A History of Loneliness Read online

  ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Who did you love?’

  ‘Ronald Reagan,’ she said. ‘Do you remember him in the films? They show them on a Saturday afternoon sometimes on BBC2. There was one on a few weeks ago and there was Ronald Reagan working on a railroad and he had an accident and the next thing he knew he was waking up in bed with both his legs amputated. Where’s the rest of me? he shouted. Where’s the rest of me?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ I said, even though I had never seen a Ronald Reagan picture in my life and was always surprised when people talked about how he used to be in films. They said his wife was an awful creature.

  ‘He always looked like he was in charge,’ said Hannah. ‘And I like that in a man. Kristian had that quality.’

  ‘He did,’ I agreed, for it was true, he did.

  ‘Did you know that he was in love with Mrs Thatcher?’

  ‘Kristian?’ I asked, frowning. I couldn’t imagine it.

  ‘Not Kristian, no,’ she said irritably. ‘Ronald Reagan. Well that’s what they say anyway. That the two of them were in love with each other.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said with a shrug. ‘I doubt it. I’d say she’s a tough woman to love.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to see the back of that Clinton fella,’ she said. ‘He was a dirty so-and-so, wasn’t he?’

  I nodded, saying nothing. I was sick of Bill Clinton myself. I liked his politics well enough but he had become so hard to trust, so concerned with saving his own skin, that he had lost me long ago. All those wagging fingers and stone-faced denials. And not a word of truth in any of it.

  ‘Him and his oral sex,’ continued Hannah and I turned to stare at her in surprise. I’d never heard such words come out of her mouth and wasn’t entirely sure that I’d heard her correctly now either but I wasn’t going to ask any questions. She was turning the sausages over in the pan and humming to herself. ‘Odran, are you a ketchup man or do you prefer the brown sauce?’ she called out.

  ‘Ketchup,’ I said.

  ‘I’m out of ketchup.’

  ‘Then brown sauce will do me fine,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember the last time I had a bit of brown sauce. Do you remember how Dad used to put it on everything? Even salmon?’

  ‘Salmon?’ she asked, handing me a plate with two fine-looking sausage sandwiches on it. ‘Sure when did we ever have salmon growing up?’

  ‘Ah there was a bit of it from time to time.’

  ‘Not that I can recall,’ she said, sitting down in the armchair and staring at me. ‘How’s that sandwich?’

  ‘Spot on,’ I said.

  ‘I should have made you a dinner.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I don’t know where my head is at the moment.’

  ‘Don’t be worrying, Hannah,’ I said, wanting to move the conversation on. ‘What did you have for dinner yourselves anyway?’

  ‘A bit of chicken,’ she said. ‘And mash rather than boiled. Kristian always prefers the mash.’

  ‘Jonas,’ I said.

  ‘Jonas what?’

  ‘You said Kristian.’

  She looked a little confused and shook her head, as if uncertain what I was getting at. I was going to explain, but at that moment I heard a door open upstairs and the slow, heavy descent of feet coming down the staircase. A moment later, Jonas himself came in and nodded at me, a shy smile, pleasant though. His hair was longer than the last time I had seen him and I wondered why he didn’t cut it short for he had a pair of cheekbones on him, that boy, and had they belonged to me I would have had them on display in the front window.

  ‘How are you, Uncle Odran?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m very well, Jonas,’ I said. ‘Have you got taller since the last time I saw you?’

  ‘He never stops growing, this one,’ said Hannah.

  ‘Maybe a bit,’ said Jonas.

  ‘And what’s with the hair?’ I asked, trying to sound friendly. ‘Is that the latest fashion now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘He needs a haircut is what he needs,’ said Hannah. ‘Would you not get yourself a haircut, son?’ she asked, twisting around to look at him.

  ‘I will if you give me three-fifty,’ he said. ‘I haven’t a spare penny at the moment.’

  ‘Well don’t be looking at me,’ said Hannah, turning away. ‘I’m in enough trouble as it is. Odran, wait till I tell you. Mrs Byrne at work, she told me I had to buck my ideas up or else. I wouldn’t mind, but I’ve been in that job eight years longer than her.’

