First Death In Dublin City (Thomas Bishop Book 1) (16 page)

24 December 2002

Georgia,

Today it’s Christmas Eve, and I just can’t take it anymore. You’re lying across from me, asleep on the couch after a long few months without a break: broken, dilapidated, exhausted, and mine. Me? I’m sitting here looking at you snore, never having been further from you.

I’m sure you’ve begun to guess by now, but I am a heterosexual. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve fallen in love with you harder than I thought possible, and perhaps sexual attraction isn’t all that important. Georgia you are one of the best people I’ve ever met, a reincarnation of Yeats’ Maud Gone, the pilgrim warrior I so wish I was. Perhaps that’s what makes this relationship strange, that it was born first not out of attraction to you, but the desire to be you.

You, you archangel of reason and independence, are everything I failed to be with my pathetic life. See, no doubt, like everyone, you’ve wondered why I stayed married to the monster for so long – but the sad fact is that every ounce of my being, no matter how badly he treated me, wants to return to him. We had a life Georgia, me and him and our beautiful son. Yes, that’s right, I am not childless, or at least I wasn’t. My son, Georgia, died just two years ago, he was the most beautiful and sprightly gift I had the joy to know.

So maybe that’s why I stayed, because when you lose a son, part of you just yearns for that old life – and will do anything to keep its shattered remnants together. The world ploughs on while inside you just turn to ash – and second to the yearning to be able to hug my son again, I am consumed by the desire to just be happy again, in the way I was before his death – and that happiness is tied to the house within which I raised him, and the husband I raised him with.

Looking back at the last nightmarish two years I think of the old AA parable my ex-husband used to tell me, and that it went a little something like this –

Every year, when the weather gets cold, the birds fly south. But there was this one bird, who on his flight landed in some cowshit. The first thing he noticed, was the warmth. Why fly sout at all, when there is a beautiful warm spot here for myself. So, ignoring the smell, the bird lay there while all his friends flew south – the comfort of his situation worth so much more than the risks involved with a journey south. Of course, within time he ran out of food, the ground temperature dropped and he froze. Yet, he remained, slowly freezing and starving to death. His friends, the rest of his race, his family – all went south to build a new life so far from this bird steeped in the shit. Yet, why would the bird move, when the journey south was so painful and difficult? So it whispered to itself, each and every morning it woke starved and cold: ‘Everything’s ok, Everything’s ok, Everything’s ok.’

So, I don’t know if that will in anyway explain it to you, when all it is is a stupid little tale; but I always felt story was what language was invented for, and if I can’t explain it through a parable, then I won’t be able to explain it at all.

And there are the two answers to the questions you have asked so often, not with your own speech, but with your expressions and manner. You’ve wondered, more than a hundred times no doubt why it is I’m so sad, but you have to understand that it was only two and a half years ago I lost my son – this being just the third Christmas without him. I don’t care what Greer says, when a mother gives birth, her son becomes as much a part of her as her very soul herself and when he died, I died with him.

I love you,

Rachel

21 March 2003

Georgia,

You finally asked me about the man who hurt me so badly, when we were together, alone, and naked – you asked me to open up (apparently nakedness is conductive to vulnerability). I am sorry, so so sorry, because I want nothing more than to be yours, to detail me in every form, and let you accept me as I am (which you claim you will do). But I cannot, secrecy sits heavy upon my brow, and I cannot help but notice how tragic it is that all my heart desires is to be able to speak to one who wishes to listen – yet circumstances dictate I cannot.

Though perhaps I can further confess here, and find solace in my soul that you will know one day what went on in my tortured mind. The man I married was a beast when first I knew him. When he was a child, his abusive father murdered his mother, leading to him and all his siblings to be taken into care. They were separated, and each put into a different industrial school. There, the man I loved was beaten and raped by the Priests who ran his life – just a child, yet he was made to understand man’s inhumanity to man up close and personal.

It was the summer of ’74 when I met him first – I had just recently started my new job and was working when all my friends had gone off chasing whatever highs they could during those days. I still regularly smoked dope and even was a heroin addict, though nothing so serious as to impact upon my chosen career, I would use only in and around once a month and I soon phased it out. My husband was a bum back in those days, seventeen years old and already washed up without either an education or any kind of social skills (the priests didn’t go much into the teaching, and were more into the beating and raping, in fact I believe he couldn’t even read or write) – and though he tried his best to hide it, he was also homeless and virtually friendless. He’d begun to spend hours in my local library, which I later learned he did because it was warm, well-lit, and had a bathroom.

By October he and I were dating – my parents hated him and I loved him all the more for that. Come May ’75 he and I fled the country, over to Berlin, where we stayed in squats and generally bummed our way around Europe for two years. Ironically, he had to leave one of the only English-speaking countries in the continent to be able to learn to read and write, but learn he did – and he proposed to me in the April of ’77 beneath the shadow of a walled Brandenburg Gate, and we shipped home to set up a life together.

