Solace (27 page)

While the news was on a second time he would make a mug of tea and cut a slice of sweet cake or apple tart from the biscuit tin over the fridge. He would feed the dog, scooping the glistening
meat out of the can with a spoon he rinsed afterwards in boiling water. He put the empty can in a plastic bag and hung it on the doorknob. He took his tea and his slice and sat back down to watch
whatever it was they had on after the news. He never changed the channel after nine. Before Mark left he had paid for the television to be hooked up to some huge number of American channels, as
well as to the English ones, which had never come properly into the house with the old aerial. Mark had shown him how to use the new machine under the television, the slim white box with the three
buttons and the dial that you had only to touch lightly to operate. But when he had tried to work it himself, the first evening on his own, he had only been able to get channels with no picture, in
some other language. At first he thought it was Irish.

He left one of the lamps on in the kitchen at night. The dog slept on an old rug under the table, and he liked to leave her a dish of water. He locked the front and back doors and climbed the
stairs in darkness. In the bathroom, he took his dentures out and left them in a plastic mug on the washbasin. After he had used the toilet, he did not bother to zip his trousers back up or to redo
his belt. He did not flush: it could wait until morning. He did not like the sudden noise in the quiet and the dark. He undressed at the foot of the bed. He turned the light out. The sheets were
cold. The pillows held his head in a firm embrace. Some nights, through the window, he could see the roof of the hayshed and the tops of the garden oaks etched hard against the moonlit sky. When
the moon was small, he could see only vague shapes, and sharp stars, and on other nights, he could see nothing but the blackness of the air. Sleep was slow in coming, but it came. He went towards
it. He took no interest in his dreams.

Mark heard from his sister now more often than he would have liked. They had little to say to each other, but between them, they worked out a bearable routine. Nuala asked the
same questions; he gave the same answers. Nuala asked about their father, knowing that Mark would have talked to him earlier; Mark knew that Nuala would have been talking with him too. She asked
about Aoife. She asked how Mark himself was doing. In those first days, those nine days, she had asked about Joanne. But even then, Mark had known that all Nuala really wanted to talk about was
their mother. She was panicking, Mark knew. He was going through it too. Trying to claw everything back into view and into focus, trying to recall everything, to preserve it, to have it for keeps
– and she was losing it. Forgetting it. Realizing that she could no longer hear, clear in her head, the sound of their mother’s voice. That she could no longer remember the set of their
mother’s face. And so every phone call became a clutching after one more memory, one more detail. Had their mother said this that time one Christmas, or had she said that? What did Mark
remember of their holidays in Spiddal? What kinds of books had their mother been reading over the last few years? What had she liked to listen to on the radio? Was RTÉ still making episodes
of the thing she used to listen to when Nuala was a child?

Harbour Hotel.
No. It was long gone. And Mark could not bring himself to look through the pile of books on their mother’s bedside table – still on the bedside table – so
he could not answer that question for Nuala. These were, anyway, little things. He knew that. Nuala knew that. But they were the clippings and the shavings and the locks of hair that Nuala needed
for the collage she was trying so desperately to make and to control. Sometimes on the phone she would let out a sob, or a sigh that Mark knew to be chased by tears. But usually she was steady,
almost chatty, briskly asking and avidly gathering, as though she were doing market research, as though she had a quota of answers to get and spaces to fill. Which she did, Mark knew. As did he.
The difference was, he already knew he could not think fast enough, could not hold everything together. Everything had never been held together in the first place. It was gone. The parts were gone.
To try to gather them was to try to gather leaves from an autumn five, ten, twenty years ago; there was the sense that countless things had fallen and scattered, but nothing to grasp at, nothing to
sweep.