  ‘Yes, you said,’ I replied, finishing off one sandwich and starting in on the other. ‘Will you not sit down, Jonas?’ I asked and he shook his head.

  ‘I just wanted a drink,’ he said, heading for the kitchen.

  ‘How are your studies going?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine,’ he said as he opened the fridge and looked inside, his face betraying both disappointment and resignation at what he found within.

  ‘That boy always has his head in a book,’ said Hannah. ‘But sure doesn’t he have brains to burn?’

  ‘Do you know what you’d like to be yet, Jonas?’ I asked.

  He muttered something, but I couldn’t make out what he’d said. It was something smart-alec, I thought.

  ‘He could be anything he wants to be, that one,’ said Hannah, her eyes fixed on George W. Bush’s face as he delivered his inaugural address.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Jonas, stepping back into the living room and staring at Bush for a moment. ‘An English degree doesn’t really prepare you for anything, but that’s what I’d like to do.’

  ‘You won’t be following me into my line of business, will you?’ I asked.

  He laughed and shook his head, but not in a nasty way, his face colouring a little as he did so. ‘I don’t think so, Uncle Odran. Sorry.’

  ‘You could do a lot worse, son,’ said Hannah. ‘Sure hasn’t your uncle made a grand life for himself?’

  ‘I know,’ said Jonas. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I’m only teasing,’ I said, not wanting any apologies. ‘You’re only sixteen years old. In this day and age, any sixteen-year-old who wanted to do what I do would be asking for trouble from his friends, I’d say.’

  ‘That’s not the reason,’ said Jonas, staring directly at me.

  ‘Did you hear that he had an article in the paper?’ asked Hannah.

  ‘Ah Mam,’ said Jonas, edging towards the door now.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said, looking up.

  ‘An article,’ she repeated. ‘In the Sunday Tribune’.

  ‘An article?’ I asked, frowning. ‘What kind of an article?’

  ‘It wasn’t an article,’ said Jonas, blushing furiously now. ‘It was a story. And it wasn’t anything really.’

  ‘What do you mean, it wasn’t anything?’ asked Hannah, sitting up and staring at him. ‘Sure when did any of us ever get our names in the paper?’

  ‘Do you mean a short story?’ I asked, putting my plate down and turning to look at him. ‘Like a work of fiction?’ He nodded, unable to meet my eye. ‘When was this?’

  ‘A few weeks back.’

  ‘Ah Jonas, you should have called to let me know. I would have liked to read it. Fair play to you, all the same. A story, is it? Is that what you want to do then? Write books?’

  He shrugged and looked almost as embarrassed as he had the previous year when I’d made that inappropriate comment at the wake. I turned back to the television to spare him any further discomfort. ‘Well good luck to you anyway,’ I said. ‘That’s a grand ambition to have.’

  I heard him shuffle out of the room then and started to laugh as I shook my head, turning to Hannah, who was busy reading the schedules in the RTÉ Guide. ‘A writer, is it?’ I said.

  ‘It’s a long walk from Brow Head to Banba’s Crown,’ she replied, a response which mystified me slightly. A moment later, she put the magazine down and stared at me as if she didn’t know me at all.

  ‘You nev
er told me what happened with Mr Flynn,’ she said.

  ‘With who?’ I asked. I racked my brain; I could think of no Flynns.

  She shook her head, dismissing this, and stood up to walk into the kitchen, leaving me bewildered. ‘I’ll make some tea,’ she said. ‘Will you have a cup?’

  ‘I will.’

  When she returned to the living room a few minutes later, she had two cups of coffee in her hands, but I didn’t say anything. I thought there was something on her mind perhaps; she appeared so distracted.

  ‘Is everything all right, Hannah?’ I asked. ‘You don’t seem like yourself. You’re not worrying about anything, are you?’

