The Weight of Him(29)

He ended the call. He would phone the Dublin office on Monday, all right.

As he walked to the back door, the breeze moved the clothes on the line. He stopped, watching the eerie dance. His father had replaced the clothesline the day after Michael did what he did. At first, Billy had felt grateful; the empty space where the clothesline used to be—with its two short, butchered ends remaining—was awful to see. But even this replacement line rankled. It had to bother Tricia, too. Destroy her a little more every time she used it.

*

Billy returned home from town, finding Lisa’s shiny black BMW parked in his usual spot. He would enter the house and face her soon enough. First, he would take down the now-empty clothesline. Tricia must have scrambled to bring in the wash before Lisa’s arrival. That was his sister, all right. Such a perfectionist, she made everyone else feel inferior. The taut, empty clothesline seemed like something sketched midair. It looked like it sliced the world.

He dragged his new purchase onto the lawn and ripped open the cardboard box with his bare hands. He removed the various parts and set about assembling the umbrella clothesline at the far corner of the lawn, next to the garage. Merely a matter of screwing together the center pole and locking it into the weighted base. From the kitchen window, they wouldn’t even be able to see it.

Tricia and Lisa appeared at the back door. Tricia walked toward him, hugging herself. Lisa remained in the doorway.

“Great idea, thanks,” Tricia said.

“I should have thought of it sooner.”

She nodded, indicating the rope clothesline. “Will you take that down now, please?”

“Gladly.” After a struggle, he unknotted the rope from its hook on the garage, and, after a second struggle, from its hook at the house. Michael mustn’t have been able to undo the knots in the previous clothesline. That was why he had used the kitchen knife. All that time to think, to change his mind, and still the boy had ended himself.

Billy held the lump of rope in his hands, wondering how the police had disposed of the clothesline Michael had used. He pictured all the ropes every suicide had ever used the country over. The whole world over. He saw them burning in a single, gigantic bonfire. Horrific testimony to all that unnecessary waste of life. He decided against throwing the rope away. He wanted to watch it burn. He wished he could have set the rope Michael had used on fire. He would have watched it blaze to nothing.

Tricia nodded toward the band of trees behind the football pitch. “Now all we need to do is bulldoze that lot.”

He half laughed. “Don’t tempt me.”

She smiled, the thin curve of her lips small and sad.

*

Back in the house, Tricia pushed Ivor’s hand away from the plate of biscuits. “They’re not for you.”

Billy shot her a sharp look, which she missed.

“Ivor, why don’t you and Anna go outside and play?” Lisa urged. “The adults want to have a little chat.”

“They’re all right where they are,” Billy said, hating how she liked to make a production of everything.

“Let them go,” Tricia said.

“Come on, Ivor.” Anna flicked her blond hair over her shoulder and pulled on her brother’s arm. The two disappeared up the hall and into the living room, Anna all bones and Ivor all rolls, two miniatures of their parents.

Lisa licked chocolate and biscuit crumbs off her fingertips, her nails polished red and her dark curls tamed into a bun, showing off her thick eyebrows and creamy complexion. Her large, silver hoop earrings glinted under the lights. Billy looked away from her bare arms, the fake-tanned limbs looking varnished and hand-crafted. At fifty-one, she could still draw whistles and comments on the street, something, she claimed, she hated.

He placed two eggs in the saucepan to boil, and fixed himself a cup of green tea.

“So,” Lisa began. “You’ve already gone public with your diet and this march?” She bit into another chocolate biscuit. He thought of the coil of clothesline on the backseat of his car, imagined the rope tied around his hands, stopping him from reaching for the biscuits.

“Were there not other options you could have looked into?” she continued. “Something that would help others without all the spectacle?”

“Spectacle?” Billy said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Stop what?”

“Did you talk to the Samaritans?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“What did they say?”

He tried not to let his face betray him. “What do you think they said? They said they’d take my arm and all.”

“What about medical supervision? Have you gone to see Dr. Shaw?”

“I’ve seen him, I know what I’m doing,” he snapped. He knew Shaw was never going to approve of how hard and fast he wanted to go about everything. Shaw would want him to slow down and go easy. That wasn’t an option. Lives were at stake.

“That’s something, at least,” Lisa said. “Tricia tells me you’ve been starving yourself, though. That’s a huge shock for your system, and it’s also how you’ve failed every other time. This has to be a change of lifestyle, Billy, not a crash diet. You know that.”

The gall of her, treating him like a child, a total eejit. All his life, it was the same old thing, as though he was the wrong brother as well as the wrong son. Trembling, he fired his spoon across the kitchen, hitting the far wall and splattering tea onto the pale blue paint. Lisa and Tricia both startled and stared at him wide-eyed.