This Is Happiness Read online

  The nature of her illness was subtle and ubiquitous. She had knives of pain in her back, now in her hips, now in all the joints of her. She had tumbling twists of a fawn nausea that came from nowhere and were signalled by her putting her hand on her stomach as though to still what was happening or hold there what seemed against her will to be rolling away. Her appetite was gone to someone else. She only realised it was teatime when I said it, and once, in a funereal humour, said, ‘I can’t remember, is it feed or starve the dying?’ She laughed the soft laugh she had and her eyes, I’ve already spoken about her eyes, I can’t make you see them, they looked at you and you felt seen. I know that sounds foolish, it’s not.

  And what was I doing there those days? The truth is, I wasn’t sure, only that I needed to be. We all have our own reasons, most of which are subterranean, for wanting to try and do something. I didn’t compute or calculate it. I just left the house in the mid-morning and walked to Faha, the electric vans and the crews hurtling past me in their conqueror’s dust and the cows letting on to the fringe of their oblivion the knowledge their watering holes were dry. To Mrs Queally I had the licence of near or paused priest. She thought of me as Father Coffey’s stand-in the same way she was for Mrs Gaffney and didn’t question when I passed through the shop and up the stairs. The first time, Annie instantly erased my awkwardness by a benign look and the kindest sentence: ‘I’m glad you came.’

  Why that should be was harder to say. Some ends can be joined obscurely is the closest I can get.

  I made tea, I made toast, of which she ate a bird’s portion. I helped her move from the bed to the chair when, with an unfairness God must answer for, the bones of her ached from doing nothing. Sometimes she could walk, sometimes she couldn’t. By the third day we had evolved the rules of engagement, when, with a single nod, she would let me help, and when she wouldn’t. By the end of the first week, the rules proved written on water and she nodded more often, becoming aware that an endless humility was what was required of us in the last act. At those moments, getting my arm around the thinness of her, feeling, say, the cool quick-to-crease crêpe of her skin, trying to get close enough for my body to provide support, at the same time as trying not to make obvious her doll’s helplessness, it seemed to me that in those moments in the long-windowed rooms above the chemist’s in Church Street, Faha, we were in the naked heart of one of the fundaments of humanity.

  By the parallel genius that underlies the caring profession, the indignities, awkwardness and embarrassments of physical failure were made easier for her because I was a stranger.

  I answered Annie’s questions about the day outside, about where the electricity crews were, and about myself, which last made dawn on me that it’s only when someone asks you about yourself that you exist in the fourth dimension of a story. In none of this do I wish to pretend that I was any more assistance to her than anyone else might have been. I know I wasn’t. I know I was each day singed some more by the terrible knowledge that I could not truly help her, that she was dying in the same slow way most people die, minute by minute and day by day.

  Soon enough of course, Faha knew it, and Doady and Ganga knew it, and soon enough after that, I suppose, Christy did. I didn’t tell him, but he was about in the parish enough and by that time the news was in the air. One evening after supper in the garden he asked Doady if it was true and she confirmed and confounded the situation in the same breath.

  ‘It is, ask Noe sure, he calls to see her most days.’

  His look would defeat the Dutch masters. He said no more until we were out of the townland on the bicycles on the crepuscular hunt for music. He introduced it using the short form: ‘Annie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A hill announced itself and we dismounted, the clicking of the bicycles and Christy’s breathy recovery the only sounds. There was no moon, the rumbled dark of the country thereabouts like the abandoned blankets of a giant. The electricity was imminent but not yet switched on, the farmhouses and all human presence erased by the night.

  ‘You didn’t tell me?’

  ‘She said not to.’

  I knew that hurt him. I knew he was too big-hearted a man not to be pierced by that, but he showed it only by a small movement in his mouth and a palming of his beard, because he wanted to get to something more important.

  ‘How ill is she?’

  ‘Doctor Troy says she hasn’t long.’ His look said that wasn’t possible and so I added, ‘She’s dying.’

