When it came to the sign of peace, the man in front of me with the roll of shaved red neck turned and took my hand in both of his, very gently. I gave him a startled smile. Mr. Wall’s papery fingers were next. I hesitated before reaching out to Kate, as did she; then we shook hands too heartily, to compensate. Her palm was startlingly warm. I tried to remember if I had ever touched her skin before.
‘He Is Lord’, the choir were moaning. Of course God wasn’t really a he; I couldn’t imagine that there were testicles in heaven. But pronouns were handy things, and that was the one I had been brought up with; ‘it’ was horribly inanimate, and ‘she’ a nice idea, but too self-conscious for me. I had to work with what I’d got, the childhood patterns of helpless prayer. It should be said that I had little interest in God the Father; he seemed to be the chief executive, rarely glimpsed in the corridors, with his own fan club of those Christians who could really only respect a middle-aged man. No, the one I worshipped, in my low-key chatty way, was Jesus, because though I called him Lord as I had been taught, he was not by any stretch of the imagination a patriarch. I saw him as a nice young guy with five o’clock shadow, the kind who might turn up on your doorstep, clearing his throat deferentially, and you would say, hey, come in, there’s spaghetti in the pot. To be really fair, I supposed, I should have worshipped the widely neglected Holy Spirit, but I only know it as a flame or a dove, and doves were basically pigeons, and pigeons outside museums were irritating to the point of deserving a kick. Once I tried to imagine the HS as a woman, but the result kept flapping her Victorian lace sleeves and coughing and saying ‘Don’t mind me’. So I talked to the Lord instead. He was a better listener than most men I knew; he never butted in with ‘I think what you’re trying to say is…’
Mr. Wall was plucking at my sleeve; I followed him into the queue for communion. Kate sat with her eyes set forward, one of the outsiders. Though, paradoxically enough, as a lapsed member, she was actually more worthy of the sacred host than was I, a practising Catholic wading through mortal sin with – how the catechism phrases rang on in my head – ‘clear knowledge and full consent’. But then again, I was not alone; all the smug married women on the Pill in this queue were as guilty as I was. Besides, what I was taking into my mouth was not the church but the Lord, nourishing as bread, and he had never judged me harshly.
Despite all the contradictions and annoyances of this church, it still gave me such relief: wood, brass, the calm disc melting on the roof of my mouth. Coming down from the altar, I saw Kate staring forward, her nose and lips sculpted like the figurehead of a ship. I wondered whether she missed him, the Lord in her mouth. What did she take in that gave her equivalent relief? I knew so little about this woman whose half-grown image had haunted the margins of my thoughts for fifteen years, and I had the weary sensation that if she stayed here another year I would not know her much better.
I slid into the pew. Kate’s leg was warm against mine for a fraction of a second till I balanced myself and moved away. I studied the prayer leaflet for inspiration. All I recognized was that old heroic one we used to chant at Girl Guide meetings while we practised our knots and polished our brass badges. ‘Dearest Jesus teach me to be generous,’ we chorused:
to love and serve you as you deserve
to give and not to count the cost
to fight and not to heed the wounds
to toil and not to seek for rest
to labour and to look for no reward
save that of knowing that I do your holy will.
What stirring iambic metre, and what dangerously masochistic sentiments. Reading it again, hunched in my seat as the communion queue thinned to a trickle, I smiled to remember how much I used to like this prayer. In the early days with Cara my strongest motive had been to help, to keep her alive and halfway sane.
What a big barrack of a building this was. The stations of the cross seemed to have been painted in watery coffee, egg, and blackberry jam; these drab humiliations of the Lord’s life and times would not be likely to prompt the congregation to repentance so much as to embarrassment. Of course, it was hard to encapsulate any life in fourteen pictures. I tried to visualize my own in a set of snapshots. How many should I save for the rest of my life, which might turn out to be action-packed or entirely uneventful? Definite choices so far were: (1) that picture of me at three days old, upright in my father’s hand like an outraged ice-cream cone; (2) at six, waltzing with Zizzy, my rag doll, who was taller than me by several inches; and (3) the one of Cara and me leaning against some brick wall, laughing ourselves sick.
