All We Shall Know

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Donal Ryan 2016
Cover design by James Jones

Donal Ryan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473509955
ISBNs 9780857524379 (hb)
9781781620281 (Doubleday Ireland tpb)

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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Week Twelve

MARTIN TOPPY IS the son of a famous Traveller and the father of my unborn child. He’s seventeen, I’m thirty-three. I was his teacher. I’d have killed myself by now if I was brave enough. I don’t think it would hurt the baby. His little heart would stop with mine. He wouldn’t feel himself leaving one world of darkness for another, his spirit untangling itself from me.

At seven weeks or so a foetus starts to move. Imperceptibly, they say, but I swear I felt a stirring yesterday, a tiny shifting, a shadow-weight. I’ve been still and silent all these weeks, listening for him. I sit here with the curtains drawn and the TV muted, waiting for a hint of something in the soft glow of things detonating, people bleeding, corpses being carried swathed in flags by dark-eyed men, people arguing and kissing and driving in cars, people opening and closing their mouths.

I’ve measured his time from the actual minute, not from the first day of my last period, like a doctor would, where a woman would be having normal sex, a normal life, and wouldn’t know one moment from another. But all my moments now are marked and measured, standing out in unforgiving light to be examined.

Pat came back yesterday evening from weeks of work around the country, installing water meters. They had to stay in digs, he said; the work was round the clock. The day he left he bent and kissed me on the cheek. His lips were cold; he paused before he straightened. I can’t remember if I looked at him. That was on the second day of the seventh week.

I stood at the TV-room door last night and looked at him, stretched along the couch in his tracksuit bottoms and Liverpool jersey, barefoot, unshaven, soft-bellied, defenceless. I’m pregnant, I said. He swung his head towards me and there was a sharp light in his eyes – was it maybe joy? – that extinguished itself after a moment, as he remembered. I told him the father was a man I’d met online, in the voice I always use to make him know I’m serious. Low and even.

He sat up, then stood before me and shouted, JESUS! just once. Then he raised his fists as though to punch me, but he pulled back and punched the air before my face instead, and he said, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, and he put his fists to his eyes and cried, very hard, teeth bared, eyes closed, like a little boy who’s just felt shocking pain.

There wasn’t much more to be said or done then, so he left. He was white as he walked with his gear-bag towards the front door, two small discs of livid red in the centres of his cheeks. He looked back at me from the open doorway. He was ghostly, washed in pale-orange light.

Are we even now? His voice was low, almost a whisper. I didn’t reply.

I always loved you, Melody Shee, he said.

All I said back was, Goodbye, Pat.

I slept deeply last night, for a while at least. I didn’t dream, or if I did I don’t remember. My body has started to do its own thing, to do what needs to be done. I’m twelve weeks gone, and two days. I announced my pregnancy at the twelve-week mark, as is customary. At twelve weeks the immediate danger has passed, the child has learnt to be, to cling, to grow and grow. Around this time a baby starts to taste. I feel I should be spooning sugar down, to sweeten his world. I tried some ice cream earlier today but it felt too cold in my chest and too hot in my belly, and a few minutes later it came back up. I have a craving now for bacon, wrapped in white bread, with butter and ketchup. He prefers savoury, so.

Pat’s father let himself in here sometime in the hour after dawn. I got up and walked around behind him, like a ghost he couldn’t see. He took a bagful of clothes from the walk-in wardrobe he’d made for us himself as a first-anniversary gift. He took Pat’s hurling helmet and togs and boots, and his laptop, and his pile of folders and papers from beside his desk in the small spare room. He left the front door open to ease his quarrying, armful by armful, of his son’s life. He forgot the power supply for Pat’s laptop, so I unplugged it and wound it neatly and handed it to him. He looked at me for the first time. His face was red with anger and embarrassment, and his breathing was heavy and ragged. I wanted to make him a cup of tea and rub his arm and tell him not to worry, and hear him calling me love and sweetheart, and see him smiling fondly at me, the way he always used to.

