Fallen (6 page)

‘It was the one and only thing I asked,' I said, ‘that you wouldn't.' Then I saw what it was. Not a birthday present, of course not, but Liam's equipment and personal effects, returned to us.

Dad knelt beside the trunk and fumbled with the latch. When it wouldn't give, he grunted his frustration and punched the side.

‘Easy, Bill.' Mother's voice shook.

‘Where are the others?' I asked.

She didn't take her eyes off Dad. ‘Florrie's at the shops. As for Matt …'

Florrie was no great loss, and Matt was most likely hanging
around some stage door or other. It was Eva I wanted, but she was at home, getting over one of her many kidney infections.

The trunk's latch clicked open. Dad lifted the lid. Liam's tunic rose, as though it breathed. A mucky, sickening stench seeped through the room. It coated my tongue, stuck in my throat.

Mother pressed a handkerchief to her face. ‘God help us, what
is
that smell?'

Dad lifted a corner of the tunic to look beneath it. ‘Let's see, what does he have here? … Ah, no. Look, Mildred. The watch is broken.'

I looked over his shoulder. The open face of the pocket watch Dad gave Liam when he went to work for the firm, his own father's gift to him, was smashed, the hands long gone. He groped for it, like a blind man. I knelt beside him and put the watch into his hand, closed his fingers over its face. Then I lifted the khaki tunic and hugged it, never mind the stink. The arms unfolded and hung at an angle, stiff and empty. I let go and the khaki slid to my lap. I pushed it to the floor, rubbed my palms on the rug to get rid of its greasy residue.

With his free hand, Dad took a packet of letters from the box. His knees cracked when he stood and carried them to the chair opposite Mother's. He sat into it heavily, letting out a sound like a groan. He slipped the watch into his waistcoat pocket, where it used to live before he gave it to Liam, and unfolded a sheet of paper from a thick ivory-coloured envelope at the top of the pile. ‘Here's one from Isabel.' He might have been going through any morning's post at breakfast, sharing snippets of holiday news.

‘
My own darling Liam
,' he began.

Something squeezed my throat. ‘Dad! That's private!' Liam's love for Isabel Tierney was the one thing about him
that was closed to me, a locked room, but I'd a queer urge to defend it. All the arguments I'd had with myself, fighting the jealousy that Eva warned would turn him against me, crowded into my mind.

Mother was pinching the skin between her eyebrows. ‘Privacy's no use to Liam now.'

‘
Your letters worry me
,' Dad went on. ‘
They hardly seem to come from you at all
.'

‘Please don't,' I said.

He turned his back on me, holding the paper so as to catch more light. ‘
We've a lot to talk about when you come home
.'

‘What date is on it?' Mother asked.

‘March. Here's another.'

I tried to see the envelope in his hand, relieved by a glimpse of ivory What if he found mine? But this was another from Isabel.

‘
Why have you not written
' – Dad cleared his throat and went on reading – ‘
since your leave was cancelled? I feel so cheated. It must be a million times worse for you. Don't let the war change you
…' He looked away from the page towards the window.

‘What's the date on that one, Bill?'

‘15th April.'

‘He'd have got it the week before … Is there a later one?'

He shuffled through them. ‘I don't see one.'

She sagged back into her chair. ‘She meant to end their engagement!'

‘She doesn't say that,' I said, uneasy.

‘She doesn't have to, it's clear as day.'

‘No, it's not.' I bundled the tunic back into the trunk, any old way, and stood up.

‘Imagine it.' Mother's voice shook. ‘And, Bill, she has your mother's ring.'

‘They're not our letters,' I appealed to Dad. ‘We shouldn't read them.'

He appeared to have aged ten years in as many minutes. ‘What should I do with them?'

My mind raced back through letters I'd written, things I'd revealed to Liam that I never would have said to my parents, information about our friends, things I might have said that would reflect back on him – whatever happened, I wanted a chance to see them first, to sift through them and decide what to show and what to hide. It was all wrong, that death had left him so exposed. It wasn't only Isabel I was defending when I said, ‘I'll take them.'

‘No, give them to me.' Mother's eyes were red. There was a queer little pause, while Dad looked from one of us to the other.

