When All Is Said(17)

‘You and me, against the world, what? You and me.’

Every Sunday evening without fail, we crowded into his bedroom. The war of course had been raging away over beyond for years. And in 1946 the papers were all about the aftermath and how the world would change, and how the horrors in Germany would never happen again. The recriminations and rebuilding projects in Europe were in full swing and my father read it all to us from the paper he had bought after Sunday Mass. Squashed into Tony’s room, with borrowed chairs from the kitchen, we listened to my father’s voice read out stories of the world beyond us and beyond the secret of Tony’s illness. After, we gave our own opinions and summations, disagreeing with the other or agreeing that de Valera had played the right card. Tony joined in when he could. But often I think he wanted to simply drift off to the sounds of our voices.

We knew we were losing him. It was like he was sinking into the bed, he had become so thin. Disappearing before our eyes. There was nothing to be done by us or the doctor. His life ebbed away from our laughter and our care. I continued to sit with him, despite the awfulness and despite my tears that sometimes fell no matter how hard I tried to stop them.

‘Ah Maurice, ya big girl,’ he said, breathlessly one evening having woken to find me sitting beside him all red eyed. He nearly choked on the weak chuckle he managed. I laughed, a big hearty laugh. We were gone again then, laughing away the tragedy of it all.

I never saw my mother look so thin as in those last few weeks before he died. Up at the crack of dawn, even though she might have sat by Tony’s side the whole night, catching snatches of sleep through his distress. We’d be gone over the fields then to earn the money to buy the rich food to save him. The only morning she asked to be excused was the day he died.

‘I can’t possibly do without you today, Hannah!’ Amelia Dollard said, as she fiddled with the flowers in her hallway where my mother waylaid her, her eyes never once rising from the carpet. ‘I’ve told you, Thomas is coming home and bringing the Lawrences. His school friend and his parents. They’ve been so good to him, through all of this, taking him on weekends and such, so we can’t let him down. Poor Thomas – we don’t often see him and what with Hugh away … well it’s the only time he can get home. And we simply can’t do without your apple tart. You’ve made enough, I hope.’ Less of an enquiry than a demand, Amelia Dollard strode away, leaving my mother alone, looking at her hands, clasped on her aproned stomach.

I was tempted to call out to her. I heard it all, you see, through the open front doors. I’d been ordered to assist the gardener with the flowerboxes in the windows at the front of the house. Instead, I watched my mother turn, tilting her head back in an effort to reverse the flow of tears, and walk back to the kitchen. It was Jenny who arrived later, as my mother, with the mounds of baking complete, put on her coat to leave. She caught her at the back door, she told me that evening. I heard my mother’s cry. Her wail rose above the rooftop, screeched over the tiles and down the walls to pound my head and shoulders as I trimmed the trees at the sides of the front door. I knew it was Tony. My legs weakened and I stretched a hand to a branch to hold me up. At that very moment a car pulled up to the house. I didn’t turn my head, knowing who it was in an instant. I heard Thomas’s boasts as he fussed with the car and hall door.

‘1700s, maybe? Not exactly sure, but Father would know. Unfortunately, he’s not around today. London, you know, bit of business. This way, this way.’

He never acknowledged me. Small mercy. If he’d as much as breathed in my direction, I might finally have landed him one. When the hall door shut, I spat on the ground after him, cursing them to hell. I was gone then. Half crazed, I ran the long way home at some speed, not wishing to pass my mother or sister. I burst through our front door, then into Tony’s room.

‘No, Maurice,’ my father shouted, as he struggled to hold me back when I reached the bed. He held my arms, but like a man possessed I kept lurching forward. Eventually I wrangled free of him, firing my father back against the wall and fell on to Tony’s frame. There was nothing but bone, no meat, no hefty muscle. Nothing. Every scrap, wasted away. I lay there, holding his skeletal arms, letting my anger go the way of his soul, up and up, until there was nothing left, just a pitiful murmur, that felt like it wasn’t mine.

My father and May pulled me away when they heard my mother arrive. Her surviving children stood together, watching her enter. It’s an awful thing, to witness your mother cry. You cannot cure nor mend nor stick a plaster on. It is rotten. I wanted to tear out the pain of it. It took every ounce of restraint I had not to run from the room and charge through the fields damning those bastards, that bitch and her precious son, who had denied my mother her goodbye. My father stood above her with one hand on her shoulder and the other on her back. That weathered, veined hand moved up and down with the rhythm of her sorrow all afternoon, never once resting. His own grief in check. I wonder, as the years went on, when my father found himself alone, did the weight of Tony’s loss stop him in the fields and lower him to his hunkers? Did he ever lay his hand on the earth to steady his body that heaved at the injustice of it all? But that evening it was my mother’s cries that filled the house. On and on it went for what felt like hours, thrashing at her small frame, refusing to recede until the priest came. Even then, only quietening enough so she could hear the prayers.