My Buried Life (21 page)

CHAPTER 31

L
ike anything from childhood that hasn’t been visited in years, reality never matches the memory of things. As a small child, my experience of the world beyond home had been limited. The farm was infinite, the fields stretching to disappearing point on the horizon. The house, with its stone floors and big rooms, had provided untold space for my brother and me to run around in, play our imaginary games on the grand stage they required, with no wish for a bigger house or more room in which to let our young lives unfold.

The house is small. Very small. Even in the murky light, not aided by the filthy kitchen windows, I can make out the proportions. Modest at best. I flick the light switch, but even if the electricity was turned on, the single bulb that hangs suspended from a frayed cord is long expired. Back outside, I knock the debris from the windowpanes as best I can, three decades of dirt, dust, moss, and whatever else travels the currents of air before coming to rest on a solid surface. I then retrieve the torch I’d had the foresight to bring with me. I’d had no idea what awaited me. Possibly a crumbling heap of bricks, or a burned-out shell. Vandals exist everywhere, not just in the marginalised suburban estates. Apathy finds willing hosts in every environment. I can’t believe the house hasn’t been burnt, or at least used by local teenagers for drinking cider and indulging their clumsy fumblings.

I make my way from the small square hall to the kitchen. The air sags under its heavy smell of decay. Rotting wood, damp stone, powdered plaster, mildewed fabric. In the fireplace a huge pile of twigs has gathered, the detritus of years of nest-building. Old feathers stick to the stone hearth, and two bird skeletons bare their bony breasts where the coal scuttle had been. Had they fallen, dead, into the room, or had they given up hope of ever escaping the cobwebbed gloom?

The muffled squawk of a crow sounds deep in the chimney, the only sound in the bruised silence.

So many years, but I remember some of it as it was. On the table an abandoned cup sits on its saucer. A cracked teapot with a matching jug keep it company. Dust and grime have smothered their pattern, but I can see that they are part of a set. A wedding present, most likely, from a kind well-wisher, a person who could never have dreamed of the turmoil that raged inside the small stone house. My parents’ wedding had been a small affair, my mother ashamed of her age and how long it had taken her to find a husband. The guest list had comprised Maude and her husband, girls from the office where my mother worked, and some neighbours from the townland. It had taken place on a Tuesday morning, and lunch had been served in a hotel. It was the first time my father had been in a hotel, and I imagine him, nervous and self-conscious in his new suit, running a finger inside his collar to loosen the shirt. Where had Peter been? Sulking while doing the milking, raking hay with all the ferocity of suppressed temper, pounding the narrow lanes, anything to keep him occupied? My mother had had no idea. Of course she hadn’t. She’d probably never imagined that such things between two men were possible.

I open the cupboards. Mice have obliterated anything that had been left, nibbled mounds of what must have been cardboard boxes into small heaps on the shelves. A glass jar with a label faded beyond legibility contains something fossilised, and two tins of cocoa, one without its lid, sit side by side. A spoon lies on the countertop beside a tea caddy. The kettle is on the stove.

My father had been about to make a cup of tea. He was alone. Then
poof
. He vanished. What had happened?

Had Peter arrived one evening after dinner, announcing that he was returning to the States? Sweating, good-looking, maybe with straw still in his blond hair. His hands washed clean of the day’s labours, but splashes of milk from the two cows still on his forearms. Fed by his aunt, probably a stew, followed by cups of tea and some soda bread.

Had the June evening still been bright, the sky not yet stained red by the imminent gloaming, shadows just beginning to lengthen, the day’s work done? Had my father just put the kettle on to boil for his nightly cup of tea, then stood at the window, watching the fields, his fields, stretch to the horizon, layered in every shade of green? Maybe he thought of Andrew and me, wondered what we were up to now that the school year had ended. Did he plan a visit to us, or want our mother to put us on the train to come and stay with him? Then maybe Peter came in the kitchen door, as every visitor to the farm did, interrupting the reel of thought. Without my mother present, Peter didn’t have to scrape his boots. The hens pecked at each other in the yard, their scratching noises puncturing the post-work hush.