Well, at least I was used to doing without her at mass; I hadn’t shared a roll of the eyes with Cara during a sermon since that day she walked out. The first time I came to this church was for midnight mass the Christmas of our first year together. It had to be carefully set up; I dragged my mother and brother all the way over here on the pretext of having heard there was a great choir. Cara caught my eye at the door and waved us over to introduce us to her father. I stood beside her, shaking with the excitement of having got away with it, so that we could stand together, our first Christmas Eve, and carol our thanks for this body magic we had discovered between us. The choir that year turned out to be appalling, from the saccharine hush of ‘Away in a Manger’ to the cracked descants of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’. Gavin was forthright, and on the way home – we had to walk, there were no late buses in those days – I said rather feebly that it must have been the other choir, the folk one, that had such a good reputation. Mammy made no comment, but squeezed my fingers and said, ‘Look at the stars.’ The back of my hand was still burning from brushing against Cara’s as our voices peaked in the final hosanna.
I looked up now at the wooden box under the flowers, and told myself that Cara was inside. But I didn’t believe a bit of it. I could grant credence to the story up to the point where the front of the car behind smashed into the bumper of the taxi in front. I could see Cara thrown by the impact, flying free, but not beyond that. Not the landing. She wouldn’t dare. Last time she came back she promised she’d never go away for good without asking or at least warning me, giving me something to hold on to. And she’d always said she wouldn’t be seen dead in a church again, those were her exact words, I remembered with an awful gulp of laughter that I turned into a cough.
Instead of a final hymn, the Monsignor asked us to join in reading ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’, which I always thought of as the ‘Christ be’. I began obediently, my voice blending into the muted clamour of voices, but found I had slipped into ‘Cara be with me’. If I said the first word of the phrase low, I discovered, no one would notice.
Cara within me
Cara behind me
Cara before me
And in a sense it was true and not blasphemous, I thought frantically between the lines, because if God was in us then all the titles meant the same thing.
Cara beside me
Cara to win me
Cara to comfort
and restore me
And even if I was being blasphemous, I was sure he wouldn’t mind. The Lord had so many millions chanting his multiple names, surely he wouldn’t resent my clinging to the name I knew best?
Cara beneath me
(I could see her now, her face crushed into the pillow, the long notched bow of her spine under my thighs)
Cara above me
Instead of a final hymn, the Monsignor asked us to join in (her ever-young nipples dancing over my eyelids)
Cara in quiet
Cara in danger
Cara in hearts of all that love me
Cara in mouths of friend and stranger
But my voice faded at that line, paralysed by my imagination. I wanted her to be in nobody’s mouth but mine.
Six men I had never seen before carried the coffin on their shoulders down the long aisle to the back doors. It balanced lightly between them, dipping a little at the front because one of them was shorter. I set my mind to thinking of wei
ghts and pendulums in Physics class, of finding some fixed point from which you could use a lever to shift the world. I thought of reeds bending and trees breaking and cog puzzles in spatial reasoning texts. I tried to calculate how many bearers it would take to carry my coffin at threescore and ten, if I continued to put on five pounds a year. I wondered whether it was the dwarfs who carried Snow White along at the level of the prince’s knotted thighs, and why they hadn’t stumbled at once, on a knot of root or just in the awkwardness of grief, so that the bite of apple would be jerked from her throat without delay and she could sit up, pale but laughing, and dance at her own funeral. Why the time lag, the metaphorical coma, the years of watching her through the dusty glass, waiting and hoping and despairing and knowing that by the time she woke up again you might be too tired to care? I also thought of the chance of rain, and the hundred and five or so minutes till lunch, and all this passed through my mind by the time the six men made it to the church porch. I would have thought of anything to keep myself from thinking of what was really in the box lying on those strange shoulders, the few inches of wood and velvet that divided them from Cara’s cool flesh.
