Excerpt from my novel 'Winter Prism'

When he reached the house there was a clutch of cars parked outside.  The cars were from Dublin, Cork and Offaly.  A Mercedes, a Golf, a Ford Focus, a Volvo and an Estate.  Some had new registration plates, they were shiny and expensive looking.  He swung open the backdoor with its rattling latch and said ‘hello,’ to the empty kitchen.  ‘Hello,’ he said again to the vacant hallway.  His heart squeezed itself into a ball.  He heard murmuring and shifting about upstairs. ‘Hello,’ he said, hesitantly, as he climbed the stairs.  

A stranger came out of Granny’s bedroom and softly closed the door behind her.  Her finger was pressed against her lips.  ‘I’m sorry for your troubles,’ she whispered as she gripped and squeezed his hand.  She re-opened the door and steered him in by the shoulder.  More people surrounded the bed.  They turned to him as a blur of faces.  Their fingers were locked white tight in prayer and their lips moved faintly as their bodies swayed to the chant.  They opened the circle to let him in.  He did not look at the bed.  Hands pushed him forward.  

He heard a yelp.  It was from Mammy.  He saw her now seated at the right hand side of the bed.  She had the eyes of an albino rabbit, white and pink from crying.   Someone else took his hand and squeezed it between theirs before propelling him towards her.  Mammy clung to him and sobbed while he stood rigid unsure what to do.

The low murmur of the incantation continued.  He looked around the circle.  Anywhere except the bed.  Their eyes were lowered to the floor or on the beads they pushed through their clenched fingers.  A priest was leading the prayer.  Two nuns flanked him, hunched and ancient, armed with holy water, candles and crucifixes.  One wore the old style headdress he knew was called a wimple.   He was a cousin, not their parish priest.  

Kai looked anywhere except at Granny.  He began to recognise people.  Uncle Pat was there, eyes on his boots, cap in his hands, fingers rotating it keeping time with the rosary.  He was unsmiling and serious, a different man to the one who’d chased him around the yard turning him upside-down to find where he’d hidden his tickles.  Aunties Margret and Mary were there.  Gripping each other’s elbows.  They had twisted their hankies around their knuckles turning them to rags.  Granny’s brothers and sisters not Mammy’s because she didn’t have any same as Kai.  There was a woman he recognised that Granny talked to after Mass.  She sang in the choir.  Her name was Mrs Sullivan.  John-Jo, their closest neighbour, who worked the farm and rented the land that Daddy left, was there looking embarrassed, like he wandered in by accident from the fields.  There had never been so many people in a bedroom.  It was Granny’s private room, he didn’t know if she would like it.

Daddy wasn’t there.  The lady to their left was finished her Hail Mary’s.  Her voice trailed off and her eyes fell on Mammy.  Mammy picked up the thread to continue the next decade.  It began seamlessly; then it got stuck.  First she paused like she needed a minute to think about it. Then the words, sore as hiccups, snagged on the fresh jags of her sobbing.  The priest looked at Kai.  Someone jabbed a finger in his side. His voice jerked into action.  The words rolled out and he surprised himself as they flowed smoothly at a comfortable rate.  

He said an entire decade.

The priest and the nun-fossils nodded approvingly.  Cocooned in the chant Kai was bold enough to look at Granny.  First her hands, resting atop the covers, mapped with age spots, the fingers curled inwards.  The wedding band gleamed on her finger.  Then her wrist.  The gold bracelet of her watch was loose about it.  In the nightdress’s short sleeves, her arms were withered and the skin sagged where muscles and plumpness had been.  The neck of her nightdress was crooked.  Her head was heavy on her neck, a toppling off her tiny frame.  Her mouth was slack and open.  It was flecked with spittle someone had done a poor job of wiping away.  Her face was transformed by its lack of expression.  Granny wasn’t in there anymore.