Did Peter announce his departure? Say he could no longer suffer the claustrophobia of the two-cow farm and his unspeaking relatives? He was sure of who he was, what he was, even in those despair-edged days of repression and ignorance. He was leaving the following day, and my father could either go with him, begin again in a city that didn’t care who or what he loved, or he could stay, chained to the land he owned through an accident of birth rather than any real belief in it. So my father phoned my mother to tell her he was leaving, moving to New York with the person who loved him. She, glacial, informed him that as far as her children were concerned he was dead. He was dead to her regardless, and it would be easier for everyone if he simply expired. So he did. An unremembered illness, an unfound grave, a vague story. It was the perfect plot: simple, unfussy, totally believable.

What did my father know of Andrew and me? Had my mother replied to any of those monthly envelopes, telling him of my brother’s death, my disappearance into exile? Andrew’s death he must have known about, because he left the land to me alone. Did he learn about my books, my awards? As much as my mother didn’t want me, she desired even less that my father would have me. How difficult had it been for him to let us go, just to disappear into the dark with his suitcase of essentials and nothing tying him down? The house had been abandoned, the teacup unused, the spoon beside the caddy, the son and daughter grieving in their childish way for the father who chose death as his alibi.

Death is so easy, the cleanest of breaks. There’s no arguing with it, no bargaining or beguiling. It simply removes. Did my father come to believe in his own death eventually? Did he drop all the layers of his life as a father, like discarded garments that no longer fit? Like foolish movie stars believing in their own hype, did Tom Perry pause in his Manhattan life, maybe while chopping vegetables for dinner, or while dodging cars crossing the road, to reflect that the story he told himself about himself was not entirely true? Possibly he’d been relieved to get away, anything to put space between him and the children he’d let down. Did we haunt him, his forgotten children? When he slept, did we visit him in dreams, remind him? He replaced us, found people, work, to occupy the empty spaces in his head, but he must have circled back in unguarded moments, found himself in the chair by the hearth, me on his lap, unhappiness weighing his heart down like a stone. Deception is an easy thing to discard at first, but it never fully goes away. Over time, it grows in size and importance, blanking out whatever gains were made by it in the first place. I don’t like to think of my father pretending to be someone other than himself. We were out there, Andrew and I, his children, one of us wanting to forget and be happy, the other wanting to be dead. Andrew got his wish, but I kept on. I suppose I believed that things would turn out all right in the end, even if the end took a damn long time coming. If I hadn’t believed it, who knows? Maybe I’d have joined my brother. The thing is, my father was who he was, but he ran from it. Running runs through my veins, just another part of my botched DNA. I find myself wishing again that he’d stayed. Even though it was Ireland, even though it was the horrible eighties and no one understood anything, we could have got through it. He was our father. He should have stayed. No use wishing that now, of course, and I’m not going to waste another minute regretting things that cannot be changed. But if he could have known how much we missed him, how much we needed him, maybe he would have changed his mind.

The cracked windowpane rattles in the rotten wooden frame. A mouse scratches behind a cupboard door. The whole place has a subterranean feel to it. Dark. Damp. Just being there makes me shaky and slightly sick. I want a drink.

In the living room, the ancient couch has sunk in on itself. Stuffing spills from gaps chewed through by mice, the fabric decayed and stinking. My father left without the old suitcase record player, but not without his records, his modest collection of jazz and big band. I lift the lid of the record player. It is perfect inside, protected from thirty-three years of damp and neglect by its case. I touch the three settings, the volume control, even the needle. This could fetch quite a bit of money on an internet auction. Everyone seeks out retro now, some bit of nostalgia to balance the rampant greed of modern life. The television can go too, the old black-and-white with its two channels and the dial that clicked when we turned it. The two-pronged antenna still squats on top. It was Andrew’s job to manoeuvre them when bad reception ruined the cartoons on Saturday mornings. Two photographs, faded now, are propped behind my grandmother’s clock on the mantelpiece. One is of my father’s parents on their wedding day, my grandmother seated, wearing a hat, my grandfather frowning behind her, his hand stiffly on her shoulder, their sepia world better preserved than the one taken on what must have been my christening, my father holding me outside the church, my mother looking away, Andrew’s eyes screwed up against the brightness. What photo did he pack of us?

