My mother swore my father was the ghost of a man from the 19th century. He haunted the building she used to live in before I was born and they struck up a closeness. One night he took corporeal form and put the seed of me into her. A man who couldn’t live nor couldn’t die: what more could a boy want from a father?
My mother smoked a lot of cigarettes and one day she coughed so much she bloodied the tissue she’d been holding to her mouth. I asked her if she was okay and she told me she was probably going to have to go away for a while and I was never to tell anyone about the friends that used to call to our bungalow twice or three times a week to play dress-up games in her bedroom while I watched videos and played chess against myself on the kitchen table. Do you hear me now, little angel man? Do you hear what I’m saying? And I nodded and promised and a few weeks later she went into hospital and never came out.
I never broke the promise I made but I took to making up stories about her. I lived with my grandfather and he would knock great joy out of them. Go on, small man, tell another one. And I’d tell him something like the one about the time my mother and me went to Salthill and there’d been a diving competition off the platform in the water of the bay at the wide part of the end of the beach and my mother had entered the competition and won it by diving backwards in a perfect arc off the top board and flipping three times and breaking the water so cleanly there was hardly a ripple.
My grandfather would smile and close his eyes to better imagine the details of my story and my mother’s gleaming victory. Ah boys. That’s right. She dived like a kingfisher that girl and she swam like a mermaid. What did ye do then? We were driven to a hotel in a car with no roof and we ate steaks and chips and had ice creams for dessert in glasses so tall we couldn’t see over the tops of them. Lovely, lovely, Grandad would say. Wasn’t that some treat?
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I made a friend in primary school called William. His parents were rich. Immaculata was his mother’s name. Im, her friends called her. Im is the Irish for butter. Mmmmm, Im. That soft diminutive belied her hard angles, the cold stone she was sculpted from. We had a thing, an understanding between us. We allowed each other certain liberties. I’d sometimes speak to her in the voice of my grandfather and his friends. How will you ever get rid of them heifers, I said to her one day, nodding out the window at William’s two butty sisters, who were flinging fistfuls of grain at a pack of pecking chickens. I don’t know, she said, and pulled thoughtfully on her fag.
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I sidled closer to inhale the heady sulphur scent of her. You could get landed with them very easily, I warned. I know I could, she agreed not unpleasantly. You should send them off nursing and see could they bag a foreign doctor each, I said, You never know your luck. Some hope, she said, and blew a blue line at the windowpane. As stuck as you’ll be, I said for devilment, you’d never let either of them marry the likes of me. You’d sooner keep them than let them off to a council bungalow. She turned to me and nodded, almost sadly it seemed. Damn right, she said, then smiled, the sweetest sourest smile I’ve ever seen.
I switched back to myself then and told her about how my own father had been a doctor, how he’d gone to Africa to work on the missions and had been taken prisoner by a tribe of Bambuti people in the Congo and had allowed himself to be used as leverage for the tribe to be given back their ancestral land that had been stolen from them by corrupt government officials and businessmen. The tribe freed him but he stayed on because he’d become such good friends with them and because they needed him to cure their sicknesses and to negotiate for them with the outside world and for a finish they crowned him king and he was there still in his palace in the jungle and he wrote me a letter once a month.
Isn’t that lovely for you, she said, and she turned her head a bit to one side as she looked at me. To have a father who’s a doctor and a king, and not a builder’s labourer from the Ashdown Road who drinks his wages every Thursday night in Ciss Brien’s and denies you even exist.
WILLIAM AND I drifted apart in secondary school and I didn’t see his mother again until I was a student and working part time in the bar of the Ormond hotel to keep myself alive while I tried to pass my law exams. It was close to Christmas but the bar was quiet, just a few commercial travellers anaesthetising themselves against the grind, and so the manager had left me to it. He trusted me. More fool him: I was skimming half my wages again on a weekly basis.
She came in on her own, dressed expensively, subtly jewelled, smelling of good perfume and hard liquor. She was drunk but she had the grace and bearing to cover it up tolerably well. She hadn’t the hunted, desperate look of the ordinary addict, the broke and broken habitual drinker. She’d been at her husband’s firm’s Christmas party, but it had been so boring she’d considered slashing her wrists.
