mountain, the poem that she had in her pocket when she died. I open the folded sheet and look upon her neat hand, her blue letters impressed on the white of the Belvedere Bond:

A Chuisle Mo Chroí
On Dealga's dark morn, Son of Huath is born,
Above black night, Alderbarren's fire bright,
In ditch the hawthorn white and breaks from bud,
Bealtaine rushes free from winter's hood,
Swallows in two and three to Ireland fall,
You are the voice of Ériu's call.

Wünderkind

‘KANN ICH IHNEN HELFEN?'

I turn. It is the tall girl I have noticed before, and at this closeness she is taller than I thought, and she is lovely — so lovely that if I'm not careful I might just stare at her, dumbly, or reach out and touch her, or do or say something foolish. I pass her the peaches, and she weighs and labels them for me.

‘
Danke schön
,' I say.

‘
Bitte schön
,' she answers. Her face offers a kindness, but her words rush at me, and already brought unsteady by her nearness, I am blown from the course of certainty. She is young, her face has all the fullness of innocence, and her long, brown hair is swept back, where some of it has caught and hangs on her shoulder. Her mouth moves, the smile remains, but there is a question held. Her pouting mouth has pouting pink lips, with the gentle, soft, damp gleam of something. Of what? Woman? Yes, but no. It is more — a flesh pink, not a painted pink. I am staring. I am doing what I have warned myself not to do. We stand in a momentary silence, a kind of suspension of time, as I look to her, and, between her high cheeks and her high forehead, her brown eyes look to me.

I breathe. I decide to play my trump card. ‘I'm Irish … I'm from Ireland,' I say, offering my hand, and she smiles a smile that is half fun and half embarrassment. She takes my hand.

‘Hello, Irish boy,' she answers in the precise English that comes from German schooling. ‘I am Mila. Welcome to Germany.'

We walk together to the checkout.

‘A fine supermarket you have here, Mila,' I say, and I begin a rollcall of the contents of the mid-shelf: ‘
Brötchen, Frikadellen, Gulaschsuppe, Sauerkraut, Knödel, Bierwurst, Leberwurst, Schinkenwurst
.' There are lentils — lots of lentils. Lentils are really big here. I stop and lift a tin of lentils with cooked sausage. I tell her that I've yet to see an Irish family sit down to a feast of lentils; lentils are not so popular in Ireland. I replace the tin on the shelf, and we continue towards the front of the store as I plough a furrow of commentary up the supermarket aisle. At the checkout, I pay an older woman for the groceries, and Mila helps put them in a paper bag. I should say something. In these matters, momentum is everything. Tied to the hot flow of excitement, a cool knowledge runs through me — I might not get a chance like this again. I have to act.

‘Would you like to go for a coffee, Mila?'

She looks out through the window — it is a warm day. ‘Would an ice-cream be too much?' she asks.

‘An ice-cream,' I say, ‘would be the most perfect thing ever.'

We find an ice-cream parlour nearby, all tiles and glass, and we sit inside. All the other customers are sitting outside, and we have the place to ourselves. We order two banana-splits from a heavy Italian. The ice-creams arrive, and they are magnificent.

‘Be the hokey,' I say, shaking the Italian's hand. ‘
Magnifique
.'

‘I think that's French,' Mila comments, in a serious voice.

‘Close enough,' I answer, and she laughs.

For two hours we sit and talk, chasing the banana-splits with several coffees. She tells me she is from Bremen and is staying in the Grosshansdorf area of the city with her relatives, working the holidays in her uncle's store. I tell her about Ireland and that I am teaching English here in Hamburg for the summer.

We leave the parlour and walk to the high street. It is a modern street, a new street. The pedestrian pavement is clean and broad, and there is a row of flagpoles along its length; but there is no breeze, so the colours of the German federation hang low. We pass a small drapery store with
FOLLOW ME
stencilled on the window. The Germans have a fancy for putting English names on their enterprises; I guess they think it gives the establishment a certain something. On the edge of the district, I have passed the Happy Cars Garage. But who am I to judge — in Dundalk, I go to the Roma for chips. We walk to the store, where I offer my hand, and again Mila gives a look that is half fun and half embarrassment.