My Buried Life (20 page)

‘Wasn’t she? In love with you?’

A slow shake of his head.
No
.

No? It’s the only thing that makes sense. ‘Yes she was. She was in love with you, and you knew it.’ Jesus Christ, is Peter my father? Is that what this is about, what he’s attempting to tell me through all this clumsy fumbling?My eyes dart about the room, alighting on anything that isn’t this man sitting erect in front of me. A bus thunders by outside, rattling the window in its pane. Even though I’m seated, my legs feel wobbly. I might never stand up again. ‘My mother was in love with you.’ If I repeated it enough times he’d have to take ownership of the truth. I needed to hear him admit it.

Again that slow shake of his head. His eyes, navy with intensity, swung to meet mine. ‘Your father was.’

The coffee and the croissants slosh in my stomach. Bile bites my throat, and the noisy hotel drawing room tilts on its side. I expect everyone to slide in one direction, but no one seems to notice except me. They carry on answering phones and mixing drinks, stirring sugar into coffee and laughing at each other’s jokes.

My mother knew. She created a story, her own invention, out of it, but she’d known all along. She conjured up a house of silent ghosts and a buried life, never to be unearthed.

Deception, like steel, holds the cold forever.

Suspended above it all, I hover, shivering, my teeth rattling like cups on a silver tray. Peter’s hands obscure his face.

Patterns bloom black in front of my eyes. My father and this man. My father and the American. My father and Peter.

The world dims its lights. My mind abruptly blanks, vacates itself, and the floor reaches out, gathering me into an empty embrace.

CHAPTER 30

T
he new motorway out of Dublin is strangled, even on a Tuesday morning in April. Each tiny town that has been bypassed hosts an unparalleled vista of the barely moving snake of vehicles winding its way, minute by aching minute, along the new road.

How the Americans would laugh at our vision of progress. A road that’s been decades in the making has swallowed enough money to fund developing countries, sliced open historic sites and destroyed the countryside, all in the name of getting people to where they wanted to go, faster. And still it crawls.

Adam has loaned me his car, his vegetable-oil Merc. The smell of doughnuts is at times too much, and I have to roll the window down when it threatens to overpower me. The nausea has subsided, though, so it’s easier.

This trip is the return leg of the journey I made over thirty years before, aged 4, with my mother driving and my brother asleep in the front seat. Now the small towns are signposts instead of milestones, bypassed and built up beyond recognition. New housing estates have been conjured out of developers’ hats, turning everywhere into a suburb of Dublin. Names like
Brook, Manor, Court, Vale
have been tacked on in some misguided attempt to convince people that they’re living in the city. The desperate need for uniformity.

What’s so wrong with being different? Why is individuality feared? Although I can admit to sometimes imagining my life in a parallel world, one where I don’t have to dwell on the inner life, where I’m happy to work in an office job and come home to my suburb each evening, nothing more pressing on my mind than what to cook for dinner. Maybe my golf-playing husband and I would watch television after the children are put to bed, some nonsense singing competition where we could be truly concerned about what the outcome would be. We could read cheap thrillers and romance novels on a package holiday to some overcrowded
costa
, not know a line of poetry or a beat of jazz, name our children after celebrities or obscure Irish heroes.

I’ve chased the unattainable, and look where it has got me. In a borrowed Mercedes, a plastic drum of used vegetable oil rolling around on the back seat in case of an emergency, returning for the first time to the place of my birth. I should have done it years ago. What have I been waiting for, my mother’s permission? Her approval? Other than vanishing after my birth, I doubted there was much I could have achieved that my mother would have approved of.

Traffic inches along the motorway, each lane stuffed with cars and freight trucks. Exhaust shimmers in the air, poisoning the banks of daffodils that flourish on either side of the road. The faces of the drivers I see are blank with boredom. Some yak on phones, other tap their fingers on the steering wheel. Most are probably doing the same journey every day. Welcome to the new Ireland. Let us squeeze you out of the cities and into featureless housing developments, and let’s hope you’re too fatigued from commuting, too worried about money and your massive mortgage to stop and think that you’re being done from every angle.

A listless child waves to me from the car in front. A police motorcycle weaves among the gridlock. Cows graze in distant fields. The sun reveals itself in jagged bursts from behind clouds, an intermittent spotlight on the green surroundings.

