The Empty Family (20 page)

When Josie’s second Christmas in the nursing home approached, Noeleen took Paul into her office one Saturday after he had finished his visit.

‘She’s worried about Christmas,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘She’s been talking about it to Brigid. She brings it up all the time, according to Brigid. She thinks, well, she thinks …’

‘What?’

‘That you spent last Christmas with your mother and left her out here.’

‘But I didn’t.’

‘I know, Paul.’

‘I drove down to see her specially, and I went straight back to Dublin.’

‘I know, Paul. I remember you saying, but I’m telling you, just in case.’

‘What should I do?’

‘Maybe try to reassure her. Say something, if you can.’

‘But I told her last Christmas that I was going back to Dublin.’

‘Well, that’s all you can do again.’

The following Saturday, he raised the subject, telling Josie that he was lucky that his friends Denis and David always had their Christmas dinner at four or five on Christmas Day, reminding her that she had met Denis a few years earlier and mentioning that his friends lived in Rathgar, not far from him. He had gone to their house last year, he said, and he was going to go again this year, once he had seen her. It would take him two hours, or even less, to get back to Dublin.

Josie did not respond.

Normally, Brigid greeted him warmly as he arrived and then pretended not to listen to any of the conversation he had with his aunt, but now she did not disguise her interest in what they were saying. She turned and nudged Josie, nodding at Paul.

‘That’s right, now,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what I said?’

Josie looked at the floor and smiled distantly, as though nothing being said were getting through to her fully.

‘Did you hear him?’ Brigid asked her.

Josie looked up at Paul, her expression absent-minded.

Brigid caught his eye.

‘She heard you, all right. Don’t mind her, now.’

On Christmas Day, she seemed cheerful as she tried on the cashmere cardigan he had brought her; he told her again that he had driven down that morning and that he was going back soon to have Christmas dinner with his friends in Dublin.

‘I’d say the road was quiet coming down,’ she said. ‘Years ago there’d be no traffic at all on Christmas Day, but I suppose that’s changing too, like everything else.’

She looked at him directly, as though she were checking now if he really had meant it when he said he was returning to Dublin. He held her gaze, trying to make it clear to her that he was not lying. She grew silent and appeared locked in some reflections of her own for a while until she noticed the buttons of the new cardigan, which she began to admire.

In the New Year, she started to weaken. Paul began to drive down one evening each week, as well as Saturday. He often found her asleep when he came on Saturdays, Brigid nudging her to wake up when she saw him coming. In the evenings when he visited, she was always in bed and usually did not wake. He would move a chair close to the bed and sit there for a while watching her. She seemed tiny in the bed; he could see the veins on her hands almost breaking through the skin. Noeleen assured him that if there was an emergency she would call him immediately.

When Noeleen finally did call, in the late morning one Wednesday in the spring, he was not surprised.

‘Should I come now?’ he asked.

‘You should, Paul.’

‘How long does she have?’

‘It could be a matter of hours,’ she said. ‘She’s weakening. The pulse is slow.’

‘Is she awake?’

‘No, Paul, she’s asleep, and we have her very comfortable.’

‘Does she know she’s dying?’

‘Ah, who can say?’

When he arrived at the nursing home, he did not go into the large room where Josie normally was but waited by the office for Noeleen to finish a phone call.

‘The doctor saw her earlier,’ she said when she put the receiver down. ‘And he’ll come back if we need him. And I phoned the Manse and told them. There’s no priest there now, but they’ll phone back as soon as someone comes in. She woke a while back and took a drink of milk, but she’s asleep again now. She’s in the room on her own. I wanted her to be private.’

They left him alone with her. A few times when she struggled for breath he thought to go into the corridor and find one of the nurses, but he presumed that they knew what was happening. A priest came and performed the last rites.

Every time he walked down the corridor to go to the bathroom or get some air, Paul had the sense that he was being watched with a sort of grim silence by the old people who saw him. He was the messenger of death, he realized. He was the one waiting. They must have seen it before. None of them even acknowledged his presence.

