The Forgotten Waltz Part 12

So he went back into town and swapped the pink bed linen for some with a chopped fruit design in acid-yellow and lime-green. He bought a lime-coloured dressing gown with purple trim, and oversized slippers with doggy faces on the toes.

He bought an iPod dock in the shape of a plastic pig and a little white chest of drawers to put it on. He bought a fish bowl and a goldfish, in a clear plastic bag. I said, 'Who is going to feed the fish?'

'I will,' he said.

He gave it to me for a moment, and I held it up to the light. An orange fish, darting and stopping in its bright bubble of water.

Happiness in a bag.

Sean fed it for at least a month, every second day, faithfully, then one evening, I got a text: 'check fish!!!!!!!!!!!'

So I feed it now, and it is still alive. A fish called Scratch. You can hear it when the house is still actually hear it nose down, picking up stones, sorting through the gravel. The first time she stayed over, Evie said the sound of it kept her awake all night, it was the noisiest fish on the planet.

Even Scratch is quiet, tonight. It has started to snow again and the tyre-welts on the street are softening into humps and mounds of white. The traffic lights work on. Upstairs, at the end of the landing, Evie's room is a padded shrine of lime-green and acid-yellow, with pips, in the watermelon smiles of blood red. Her clothes, in the little white chest of drawers, tend more to black as the months pa.s.s, with rips in the right places, and skulls, and scrag-ends of tulle. Her father lets her wear what she likes. He talked about a carpet, so her sequinned hi-tops would have something to look good on, while she is away. It is like he has forgotten where he is.

'A new carpet?' I said.

'Maybe a rug.'

So I hoover the rug.

I did not pay for the rug.

I nearly paid for it, mind you that woman is bleeding him dry.

The rug has big coloured squares on it. It looks great. And I am not complaining. When it comes to housework, 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 cla.s.sical 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. Pa.s.sionately dead. Pa.s.sionately 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.'

p.r.o.nounced '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 gla.s.s, 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 s.h.a.ggy 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.

'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 sh.o.r.e 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 ac.u.men, 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 gla.s.s. 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 f.a.g 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 gooseb.u.mps. 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, s.e.xually: 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, glad our mother was dead, so she wouldn't have to witness the way I was carrying on.

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 gla.s.s, 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, down-kick and tip and heel-fall, bang, kick up, heel-step tip-drum.

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 s.p.a.ce, 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, p.i.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ces 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 pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.s, 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.

Paper Roses A COUPLE OF months ago, I saw Conor on Grafton Street. He was pushing a buggy, which gave me pause, but then I recognised his sister beside him, home from Bondi. He did not seem surprised to see me. He looked up and nodded, as though we had arranged to meet.

His lips were chapped, I noticed. The light was too strong on his face the way the sun sets straight down Grafton Street and when we circled around, the better to see each other, I was bizarrely worried that my skin had aged.

'All right. You?'

'Yeah.'

His sister was watching us, with a look so tragic I felt like asking her did the budgie die.

'Oh my goodness!' I said, instead, and I bent down to look under the hood of the buggy. There was her baby, a little shock of humanity, looking me bang in the eye.

'Gorgeous!' I said, and asked how long she was staying, and what the news from Sydney was while Conor seemed more and more tired, just standing there.

After I walked on I got the blip of a text in my pocket.

'Are we married?'

I kept going. I put one foot in front of the other. A second text arrived.

'Need to talk about stuff.' I glanced around then but Conor was thumbs deep in his mobile. Fatter too, in the harsh light. Or, not so much fat as more solid. He glanced up, and I had, as I turned away, an impression of his weight along the length of me, top to toe.

'I'm just saying,' says Fiachra. 'He's small, good-looking, witty.'

'So?'

'He's your type.'

'I don't have a type.'