that warrants intervention. They dope you to the gills. Like a veil thrown over everything. All you’d miss.
Lulled and sated, he picks up the Mahon book, opens page 81. Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels. Asphodel meadows, where the souls of those who did neither good nor bad reside. He looked up the asphodel flower once and when he clicked on the images and recognised the yellow flowers – which he had always assumed were a variety of iris – as identical to the flowers that appear every summer at the edge of the Inch, he was momentarily floored. Mythical flowers from Hades growing here on his land, right under his nose. What were the chances!
Irises were Maeve’s favourite flowers. He brought her home a bunch of blue ones to celebrate the good tidings of great joy. Two weeks later it was all over and when they came home from the hospital she lay on the bed facing the wall. He lay beside her, then stood at the window. Nothing to say. Above, the night sky, the stars, the indifferent earth. A mistake of nature. Unplanned anyway. Better to happen now than at age four or fourteen, he told her later. They got hammered the following weekend and fell in the door at 3 a.m., and onto the bed, laughing. To think it was all over. A heavy period, that’s all it amounted to, blood clots flushed down the toilet. A life, a life not … No soul yet. Or was there? Forty days before ensoulment occurs, the Greeks believed. Islam says one hundred and twenty. The yogis say it happens at the moment of conception when the ovum meets the sperm. A flash of astral light, then the soul rushes in. Wonder if a couple’s spiritual goodness and wholesomeness matters, if their devotion to each other helps serve as a divine magnet to draw a good soul towards them. Wonder where the soul resides. Not in the body or blood, it being metaphysical, not physical … All those years in the grave, the blood of those two soldiers mixed with Joyce’s and settled in his body. Traces still there maybe. One body, three bloods. A trinity of blood, he’d have liked that! Wonder what the soldiers were doing in the hospital that day.
He reads the poem. A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. He leaves his head in his hands. Tired. Foresees the road ahead, the years ahead … Sleepy … Shouldn’t sleep here … He can do whatever he wants. He lifts his head and smiles. If you behave, Borges said to his six-year-old nephew, I will give you permission to think of a bear. I will give you permission to think … A thousand souls crowding to a door, waiting to be born … crying Me, Me … Go back, go back, it’s not your turn yet.
FROM THE KITCHEN window he watches a red van snaking up the avenue. As it passes the window the driver turns his head and meets Luke’s eyes before continuing on into the yard. Casing the joint. It happens about once a week – they see the big house from the road and take a chance.
He stands at the front door and puts out his hand when the van approaches from the yard. The passenger lowers his window and Luke leans in.
‘Morning, lads,’ he says, throwing his eyes over the driver and passenger. ‘Ye’re out early.’
‘How’s it going, boss?’ the driver replies. A big, burly, red-faced fellow with ash-blond hair. A slightly younger version of the same man sits in the passenger seat.
‘What can I do for ye?’
‘Would you have any auld scrap lying around? Any auld iron or copper?’
‘Devil the bit,’ Luke says. He keeps his eyes hard on the driver, then makes a big show of looking into the back of the van. Plastic bags, lengths of rusty iron, a marble fireplace. ‘Ye’re not local, are ye? I haven’t seen ye around here before.’
‘Ah, not far, boss – the far side of Mallow. What about new windows?’ He nods towards the house. ‘This man here can get the best of PVC windows for you.’
‘No, no, ye’re grand. I’m not interested.’ He slaps the roof of the van twice, takes a step back. ‘All right, so … Good luck, now.’ Off with ye and don’t come back, he wants to add.
He waits until the van is out of sight at the end of the avenue, then sits on the step. He needs to put up gates at the entrance and proper mortice locks on the front and back doors. He’ll come home some day to find the place cleaned out. One kick to the back door and they’re in. The Adam fireplace, the furniture, Dadda’s gold pocket-watch, Ellen’s trunks. A small fortune sitting in there.
The granite step is warm. It was on this step his mother was felled two years ago. A beautiful day in June. Sitting here talking away to him while he planted annuals in the flowerbed beside the front door. She had had him all to herself for several years. No more Josie, no more aggro. He had begun to enjoy her too – her fierce wit, her ferocious tongue.
‘Get me an ice cream,’ she ordered. He tipped a little plant out of its pot and set it in the soil, then turned to look at her. Her eyes were closed, her face tilted upwards towards the sun. He stood and looked out over the fields and down across the river to the town. A perfect day, he thought. He went inside and brought her out a choc-ice and bent again to the flowerbed, his back to her. A little puff of wind blew the ice cream wrapper past him, and he reached out his hand to try and catch it. It came to rest against a pot. Stay, he urged it. But another little gust blew it on; it stopped and started and worried along for a few more feet. He stood up and went after it.
‘You’re a rip!’ he said, waving the wrapper as he returned. ‘Why do you always have to make work for me?’ His role now was the exasperated parent to her naughty child. It was the way she loved too – with robust gesture and combat. He resumed the planting and waited for her mocking jibe.
But none came, and he prodded again. ‘Here I am, morning, noon and night, serving you … Jesus, and you haven’t an ounce of gratitude or consideration for me – or for anyone! Do you know that?’
Again, no response. He turned to look at her. On her face, a wry crooked smile, a fixed grin.
‘What?’ he asked. The grin remained, lending her a look of stupidity. Mimicking Josie, he thought. I have a thundering bitch for a mother. ‘Stop that,’ he said and turned back to the work. Again he waited for the quip, the wisecrack reply. Again, none came. He turned around. The same frozen grin.
‘Stop messing, Mammy … For fuck’s sake … Stop it, it’s not funny.’
Her face was tilted, her left eye half closed. The choc-ice slipped from her fingers onto the step. Mammy, he said urgently, jumping up. From her twisted mouth came a guttural sound. Her head slumped to one side. He leaned towards her and touched her face, then lifted her left arm. It fell, slack. His stomach lurched. He took out his phone and dialled. He kept saying her name. ‘It’s okay, you’ll be all right.’
He lays his hand on the warm granite. On this stone a cataclysmic neurological event occurred in his mother’s brain. He rubs the granite. We know not the day nor the hour, nor the stone. He wonders if she had a premonition. After four weeks in hospital she recovered sufficiently to be moved to rehab. Then, in the ambulance en route there, she was struck by a greater and, this time, fatal cerebrovascular event.
Just after eleven, another vehicle – a small yellow car – comes up the avenue. Again he goes to the front door. The car stops and a girl steps out. Small, striking-looking with very pale skin and short, jet-black hair. She nods and half turns to close the car door. Then she stands before him and meets his gaze calmly. She is thirty, perhaps thirty-two. Not a girl, but a woman.
‘Hello,’ she says, smiling. She glances at Lily, standing in the doorway behind him.
‘Hello,’ he says.
Lynch’s Friesians are grazing in the field behind