Later, when it was dark, the doctor came and said that Josie could not last much longer. They left food for Paul in the dining room and put an armchair in Josie’s room, in case he wanted to sleep.

‘You can never tell. She could last longer than any of us think,’ Noeleen said as she prepared to retire for the night. ‘That’s God’s decision – it’s not ours.’

One of the women working all night was from Lithuania; the other was local. He was not sure if they were nurses or orderlies; he did not know their names. Slowly, however, as the night wore on, he realized, by the way the local woman came and took Josie’s pulse and by her skill at making his aunt more comfortable in bed, that she was a nurse. A few times when she came into the room he went out into the corridor with her afterwards.

‘I’ve seen it before,’ she said. ‘She’s holding on. It’s impossible to know for how long. You learn things in this job. And one of them is that sometimes it’s the hardest thing to die, almost harder than to live. For some people, it’s the hardest thing of all.’

A while later, when Paul was alone having a cup of tea in the kitchen, she came and told him that he should return immediately to his aunt’s room. ‘She’s awake now. I didn’t think she would wake again.’

Josie, he saw, was lying on her back with her eyes open. There was a bedside lamp on, but he kept the door open as well so that light from the corridor came into the room.

‘It’s Paul,’ he said. ‘You’re having a great sleep.’

She mumbled something and then made as if to turn.

‘I’m here now,’ he said. ‘If you need me for anything. I’m sitting here. And I’ll get you anything you want.’

She seemed to grow more agitated, and her right hand began to shake. She was trying to say something, but he could not make out even a single word.

‘Don’t make yourself tired,’ he said. ‘You can rest now, and we’ll talk later.’

She turned her head and looked at him and tried again to speak.

‘Her,’ she said. ‘Her.’

‘Who?’

He could not understand the next thing she said.

‘We can talk later, when you are up and dressed,’ he said.

Josie’s hand started to shake again, and her breathing sounded like a set of sighs.

‘Josie,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me?’

She fixed her eyes on him.

‘Can you hear me?’

She mumbled, and he thought she might be saying that she could hear him, but he was not sure.

‘I won’t see her. Do you understand?’

Her gaze was sharp now, almost accusing. She made an effort to move.

‘No, don’t move. I’ll get the nurse in a minute. I just want you to know that I won’t see my mother. I didn’t visit her. I didn’t. I don’t even know where her house is. I haven’t seen her. And I won’t. I promise I won’t.’

She nodded, but he was not certain that it was a direct response to what he had said. He leaned in towards her and held her hand.

‘I promise you now that I won’t see her. I don’t want to see her.’

He was still not sure that she had understood. When she closed her eyes, her face changed. For a moment it could have been a smile, but it was hard for him to tell. Her breathing grew shallow. He thought that she was going to die then and touched her arm tenderly for a moment and went to find the nurse. When he came back to the room, Josie’s face had changed once more, he thought, the expression softer, calmer. The nurse checked her pulse and looked at her watch.

‘No, she has a while to go,’ she said. ‘She’ll go in her own time. The doctor prescribed something for pain if she needs it, and I have the keys to the press where it’s kept. But she won’t need it now. She’s slipping away without any pain, that’s what she’s doing. But she’s not ready yet.’

As dawn broke and the morning light crept in through a chink in the curtains, new nurses came on duty, and the early routines and noises in the nursing home, which he had never witnessed before, began. When Noeleen appeared and said that it must have been a long night for him, he realized that the whole night had felt like an hour or two, nothing more. What was strange now, when he went back to the room and sat with Josie again, was how much she changed every few minutes. He wondered if it was a trick of the light, or maybe his eyes were tired. Her face, for a while in the morning shadows, seemed to him like the face of someone young. He had not known her when she was young. He remembered her always as a middle-aged woman with grey hair, someone content as long as nothing new or unusual was happening, someone always happier in her own house when the day was over and everything was in its place. He sat and watched her.

In the middle of the morning, they asked him to leave for a short time as they shifted her position in the bed again.

