Hanging with the Elephant (11 page)

Well, why the fuck was I wasting my time staring at the floor when I couldn’t focus at all? I was up on my feet in an instant and quenched the candle in complete frustration and went outside and paced up and down the garden, using the musician’s walking stick to whack last year’s nettles and me in a rage that I couldn’t quite understand.

If she hadn’t been in Poland at that moment, what would I have done? If she were near me, if she were in the kitchen, what would I do? I would have gone into the house for a
cup of tea, a slice of currant bread or a bowl of chilli soup; whatever was going. It would have calmed me down. Or if she had been in her studio at the end of the garden, I could have gone down and sat by her stove as she sculpted some new figure in clay. If she were not in Poland, she might have sustained me. Any kind of small talk would have taken me away from the badger and the soldier and the war in Afghanistan, because as sure as there is shite in a goose, meditation wasn’t helping me.

M
Y MOTHER WAS afflicted with loneliness. I suppose it eats away at everyone eventually. Of course, it’s glaringly obvious in the old bachelors from up the hills buying their bread and rashers in village supermarkets, and you can’t miss it in widowers who take up carpentry just to belong to a club, or widows who go to yoga classes. And there’s often someone in the local book club or drama group who has had a sudden bereavement and is trying to get out of the house. And they walk with such a heavy weight that their loneliness is
easy to feel. But there are lonely people in marriages, too. Unnoticed. Those whose smiles are a prison because they just can’t admit even to themselves that their partner is a waste of space, in case it brings the world tumbling down on their children’s heads or in case their mothers would say, ‘I told you so.’

Sometimes when I see a couple sitting together in the corner of a bar, I can’t avoid noticing how she glows in his presence, smiling like the sun, holding her face close to his, but when she slips away to the bathroom, the smile evaporates and her expression is drained and uneasy – and then does the make-up seem just a touch overdone. And all her gloss and powder seem like a prison door behind which she too might be wondering why she always feels alone. Maybe everyone is lonely and maybe it’s incurable. And no matter how many relations hold hands around a deathbed, there is no escaping the solitude of that final letting go. And maybe that’s the secret of this universe. Certainly when I look at the happy young woman my mother was in pictures from the past, she didn’t know what the universe had in store for her.

Her face blazed with happiness as she walked the streets of Cork, arm in arm with her friends. And even when we were growing up, she loved having people come to stay, and preparing dinners, and wheeling trollies of freshly made buns into the drawing room when the room was full, and making chicken soup dinners when her children came
home from university for a weekend, and bringing buns to the old women in the annex of the county home on Sunday afternoons, and playing golf, and going to visit her sisters in Westmeath and Dublin, and staying up all night in our house at parties when there were other people there who would listen to her stories – and all that time she loved other people. She needed other people. But like all young people, she never thought she’d get old. Like many old people, she didn’t know why her heart had grown melancholic. I suppose the heart is the core of the problem. She reached out all her life to be held by others, because we all need to be held by something or someone. And as she got older, that holding was less firm, and the friends dwindled until they were few and far between, and she realised that loneliness is what kills us all in the end.

She was in her seventies when the beloved and I first moved to Leitrim. That was in 1993. She drove herself to our front door on the first Christmas we were in the house, and again at the end of January, for our daughter’s first birthday party. But two years later, she was going downhill. She was seventy-nine and we thought she wouldn’t last much longer. She stopped driving. She was short of breath. And she had dwindled into a small bird of a woman in a tweed suit. She sat in the kitchen of our little cottage in the hills above Lough Allen on Christmas morning. Myself and my beloved went for a walk around noon, as the turkey
roasted slowly in the oven. Outside it was snowing and the world was silent and white.

‘I’d prefer to watch mass on the television,’ Mother had said.

So off we went, me and the beloved, arm in arm, while the old woman held herself in rigid attention for the pope, and the child slept in the cot in the front room.

I thought it might have cheered my mother to be alone with her grandchild, but it didn’t. She was still watching the pope when we returned.

‘How was the child?’ I’d asked.