Why wasn’t it me carrying her? I hadn’t thought to ask. How stiff she would be by now, how very awkward if she tried to sit up from the pious position they had locked her in. I imagined her tittering through her paralysis, fingers knotted, gasping ‘God help us, Pen, I can’t move a muscle, would you scratch my nose for me?’
What seemed like hundreds of strangers were clustered by the door to commiserate with Mr. Wall as we struggled out. He was introducing Kate to many who would remember her only as the dark girl, the one who went off to the States with her mother and never came back. I held back, not wanting to hear him fumble for a title for me.
Beside me was a nun I thought I recognized from Immac; her thin lips widened as she tucked a leaflet into my hand. It bore a cartoon of a bubble-headed person going through a pair of pillars that reminded me of the gate to that swanky new housing development down by the sea. ‘The Bereavement Support Project’, it announced in one of those curvilinear typefaces meant to give the impression of handwriting, ‘is offering a Weekend Retreat for the Newly Bereaved.’ I supposed newly-bereaveds were like newly-weds, only less prone to waterbeds and champagne. I wondered what the BSP (that was their simple logo, BSP in a teardrop shape) would have to offer. Were there specific skills someone like me could learn for getting through this? I suspected the Retreat might consist of exactly the same confidentiality ground-rules, getting-to-know-you exercises, and vague expressions of confusion and goodwill, as every other damn workshop Cara had led me into by the coat-sleeves.
I left the leaflet on the porch table just before the crowd inched me through the door. A curtain of warm air slapped against my face. I couldn’t see the sun, but one patch of grey sky was burning whiter than the rest. I was borne along with the restless mass-goers as they clattered towards their Toyotas and Volvos on narrow heels. I found myself standing at the top of the steps, holding on to the rail, the pads of my fingers registering a faint rash of rust.
In the far corner of the car park I recognized Jo’s purple Bug with the labrys painted on the side. There was Mairéad’s heavy plait, and a straw hat on, what was the quiet one’s name, Sinéad, that was it. I watched for a few seconds as they all crawled in through the front door. None of them waved. Maybe they didn’t see me; maybe they were being discreet.
Glasnevin cemetery was a good forty minutes away. Minnie chugged along behind the hearse – a grossly shiny thing, reminding me of the bootleggers’ cars in Bugsy Malone – while aunts and uncles purred behind. We sat in traffic, my elbows on the steering-wheel, Kate with her hands tucked between her knees, Mr. Wall in the back with his greying head occasionally bobbing into view in the mirror. Everything that it occurred to me to say was too heavy or too light, too big or too small. To keep myself from gabbling I held my breath.
It felt better as soon as we parked the car and went in on foot, escaping from the twentieth century. The three of us led the straggling procession down a corridor of yews that opened out into a lattice of gravel paths, dividing the grass as far as the eye could follow. I busied myself with keeping an eye out for section L. Mr. Wall said something too hoarsely for me to hear.
‘Sorry?’
‘So many.’ When I didn’t answer, he cleared his throat with a deafening bray. ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’
I waited.
‘It’s a line from something,’ he apologized, and bent to pick a weathered ice-cream wrapper off the verge and put it in his trouser pocket.
Just as Mr. Wall stopped at the plot half-full of Wall doctors and lawyers, just when the sky should rightly have let down tears of acid rain, didn’t the sun come out. Not the glare we had had all morning, but full honest-to-god radiance through a patch of blue sky, making a pool of light that caught white headstones and angels for hundreds of yards around. This was weather for the last trip of the year to Brittas Bay, or a picnic in the heather above Lough Dan. Instead we were standing round a rectangle of earth, watching a box being lowered on ropes. Some woman was sobbing already, and strangers were fumbling for their balls of tissue. I couldn’t see Kate. Mr. Wall was standing beside me, his face as private as a wardrobe.