I’m sorry, Paddy, I said. I could almost feel his palpitating heart, rippling the air between us. I wanted to tell him to go easy, to mind his poor heart.

Ah, look, he said. Look. And he had no more words for me, nor I for him.

His car was backed into the yard, boot open, engine running. Fumes curled inwards along the hall. I thought, That would be a way to do it. He drove out and stopped on the avenue and walked back to close the gate. Like a protective grandfather, like a man who might say: Better keep that oul gate shut, for fear at all the child might run out in front of a car.

Yesterday’s ripple of sickness is a great wave today, rolling in and crashing over me every few minutes. A terrible tiredness came on me this morning and I sat on the couch for most of the day, with a basin at my feet. I rinse it out every now and then, in the kitchen sink. My muscles ache each time I walk, and my head spins when I get up and when I sit down, and pins and needles prick my goosebumped skin. I don’t remember eating, but I must have, because there are crumbs on the kitchen counter, and the rind of an orange.

Morning sickness my arse. The vomiting subsides in the early evening. I slept last night in my dressing-gown, cocooned in doubled-over duvets. The air in our room is always cold, except for a few weeks in midsummer. Pat always loved the coldness of the air: he said it made the bed more cosy to have a bit of yourself cold, your toes or the top of your head; you could appreciate being in bed a lot more. Oh, Pat. All the fights fought and terrible words spoken, all the years of nicks and cuts and scattered days when we tore each other so vicious and so deep. And this is what I’ve done to end it. Announced from the TV-room door that I’d let another man do what you couldn’t. I’ve been on my hands and knees for numberless hours. This is more than I can bear and less than I deserve. We’ll slip away to darkness soon enough, and live inside it, just us two, once I have all my loose ends neatly tied.

This morning I stood barefoot on the decking, drinking tea. The sickness was gone. I thought about having a fag. My body felt neutral, except for a twitch now and then from the muscles in my abdomen, as though aimless electrons were pulsing along it, shot from some confused gland that had been sleeping up to now. The air was clear and clean and there was a faint smell of mown grass. Someone nearby doing their first cut. I looked at the clay flower-pot at the far corner of the decking that Pat used for years as a giant ashtray, without ever thinking to empty it, overflowing with butts and black muck. My stomach churned a little bit.

I imagined the decking to be a gallows, the wooden planks beneath my feet its trapdoor. An audience of thistles and tufts of grass. I touched the belt of my dressing-gown. I thought of the high hook on the bathroom wall. I wondered how long it would take and how much it would hurt. I wondered if there were Stanley blades in Pat’s virgin toolbox in the cracked, untreated shed. I thought about a deep bath of roasting water. Why does the bathroom seem to be the natural place? The water and soap and disinfectant, the white tiles on the floor and walls, easily cleaned, the clouding steam. There’s something attractive about the dark inversion of leaving the world and curling myself into a cramped, warm space.

I ate: a boiled egg and dry toast. It stayed down. I slept.

Week Thirteen

MY DAYS ARE quadranted neatly now. I wake promptly at eight as I always have. I spend the first hour of each day convinced that I will actually kill myself. I feel relieved. I spend the hour after that worrying about the consequences of killing myself. My relief evaporates. I spend the next hour convinced that I will not kill myself. I feel relieved again. I spend the hour after that worrying about the consequences of not killing myself. My relief evaporates. I repeat this cycle three more times and I go to bed. I sleep for eight hours.

What thread has me tethered to this earth? Fear of pain. And a picture in my head of my father’s panicked eyes, having seen the squad car draw up outside with Father Cotter in the passenger seat. His hands shaking as he fumbles with the lock, reaching for the jamb to hold himself upright. His legs buckling in a weakness, big Jim Gildea stepping forward, kind, strong, embarrassed, or a young guard, red-faced and awkward, desperate for their ordeal to be over, catching a hold of him and helping him inside to a chair. A picture in my head of him standing alone at my grave, a cold wind on his face, a look of incomprehension in his eyes, his embarrassment as he accepts the sympathy of friends and barely remembered acquaintances with words that don’t sound right in his ears: Thanks; You’re very good to come; At least the rain held off; She’s in a better place; She’s with her mother now. The thought of his aloneness, the completeness of his sorrow, the idea of his world containing nothing, only sadness.