I revealed nothing to Adam about Peter, or the trip I needed to take, the inheritance I’d uncovered when I finally dragged myself into Charles Bergin’s office, and Adam was enough of a man not to ask. His week with his daughter was a success, and I discovered how interesting it can be to spend time with a child. I need the practice.

My father has left me the farm. When he moved to New York he locked the door of the house and kept the key. It wasn’t sold or rented. The land was leased to another farmer until the end of last year. The house is probably in ruins.

Charles Bergin assured me that he knew nothing of my father’s recent death.

‘I have a letter from a firm of American lawyers, with instructions for you,’ he said, as we sat in his office on a bright day at the end of March, and he read me what I owned. The farmhouse, the land, any equipment or animals or crops that are still there.

He quoted from codicils, explained what I needed to do in order to take hold of my inheritance. My father also left me money. The business he owned with Peter in Manhattan was very successful. The money resides in a bank in New York, and requires my signature plus my presence before it can be accessed.

So either way I’m returning to New York. Back to the city of a thousand languages, self-absorbed and consumed, eating itself up in a vortex of around-the-clock noise. The city that never sleeps. What an understatement. The city that never even blinks in case it misses something, some new trend or piece of art, something that hasn’t happened anywhere else. How exhausting to be so constantly chasing after the tail of your own reputation, never to be able to draw breath in case it occurs somewhere else instead. I love New York, even though its self-awareness grates at times. All those movies, all the art and stories, none of it comes close to capturing the real city, because a city is a constantly shifting landscape, and to try and pin it down to a few characteristics is to keep its flame in a jar. I understand that much about New York, but I’ve met few other people who did. Maybe my father felt that way about it. I like to think he did.

It feels like I’m emerging from hibernation, a tunnel that has taken an eternity to crawl out of. The light is still too bright for me after all that time underground, but I’ll get used to it eventually. At least I can dig my way out of the buried life. Unlike my brother, who had to leave the world in order to be free. Unlike my mother, who constructed a wall of anger that no one scaled. Unlike my father, who jumped ship and swam to another shore. My soul requires work, but at least I still possess it.

I honk at a woman applying mascara in the car in front of me, holding me up. She gives me the fingers before putting her car in gear and driving on. For all the difference it makes. Five minutes later, another bypassed town, another thousand cars and trucks trying to exit and enter the slip roads. I give up.

A Brazilian girl, all big hair and polished skin, brings me my coffee and sandwich. The small pub is empty, except for the daily clientele of about four men, who probably squander all their days here, checking the horse racing results and making their pints last for hours. Widowers, or bachelors, or maybe men whose wives had run away after they caught them engaged in illicit relations with the neighbouring farmer’s nephew.

A barman polishes glasses, and the Brazilian girl swipes at tabletops with her cloth. A radio plays bad country music, but at least the volume is low.

The girl is in Ireland to work. She stayed in Dublin for a month, hated it, then moved with her friend to the midlands. She loves it, she tells me in accented English. She wants to stay. The climate doesn’t bother her, she says with a graceful shrug. After a lifetime of the tropics and poverty, there is more to be experienced. She teaches samba in the community centre three nights a week, and already she’s booked out.

Samba in the Irish midlands. Motorways, supersized shopping malls, SUVs on every road, and now samba. What a change from my father’s youth, when all that was available was the land or the priesthood, Mass and the GAA at the weekends.

I feel very old and very weary. I’m only 37, but it’s like I’ve lived ten lifetimes. I wish I were more like Maria, the frizzy-haired beauty who still has enough faith in the universe to ignore the rain and the monotony of the flat land, to get excited about teaching Latin dancing to the rhythmless hordes. I can just about muster up the energy to teach literature.

I understand how people snap. The line is so fine, just silk really. My brother slicing his skin was just his way of saying
enough
. I could order a few whiskeys now, then get behind the wheel of the Mercedes and fall asleep. It would be harder in broad daylight, easier to do it in the quiet of night, with fewer people around to pull me from the oily wreckage, call for ambulances, do some mouth-to-mouth to get me moving.

I pay for the surprisingly good sandwich. Honestly, I expected a slice of orange cheese on cheap white bread, maybe a bit of ham for good measure, not the olive bread I’ve just consumed, with feta, tomatoes and tabouli. I drain my coffee cup and get back into the car.