‘Don't, Dad. Please. It's not fair.' I held out my hand.

I felt the heat of Mother's glare, but kept my eyes fixed on Dad, willing him to listen. ‘People wrote things for his eyes only.' I had to swallow the lump in my throat. ‘We all did. You wouldn't read them if he were still alive. You know you wouldn't. Give them here, to me, and I'll get them back to the people who wrote them.' I reached for the bundle of letters. He let them go. I moved away, in case he changed his mind.

‘It's none of it Liam. It's a travesty!' Tears stood in Mother's eyes. She dashed them away with the heels of her hands. ‘I want rid of it. All of it.' A piece of wood spat a shower of sparks into the grate. She swept something unseen from her lap and got to her feet. ‘You may as well burn it.'

‘But,' Dad said, looking down into the trunk, ‘there are photographs.'

‘Does nothing I say matter any more?' She stamped her foot. Everything glass in the room shivered – windows, picture-frames, ornaments, siphons, crystal. ‘I said, burn it.' A fierce glance dared me to argue. She rushed out.

‘You'd better go after her,' I said.

‘But –'

‘Go on. I'll deal with this.'

I stretched my arms across the cold breadth of the trunk and tried to lift it, but it was too big, too heavy. My knees knocked off the edges. I took hold of one of the handles and dragged it to the basement stairs. I went down first and pulled it carefully after me, steadying its weight with my body. I'd a sudden flash of Liam, that horrible autumn he went away to school. He bumped his school trunk down the stairs just exactly this way, mimed being knocked from step to step, exaggerated his surprise to make me laugh.

The door to the kitchen was closed. When I opened it, a smell of stock made my stomach even more uneasy. Lockie looked around from the pot she was stirring. ‘What is it? You're green as mould.' She looked past me, at the trunk. ‘Ah.' She moved the stockpot off the heat and came to help, wiping her hands on a rag. ‘Bring it through to the scullery.' She bent to one of the tin handles. I took the other. Between us, the trunk was easy enough to carry through to the workbench.

She made no comment about the row she must have heard, even with the door closed. She said nothing about sacrifice or duty, none of the platitudes I was so sick of hearing. Instead she got to work, quick and efficient. I took the letters and photographs from where they lay on top of the clothes that were so alien, set them aside on a shelf. Then I followed Lockie's lead.

There was muck caked into underclothes, a bloodstained shirt, a pair of stiffened, encrusted socks. Underneath, we found a pile of poorly laundered shirts, a dress-uniform jacket that looked brand new, a stiff leather belt. Lockie brought over a scissors and cut away the badges, the single star from the shoulder and the buttons, the shiny and the tarnished. ‘Ye might want mementoes,' she said.

I fingered the shirt. A button was missing, the button hole enlarged and frayed. It told me nothing. Mother was right, none of it felt like Liam. The army could have sent any man's things, one khaki uniform was the same as another. Apart from the letters and the two photographs, we wouldn't know the difference.

He and Isabel had met a commercial photographer one day in the mountains, and had their portrait made as gifts to each other. Liam's slightly prominent teeth were showing, his eyes shadowed by his cap. Isabel's face was alight, as though the sun were shining into it. The other one was of me, with a hand clapped to my mouth. I'd had it made in Lawrence's, with money I'd begged from Eva, and sent it in my first letter after he went to the training camp, last August. I didn't have to turn it over to remember what I wrote on the back,
Little sister, big mouth
. The concession to his supposed seniority was my way of apologizing for the stupid row we'd had before he left.

Not even Liam could claim he was older now. I slipped the photograph into my pocket. I didn't want to explain to Lockie what I'd written. If only I could take back the things I'd said to him as easily.

She put the scissors aside, scooped the buttons and badges from the table to her broad palm, and poured them into an empty tea-tin. The tin was black, decorated with Chinese figures robed in scarlet and gold. A tall woman, the height of a Dublin policeman, she didn't even have to stand on tiptoe to put it on the top shelf, where Mother wouldn't notice it. She stuffed the remaining heap of clothes into an old potato sack while I put the other photograph into a manila envelope.

‘It should have been me who died. She'd have preferred it.'

Lockie didn't turn a hair. ‘God forgive you, girl.' She slid the envelope into a drawer, as calm as if we were sorting laundry.