‘It won’t be long now,’ the nurse whispered to him when she came to tell him that he could return to the room. He stayed with Josie for the next hour or so until the nurse appeared once more and took her pulse and then returned with Noeleen and another nurse and they said a decade of the Rosary as Josie faded into death.

The day was warm. Paul stood out in front of the nursing home and phoned work to say that he would not be there until the following Monday and then texted some friends in Dublin to say that his aunt had died. As he came back in, he found that Brigid had been taken by Noeleen down to the room to see Josie and say goodbye to her. He waited in the doorway as Brigid stood beside the bed. She smiled at him as she turned.

‘Paul, I’d say you’ll miss her now,’ Brigid whispered to him as she moved towards the door. ‘We’ll all miss her.’

‘We will, all right,’ he said.

Brigid sighed as she passed him.

‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ she said.

He stood in the doorway and watched her walking down the hallway back to her place in the large room, with Noeleen behind her to make sure that she did not fall. He turned then and closed the door and sat on his own with Josie. He thought for a moment of pulling the curtains back and letting the room fill with light so that he could look at her clearly for the last time, but he knew that it was better to leave the room as it was. Her arm, when he touched it, was already getting cold.

He did not touch her again, but stayed there silently with her. He was tired, but he did not have even the smallest urge to sleep. He checked his mobile phone as a text came through from a friend. He thought that later he would go to Dublin and get a suit and some clean clothes and then come back and maybe stay at the hotel. In the meantime, he would wait until the undertaker arrived and then think about the death notice to be put in the newspaper and the arrangements for the funeral. There was, he thought, nothing else to be done.

As he sat there, he realized that he should go to Josie’s house, that staying at the hotel would do nothing for him. He could, he thought, leave the door ajar in her bedroom and her sitting room, or open a window, do something in the house to mark the fact that she had gone. He was surprised at how much that thought seemed to satisfy him, almost console him, and how quickly that thought led to another, one he had been keeping at bay.

Somewhere not far from here, he knew, his mother was living in the same day as he was, under the same sky, in the same watery light that came from the sea and the Slaney, and someone would surely tell her before evening that Josie, her sister-in-law, had died. The knowledge that he had promised not to see his mother merged in his thoughts with an image of her being told the news of Josie’s death. Her life and the one that he had lived apart from her filled his mind now, as though a space had been freed for them, the shadows cleared, by what had happened in the night and by Josie’s going. He found himself inhaling and releasing breath as a way of nourishing that space, and he breathed in hard for a second at the thought that nourishing it like this was maybe all he would ever be able to do with it.

Barcelona, 1975

At first there were two. They watched me easily, nonchalantly. They were good-looking and, like actors, utterly alert to themselves, dressed I remember now – and I may be wrong about some of these details – in black and white, one with a waistcoat, the other with a grandad shirt. One was taller; both were thin and lithe. The taller one was braver, cheekier; the other seemed content to wallow in his own skinny beauty. They were watching me now and they wanted something from me and I was not sure what that was.

I was twenty then. I had left Dublin just after my final exams, taken the boat first to Holyhead and then the night train to London and then the plane – my first plane journey – to Barcelona. I was raw and unhappy and I missed home. Sometimes at the beginning I stayed in bed the entire day, listening to the city sounds – metal blinds being pulled up and down, motorbikes, voices – wishing I was back in my old bed in a back room in Hatch Street with everything familiar and easy.

I dreamed one night that I found a great balloon to take me over the Pyrenees and the Bay of Biscay to the comfort of Dublin. I dreamed of watching the kingdoms of the world from this height, all made golden by the prospect of abandoning the daily ordeal and the constant excitement of being in a foreign city alone for an indeterminate time without a word of the language.

The two of them were watching me still. To make sure I was not imagining that they were somehow in pursuit, I stood up from the seat and moved slowly down the Ramblas towards the port. They stood up from the seat opposite and, when I looked behind, I saw that they were following. I sat down again on another seat and they sat brazenly opposite me. When one of them smiled, I returned the smile. They were not threatening me; they were not frightening; and they were not going to go away. By now I was not sure, in any case, that I wanted them to.