I dreamt last night, one of those dreams that seem so vivid you wake and lie in bed and wonder for a while what’s real. I was in a meeting of the Kurt Cobain Club. Breedie Flynn was sitting cross-legged and barefoot in her shorts and I was sitting cross-legged in front of her, watching her. Streams of tears flowed along her cheeks, pooling for moments in tiny valleys formed by acne before falling floorwards. Breedie’s face was livid and pitted; Breedie’s face was so beautiful I sometimes hated her. We were in Breedie’s bedroom in my dream, and we had tented a sheet above our heads between a chair-back and Breedie’s bed, and we had sandbagged ourselves against the world with pillows and cushions and Breedie’s collection of stuffed animals from her childhood.

Breedie Flynn and I founded the Kurt Cobain Club in April of 1994. Breedie thought he was a god; I just thought he was gorgeous. Kurt Cobain had chronic stomach pain all of his short life. So did my beautiful friend Breedie. She spoke to a poster of him as though he was in the room; I listened embarrassed and I never looked in her face when she almost absent-mindedly held my hand. I liked when she did, though. The Kurt Cobain Club owned these things: a Ouija board we would use to try to summon the spirit of Kurt Cobain; a litre bottle of vodka we would drink from in terrified sips; a tape recorder and microphone we would use to make recordings of Breedie Flynn’s wild stories and imagined conversations in the perfectly mimicked voices of the cool girls, the fellas, the teachers, our parents, with a backing track of my screams of laughter.

Breedie looked at me in my dream and said, Melody, why did you leave me? And she reached for my hand and squeezed it and she was haloed by a blazing light and her hand was burning hot and I woke then, saying, Breedie, oh, Breedie, I’m sorry, and lay sweating in the cold air, and felt the creeping nausea hasten to a rush.

My father rings me every day to tell me things he thinks that I should know.

He was out at the bottle bank earlier. Someone had thrown a load of rubbish into it. He said, Lord, isn’t it a fright? The CCTV cameras were broken, of course. I tut into a gap of silence and he goes on: I met Mossy Shanley yesterday evening below in the hurling field. The minors lost to Kildangan. Mossy hadn’t a good word for poor old Jack Matt-And. He called him every name you could think of and a few you’d never think of. You’ll have no luck, I told him, speaking ill of the dead like that. Eff that, says he, and he spat on the ground. Just because he’s dead it doesn’t mean he wasn’t a bollix. Mossy said that, imagine. Lord, poor Jack. He hadn’t a bad bone. All he ever wanted was to have a drink and to tell a story. I saw a lad earlier when I was walking home from devotions, and he driving along and he holding his telephone to his ear with one hand and he fixing his hair with the other hand and no hand at all on the steering wheel. Maybe it’s a thing that he had a third hand sprouting from somewhere but if he had I couldn’t see it. I could not.

And he stops and he waits for me to say something back, and he listens for sadness in my voice, I know. Will you call over this way one of the days?

I will, Dad.

I know you’re busy giving the reading and writing lessons and all.

I am a bit all right, Dad.

Is it the same little tinker lad you do have all the time?

Traveller, Dad.

Oh, ya, Traveller. Lord, everyone is gone fierce particular about what they’re called these days.