Her eyelids were closed.  They looked less heavy.  The priest droned out and the nuns handed him a metal chalice to be swung on strings through the room.  Choking plumes of incense escaped it.  It burnt like a forest of Christmas trees.   It lay heavy on the air already drowsy with the heat off the bodies huddled close around Granny like the animals at the nativity. 

Kai wanted to be alone in the room so he could fix Granny.  Straighten her nightdress on her shoulder, close her mouth and arrange her hair so the parting was right.  He wanted to listen to her not breathing.  Rest his head on the bony wasteland of her chest and tap it to hear if her heart thwacked back.  

‘We might have missed you on the bus,’ said Mammy, ‘so were waiting ‘til you got back.’  

The people hung together in hushed clumps.  The priest talked with Mammy about arrangements.  The conversation didn’t include Kai.  He slunk down the stairs passing Daddy on his way up.  There were women there, neighbours and people he didn’t know, making or unwrapping sandwiches and slicing breads and cakes.  He heard ‘Poor love,’ and ‘Poor pet,’ and, ‘Is that himself?’ as he walked through the rooms of the house.  Anyone at all could touch him or tousle his hair.

‘Would you like a cup of tea love?’ a stranger asked him in his kitchen.  ‘Yes,’ he said.  Press doors flapped and snapped as they were looted for tea pots, trays, good china and a doily for serving cake to the priest on.  The women asked him ‘Are you alright?’ or, ‘Can we get you anything?’ or else they asked him to find them things.  Like the sugar bowl and the milk jug. They were more interested in asking how he was than on waiting for him to reply.  He was ‘fine’ and ‘grand’.  ‘A good man,’ and ‘a great lad,’ or ‘a fine fellow,’ the men said.  ‘The image of his grandfather,’ said the women.  

‘I’m okay,’ said Kai to himself.  It felt funny.  Like walking in on a party happening in your own house you hadn’t known about.  He walked back into the sitting room, where the men were with a cup of tea, two ham sandwiches and a slice of Madeira cake on his plate.  There was nowhere for him to sit. ‘Back again!’ exclaimed a woman as he re-entered the kitchen. ‘Do you remember me?’ said another and Kai blushed because he didn’t. ‘Sure why would you,’ she said, and laughed.  Kai escaped to the yard.   

He found Daddy there.  Daddy was wearing a suit.  He was holding court around the back door with a group of men newly arrived.  They were smoking and talking about the weather mostly.  There was more grunting and guffawing than in the house.  Kai set his cup down on the window ledge and ate his sandwiches standing up listening.  It was almost a good party.    

Later, when the women were finished clearing up and the thanking them was over.  After the drop of something stronger was first refused then taken.  With the stories and the tears dried up.  The house was empty apart from Mammy, Daddy and dead Granny.  His head buzzed with tiredness, he had waited ages for everyone to leave.  He thought he would be glad they were gone when they left, but he wasn’t.  Death had made the house lonely.  He couldn’t talk to Granny about it because she wasn’t there. 

He could go in and out of her room now to fix her or the things in it.  But he didn’t want to.  It wasn’t fair that she was dead.  He lay on his bed and remembered her hard.  As far back as he could go to.  Granny pretending to be afraid of the spider he’d shown her, Granny teaching him cards then letting him win, Granny singing along to the kitchen radio, not knowing the words and out of tune.  Mostly Granny reading him stories and telling him her own ones.  He tried not to feel sorry for himself he was on his own now.  With Mammy and Daddy.  He tried to be glad for her she was with Granddad.  But he couldn’t help but be sad.  That she wouldn’t be there to take care of him any longer. And because he would miss her though he couldn’t imagine her being gone yet.

He was snuffling and cold under the blankets when he heard it.  Terrifying through the walls.  A baying sound.  Splitting the world in half.  He heard Daddy try to stop it with his arms and words of comfort.  It was painful grief that thrashed and moaned through Mammy.  A sorrow so monstrous its black wail made him shiver.  He hid under the blanket.  His tears were dampness compared to the ocean she cried.  He slept holding the medal as it hung about his neck.  It left a disk shaped imprint on his palm.  