  She thought about it. ‘I didn’t want to get into it,’ she said, leaning forward in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘But now that you mention it, and strictly between you and me, I don’t think Kristian is very well at all. He’s been getting these awful headaches. But will he go to the doctor? You try telling him because he won’t listen to me.’

  I stared at her. I wasn’t sure what to say, what she could possibly mean by this. ‘Kristian?’ I said finally, the only word I could muster. ‘But Kristian is dead.’

  She stared at me as if I’d just slapped her across the face. ‘Sure don’t I know that?’ she said. ‘Didn’t I bury him myself? Why would you say such a thing?’

  I was confused. Had I heard her right? I shook my head. I let it go. I drank my coffee. When the clock said nine and the news came on I listened to the headlines, watched Bill and Hillary board a helicopter and wave goodbye to the nation, and then said I better make a move myself.

  ‘Well don’t leave it so long next time,’ she said, neither standing up nor making any sign that she was going to see me out to the door. ‘And next time I’ll cook you that dinner I promised.’

  I nodded and left it at that, going out into the hallway to retrieve my coat, closing the living-room door behind me. As I stood there putting my coat on, the door opened upstairs and Jonas, barefoot, came to the top of the stairs and looked down at me.

  ‘Are you off, Uncle Odran?’ he said.

  ‘I am, Jonas. We should talk more often, you and I.’

  He nodded and came downstairs slowly, handing me a piece of folded-up paper. ‘You can have this if you want,’ he said, unable to look me in the eye. ‘It’s my story. From the Trib’.

  ‘Ah great,’ I said, touched that he wanted me to have it. ‘I’ll read it tonight and get it back to you.’

  ‘No need,’ he said. ‘I bought ten copies of it.’

  I smiled and put the paper in my pocket. ‘I’d have bought it myself if I’d known,’ I said. He stood there nervously, looking back towards the living-room door, bouncing up and down on his toes. ‘Is everything all right, Jonas?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You seem like you’ve got something on your mind.’

  He breathed heavily through his nose, unable to look me in the eye. ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ he said.

  ‘Well go on so.’

  ‘It’s about Mam.’

  ‘What about her?’

  He swallowed and finally looked directly at me. ‘Do you think she’s all right?’ he asked me.

  ‘Your mam?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She seemed a bit tired to me,’ I said, reaching for the latch on the door. ‘Maybe she needs more sleep. We could all do with a bit extra, I suppose.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said, putting a hand on the frame to keep me there. ‘She’s been repeating herself a lot and forgetting things. She forgot that Dad is dead.’

  ‘They call it middle age,’ I said, opening the door now before he could stop me. ‘It comes to us all. It’ll come to you too, but not for a long time yet so don’t be worrying. It’s cold enough out here now, isn’t it?’ I added, stepping outside. ‘Get yourself back inside before you catch something.’

  ‘Uncle Odran—’

  But I didn’t let him continue. I walked down the path and he watched me for a few moments before closing the door behind me. I felt the guilt of it but could do nothing; I just wanted to go home. As I stepped over towards the Fiesta there was a tap on the window. I looked around and there was Hannah, parting the net curtains and calling something out to me.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, cupping a hand to my ear, and she beckoned me forward.

  ‘Where’s the rest of me?’ she cried, before laughing heartily, closing the curtains and turning away.

  I knew then that Hannah wasn’t right, that here was the start of something that would only bring trouble about all our heads, but in my selfishness I dismissed it for now. I would call her in a week, I decided. Invite her to Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street for lunch. Buy her a fry-up and a cream bun to follow and one of those coffees with the frothy white heads. I would make an effort to look in on her more often.

  I would be a better brother than perhaps I had been in the past.

  Before driving home, I decided to make a late-night visit to Inchicore – a longer route, of course, but I wanted to pull into the church and take a few moments at the shrine there, a replica of the grotto at Lourdes, a town I have never visited nor wanted to see. I have little patience for those places of pilgrimage – Lourdes itself, Fatima, Medjugorje, Knock – which seem always to be the inventions of impressionable children or the delusions of tumbling drunks, but Inchicore was no pilgrim’s destination, rather a simple church with a shrine and a statue. I often came here at night if I felt unsettled.