It should only be a ninety-minute drive from Dublin to the farm; it feels like a drive across the outback. The original road, the one we took that night in the old Hillman Hunter, surely would have been quicker than this traffic-clogged Hades.

I check the map. Not too far now. Two more towns to bypass and then I’ll be there. I pass an unfinished housing estate just off the motorway. The signage proclaims it to be a place where dreams begin. Nightmares, more likely. The grey concrete, the land stripped of all greenery, the road leading nowhere. A ghost estate. A headache dislodges itself and begins to pulse. My nerves prickle. Dread pools in my stomach. I almost wish I’d brought someone with me, but whom could I have asked? Not Maude, not Adam. Not Sean, already settled into his Australian odyssey. My sad social circle. Regardless, I couldn’t have asked anyone. This is one of those journeys that must be made alone.

Finally, the motorway is behind me. I’m back on narrow roads, with verdant hedgerows dividing land, chestnut trees with buds just peeping into bloom. New lambs stagger on spindly legs in fields, beside the woolly contentment of their mothers. The sun skids in and out of cloud cover, the air clear and free of city pollution.

I surprise myself by knowing the farm when I get to it. The road is narrower than I remember, but it’s the same. The wide red metal gate for keeping the cows in the field is now black, and in better shape than it had been when I was a child. I recall picking the bubbling paint off it, digging up the rust with my fingernails, then spending ages washing my hands to get the smell of rust off my skin. That metallic taste. I can still feel it on my tongue.

The Mercedes barely fits in the driveway. Blackberry bushes scrape their limbs against the paintwork, the overgrown grass on a level with my eyes as I drive. Two thrushes fly out of the bush, their squawks of fright ringing loud in the empty country air. No one has disturbed this path for a long time.

Doubtless some developer must have investigated the house and land. Charles Bergin said the fields had been tilled until last year, but a thousand houses could have sprung up if the farmhouse had been bulldozed. They built everywhere else, why not here? I could sell it all, and never again have to worry about an income. No more academia. I could pack up and leave. Maude is safe and independent. With a bag on my back I’d be able to go wherever I want, stay as long or as little as I desire. I could keep running, as I’ve been doing since my brother died, and maybe if I stop thinking, even for a minute, I might just be able to forget it all. Reality has worn me out. One way has led me to another, and I’m further from the starting point than I’ve ever been, too far even to contemplate returning to zero, if I could even remember what that was.

I kill the engine outside the back door. We never used the front door, from what I recall. The old boot scraper is still there, smaller than in my memory, rusted down to a brittle skeleton. The chicken coop has rotted away, the wire netting oxidised, the wood almost gone. A crow flies out of the cowshed.

The silence is overpowering, deafening in the sounds that are no longer heard. The cows lowing, the hens fighting for grain, the hiss of the cats as they fought over mice, the crunch of gravel under work-heavy boots, all extinguished.

The car door groans when I open it. I palm the house key and step out into the hush of the early afternoon. The last time I crossed this gravel I’d been barefoot, sharp bits making me hop, my mother’s hand on my pyjamaed shoulder urging me into the car, her impatience gleaming, transparent in the late June night. Even then I’d aggravated her, my gaping need, her cold failure to fill it. But it was my brother’s need that eclipsed all else, and she hadn’t had the courage to face it. Far easier to dwell on me, cut off from my father. Impatience with a dispossessed child was an easier repository than the bewilderment of an unhappy boy, whose sadness, left unchecked, grew into the demon that swallowed him whole. His rage and self-abasement sneaked through his cells like the deadliest tumour, gaining momentum from the fear it evoked in others.

Simpler by far to focus on the soft target. That was my mother’s knack. That way at least she could be seen to be doing something.

The sky had darkened as I drove the last few miles. Rainclouds now meet and meld, obliterating the spring brilliance. A breeze whips my hair across my face. Dust blows up from the gravel. It mustn’t have rained in weeks. A half-inch of water reposes at the bottom of an ancient barrel near the back door.

The dithering has to stop. There is no reason to stay outside.

The key fits perfectly in the rusty lock. The door swings inwards with a creak that speaks of years of neglect, a longing for oil. Gathering my apprehension in a tight grip, I step inside.