Sadness gathers and collects in distant parts of me. No one forgets children, or replaces them. I must be kinder about my father. Regardless of what he did, what choices he made, leaving children is an impossible option. No one wins. I don’t want to think of him, childless, and so far away, wondering if we thought of him, grieved for him, loved him. The sadness is heavy, and it pulls at me, draws me again to think of him as I have always thought of him. Sweet, gentle, kind. He was such a good man.

The stairs creak as I ascend. I step on the edges, mindful of the dilapidated wood. Upstairs is much the same. The taps in the single bathroom, which rattled and shook each morning as they suffered to bring us water, now run dry. Rusty water marks disfigure the once-white sink. The window has slipped from its frame, and cold April air courses in through the cracks. I call to mind how my mother had complained more about the bathroom than any other aspect of the house. Too young to comprehend her frustration, I hadn’t understood, but now I can empathise. Vaguely I recollect her attempts at gentility, the fancy little towels, the perfumed soap, the embroidered cushions she’d put on the couch, the tiny watercolours she framed and hung along the stairs.

The house is a farmhouse, built at the turn of the century for a modest farmer with no knowledge of, or interest in, the world beyond his fields. It was suited to just such a person, his life revolving around crops and animals. Soap and matching wallpapers would remain forever outside his sphere of reference. My grandparents and their parents had been such people, uninfluenced by, and unaware of, city culture. Decades meant nothing to them. Trends didn’t change. Worrying about what clothes to wear would have seemed trivial, insignificant preoccupations for a mind with nothing else to focus on.

I trace my fingers down the moist wall in the bedroom I shared with my brother. His Airfix models still hang suspended from fishing line, testament to the durability of the nylon line and the hooks our father screwed into the ceiling. Water drips from a leak in the roof, the sound hollow, echoing in the deserted landing.

An epiphany of sorts creeps over me, standing in that damp bedroom, with its mouldy bedclothes disintegrated into the rotting mattresses, the child-sized clothes in fragments in the wardrobe, the smell of fungus filling my senses. I feel my mother’s frustration. How angry she must have been with her life, with the shitty deal she’d been apportioned. A house she couldn’t keep clean or refined, regardless of her efforts. A daughter she never bonded with, who clearly preferred her father. A social life that revolved around two stations on the television that she insisted my father buy, and Mass on Sundays among people she considered peasants.

Instead of discarding it all when she left, instead of praising herself for the courage she summoned to escape, she allowed herself to sink into bitterness, holding on to her rage until it became the blueprint for her life. She hated me because I wasn’t her. I was different, the unmouldable daughter. Her cast could not contain my form.

I cannot forgive her for flinging me aside, but standing in the cold little house, a city girl to my bones, I find a measure of understanding for my mother. It is only a miniscule amount, less, perhaps, than a teaspoon, but it is there, and I acknowledge it. The Pears soap, the cushions, the watercolours, the vases of wildflowers. She’d tried. The other things, all that came after we moved, I’ll deal with eventually. I have no choice, not if I want to keep my sanity and refrain from following the prints her feet have so carefully outlined.

Poetry helped, and who knows, maybe it will again. I’ve learned not to rely too heavily on anything or anyone. In the end, all I have is myself. And for now, I am enough.

Bloodied light percolates through another hole in the roof. The sun has emerged and begun its descent. I untie my cashmere cardigan from around my waist and slip it on. Evening is falling, and the cooling air will chill me. The softness of the wool glides over my bare arms. This is the cardigan Isaac gifted me that terrible weekend in LA. I’d put it in a bag for donating, but retrieved it. Why bother? I still like beautiful things. Isaac doesn’t have to haunt everything I own.

I consider opening drawers, sifting through the rest of the abandoned stuff, but it is mostly beyond recognition. My father had turned the key and left it all behind him. Other than his records and the clothes he wore, he’d brought little with him to his new life. How great his hurry must have been if he didn’t even drink his tea. Peter had probably issued him with an ultimatum,
leave with me tonight or you’ll never see me again
. My father, grasping at the straws of freedom, had turned off the kettle, put his records and a toothbrush in a bag, and shut the door firmly on the life he chose not to live.