  The moment you say the words out loud they become real. Until then, you can think them, you can understand the medical fact, be clear and honest and rational, but because of a benevolent crimp in our nature, some part of you is still holding on to the possibility of hope. Some part of you is informed by the knowledge that the unlikely history of all of us everywhere has given birth to the single truth: You never know. But when you say She’s dying out loud the words become a thing hard and cold and beyond negotiation, and it knocked down the walls of Christy’s personality and he stopped on the road and I stopped beside him, and then, as though the air was going out of both tyres, he led the bike over to the ditch and laid it there and leaned against the bit of a broken wall. I pulled over beside him.

  We stayed quiet and small in the immensity of dark.

  And that, as they say, was that night.

  The days after that, Christy was drawn into himself. He lost some of the life of him, and for a time I thought it was going out of him at the same rate as it was going out of Annie. He knew I was continuing to visit her, but he asked nothing of me. Still, I felt a responsibility of bridges, to join both sides. I knew if I asked Annie if he could visit she’d say absolutely not. Despite the ravages that were apparent in her in the early morning, she hadn’t lost her woman’s right to choose how she looked to the world and retained a preserved dignity that made visitors unwelcome. ‘What a fright I am,’ she’d say, not with an exclamation mark, but with mixed awe and appal and the surprised smile of being an eyewitness to yourself. She’d pull the cuffs of her cardigan down over the thinness of her wrists to hide their reminders from herself. No, I knew she wouldn’t want Christy to come, and so I didn’t press her.

  When I wasn’t at the chemist’s I was playing the fiddle in the garden to an audience of cuckoos. They had come again from Africa, a return so welcomed by the old people that it wasn’t until I grew to this age that I fully understood it: it was the signal you had survived another winter. In the song of the cuckoo was embedded the simple joy of existence and because the bird was unseen and the song’s two notes travelling from treetops it had the air of nature’s telegraph. ‘Great year for cuckoos’ was Mick Finch’s catchphrase, his surname lending him the authority of a cousin.

  If, a year earlier, you had foretold a spring and summer of unparalleled sunshine, people would have told you they’d give their right arm for it. (Tim Kelly would have given you a small child.) But, because of a flaw in creation, even paradise became monotonous, and soon enough the heatwave had outworn its novelty. A new strand of Saharan complaint came to the parish, and in Clohessy’s Mary Mulvey offered the Lord a suggestion to improve on His work, ‘He should take the sunshine away for a few days to those that needs it, then bring it back again.’

  As part of his pastoral duties, Father Coffey visited Annie a few times each week. She had been a regular Mass-goer same as everyone else, but she kept her religion in a tight box and made clear she didn’t want any praying over her. There were to be no visits from the Legion, no rosaries, no holy candles. ‘People die, I’m dying’ was her précis of a philosophy of life factual and finite, and to be fair to him Father Coffey didn’t try any funny business to come around her. He’d make his visit – ‘How are we today, Annie?’ ‘Still dying, Father, how are you?’ – and sit and have tea and biscuits, backhanding the crumbs off his trouser leg, and tell her about other parishioners he was calling on and that way keep her up-to-date on the illnesses going around, most of which were long-standing and
with which she was familiar from the custom of the shop. Keeping her up-to-date was his version of saying You’re still among us, and she got that I think, and listened, and sometimes when one of those sudden sleeps of medication or exhaustion would overtake her, he’d pause the update and wait, and when she’d return with a start he’d carry on without comment and in that be a testament to the Christian.

  He didn’t question me about myself or interrogate the state of my soul. I hadn’t appeared again at his altar-rails. But, from his time in the parish so far, Father Coffey had taken a wisdom that wasn’t in too many priests then, which was: leave things be.