I’ll have to leave the house soon. Time passes as a crawling on my skin, from my scalp to my soles and back up again. I’ll have to get food, to stay alive while I’m waiting to die, and something for this sickness. Start of second trimester: morning sickness ends. I read that in a book, put just like that, set out perfunctorily as a fact, unassailable, incontrovertible, beneath a photo of a beautiful, smiling, perfect mother-to-be. What if your fucking morning sickness only started at the end of the first trimester? I’d nearly swallow a fistful of Valiums now, just to lie becalmed awhile, and drift away. There’s a full bottle on the medicine shelf in the bathroom press. There’s vodka in the cocktail cabinet and tonic in the fridge and ice in the freezer. Jesus, the party I could have. Will we do it, little man? I don’t know why I’m so sure it’s a boy. I just think of the child as the father compressed: red-cheeked and blue-eyed and dark-haired and beautiful. If I’m still alive when this tide of sickness turns I’ll go and visit my father.

So here I am still, less sick but no more mobile. Aren’t I rightly landed? Forty years ago I’d have been taken bodily away and set to work on the stained vestments of righteous men, the shirts and smocks and socks and smalls of those still in good standing with the Almighty, my baby dragged from me and sold and spirited away to live in grace away from my foulness. I feel a burden of freedom, a cloying sense of open space; I’ve been sitting now for hours on end unable to rise or to leave this room because I can’t think which direction I would turn at the door: away down the hall to bed, or out the door to my car? Where would I go? I have enough money to do me a year or maybe more, and this quietness I longed for soon will pass, and everything I wished would end will come crashing to a start again: Pat will bang against the door and beg, and try to make me say I only lied, and I’ll open it to the length of the chain and he’ll reach through the gap towards me and cry and say, Please, Melody, please. I need you, Melody. Because he always needed me, and still to this day I can’t think why.

I could still fly to London and end this, and come back and say, Yes, Pat, I was lying, and he could persuade himself to believe me, and we could take a weekend break somewhere and be massaged together, and walk along a river hand in hand, and stand beneath a waterfall and feel the spray on our faces and laugh, and think about the cave behind the falling water, cut off from the world, and all the roaring peace to be found there, and have a drink in the bar after dinner, and go to bed, and turn to one another’s flesh for warmth, and find only a hard coldness there, and no accommodation, no forgiveness of sins; and we’d turn away again from one another, and lie apart facing upwards and send words into eternity about babies never born, and needs unmet, and prostitutes and internet sex and terrible unforgivable sins and swirling infinities of blame and hollow retribution, and we could slow to a stop as the sun crept up, and turn from each other in familiar exhaustion, and sleep until checking-out time on pillows stained with tears.

Thoughts sharpen themselves on the flints of one another and pierce me like a knife in my middle, sunk deep and twisted around. How we couldn’t make ourselves remember, Pat and me. How we loved one other. If only we could have been perfectly dispassionate a moment, viewers from outside, or above, had out-of-body experiences, like floating spirits unshackled from their slashed-open, heart-stopped bodies in a blood-soaked surgery, watching their own evisceration without feeling the pain of it.

He fairly crippled himself, my Pat, with the weight of the expectations of others: his mother, his father, his sister, his friends, his monomaniacal hurling trainers, me. He told me once, not so many years ago, when we were still capable of reason, that he’d never once felt small until he’d met big men. He laughed but he wasn’t joking. I watched the tears lay siege behind his eyes. My heart tore for him; it physically pained me. I had no other words, I could only whisper that I loved him, there was that, there’d always be that. And still, even after that, knowing what I knew, having said what I’d said, having wanted so badly to take his pain from him and make it my own, I started only short years later to give my days to making him feel smaller. I waged war against him, and he waged war on me.

You have a fine fat arse for a one that’s forever on a diet, he would tell me.

You’re like a simple child that’s only barely toilet-trained, I would tell him, the amount of piss you get on the floor.

He’d say: A lot you’d know about children, simple or otherwise.

I’d say: You must have a fair shitty seed the way it won’t take properly.

He’d say: Why don’t you write a poem about it? And send it in to the paper? The way the neighbours can all have a good laugh again. Give the lads below in Ciss’s a good howl. Do you know they all read your poems out to each other down there and piss themselves laughing?

I’d tell him he was no man, he was never a man.

He’d tell me I must have a cold cunt of a womb to say no child would stay in it.

