Ian McDonald - After Kerry

Illustration by Darryl Elliott

November is the dying season in our family. The light fades out of us, we grow pale and cold and fall like leaves. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins accidentally killed; all the dead of November. Now, my mother.

It’s a good month for burying, November. The low between-light of autumn-going-winter shows the bones and struts of things; the land, the things growing from it, the people standing on it. Ireland is a country that looks best by winter light, stripped bare of leaves and greenery, spare and strong and good. We buried Ma beneath an intense blue sky, the golden light casting long shadows on the grave grass from the marble Jesuses and alabaster angels and our overcoated figures around the hole. Family, the few living relatives, Father Horan. No friends. My mother had never had a friend she had not alienated in the end.

The dying had been painful and long and inevitable. Ironic, mostly. Every time one of us had tried to break away from that dark little house full of the smell of frying food, she had found a lump, or noticed a mole had grown larger, or had pains in her stomach, or passed blood. And she would reel us in from wherever we hoped to escape to. Dangerous, to invoke the name of the angel of carcinoma. He flies in tandem with the angel of poetic justice. November is his favorite month.

Kerry had broken the tether. She flew free.

Father Horan sprinkled the box with water, and they put Ma down into the black pit and shoveled the earth over her, and I did not feel a thing. Da stood, shoulders slumped, watching the Father roll up his stole, and I knew he felt as I did. It was like God had died and left us all to our own wills and consciences,.but we could not believe the infinity of the universe we had been let play in.

Louise was crying; shuddering heaves and sighs. She was doing it for those of us who would not. She probably blamed herself for the cancer, somehow.

A small flock of starlings dashed over the cemetery. Symbol of a soul in flight, to the ancient Greeks. Metempsychosis. She’d always hated it when she thought I was showing off. Mr. Too-Big-For-His-Boots. Knows everything, but knows nothing. Ma had never allowed us to enjoy anything she lacked. Including education. We learned to temper our ambitions to her jealousy. The soul of Aeschylus, Ovid, Whitman, Heaney, at the batch desk in the Allied Irish bank.

“Metempsychosis,” I whispered, because I was free to.

“What?” Da grunted.

“Transmigration of the soul. The spirit moving from one body to another.”

The birds turned with a flash of wings over the brick chimney of the crematorium and swooped away, calling to each other.

In the car park, Father Horan shook our hands with pleasing firmness. Another surprise, he drove away in a red Toyota sports model.

“I thought Kerry might have made it,” Da said.

“How?”

“Seen the notice, maybe.”

“We don’t even know she’s still in this country. It’s been three years.”

Three years of something more than silence. By gesture and expression and mood and sigh, Ma taught us that Kerry was dead, to her, and so to us. But you talk about the dead, you remember them, fondly or not; their spirits haunt you. Kerry was an exorcised ghost. A never-existed. An unconceived child.

I had called at her flat, a few days after the night of the argument, to convince her that it was unnatural for a daughter to swear never to see her mother again. “Kerry doesn’t live here anymore,” Michaela her flatmate had said. She was as surprised as I. No warning, no preparations, no forwarding address. Gone.

I can still see Kerry’s room. October sunlight through a leaded window; dusty sneaker-prints on the boards; closets and drawers open, bed stripped down to the stained, candy-striped mattress. Rectangular pink nipples of sticky fixers where pictures had been taken down; the patches of unfaded wall color beneath. The light struck a glint from the far baseboard. A brooch: a tiny, silver, winged bird in flight. Overlooked, or a parting message?

I still have that brooch.

I called her job. She had quit her job. Her boss talked to me as if, being blood of her blood, I was complicit in her disappearance. No notice, no explanation, no excuses, no point of contact. Gone.

We could have found her. We could have contacted friends, lovers, work mates; asked at other studios if Kerry had approached them. We could have posted her missing with the police and watched for her face to appear on the side of the morning milk carton. We could have searched for her through the information net that weaves our lives so tightly that none drop through it. We didn’t. On a brilliant November morning in the car park of the cemetery in which the mother I hated lay stuffed under wet soil, I understood. We were afraid to find her. That would have meant talking, and questions, and answers to those questions that might upset the miserable equilibrium of our family. Better to let one go than risk the unacceptable truth.

Louise was sniffling again. Little hankie job. Declan was holding her to him but he knew the smell of political tears. Sean and Liam stood in their weddings-and-funerals suits, wanting Daddy to tell them they could get into the car. To them, Nan had been a horror of their noise, a list of Do-Not-Disturb injunctions, dreadful chicken dinners they had to eat every last fragment of, and the oily, post-menopausal smell of old woman. They wouldn’t miss her.

No one would.

“She should know,” Da said. “Kerry. She should know.”

“About Ma?”

He shook his head.

“That she can come back. That we want her back; that it’s all right now, she’s gone; maybe now we can be the family we should have been. Only…”

“Only what?”

“I can’t do it. I can’t face her. I wouldn’t know what to do. Stephen, would you?”

My family role had always been the burier of dead animals, the shovel-er of shit, the cleaner of vomit. In latter days, the mediator, the ambassador. Another role now: the releaser of exiles.

I have several other lives that orbit at varying distances around this one that is my day-to-day experience. The Poet is closest; more a moon than another world. I can look at it, study its features, imagine how I might reach it some day. I am some way toward it, building a tower of file-block sheets and Post-it notes up which I might climb, if the vertigo does not overcome me. The Great Detective Story Writer is more remote, little more than Friday afternoon imaginings, when the clock drags and I try to think of a more satisfying Monday than the one in which I return to this desk and terminal. I could never reach that world: if I had failed to be the accountant I was expected to be, I could not possibly be a success at anything else. But the sun of this private pre-Copernican universe was gone, the gravitations rearranged, and I found I had become my own detective hero.

I set out in search of Kerry in the way I knew best: feeling the vibrations of her passage through the web of digital transactions that is twenty-first-century banking. The transition between our old, screen-based system and the new “virtual interactive consensus transactional financial interface” (high managementese fringes on perversely beautiful poetry) was a good time to conduct illicit searches through the system. The managers smile beatifically beneath their blank plastic virtuality visors as they wave their manipulator-gloved hands, conducting the waltz of the billions. Ludicrous. But it’s computers, and therefore beyond criticism, and the consultants are taking twelve million off us, so it’s higher even than papal infallibility.