  Doctor Troy of course called every day. He looked at me as though I were an armchair in the wrong room. I would move out when he came in, and after, when he was leaving, he’d pass me the same look in the hallway. He had the fierce all-knowing all-judging eye of God in the Old Testament. A policy of keeping his patients’ confidences behind his moustache gave him a frosty demeanour. I didn’t mind. I appreciated that he was monitoring Annie closely and, to be honest, I was frightened, frightened when she took a turn, when her head went back into a precipitous sleep or when the pain outmanoeuvred the roadblocks of pills and it was two hours before she was due the reinforcements.

  Sometimes there were rallies. I would call and Annie would be sitting up in a silver-grey cardigan and looking as though on pony and trap she had arrived at one of those vistas of grandeur plentiful in Kerry. There was a lightness in her, and at first it was puzzling because of the pain of yesterday. She saw my confusion, but said even pain must sometime take a rest, and recited the dictum of Felix Pilkington, ‘Life is a comedy, with sad bits.’ If you saw her then you’d fall into the trap of thinking a cure was coming. She’d ask you to pull back the net curtains to let all of the day inside.

  From a perceived shortage of fresh air, no window in Faha was closed in that Spanish season, but when you drew aside the curtain it seemed you let in not only the air but a continental sunshine too, and you would not have been surprised if it had been ordered by prescription.

  On one such day, Annie slipped away from pain. When I ascended the stairs, she was tidying her things. She wanted everything in order when McCarthy came to carry her to the mortuary, she said. Together then we emptied presses, chests of drawers. With a general’s discernment, she would conquer by division, what to the dump, and what to Mrs Queally, who was Faha’s artery to the charities in town.

  And maybe because of this, because of the nature of time and its war with memory, because, as I know now, as you get towards the end you revisit the beginning, one day Annie Mooney finished going through her clothes, put her two hands on the support of the table, and said the thing I never thought she would.

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  41

  I can’t say I knew what would happen next. By a crossed wire in our brains it’s only after a thing happens that you realise you knew it was going to. In this life, I-could-see-that-coming and I-couldn’t-see-that-coming both amount to the same thing, because in neither case did you make a difference. What happened next, I didn’t make happen. By no means direct or indirect did I suggest it. I was resolved to my station of visitor, house-caller, tea and toast maker, press emptier, and took a jigsaw solace in fitting in in that small way.

  I told Annie about Christy. I told her about his arrival in my grandparents’ house, about the work he was doing with the memorial, about our evening cycles seeking Junior Crehan, and also about Christy’s singing outside her window.

  ‘I remember,’ she said.

  ‘We were watching the curtain to see if it moved.’

  She didn’t say she was standing just inside it in her nightdress. She didn’t say it had sent the heart in her skip to be serenaded by a street-singing out of storybooks. But she said it with her look. Then a realisation came to her.

  ‘You’ve told him.’

  ‘I had to.’

  She winced a wince-smile and a ripple crossed her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right. He’s your friend.’

  I told her he asked about her. But she didn’t stick to convention and enquire what he said, and at no point did I break the rules of our engagement by asking if he could come see her. There was a line there, I didn’t approach it. Whenever I finished speaking about him, Annie didn’t pass comment. She listened all right. She took it all in, but it felt the way it does when you know you’re reading the last pages of a long book and you just need these final bits to complete the picture.

  And that came about at my grandparents’ a few evenings later.

  A draughts tournament was underway out in the garden sometime between the sun going down and the velvet bats appearing. Ganga had a bottomless passion for the game. He played fast and found a confounding comfort in the reoccurrence of old games’ mistakes, which he recognised a moment after he had made them. Janey. He had two kings to Christy’s one and in the endgame the draughtboard had escaped its linear dimensions to become a fluid thing of backwards and forwards chasing that might have continued until forever but for the pulsing of the telephone.

  Officially, Doady wasn’t interested in the tournament, but she took an overseer’s position and watched her husband’s playing over a metronomic knitting that no longer required looking. When the phone rang she finished her line and put down the needles. In those days, time still retained elasticity and so you didn’t run to the phone. It would ring until you got there. It was news from Kerry or a message for one of the neighbours. The house operated as a poste restante where word could be left, there was a jotter with irreducible pencil stub on the ledge beside the phone, and Doady had evolved a left-handed habit of dabbing the lead on her tongue in preparation to note the news even as her right one picked up the receiver.