The man I first began to date in ’74 was known as bad news, he was violent and a raging alcoholic. Rumours surrounded him as to whether he had killed a man, but I know that’s not true. He only ever killed one man, and that was his father. Before we left for Europe he had finally cobbled together his masterplan, whereby he managed to disguise himself as a prison janitor, slip into Mountjoy, and kill his father. I, honestly, have no idea how exactly he worked it without being caught – but that was the thing about him, people thought him violent and a drunk, which he was (though he never hurt me), but he was also one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, with an ability to meticulously plan eighteen steps ahead of everyone else.

Maybe you’re wondering why I would have married a man I knew to have been a murderer, but if you had known his father, you’d have wanted him dead too.

We returned and married and sobered up, neither alcohol nor drugs in our life. My husband did the leaving cert and then his degree, and I found a stable job. My son was born.

Look, I don’t even know what it is I am talking about Georgia, but you asked who my ex-husband was, and this list of random anecdotes that you never shall read is the best I could come up. Most importantly though, you will ask, is whether I hate the man?

No Georgia, I love him still. I love him, I love him, I love him. He and I are soulmates, and I pray for the day I fall out of love with him – but it doesn’t seem to be coming about anytime soon.

I love you,

Rachel

29 March 2003

Georgia,

Tonight, I awoke in a painful panic, the nightmares shrouding the darkness, warding of sleep.

During those two years of hell, my husband came home one night, stoned as stone could be – but it hadn’t been H he’d been taking, lord fucking knows what it was, but he was wired. Paranoia had scarred his once beautiful face; I had already been fired, and had spent all day drinking cheap white wine alone on my sofa and I wanted nothing more than sleep.

He wanted to fuck, I told him to fuck off. He grabbed me and we wrestled before he threw me onto our stairs – then he was on me, tearing my clothes off and screaming in my face – more animal than man, at least that’s what I tell myself. In reality, what scares me most, was that he was in fact in full control of his faculties when he raped me, reason had not escaped him, and he knew what pain he was causing – in fact that was the whole point.

It was the end point in the degradation of our relationship, he showed me now that he not only had fallen out of love with me, but that he hated me. He showed me that I had been objectified, that he had nothing but anger and pain to give to me. What the most though strangely wasn’t the physical pain of the rape, it wasn’t even the emotional suffering that’s coupled with losing one’s bodily autonomy and sexual independence, the stripping of dignity and liberty; not even the weeks, months, years of living in crippling fear to drink again. No, what hurt me the most was the man who did it. He made a vow, to protect me in sickness and health, and he shattered it. The man with whom I had shared my deepest desires, dreams and fears. The man with whom I had cuddled during a hundred storms, had comforted our newborn son – the man I shared my soul with. What hurt most was the betrayal. The man sat down and imagined what would break me the most, the used it and he broke me.

I stayed married to him for a year afterwards.

Yours Tearfully,

Rachel

16 August 2003

Georgia,

I shall not give the exact date, because if I were to do that, then upon you receiving this letter you would be able to figure out who I was, which then means that I’d never be able to give you this letter, which defeats the purpose of this letter ever being written. Still, I can tell you that it was in this month of August three years ago that my son died, and I haven’t even been able to hide my crying from you, as usually I do.

I miss the boy who used to tell me everything about football I didn’t care to know; the boy who for some reason never ate beef, the boy who as a baby would never sleep if he had the slightest cold. I miss the boy who never used to let me fix his hair before he went to school, who as a baby could always be silenced by a packet of buttons, and bought so many footballs they are no doubt still rotting in the garden to this day.

My heart it aches, my soul it burns – and no matter how much I do love you, I want to commit suicide more every second that passes, maybe to see my son somewhere again. My life is not worth living without him, nor ever will it be again. It is art alone that sustains me, as I feel beautiful minds from history reaching out to hold me in my grief and tell me that, they, too have suffered as much as I. I don’t even have a photo of him, I ran from my ex in such a haste, but his face I never shall forget. Shakespeare wrote once:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form

And I read his words weeping, unable to catch a breath with this angry pain on my chest; my heart hurts so bad I feel as if it were about to explode from my breast. I listen to Barber’s Adagio and Davidson’s Marriage d’Amour which echo through this empty room and make a meagre comfort for a pitiful being. Shelley on despair:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear --

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

But god, no nothing can compensate for his loss, and which is worse, I must grieve alone. The woman I love with all my heart cannot know for she would risk the wrath of the man I once loved who abandoned me to my lonely drunken grief long long ago.

Yours Faithfully,

My Brother, My Killer

3 January 2004

Georgia,

Today I learned that a daughter was born from the death from my son. She was born just five hours ago in the Coombe, and I couldn’t give a shit. By god, only a few months ago I would have been broken, consumed with the fires of vengeance and rage. But these days I can only be happy, because Georgia, I am truly, madly, deeply in love with you.