Because Mark was forgetting things too. Already his memory was deciding that some things could be discarded, that some things could fall out of view. On this, his memory was not consulting him.
There was nothing Mark felt willing to discard. But it was just one more thing he could not control, and what he could not explain to Nuala was that he felt miles away, even, from being able to
worry about that, much less panic about it. None of this was in his control, but some of what he had to get up to, face up to, was more consuming than anything else. And what he had to face up to,
every day and every hour, was the fact. And at the fact, Mark felt as though he was still staring, still trying to make it real. Still trying not to be as startled by it every morning as he would
have been if he had woken to find a stranger in his room. And so there was no time to cry over what was going, over what was slipping away. The business of being the self that could cry over such
things, that could exist after a fact like that and react with sorrow or anger or fear: all of that would have to wait. All of that he could not do. Not yet. He was not yet ready to realize that he
was alone.

Alone. He was not alone. He had a father who called him every day, a father he had to call every day. He had a sister. He had friends, who tried to do the kinds of things they thought friends,
in such a situation, were meant to do – although some of them vanished, some of them could not face him, call him, text him, even, to say a version of the same old lines everyone felt they
had to say. And he had Aoife. A daughter. A child. Sixteen months old, with her mother’s quick, vivid glance. A challenge and an interrogation, meeting with him every morning, looking at him
over the bars of her cot. She watched him as he came towards her, she watched him as he walked away from her at night. She watched him as she sat at the kitchen table, as she stood, demanding,
beside the fridge. She watched him as she walked, as she wobbled. As she sat in front of the television programmes he hoped she would watch. Before, those programmes had only ever been on for an
hour a day. But this was not before. This was now, or this was afterwards, and in now, or in afterwards, he depended on cartoon animals and animated trains for distraction, for relief, for help in
spinning the hours into a pale, dulled haze. But she did not watch these programmes, not really. She watched him.

She had three words. The name she called him, which made her sound like a little Dubliner hollering for her da. ‘Boy’, the name for the blanket she carried with her as she walked
– it had looked angelic and soft when they had bought it, in its whiteness and its satin and its fleece, but now it looked like a month-old lump of snow. And she had ‘mere’, which
meant ‘come here’, which was Mark’s signal to follow her, go to her, take her hand and walk with her to the fridge, the toybox, the staircase, the front door; c’mere, it
said, and do what I want you to do. Do what has to be done. Do the thing that has just occurred to me and is full in my mind’s eye as the only needful thing in the world. Look sharp about it.
Or be with me as I do it, as I get it, as I turn the dial or climb the step or push the door to make it happen. To make it begin.

He spent his days with her now, mainly indoors. Mainly in the house on Arbour Hill. Because of her, there was need of a routine. He took her for her walk. They came home and ate breakfast. She
played, walked through the rooms, waved things at him, gave him her bright, urgent orders. He changed her. For a long time as he changed her, he found himself on the brink of turning to Joanne to
make a comment about the smell or the colour of the child’s shit. He found himself, more than once, beginning to turn his head towards the bedroom door, towards the other room, towards the
rooms downstairs. As the child watched him look there, she looked there too.

Money was not short. They were fine. The mortgage was long paid on the place. His funding was safe for next year – McCarthy had phoned early on to assure him of that, and what was left
would stretch. The money his mother had left him came through in a cheque, and for months he let it sit in a drawer. Eventually he opened a savings account for Aoife. It was something he and Joanne
had meant to do. Now the account was there, and it had more money in it than any bank account Mark had ever had, but by the time she used it, he knew, it would pay for maybe a couple of months in
America on a J1. Or a second-hand car. Or a master’s in something useless, if they still had degrees in useless things by then. But they would. There would always be degrees in useless
things.

*

The Phoenix Park was depressing. Homeless people slept there. Rent-boys worked there. The pope had blessed the country there. Animals lay in filthy cages in the zoo there. But
it was a park. It was Mark’s local park. And the park, he decided one morning, was where you were meant to go on your morning walks. Not the square in Smithfield. Not the footpaths along
Manor Street. In the park, with trees and greenery and water, and sunlight reflecting off them all. ‘We’re going out to see the sunshine,’ he told Aoife, and she frowned and
tugged at his hair.