‘No trouble,’ she’d replied, as if the baby might have been a sheep.

But now I know that while we were out walking, she was writing in her diary – a tiny book, hardly bigger than a cigarette box, with just one line for each day of the year.

Christmas Morning. Last night they had visitors in the front room. A young couple. Teachers. I sat in the kitchen all night at the television. Very lonely. No wireless.

Later that night, alone in her bedroom, she wrote about Christmas Day.

My pudding and cake went down well, I think.

On Stephen’s Day, she wrote again.

Not feeling well. I want to go home.

She stayed another six days but insisted on going home before New Year’s Day. We watched her pack her bag like a sorrowful child heading off to a grim boarding school on the last day of December, and we put the small presents we had given her on Christmas morning into the boot of the car. On each of the six days, unbeknownst to us, she had written another terse report in her diary.

Not well today.

We had dinner in Ballinamore on the way to Cavan and when we got to her house, I discovered a leak from a pipe in the bathroom. The ceiling was ruined. I phoned a man, who promised to come out the following day and fix it. I kissed her on her dry, powdery cheek at the front door and drove away.

‘Ring me when you get home,’ she said.

I tried her number later in the evening, but she didn’t answer. I left a message wishing her a happy new year and guessed she had gone to bed early.

In her diary she wrote.

Very upset about the water. He did nothing. I have no one to help me.

And the next day.

Stayed up to watch the New Year on television. Nobody rang.

And the next day.

Nobody called. Bad day.

She lived through sixteen more Christmases, mostly spending them with us, either in Leitrim or Mullingar, and they were always much the same. There was a glass wall between mother and son. We went through various rituals and we sometimes brushed our cheeks against each other when we met or parted, but that was about it. Intimacy was a project we had both abandoned.

When she came for Christmas, we tried to do as much as we could for her. We warmed the bed. We put on big fires in the front room. We got water for her at night and a bedside lamp that she could manipulate with ease if she needed to go to the toilet. But nothing worked.

She was isolated in a little world of her own, which she tracked in her diary but was resolute in keeping from her son. And she teared up with automatic melancholy when other folk walked into her presence. I asked her once why she didn’t share more with me. She said, ‘I don’t want to be upsetting you.’

But she did upset me. She was unhappy all the time, and that made me sad.

Sometimes, I wondered why. Did I not visit her often enough? Did she feel she ought to be living with us even though we only had a cottage with two tiny bedrooms? And no matter how many Sundays we took her to dinner in the
Kilmore Hotel, or no matter how many times we brought her to family festivals, birthday parties, or for Christmas, we never really were able to cross the line and reach the space where she lay wounded for so many years. In hotels, she always insisted on paying for the dinner. At Christmas, she brought puddings, Christmas cake and bottles of whiskey. But when Christmas or Easter or the child’s birthday was over, she went home to her own house and closed the door, and wrote in her diary and said nothing more to us.

I would often spend half an hour on the phone.

‘What’s wrong, Mammy?’ I would say. And she would break into willowy sobs.

‘Nothing,’ she would reply. ‘Nothing at all.’ The silence would stretch out between us on the line like a great empty beach in Donegal and we might as well have been at either end of that beach, whispering into the wind.

‘Please tell me what’s wrong, Mammy. Did I do something to annoy you?’ Over and over again. Until eventually she would say it again: ‘Nothing.’ And the phone would go dead, leaving me full of anxiety that I had failed as a son.

Maybe she didn’t have the language to express her terror of old age or her rage at ending up so frail. Perhaps there was something about growing old that she couldn’t accept or articulate.

And yet with other people, she could be the direct opposite. When other people held her, called her, touched her, she responded like a little girl who is admired in a new
dress. This was the most important mystery about her life – that, alone, she sank deep into the dark and yet when she was teased into company, she became almost alarmingly jolly. She was vivacious. And she was even jolly in old age when anyone reached out to her. When her neighbours came to the door with the newspapers or groceries or collecting for the parish, she’d bring them into the drawing room and show them pictures of her grandchild and talk about how well her children were doing in the world and gossip for hours about other neighbours. She wouldn’t let them go for hours, because she needed them so much.