I’d call him rotten, and disgusting, and a pervert, and a prick, and I’d roar my throat raw. I’d tell him that I’d never loved him.

He’d tell me in a flat, steady voice that he hated my guts.

How did we turn to such savagery? How did love’s memory fade so completely from us? The things we said, the things we thought. My poor Pat, my lovely man, my twinkling boy, my hero. Oh, me, oh, cruel, cruel me, I never knew myself. Tomorrow, I’ll have forgotten myself again.

Week Fourteen

I FELL IN love with Pat the day I first saw him play hurling. He was sent off that day, and he looked at me as he walked from the field, and he pointed at me as if to say, That was for you, and the lad he’d punched was still on the ground, and little skirmishes were erupting around the ref and the fallen player, a fella I’d slow-danced with months before at a Foróige disco, who’d ignored me afterwards and shifted someone on the way home in the bus, and had said something smart about me in school on the Monday but I don’t know to this day what, and Pat took off his helmet as he walked with one sweeping movement and his hair was wet with sweat and swept back from his forehead and the sun lit his face and his blue eyes blazed and they held mine and he pointed to his heart as he strode through the cool evening air towards the sideline and my legs felt so weak I thought I’d fall down on the ground, and Breedie Flynn was saying, Oh, my God, Melody, he’s pointing at you, and she was squeezing my arm, and oh, sweet Jesus, how I loved him, loved him, loved him.

Pat was the first boy I ever kissed, whose hand I ever held, and was, until thirteen and a bit weeks ago, the only boy I’d ever kissed. I’d never felt another man’s hand on my cheek, or seen that piercing light of longing in another man’s eyes. We merged over time into one person, I think, and it’s easy to be cruel to oneself. I can only now separate myself from him, now that we’re properly separate. Even through the hating years we were always close by each other.

I felt like I was doing it wrong, the first time we kissed. Breedie Flynn and I had practised on each other, but we’d never used our tongues, reasoning that to do so would make us lezzers, and anyway we laughed too much to get any serious research done. Breedie drew back from me once and put her hand on my cheek and I put my hand on top of hers and we looked into each other’s eyes and time moved liquidly to a forking of paths, and then I laughed and so did she, just at the point of divergence. The universe makes and remakes itself in each moment. I feel those other lives sometimes, going on around me.

Pat seemed like a really good kisser. He never bit into my lip the way I’d heard some girls say their fellas did, or squeezed my nipples, or tried too roughly to get his hand up my skirt or down my pants. I felt embarrassed at first, unsure what to do, but soon kissing Pat was the most right thing in the world, a thing I just did, like singing in my head as I walked, or looking at the sky’s different blues, or listening in the night to the whispering breeze and hearing my mother’s voice.

My mother and father didn’t fit together. She was taller than him by an inch or so; she had long slender hands and his were thick and stub-fingered. She was an aesthete and a classicist; he didn’t know what these things were. She wanted to work as an academic, but she never did. He worked as a foreman for the council, on the roads mostly. My mother always smelt of French perfume and expensive leather; my father always seemed to smell of sweat, and something sharp and heavy, bitumen maybe, or whatever dark and tarry things filled his days. My father didn’t seem to interest her, or to excite her. He didn’t make her weary, the way another man might have, a man more able to read her silences, to decipher the algorithms of her. That’s what she saw in him, I think.

You should be a manager by now, I heard her tell him one morning.

I’m not equipped for that sort of a job, he said.

I heard her sniff, and I heard a long silence, and I heard a chair being pulled out from the table, and I heard my father say, Right, well, in his soft voice, and I heard him picking up his keys, and then I heard her say: What are you equipped for? What are you equipped for? What are you good for? What good are you, Michael?

And I heard my father say, I don’t know. Sure, look, I’ll see you later. And he left through the back door, and he didn’t even slam it, and there was no sound of movement from the kitchen, but I could smell cigarette smoke, and the air felt cold around me in the hallway where I stood listening.