The trunk itself looked smaller, an indifferent class of a thing, now that everything remotely personal had been taken away. She edged it into a corner with her foot.

I picked up the letters. ‘I'll take these upstairs. Then what?'

‘We could bring the clothes around to the nuns, for burning. That way your ma doesn't have to know it's happening.'

‘D'you really think we should?'

‘If that's what she said. It's fitting. It's no use to him now.'

The sorrow in her voice nearly undid me altogether. ‘I'll take them.'

The hessian chafed my arms on the way over to the convent. I was glad of its burn, glad to feel something I could put a name to. Overhead, the clouds were the colour of bone.

A short, elderly nun answered the convent door. ‘Of course,' she said, when I explained why I'd come, as if people turned up every day with requests just like it. ‘Give it here, I'll take care of it.'

‘No. I'll do it.'

The nun tilted her head and considered. ‘We'll let Harrison see to it,' she said at last. ‘He's outside.'

She led me through dark corridors smelling of beeswax, the walls lined with images of martyrdom and upturned, haloed faces, through a stone-flagged kitchen not unlike ours, and out to the yard, where the hens clucked and scrabbled in their pen. There was a row of sheds at the back, where the man who must have been Harrison sat on an upturned pail. He threw away a cigarette and stood when he saw us coming, a bony man with a weathered, good-natured face under a battered hat.

The nun explained what I wanted.

‘Not to worry, miss.' He grinned, revealing dark stumps of teeth. ‘There's the makings of a bonfire here already. We'll get a dacent blaze going in no time.' He poured oil on a rag
and set it on a pile of kindling. Then he reached for the sack. His hands were grimy, his fingernails black.

I hesitated. ‘I'd rather.' Part of me wanted to scream at him to hurry and get this over with, but my hands stuck to the cloth, the way Dad had held on to Liam's letters earlier. The little nun laced her fingers together. Harrison smiled, encouraging.

I gave him the sack. He laid it on the kindling, wiped his hands on the sides of his trousers, struck a match. If we all went up in flames right there and then, that'd put an end to this sham of a birthday for good and all. I fought an urge to howl, loud enough so Liam would hear, all the way across the sea and under foreign fields as he was, his ears full of mud.

The nun pulled a black rosary from her pocket and murmured under her breath, a rolling boil of sounds. The familiar rhythm took over and, despite myself, I gave the responses. When the decade was finished, she kept going, into the Requiescat:
eternal rest … perpetual light … rest in peace
.

I was melting in a blast of heat, and the whole world with me. Oily blue smoke wavered around my face and filled my lungs. Next, I was sitting on Harrison's pail, my face close to the shifting ground.

‘Keep your head between your knees, child,' the nun was saying. ‘You nearly fell in the flames. Drink this.' A chipped cup was put into my hand. ‘It's water.'

It tasted putrid, as though all the world's filth were in it.

Back in Liam's old room, I put the packet of letters on his desk. This is where I used to sit to write to him, after he left. I'd enjoyed the clear surface, the blank paper waiting to be filled, my pen nestled in its snug wooden groove. It was pure luxury to have space and quiet of my own.

In the room I'd shared with Florrie, and Eva too 'til she
married, there were always pots and jars to push aside if I wanted to use the dressing table, a residue of lotion or powder that would stain the page. Florrie would chat away in the background, no matter that I'd little interest in her latest hatpin, or her friend Glenda's new gloves, or if Eugene thought there might be money to be made from the perfumed creams she spent hours concocting in our room. Such rows we used to have, Florrie and I, about whether we'd have the window wide open or shut tight. She had it all her own way now. Eugene had saved her from the fate of the unpromising spinster daughter – which role now fell to me.

During our college days, Liam's and mine, I used to study at the dining-room table, to get away from her. Liam would come in and distract me with the latest chip of economic or political brilliance from Professor Kettle. Liam and his friends canvassed for him in the election that sent him to Westminster. I posted a few bills myself, I have to admit. He dazzled us all with visions of a fair and prosperous future, a future the best of his followers wouldn't live to see. People said John Redmond was to blame for sending so many off to fight, but it was Tom Kettle who turned Liam's head.