The Forgotten Waltz

Sean is a clean sort. You don’t catch him at it, but after he has been through, the place is brighter, neater. His laundry tablets may glow in the dark, but they make my clothes smell like sunshine itself.

He is asleep now, wherever he is. He is dreaming figures, calculations, presentations: he is dreaming about rooms. There are women in those rooms, but do not ask him, when he wakes, which women they are.

‘I never dream about people I know. Rarely,’ he says.

I close the lid of my laptop and listen. There is a sound in the house – a sound like the fish, but it is not the fish. Something tiny.

I go through the rooms downstairs, but the noise seems to move about as I try to follow it. I pull up cushions from the sofa, and listen at the chimney breast. I go out and head up the stairs, only to pause before I reach the landing. It is somewhere between the top of the stairs and the bottom of the stairs. I go up and then down. I turn and turn about. I stand still and listen.

Finally, in a rush, I pull Sean’s gym bag out from the cupboard under the stairs. His kit is in the wash, but his trainers are still in there, also a toilet bag, and a loose tin of talc. I drag on some neon-green wires until the headset of his iPod comes into view. It is one of those jogging headsets, with a stiff band that rests on the back of your neck; the kind that looks a bit stupid even if you are actually jogging. It takes me a moment to pull the thing free. The music seems so small and frantic, locked up in there. I put one of the buds to my ear, the band twisting against my cheek, and I hear it open up, a whole cathedral of sound.

‘Listen to this,’ he said one night. ‘Listen to this!’ slotting the iPod into Evie’s plastic-pig speaker dock; some smiling diva on the display, and a voice – once you got over the swoop and posh of it – singing something no one should be asked to understand.

There she is again, dangling at the other end of the luminous wire. The ‘Four Last Songs’ with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. Surely he wasn’t pounding the treadmill to the ‘Four Last Songs’? I sit on the floor and listen for another while, before switching the thing off and throwing it back into the staleness of the gym bag. I do not linger. I do not unzip the side pockets, or check his toiletries, or lift the rectangular base of the bag to see if there is a condom under there, long forgotten, or freshly stashed. I just pause the iPod and push the lot back under the stairs.

That is how quiet Dublin is, on this night of snow.

My father listening to classical music in the dining room; his papers in piles on the polished table, the sunset making the room thick with colour. The beauty of it.

Don’t annoy your father now.

My father sitting in the chair, eyes closed, one arm hanging by his side; dead, or asleep. Passionately dead. Passionately asleep. Or maybe he was just out of it. What was the music?

Ravel’s Bolero.

Ah. The nineteen-eighties.

I get to my feet and he is behind me as I turn, talking into the phone, smoking into the old-fashioned cold of the hall. He spent his life out here, conducting cheery conversations about nothing you could put a finger on. We used to listen, myself and Fiona, to see if he would say something we could understand; a word like ‘money’ or ‘intestate’ or even ‘county council’, but he could go twenty minutes straight without nouns, or names, or anything you could stick a meaning to. ‘That’s the way of it,’ he said, or, ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he,’ along with much chortling of a professional nature. All the time playing some deliberate game with the lighted cigarette that was in his hand, laying it with precision at the edge of the table, then nosing it along, to keep the burning tip ahead of the wood.

‘Indeed, you might say that. Ha ha. You might.’

And later, in the dining room, when the music could not hold him, I remember our father getting agitated at the dusk, turning to the window over and over as if to ask, What is happening to the light? Like a dog during a solar eclipse, my mother said. This was in his last illness. He had some funny bile thing that affected his liver and the toxins in his blood caused a quick kind of havoc in his brain. The world refused to make sense to him, even as it turned. It took us a while to notice – dementia gave my father a bluff and paranoid air. He became more hearty, and trusted no one. It was just as he had always suspected.

One afternoon I came back from the swimming pool in Terenure College with my hair wet. There must have been boys there; something about me that looked like guilt.

‘Why is that one wet?’ he said, and he looked to Fiona, like I was the greatest eejit.

‘She went for a swim, Daddy.’

‘A swim?’

It was hard to know what part of the sentence he did not understand; whether he had forgotten about swimming, or forgotten about water, or forgotten, indeed, about wetness. But he did not forget, not to the very end, how to pitch one human being against the other. That he could do when all else was lost to him.

‘A woman should be very beautiful or very interesting,’ he used to say, when he was well. ‘And you, my dear, are madly interesting.’

Pronounced ‘medley’, in that lush, Irish camp he liked to affect when he delivered his bon mots. Fiona, of course, was medley beautiful.

Neither did he forget how to drink. Fiona would dispute this, but I have the clearest memory of us both walking down to the hospice on Harold’s Cross Road with a naggin of gin that we had bought for him in the off-licence before the park. We had saved our pocket money for it.

He was sitting up in the bed when we found his room, but he did not know who we were. He said to Fiona, ‘Who are you? Why are you kissing me?’ But he still remembered the difference between vodka and gin – it was supposed to look like water, we knew that much, but it seems we got the wrong one – he spat it back into the tooth mug, and said, ‘What do you call this?’

Then he drank it anyway.

It was as though he was made of glass, his insides had gone so slack and loud. You could hear the liquid travelling into his stomach, spilling down his oesophagus, gurgling into his belly. There was a wrung-out kind of creak as it rose back up and the expression on his face as he willed it down again was comically fierce. He closed his eyes and rested. Then he opened them again and, for two minutes, maybe five, he was completely himself. He was the man we knew; clever, busy, large.

‘If you stopped biting your lips, my dear, then you wouldn’t have such a raggedy mouth.’

My father used to complain about my mouth, the way it gave me an insolent look. ‘What’s the puss about?’ he said, or once, memorably, to one of his cronies, ‘She didn’t get that, sucking oranges through a tennis racket.’

But he said plenty of nice things, too. My father never treated us as children. If you hurt him, he would hurt you right back. If you made him laugh, he would bring the house down with delight. I don’t remember people ‘doing’ children, the way Fiona ‘does’ hers in that tidy your toys and we’ll have a nice hug sort of way. There was drama all day when my father was around, and it was all as big as it needed to be. He fought with my mother, he loved my mother. He went missing. He came home and was shaggy and large with us. I loved that about him, the wonderful air of danger and surprise.

I just hated, as I got older, the look of him when he had drink taken: the way he swivelled his face around to find you, and the chosen, careful nonsense that came out of his mouth when he did. I hated the way he sat there, benignly absent, or horribly possessed by some slow creature, who rolled, across the distance between you, whatever sentence he could shape in his head; lovely, mean, grandiose, small. Or fond: that was the worst, I think. Fond.

‘Look at you. Aren’t you lovely?’

By the time we were teenagers, he wasn’t around all that much. He always kept Sunday at home, but even on a Sunday he was in bed till eleven, and went out around five so, let’s face it, six hours a week, a bit of roast lamb with mint sauce on the side – you could take it either way. You could be mad about him, as Fiona was, you could be pretty and perfect, you could have plaits that were sweet, and hairbands that stayed put, you could work on your Irish dancing and your songs from Oklahoma! or you could slob about and glower, like me. I was clever. I mean, Fiona was clever in a let’s-all-get-a-B-plus sort of way, but I was clever because if I was clever then I would not have to care.

Now she has a perfect life, my sister has taken to inventing a perfect past to match it. She doesn’t think our father was a drunk – which makes two of them, I suppose – and she would certainly deny the memory I have of us hanging on to each other laughing, coming back up the Harold’s Cross Road.