And yet if, subsequently, I phoned her and enquired if she had seen anyone over the previous few days, she would leave a pause on the line that had a kind of anger in it, and eventually she would whisper, ‘Nobody.’

T
HE SAME NOBODY I was left with when the beloved was in Poland. And I feared that the days would pass slowly and that I would be bored with no one to talk to. But I was wrong. In fact, the days flew.

It snowed twice. Rainstorms battered the roof at night, and the gutters got clogged with pine needles blown from the trees and the water began to overspill from the guttering onto the window sills. One night, the electricity went out and I sat by the fire reading from a Kindle, and I lit the stove in the sun room and then fried potato cakes,
eggs and rashers in a pan on top of the stove. It felt like camping out.

Every morning, I made a bowl of porridge and a pot of coffee. I went to the studio and lit the stove there. I sat looking out at the mountain. Around noon, I went walking up the hill. In the afternoons, I sat again in the studio, dozing, eating apples and drinking coffee. On the first day, I had made a shrine by clearing a small table and layering it with blue Mongolian prayer scarves and white Tibetan prayer scarves and I brought out a statue of Buddha from the glass case. A precious Buddha statue I had got from the reincarnation of the King of Tibet in India years before. I had put a candle beside it. I wanted to set out the water bowls as well, but when I saw them in the drawer corroded from having been left unused for too long, I’d decided to leave them where they were.

After five days alone, I had seen nobody apart from the postman, whom I saw occasionally through the window as he dropped electricity bills and flyers for Aldi in the letterbox or when he knocked on the glass door of my studio with a parcel. I had planned to clean the house to a standard of military perfection because I’ve always had the notion that with one person away, cleaning would require less effort. But after almost a week, things were getting more chaotic.

The dirty clothes defeated me. I put on a wash, probably on too high a heat, which turned the bed sheets pink
because I had thrown in some particularly red tartan pyjama bottoms, which I had been given the previous Christmas to match the pair of tartan slippers. I wasn’t bothered about that, apart from being angry with the pyjamas. First, they killed my libido and now they were destroying the sheets. I dragged them out of the tumbler and hissed at them as if I was holding a disobedient dog.

‘You fucking stupid excuse for pyjamas,’ I said.

I do know that pyjama bottoms are an inanimate object and incapable of feeling. I know they didn’t worm their way into the washing machine unbeknownst to me. But being alone has many strange effects on the mind, and I had begun to develop a compulsion to vent my anger at the most innocuous of objects around me.

Drying clothes was another difficulty. I couldn’t master the art of drying anything outside. I presume it’s possible because the beloved does it all the time. But women may have some secret ability to sense when the rain is going to stop, so they can dash out and throw everything on the line immediately and take them in again two hours later before the rain resumes.

I decided to dry them in the house. I even found three clotheshorses in the shed that had been there since the time the child was in Baby-gros, and I set them up in the sun room and lit the stove. We have central heating, but we also have four stoves – one for her studio, one for my
studio, one for the office and one for the sun room. They were bought one at a time, and the theory was that they saved money. But the stove in the sun room is rarely used, and so it smoked all day while I was out in my studio chanting like a Mongolian Lama. Even the cobwebs went sooty. I had no alternative but to put on the central heating and leave the clotheshorses stacked against the radiators all night. But that didn’t work either. Maybe I stacked up too much because the radiators just warmed the wet garments and detergent filled the room with a soft damp aroma in the morning.

After that, I didn’t bother with clothes. I put the wet ones back in the machine, given that many of them were sooty from the smoking stove, and I resolved not to bother changing the clothes I was wearing for the rest of the month. I just needed to be careful. After that, I allowed my elephant go where he wanted. I was going to suit myself. Let the elephant do what he likes and sit where he wants and wear pyjamas. Don’t keep trying to improve him. Besides, no one was going to know if I didn’t change my clothes for the month.