  It turned out she didn’t need to write down anything. Outside, in the clement California of that evening we heard her Hello? and a louder Hello? her voice going into and down the line as if towards the caller, and then her Yes and That’s right and then she had put down the receiver on the ledge leaving the line open and vulnerable as an infant on its back and come outside with the flutter-pulse that accompanies all events of the heart not just in old age and said to Christy, ‘It’s for you.’

  Three heads turned.

  Doady replied to the silent questions with a small back jerk of her head. Then, as though he had the whole of the next chapter, as though it arrived entire in the depths of his eyes, Christy rose from the game and went inside.

  To those who hadn’t the whole picture, Doady gave the primer: ‘It’s Mrs Gaffney.’

  The evening cocked an ear then, maybe six ears, the air between the black-and-white of the draughtboard and the front door pulled taut to let the talk travel out along it. It was a lopsided exchange, but from Christy’s first hard swallow and hesitant This is Christy to his near-whispered Goodnight nearly two hours later the other side could be imagined and the picture coloured in without going too far outside the margins.

  Annie Mooney’s first proper conversation with Christy in fifty years began with a blunt declaration: I don’t want to speak about me. She wanted no acknowledgement of her illness. What she asked instead was for him to pick up the thread where their lives came apart and tell her where he went the day of their wedding.

  His first words to her were the ones he had been holding in the barrel of his chest for so long they came out in a brine of sorrow:

  ‘Please forgive me.’

  Hearing that in the garden, the lenses of Doady’s glasses flashed, two discs of the darkening night sky trapped in them, as yet no stars. She had the split reaction of all who come upon an instance of naked confession, not to listen, and to listen harder, and resolved this by picking up her knitting and craning her head back at the same time. Ganga seemed not to be listening at all but hummed a low ‘Oh Susanna’ and carried on playing the chase of the two kings after the one, playing both sides and still not winning in a game that had ar
rived in a place of constant motion and stasis both.

  Aware of the audience in the falling dark, Christy lowered the receiver and bent his head to it, so he resembled nothing so much as a man speaking to his heart.

  ‘We are too old for tragedy,’ Annie said. ‘And there is nothing to forgive.’

  (Mrs Prendergast on the exchange in the post office had the best vantage and the truest version. She had a telephonist’s intuition and a perfect knowledge of the timbre of secrecy in the human register. In the first three words of any conversation coming over the wire she could tell whether this was one worth listening to. She knew the music of yearning in a human voice, and with the headset on had developed a blind woman’s sensitivity for sound, could listen into and along the wires, and did so now with her eyes closed and all other lines disconnected, leaving behind her body to go elsewhere through her ears, half a century before it would be commonplace. Mrs Prendergast heard it all. And after, she adhered to the strict privacies of the postman’s code and told no one, until she did. Some stories are too good not to be told, was an alibi in Faha. She told it to her sister in Dublin, judging near three hundred miles a safe distance to let the cat out of the bag, but misjudging the legs of a story which started its return journey that same evening when her sister told a friend visiting from the story-bog of the Bog of Allen, Mrs Prendergast not only misjudging the cunning of the cat but the fleas of invention it would pick up along the way back. When, two weeks later, Mary O Donahue leaned into the counter to tell Mrs Prendergast in loud whispers what you wouldn’t believe about that electric man above in Crowe’s – Christy had been in prison in Mexico, he had seen the alligators sunning themselves on sandy banks and been seduced by bare-chested beauties with black hair and blue tattoos, been in thrall to the valentine bottom of a shopkeeper’s wife, had gunpoint or was it knifepoint encounters and was rumoured wanted in three jurisdictions for I wouldn’t like to repeat – Mrs Prendergast had to resist incrimination by giving the authorised version.)