They passed the disused travel agent’s, and the hair salon already busy with women sitting under driers, and the four squat cottages at the foot of the hill. He felt the pushchair jolting,
and he knew that Aoife was pointing to something, kicking her feet, saying one of her words. It was impossible to hear her. At this hour, these streets were at their worst; hardly wider than
country lanes, bloated with rush-hour traffic. From narrow junctions all along Manor Street, drivers tried to edge into the main flow, surging forward, stalling, ignoring the horn blasts. Ahead of
Mark on Arbour Hill, a lone cyclist was forced in tight to the kerb by traffic, one foot on a pedal and the other stepping its way along the pavement. A siren dipped into the clamour of horns and
engines and car radios. The bells from the nearby church rang for nine, and an instant later, the jingle for the hourly news sounded from inside the car that Mark was passing. The driver pounded
both hands on the wheel and swore. Ahead, several sets of lights changed to red at the same instant. So imperceptible had the crawl of the traffic been that it was only in its sudden seizing up
that it made itself known. Mark walked on.

People were still sleeping on benches in the park. It was too early to expect them to be up and moving in towards the city. An old man lay on a bench, a piece of clothing bundled up as a pillow,
his feet on the armrest as though he were basking in the sun. Farther on, a couple lay locked together under a blackened blanket, cider cans on the ground beneath the bench, like skittles toppled
in a game. Sometimes, especially during the winter, passers-by would leave things under the benches: packets of crisps, or sandwiches, or cartons of milk. There were no offerings today. After he
had passed, Mark reached into his pocket, thinking to leave them some coins, but he found nothing that could be of use – a clothes-peg, a penny, a soother. He moved on towards the pond.

He settled the pushchair at a bench in front of the spot where the ducks seemed busiest; they were surfacing, circling, fussing. Aoife was straining against the straps, calling out. It was her
new word, her fourth word. Up. He unstrapped her and lifted her out as she squirmed. She started, in her hurried, half-balanced steps, towards the water, towards three fat ducks, which were
ignoring her, picking at themselves with their beaks. She squealed, and still they ignored her, and she turned to look back at Mark, and to wave her arms at him, and to smile a smile of such
unbuttressed glee that he found himself feeling, for an instant, almost sorry for her. They’re ducks, he found himself wanting to say to her; dirty, probably diseased ducks, and they’re
ignoring us, and if you go closer they’ll scatter and get as far away from you as possible, and yet, from the look on your face, they’re the best thing in your life right now. In your
little life.

The ducks moved off into the middle of the pond. Aoife watched them and turned to him with a question on her face. He knew what it was.

‘Ducks gone,’ he said, in the tone he used to tell her that something – a yoghurt, a drink, a game – was finished. Her reaction to this tone was the same as always. She
shook her head. She peered at him as though giving him one more chance to change his tune. She swung an arm towards the ground as though throwing something. The action unsteadied her. She jolted on
her feet.

‘Ducks gone,’ he said again, and she began to whine. A low whine at first, a warning – there was still time to repent, it seemed to say, there was still time to get the ducks
back, to set everything right with the world – but as he came towards her it rose to a wail, and as he bent to her she was howling, flailing, battling against him. Her cries spread out over
the water of the pond, and the ducks lifted too, into clumsy, irritated flight, and he rocked her, and shushed her, and bundled her into the pushchair. Already the park was growing busier –
other pushchairs, other parents, other howls about other heartbreaks, other eyes lighting up at the sight of other indifferent birds. On the bench where they had been sleeping, the man and woman
were awake now, sitting at a distance from each other. Their hands, wrapped around new cans of cider, were the same deep red as their faces, their coats looking too heavy for the warm day it was
turning out to be. They could have been in their thirties or their fifties; it was impossible to tell. Both of them had eyes of an intense, bright blue. But they did not look at him. They looked
elsewhere. She to the ground. He to the sky.