My father seemed different to me when he came home that evening. I was barely ten, and I’d only ever thought of him in terms of love. Some childish opacity had fallen away; the suffusing light that had always in my vision surrounded him was dimmed, flickering towards extinction. I appraised him, coldly. What was he good for?

Thinking now about the way I thought about things then, about how I let my mother’s anger towards him seep into me, I feel a desperate need to apologize, to mitigate the hurt I must have caused him as I drew away from him, as I let my perfect love for him be sullied, and eroded, and disintegrated, by the coldness of a woman I didn’t even really like, but whom I wanted more than anything to be like.

I didn’t run into his arms that evening, so he knew that something had changed; I walked to meet him at the door, and there was a stiffness and an awkwardness between us, and he must have sensed that I was suddenly no longer a child, but another woman in his house, an addition to, an extension of, the woman already there, who seemed to need him and who seemed to despise him, and sometimes, often, to hate him.

He was shocked at the change in me, but he didn’t let on. I knew by the way he was looking at me with his eyebrows closing together, holding me from him at arm’s length by the shoulders, seeing whatever hard light he saw every day in my mother’s eyes, and laughing, as though he couldn’t believe it, but should have known all along that this would happen. I think he started that day, at that moment of strangeness between us, on his journey to being a duffer, a run-of-the-mill old man, a quiet, boring person, who just existed, moving through his days out of duty, a sense of having to see this thing through, this raising of a child and supporting of a wife, this series of payments that had to be met, with nothing to grasp at the end of it all, no soft bed of thanks to lie upon, no sweet relief that his work was done, and done well, and those he worked for were grateful, and loving, and adoring.

But still he loved me, defiantly, fiercely, and he loved her the same way, because what else was there for him to do?

I was fourteen the first time I lost my reason. It was the sight of my mother’s fingers that ignited me. The way they had been arranged, unnaturally, with a rosary beads artfully twined into them. I somehow had failed to notice it, or I had seen it but the seeing hadn’t landed on me. Our family doctor had given me an injection of something the night before to help me sleep, to take me away from the pain. We were standing at our chief mourners’ posts, Daddy and me, Mercury and Venus at our extinguished Sun, Mammy’s brothers and sisters arranged to our sides like the farther-out planets, an asteroid belt of cousins near the doors, lined along the vestibule.

I said, Daddy, what the fuck are those rosary beads doing there? She never said the rosary in her life. Daddy didn’t look at me. He swallowed hard; something in his throat clicked. I remember the paleness of him, his gritted teeth, the tiny tremor in his head that only I could see as I stood incandescent beside him.

It’s okay, pet, he whispered. It’s always done that way; they just presumed.

Presumed? I nearly screamed, and I saw through the arched door at the far end of the parlour a cousin, barely more than an infant, giggling in the vestibule. I broke from our small rank of chief mourners and pushed through the stream of duty-doers towards the daylight. Chief mourners, intermediate mourners, minor mourners, all staring at me, their eyes following me out; a bit of fun suddenly, out of the blue, a breaking light in the sombre day. I rushed at him and he never saw me coming, or if he did he didn’t know it was for him I was coming, and I smacked the giggling cousin across the side of his head. My hand made a sound like a whip-crack on his skull. He’d only have been eight, nine at the most. Then I whirled away from him and grabbed Frank Doorley’s meaty arm. He’d been standing sentry at the entrance, guarding the hospice donation box. Get in there and take those beads from my mother’s hands. He didn’t move. Get. The fuck. In there. NOW.

And so, at a weary nod from my father, he did. And the entrance door had to be closed for a few minutes, and my little cousin, who had hardly known my mother, contorted his face in a keening, breathless cry and was hugged and shushed kindly by older children and whisked away, and the truncated line of neighbours and friends and my father’s workmates and half-remembered relatives shook the offered hands and filed away from the embarrassment of it all in grave procession, and Daddy stood still and white and watched while Frank Doorley prised and teased and finally cut the offending beads from Mammy’s translucent hands.

SHEE