The priest began to talk again but I shut my ears to him. The lettered slab at the head of this plot was dabbed with lichen; there had been no new guests at this party for twenty-two years, it seemed, since the paternal grandparents had gone within six months of each other. Cara, ever impatient, had skipped her turn, burrowing under this quilt of earth before any of her father’s generation. There were ten in the bed and the little one said ROLL OVER.
I shut my eyes now – swaying slightly, as balance became harder – and told myself that this was the right moment to cry. I squeezed my eyes together till they stung; surely something would emerge? My right eye itched again; I rubbed at it furiously. In my mind I recited some trigger words: grave, death, gone, funeral, Cara. None of them worked. I felt the sun between my shoulder-blades, burning on the black silk, and I longed for a fresh grapefruit, grilled brown with sugar and a glacé cherry on top.
There was Kate at my right elbow. She was not doing the tears thing either. I watched the lean lines of her face. She was scanning the crowd like a store detective. I looked away as soon as she caught my eye; I wanted no sorority with her over the grave of her sister.
I waited for the men to start scattering earth – or perhaps to invite Mr. Wall to begin with the first gritty handful – but instead they lifted a panel of fake grass piled high with wreaths, and set it over the grave. What a cheat. I had been counting on seeing it done now, the filling in. I was prepared to feel the earth, damp and real between my loosening fingers. Instead we were going to be fobbed off with this green plastic lid, and the priest’s voice rising and falling over it like some lethargic seagull.
Mr. Wall had disappeared. I peered around until I recognized the back of his dark suit, his arm propping him against a tree.
When I looked back at the crowd, the sunlight caught a bronze head: some girl with her face buried on her mother’s shoulder, a cousin perhaps, crying presumably not for love of Cara (who never had any idea how many cousins she had) but in outrage that such things should happen. What was making those slight shoulders heave was the possibility of her own death, the knowledge that the big D was not always busy stalking the old folk but could slice down the brightest of red hairs.
I only learned that myself at fifteen. A girl in the year below got a brain tumour and died quite suddenly, and for a week or so the school was filled not so much with mourning as with tremendous embarrassment, as each of us realized (without saying a word of it) how blind to our own danger we had been. We forgot again soon enough, of course. You can’t go on bearing such things in mind.
The girl was sobbing louder into her mother’s lipsticked tissue. Her face was choked behind curls. I wanted to take her into my arm
s, kiss her better, make her mouth part with such astonishment that she would not worry about death any more, would not even believe in it, would laugh it to scorn as girls can. I wanted her hair to be straight and redder, and her face to be Cara’s, and when she died in her turn I would find another, and another, an endless supply of sixteen-year-old virgins to feed my dragon smile.
I felt tired at the thought. People near me were walking away now, but my hot feet were rooted where I stood. Cara would be yawning after all this fuss, and inquiring after a cup of tea, or the nearest metaphysical equivalent. Cara was most herself when she was asleep with a half-drained cup of tea beside her. The lines of her face loosened, and she looked, not childlike as we were supposed to look in sleep, but older, calmed into her age.
As the last stragglers turned away from the grave, I stared at the wreaths, topped with a heavy circle of white lilies.
‘Her mother.’
‘Sorry?’ I turned my head to Mr. Wall.
He was picking at some wax on his sleeve. His voice sounded like it was electronically generated. ‘Mrs Wall sent those white ones.’
I strained to look right through the flowers that pathetic woman sent instead of being here, past the fake grass panel, down the rabbit hole, past the wooden lid to where Cara was sleeping. I wanted her to stay asleep all afternoon, pale and arrogant, and not wake to burden me with her crises. I wanted her to find comfort and have no further damage done to her, to let all the marks of life be rotted away, down to the clean bone.