‘Who are you? Why are you kissing me?’ he had said to her. ‘And why, my pet, have you stopped kissing me, when we were getting so nicely acquainted?’
Demented is different to drunk. I think people get demented the same way they get annoying. The thing you don’t like about them just gets worse, until one day you find that’s all there is left of them – the fuss and the show of it – the actual person has snuck out the back and gone home.
I can’t remember how long his illness took. Too long. Not long enough. When the school holidays came, we were sent across to our Granny O’Dea’s house in Sutton where the sea lapped the garden steps or exposed a rocky shore and sometime, between one tide and the next, he died.
At the funeral, then, we got him back: this wonderful person, our father. The church was packed, the house overflowed with men in suits, who sat and leaned their hands on long thighs, to tell tales of his wit, his acumen, his canny charm. He was the last of the great romantics. My mother said that. Someone had sent a case of Moet, and she asked for it to be served. She stood up and raised her glass. She said, ‘Here’s to Miles, my handsome husband. He was the last of the great romantics.’
Why not?
Then they left and we were alone.
We had a way, all that autumn, of hanging out and moping – that’s the only way to describe it: the three of us talking about clothes and hair and weight, pecking at things, idling them through our fingers, going on the same diets, swapping clothes; stealing from each other too.
‘Did you take my halterneck top?’
‘What top?’
And nothing in these conversations was ever satisfactory, or wanted to be, there was only one direction, and that was downhill.
When Fiona hit seven stone my mother brought her to a shrink, who said my sister had stopped eating in order to stop the clock: if she stayed a child, then her father would not have to die. Which was too sad to be useful really. Joan went back to wearing her dressing gown all day and Fiona went back to her cottage cheese and there was no food in the fridge anyway – at least not after I had been through it – and then, when the spring came, we discovered boys.
Or I discovered boys. Fiona, if you ask me, only pretended to.
People might think it hard, growing up with a pretty sister but Fiona was lovely the way girls are lovely for their Daddy, and after he died, she did not know what to do with it, really. Her beauty was a sort of puzzle to her. And she always ended up with the wrong sort of guy: the kind who want a girlfriend to match their car; prestige types, bottom feeders, liars. At least that’s what I think; that boring old Shay was probably the best of them. That she ran into motherhood in the hopes that she would be safe there, and they would all leave her alone.
But in the spring of 1989, six months after Miles died, my sister was pretty and I was lots of fun. Joan screwed a fag into her white plastic filter, and got out the powder and blush. We were the Moynihans of Terenure. It was our duty to have a queue of young men knocking at the door.
Across the road – which is now a busy road – is the bus stop where I used to say goodnight to those early boyfriends: sitting on the wall for hours, or strolling around the corner on some excuse (‘Let’s see what’s around the corner!’), for a bout of kissing. Rory or Davey or Colin or Fergus: it was supposed to be about their eyes or their fringe or their taste in music, but despite the way I persuaded myself, with doodles in the backs of copy books and shrieks among friends, that I loved them, each in turn, it was all just about this: the smell of petrol from the buses, and the evenings getting longer, and kissing outdoors until the tips of our noses went cold. In those days, just being in the open air gave me goosebumps. Walking down the street alone, thinking my beautiful thoughts, picking the yellow blooms off the neighbour’s forsythia and shredding them on to the path: kissing was the answer to all this too.
It took me a long time to move on to anything more serious, sexually: Fiona too, I think. The Moynihan girls were old-fashioned. It was something to do with our mother being a widow; an instinct we had about power.
It was Fiona I missed, that first Christmas back in Terenure. Sean was in Enniskerry doing Santa Claus for a child who no longer believed in Santa Claus. Aileen was serving a light fino before lunch. I was alone. And the person I missed was my sister, the woman who was glad – as she said,
She was wrong about that, by the way. My mother would have understood. My mother with her handsome, infuriating husband; she would have kissed the top of my sad head.
I slip between the curtains in the front room and press my forehead to the glass, with the nets falling down my back, the orange light of the streetlights outside turning the shadows violet, and I remember, or think I remember, some childhood snow, Miles bringing us to the big hill in Bushy Park, half the neighbourhood going down it on tea trays and body boards and plastic bags, Hold on tight! The outraged ducks slipping across the obstinate pond, our screams bouncing off a low, blank sky.
Miles in the room behind me, with the rug rolled up, old twinkle toes.
Once round the dresser!
Teaching me Irish dancing, singing out the patter: one two three, one two three,
And just for a moment, I do not care what kind of a man he was. Perhaps it is the way the snow opens up a space, but for a moment, all my memories of my father are chocolate-box, and smell of winter: icing sugar thrown on the fire, in a shower of yellow flame, a crate of satsumas cold from the garage, my mother in a Nordic knit, Miles with a daughter under each arm standing on the doorstep, listening to Mr Thomson down the road, playing ‘Silent Night’ on his military bugle. Of course Christmas in this house was always a bit of a torment – there was always, before the day was out, some crisis with handsome, pissed old Miles – but it started well. Bursting through the door to find our presents in heaps at either end of the sofa – Fiona’s one end, mine the other – a big comfortable sofa, the fabric a dark embossed red; picked out, along the seams, with a beige fringe.
There I am, on my father’s knee, a little pieta. I am waiting to be tickled, playing dead.
My father lifts one hand and holds it high.
‘Is that the way?’
‘I’m dead!’
I start to wriggle to the floor and, as I slip across his knees, he pounces, finding the spaces between my ribs and digging in. By the time I have hit the carpet I am beside myself. I am out of my skin, stuck to the spinning floor. I am tied to my body where his fingers hold me together, as I fly apart.
‘No! No!’
My father tickling me from the sofa, as I squirm on the ground, my shoulders churning into the carpet.
‘Oh no!’
His cigarette is clamped between his in-rolled lips: he gathers my ankles in one big hand, then he turns to leave the cigarette in the ashtray.
‘Oh the mouse,’ he says. ‘Oh the mouse,’ and his fingers dance and scrabble across the soft underside of my foot.
Being dead was like being tickled, except that when you flew out of your body you never came back.
When I was twelve or so, I used to practise astral flying – it must have been a fashion then. I lay on my back in bed, and when I was fully heavy, too heavy to move, I got up, in my mind, and left the house. I went down the stairs and out the front door. I walked or I drifted along the street. If I wanted to, I flew. And I imagined, or I saw, every single detail of the passing world; every fact about the hall or the stairs and the street beyond. The next day I would go out to look for things I had noticed, for the first time, the night before. And I found them, too. Or I thought I had.
The pubs have shut: there are shouts in the distance and the screams of girls. I lean my forehead against the cold glass, as the traffic lights change and change again. It is time for bed. But I don’t want to go to bed. I want to keep them company another little while: my father and mother, dispersed as they are along the sweet, bright arc of the dead.
