Birchwood

‘Just think of it,’ he mused, gazing into the singing flames. ‘Roasting. That would be awful. I remember a priest came once to give a mission, for three days, you know, praying and so on. He had a cross in his belt and he kept fiddling with it, I remember that, pulling at it. He said that if we did things to ourselves we'd be put into a special part of hell. I suppose he meant we'd have devils sticking forks in our mickeys. He was funny.’ He paused, and poked at the embers with a charred twig, faintly smiling. ‘Do you know what I did? After school I had to burn the dustbins, out behind the camp.’ He sniggered. ‘I did it into the fire!’

Did what? I laughed uncertainly, wondering what he could mean. Some happy thought struck him and he laughed again.

‘I nearly put the fire out’

Then I heard them. They were above us. I heard their low voices, soft laughter, the crunch of dry leaves under their feet, and soon they appeared, flickering through the trees, a fat man and a fatter woman, a tall thin figure in a black coat, two girls and a youth, a small boy. Michael had not taken his eyes from the fire. I tugged at his sleeve, and he turned, unhappily, irritably, and snapped,

‘What do you want?’

I shrugged, obscurely angry at him, and looked up again and watched the crowd climb the hill diagonally and disappear over the ridge into the birch wood. I was not frightened, not exactly, but I felt a mingled excitement and dread, and a sensation of controlled and not unpleasant panic. I turned to Michael again, silently questioning. He glanced at me, away, nonchalant.

‘What's up? Did you see something? The fire's going out.’

I stared at him. Why should he lie?

10

THEY SEWED UP Granda Godkin's ear and bathed his black eye back to its former jaundiced shade, but they could do nothing for his maimed brain. Now he shuffled between the poles of his existence, the dining room, the lavatory, his bed, wrapped in a numbed impenetrable lethargy, crouching under imaginary blows. Sometimes he would disappear for hours, to be discovered at last in a shuttered room standing bolt upright with his back pressed to the wall and his stricken wide eyes glowing faintly in the gloom. These periods of catalepsy terrified Mama. In her first year at Birchwood he had thrown, if that is the word, two epileptic fits, and although she had not witnessed them she was convinced that one day he would fling himself down at her feet, snapping and foaming, to expire slowly, with a great clamour of rattling heels and gnashing teeth, while she stood over him helplessly, gazing back horrified into his numbed beseeching eyes. Doc McCabe had once warned her that the old man must never be allowed alcohol. Now she fitted a rusty padlock on the rosewood cabinet in the dining room, and, sure that she had hit on a cure, walked out into the hall and found Granda Godkin teetering on the stairs, knees bent and arms outstretched, his fingers twitching, emitting through clenched teeth a high-pitched birdlike screech, and she was forced to admit finally that his mind was forever frozen in that moment of collision and clatter, feathers and blood, when that furious winged great creature had flung itself upon him in the dawning garden.

He ventured less and less often out of his room, and then took to his bed permanently. I was made to sit with him, I suppose on the principle that an old man should want the youngest carrier of his name and seed near him at the end. I suspect Granda Godkin could have managed without me. These vigils were excruciating. He lay motionless, watching his hands on the counterpane with profound suspicion, as though convinced that they had slipped into the bed an immensely patient, crafty assassin who was only waiting for a chance to throttle him. I sat on a hard chair trying to remain absolutely still, for at the slightest movement his lizard eyes flickered venomously at me. The air in the darkened room was viscous, tainted with faint odours, wax and excrement. My indifference toward the old boy turned to hatred. I wondered where his thoughts could possibly be during all those long days of immobility and silence. Old men have their interests, collecting stamps, antique matchboxes, interfering with little girls, but the most I could recall of his life was a wicked grin shuffling down the hall and a face staring vacantly into a fire. He had wasted that wealth of days, scooped out and discarded their hearts, happiest with husks. So much emptiness appalled me, I tried to creep away, those yellow eyes transpierced me.

One morning there was a startling change in his condition. Mama found him sitting up in bed rubbing his hands gleefully, trembling with excitement. God had come to visit him in the night.

‘That's nice,’ said Mama. ‘Did he have anything to say?’

He gave her a crafty sidelong look, became suddenly morose, and changed the subject by petulantly demanding his false teeth. They had been in a little glass there beside the bed. Where were they gone? She tried to outmanoeuvre him.

‘You know, I'm sure Mr Culleton would be very interested to hear about-’

‘Bugger that-where's my teeth?’

She had taken away that dangerous set of weapons while he slept. Now she brought them back. Poor Mama, no tenacity.

‘Where's Joseph?’ he cried, clacking his choppers. ‘I want to talk to Joseph.’

But when my father was found the old man had forgotten what he wanted to say. He lapsed again into silence and staring. By the afternoon he was delirious. An enormous woodlouse, he told us, was lumbering around the room with elephantine tread, blind antennae feeling the fetid air, searching for him. The louse, it seems, was god come a second time. The old man tried to flee from his bed and had to be restrained by force. His withered frame hid unexpected reserves of strength. The vicar and the doctor arrived together, unlikely angels of death. The Reverend Culleton had five minutes alone with the fast-failing sinner and came out of the sickroom looking decidedly shaken. Doc McCabe, hardly less decrepit than his patient, just looked down at the old man and shook his head.

‘What's wrong with him?’ Papa whispered. The whole business of this dying had come smack in the middle of a delicate and complex land deal.

‘Poor Simon,’ the Doc sighed. ‘Dear me, it seems like only yesterday…’

‘Yes yes, but what's wrong with him?’

Tor god's sake man, it's a wonder he's alive at all! He's as strong as a horse, must be.’ Papa looked down doubtfully at the ancient foetus in the bed. McCabe suddenly cackled. ‘It wouldn't surprise me if he lived another couple of years!’

Papa slowly closed his eyes.

‘Christ,’ he muttered, and walked away.

Granny Godkin refused to acknowledge that her sometime husband was on the way out. Perhaps she did not want to be reminded of her own approaching extinction, or maybe she was just not interested in the old man's going. I favour the latter. She sat by the fire in the drawing room all day and greeted Aunt Martha's bulletins from the sickroom with a deaf smile.

‘What's that you say, my dear…?’

I was summoned to the bedside in the evening. Granda Godkin wished to say goodbye to me. For a long time he said nothing. The others, at my back, began to fidget. He gazed through me, into his private pale blue eternity, and it was as if he were already dead, a mere memory, he was so thin and faded. At last his eyes came back and focused on me. He took me for my father, and said very clearly,

‘Joe, you'll never be anything but a waster!’

That was his farewell. I knew that those attendant silences behind me expected something of me, but what it was I did not know. I tried to take his hand but he would not let me lift it, and turned his face to the wall, so I caught hold of one of his brown-paper fingers and shook it solemnly and then made my escape. Did I mourn him? I suppose I did, in my way. But I felt, as I have felt at every death, that something intangible had slipped through my fingers before I discovered its nature. All deaths are scandalously mistimed. People do not live long enough. They come and go, briefly, shadows dwindling toward an empty blue noon.

One memory, hardly worth mentioning, but here it is, for lack of something finer. He taught me to ride a bicycle. In spring it was, of course, an April evening, sunlight, wind in the trees, the crocuses sprouting. A dog followed us, a miserable creature with a swollen belly and moist eyes. Granda Godkin loathed animals, he picked