 

He dreamt he was being chased by a black squiggle.  A writhing nest of lines looping and wiggling, it tried to trap him in its tangles, never to be freed again. 

There was no school the next day.  Granny went from the bedroom to the sitting room downstairs.  From the bed to the coffin.  Laid out and decked by flowers, pink, white, blue and yellow flowers.  Sitting in oasis’s green, wet, and so spongy that they sprung back to shape again when he pressed down into them.  He touched her finger in the coffin, it was stiff.

Mammy fussed and worried over his clothes.  The black shoes he owned were last years and tight on his feet.  They scraped his heels and crushed his toes. He rubbed one shoed foot against the back of his shin.  Mammy was borrowing a suit from Mary for the burial which was tomorrow.  She could wear her own black dress today.  Daddy could wear the same suit the whole time because he was a man.

Kai and Mammy had picked out a photo.  It sat in a silver frame at the head of the coffin.  It was of Granny in the summer five years ago being happy. Kai and Mammy sat together and remembered Granny’s favourite hymns. There was the ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Blue is the Colour’ but Mammy laughed because it wasn’t a hymn and it wasn’t even the name of the song.  Granny sang it in the mornings.  She sang the same bit over and over again because it was the only bit she knew.  Mammy didn’t ask Daddy what he thought Granny’s favourite hymns were.  

Daddy’s face was solemn but he whistled a cheery tune.  

‘She had a fine innings,’ he said to the visitors as they arrived.  He welcomed them to his house and shook their hands.

‘It ended the way she wanted.  She wasn’t a young woman.’ 

He showed them in to see her waxwork in the coffin.  Then they shook hands with Mammy and Kai and everyone else in the chairs that lined the room.  The coffin was not oak.  It was wood veneer.  Mammy had wanted an oak coffin.

‘You haven’t been keeping track of the accounts,’ Daddy sucked on his teeth and frowned, ‘between the Doctor coming and going and the priest…’  She didn’t have a head for it.  

The priest came in with a book from which Mammy and Kai selected readings.  

‘We’ll give her a fine send off.  A fine send off.  No expense spared,’ Daddy said, loudly to the neighbours.

‘We just don’t have it,’ he told Mammy.  So she was borrowing the suit and there would be sandwiches at the bar of the hotel not dinner in the restaurant when the burial was over.  She agreed to all he said except the flowers.  The flowers she cried and cried for.  There was no expense spared with the flowers.  The flowers were earned with tears.

‘It was her time,’ Daddy told the mourners.  

Kai chewed the inside of his cheek.  

‘Great respect for her.  Great respect for that woman.  A house on fire.  The best of friends. ’

Kai’s eyes widened.

‘We’ll be sad to see her go, well missed, well missed indeed.’

He blinked hard.

‘I’ve been over the books , we don’t have it,’ Daddy said to Mammy.

Mammy nodded.  Listening or not listening.  She was a wisp of her own smoke, not eating, not sleeping, blowing from room to room.  

‘I was with her right to the end,’ said Daddy.

Kai left.

Jimmy came with his mother.  Some of the other boys were there too and they sat on the stairs together.  ‘Sorry about your Granny,’ the said.  ‘Thanks,’ said Kai.

They were allowed to eat cake and they were allowed to go outside but not too far because it was dark.  

Kai showed them about the yard, some of them had never been on the farm before.

‘You missed it earlier Jimmy,’ said Daddy in the late part of the night ‘Kai crying like a baby for his Granny. Wa, wa, wa.’ 

He offered it like a joke for the lads to share between them.  

‘Yeah,’ said Jimmy, he didn’t laugh.

Daddy took a swallow from his whisky, ‘bawling,’ he said.

Jimmy didn’t laugh or sneer. Daddy walked away.

Kai had never been to a funeral before and he wondered would it be longer than mass. 