Go on so, she said, as though no time at all had passed since last we’d met, as though I was still 11, besotted and bewitched, telling her tall tales. Talk to me. Tell me one of your stories. So I told her about the play I’d been commissioned to write for the Abbey Theatre. The Abbey Theatre, no less! And there was me believing Nancy Dwan when she said you’d failed all your exams and were back living with your poor grandfather. And all along you were having plays commissioned by the Abbey Theatre! What’s it about?
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The Garden of Eden, I said, what really happened between God and the serpent and the parents of all mankind. Imagine that garden, I said, just before the deed was done and just after, the fruit from the forbidden tree plucked and eaten and the first lie told, and told to God. I acted it out for her, my idea about the garden and the serpent, Adam’s imbecility and Eve’s gullibility. I put on a proper show, up and down the bar, as she swallowed one brandy after another, smiling at me dead-eyed.
Imagine the two of them, I said, unblemished, uncorrupted, not knowing they’re born, sated to foolishness. And the serpent slithering around keeping an eye out for a way to ruin things for them. Out of pure badness just, out of sourness at their innocence, the pureness of them. Imagine God walking in. Warning Eve off about the tree. Asking in His booming voice where Adam was.
– Where’s the other fella?
And Eve hardly stirring from her half-slumber, answering in a whisper through a yawn.
– What other fella?
– Less of the smartness out of you, lady. I only made one. More fool me for making e’er a one.
And Eve waving her hand at God dismissively.
– Oh I don’t know, he went off somewhere, he’s not gone far I’d say.
And God stomping off to find the first of all men so He can read him the riot act about the special tree that was under no circumstances to be touched. And the serpent on his belly in the dirt, plotting.
– Hye. Hye. Eve. Eve. Eve!
And Eve all soft and stupid with the beauty and the ease of it all, not knowing her luck.
– What?
– Was that God I heard you talking to?
– It was.
– Was it, faith. And what was said?
And Eve lying in the yielding grass looking up at the blue sky, dreaming, and Adam off somewhere among the blooming trees, swinging all his appendages about, knowing no shame, as happy as eternity was long, his lad in his hand, skipping for joy; his garden, his fruit, his cooling water and gentle sun, his pliant beasts and his rib-wrought bride, his heavensent handmaid, his love, and the serpent meanwhile coiling itself around his new wife’s softest part, beguiling her, fucking up their happy life.
– Oh. Something about some tree we’re not meant to eat from. That one there, in the middle.
– What? says the serpent.
– That’s the best one! Ah here, that’s blackguarding. He couldn’t have said that. You heard Him wrong, I’d say.
And Eve now sitting up, examining the serpent, looking for evidence of something she couldn’t put a name to, nor ever know, because it didn’t exist in the world yet. But she had a sense of it all the same, it was latent in her flesh, in the marrow of her virgin bones, the truth of the power of a lie.
– If I was you now I’d go over and take the biggest ripest fruit and I’d fill my face and I’d spit the pips back into the earth the way they’ll take seed and spread the goodness of that tree around the garden. What right has He to deprive you of it?
And the serpent’s tongue flicking and Eve in the blackness of his eyes licking her own lips and reaching in her perfect nakedness for the fruit of the forbidden tree.
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I SAW HER this day last week. She was lined around her lips and beside her eyes. The liquor smell was there still, and something else, rank and cloying. Her old beauty was alive but only just, dying its death gracelessly, kicking against it. Her upper lip was bloated to bursting on one side and thinned to nothing on the other; her forehead was as smooth as marble and as stiff. Isn’t it a shame you never finished your exams, she said. You could have handled my divorce. I could have done with someone like you at the time. The only honest man I’ve ever known.
Well, I said, turning my wine bottle before passing it to her so that the yellow label saying SPECIAL OFFER €2 would be obscured, I’m qualified to practise at the bar in Australia, New Zealand, and New York, but I’m currently involved in a business project in Monaco. Monaco? Yes, I’m heading back there tomorrow. Are you now? Maybe I’ll go with you. And she shifted a little closer to me to gain the warmth of my body against the cold concrete of the footpath outside the church of Christ the Redeemer where daily I sit these days and sometimes, in clement weather, sleep my nights.
I went to put my arm around her but she was gone, turned from flesh to spirit, and all the things that had passed between us faded on the evening breeze, as all things fade, to an echo of a memory of some sweet imagining.
This short story is from Tidings: An Anthology of New Irish Christmas Stories, edited by Seán Farrell and published by the Lilliput Press