  I arrived quickly along empty roads, parked the car and entered through the open gates. The moon was out that night, bright and speckled, lending some illumination to the grounds, but as I turned the corner I was surprised to hear a keening of sorts, a kind of terrible anguished moaning emerging from the direction of the grotto. I hesitated, trying to decipher the sound. If there were young people over there getting up to all sorts, then I didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to know about it, would rather just get back in my car and go home, but after a moment I realized that these were not cries of passion but the deep-plundered howls of uncontrollable weeping.

  I stepped forward carefully, and as my eyes focused I saw what appeared to be a body lying face-down, its arms and legs outstretched, a human crucifix prostrate on the gravel, and my first thought was that a crime had been committed, a murder. Someone had come and killed a man in front of the grotto at Inchicore church. But then the body moved; it lifted itself up into a kneeling position and I saw that this was not an injured man at all, but a praying man. A priest, in fact, for he wore the long-sleeved black cassock of the ordained, the garment blowing in the breeze just above his ankles. As he knelt, he raised his hands to the heavens before twisting them into fists which he used to beat himself rapidly about his head, a pounding of such ferocity and wildness that I prepared myself to intervene even if there was a risk that he might turn on me in his grief or madness and do me an injury. He turned slightly and I saw his face silhouetted in the moonlight. A young man – younger than me anyway by a decade or more, perhaps in his early thirties. A mess of dark hair and a prominent nose with a wide bridge at its summit. He let out a cry and collapsed back into the position in which I had originally found him, but although he quietened now, the moaning continued, this interminable sobbing, and I felt a chill run down my spine when I looked to his left and noticed that he was not alone.

  For seated in the corner of the grotto, almost hidden out of sight, was a much older woman, in her late sixties, and she was rocking back and forth with tears streaming down her face, suffering distorting her features. As her face caught the moonlight I saw that she shared something in common with the young priest, that aquiline nose, and I knew immediately that he had inherited it from her, his mother.

  And so there they were, the young man lying flat, beseeching the world to bring his torment to an end, the mother shaking in pain and looking for all the world as if she would like the heavens to open and for God to call her home without another wasted mome
nt.

  It was a terrifying sight. It unsettled me enormously. And while another in my place might have gone over to the pair and offered whatever comfort they could, I walked away, quickly and nervously, for there was something there, some horror looming over us all, which I felt ill-equipped to cope with.

  And I look back at that night, more than a decade ago now, and I remember those two incidents as if they only took place earlier this week. George W. Bush has been and gone. But I recall Hannah sitting in her armchair telling me that her dead husband was suffering from awful headaches and I recall this mother and son, weeping and wailing at the grotto in Inchicore. And as I drove back through the streets towards the comfort of my lonely bed, I knew without question that the world as I had always known it, and the faith that I had put in it, was about to come to an end, and who knew what would take its place?

  CHAPTER TWO

  2006

  IT WAS JUST over five years later that I was taken away from Terenure College, the school where I had been living and working for twenty-seven years. I had long ago accepted that I was at my happiest when hidden away behind the high walls and closed gates of this private and erudite enclave and the change came as a shock.

  I had never intended to stay at Terenure for so long. Returning from Rome to Dublin in the middle of 1979, finally ordained after seven years of study but with a slight whiff of scandal still attached to my name, I was assigned to the school chaplaincy with a view to moving to a parish soon after. But somehow this relocation never took place. Instead, I passed the exams for my H.Dip and ended up teaching English, with a little bit of history thrown in. Outside of teaching hours, I ran the library and celebrated Mass every morning at half past six for the same small group of elderly men and women, retirees all, who had never learned the ability to sleep in or were worried that they might not wake up if they did. I was to be a spiritual counsellor to the boys, a job whose demands decreased dramatically as the eighties gave way to the nineties and these in turn yielded to the twenty-first century, for the life of the spirit was one that seemed less important to the students as the years went on.