 

The lid went on and the screws eked closed on the coffin.  But Granny wasn’t in there she was the snowdrop.  That helped him to breathe when the coffin lid shut.  They walked behind the car it travelled in to the church.  The chief mourners - Mammy, Daddy and Kai. The January sunshine was cold and weak. The car was called a hearse and you could see the coffin inside through the back window.  It drove slowly enough for Mammy to follow even in heels.  

Daddy’s job was to help the men carry the coffin into the church.  Kai’s job was to carry the flowers up to the altar while Mrs Sullivan sang the ‘Ave Maria’.  There was a good turnout.  He was seated up the front but he got to see all the people going by when they went up for communion.  The material of Kai’s trousers was thin.  His knees were sore from kneeling on the bench.  His shoes pinched.  One shoe squeaked.  Outside the church neighbours, family and friends knotted together in groups.  They chatted and laughed but not when Kai and Mammy went by.  The day got overcast.  The line of crows sitting on the telephone wires outside the church eyeballed Kai.  He squinted back at them, he made a face.  ‘Shut-up,’ he said as he raked his shoe through the ground.

Next was the graveyard where they would bury the coffin.  Kai liked it there in the calm and still.  The gravestones were uneven and crooked as teeth that had grown up that way from the ground.  The wind whistled and sucked through them.  They had writing on them, inscriptions; some had faded away so only part of the words could be read.  Old deaths lay beside new deaths.  He passed a child’s white headstone. He stopped.  He zipped his jacket right up to this throat and moved on.  Granddad’s grave was at the top of an incline.  The sky darkened, it was threatening to make rain.   The Undertaker passed out massive black brollies.  They hovered above the mourners.  

They stood around the hole.  It was tarpaulined over so you couldn’t look in.  Kai was dizzy.  He looked for Mammy, she was leaning on Daddy.  Granny’s coffin disappeared into the dark.  Mammy stepped forward and threw a handful of soil on the coffin top.  He heard it scatter across the fake wood lid.  Kai threw a flower.  The skies spilled down.  The wind blew harder.  The priest went quickly through the blessing.  

They headed back to the cars muttering against the weather.  Kai could cry and no one would know.  He took his time zigzagging in and out of gravestones.  He stopped to admire a rockery.  He stood beneath a high Celtic cross and looked upwards.  He watched as the flowers of the new dead were washed and tattered by rain.   The plastic tags of flower givers flapped in the wind.  The ink ran out of their names.  Jesus with the outstretched arms looked down from a cross high in the centre of the cemetery.  His nailed palms were filthy.   Rain rolled down his cheeks. 

In the shelter of a yew tree Kai scrubbed the wet from his face.  He was in hiding.  A fox watched him from the bushes.  ‘Hello fox,’ said Kai.  It was a little fox.  Not fully grown, no bigger than a Jack Russell.  Its pointy face was so close to Kai he could almost touch it with the clouds from his breath.  

The fox cub sniffed the air.  Then slowly he padded towards Kai.  Kai stayed still.  ‘Don’t worry fox I won’t hurt you,’ he said.  The fox sniffed his feet.  Kai bent down to pat his head.  The top part between his ears.  He laid his head down on Kai’s lap.  Kai patted it, ‘Good fox,’ he said. 

His fur was wiry to touch.  Kai felt his chest pant against his leg.  His bush tail wagged.  His beady eyes blinked and he scurried away, back through the bushes.  

That night Kai woke with his heart pounding.  There was a weight on his chest heavy as six feet of soil.  He sat upright in bed, his chest heaving, gasping for air.  He put on his slippers.  His feet were blistered from the shoes.  There was blood on his socks when he took them off.  He went downstairs.

In the sitting room the fire still glowed.  He moved the guard away.  On the grate was a charred shape.  It collapsed with a poke of the fire iron.  Sparks flew off.  The hard binding of a spine was blistered and curled.  But he could still read, ‘The Complete Illustrated Stories of Hans Christian Anderson’.  Tattered and black it pages flown like crows up the chimney.