Mary Costello - Academy Street

Monkey kept pestering her, breaking the spell. He jumped on her bed and rolled over, flagrant. She stroked his head, his pixie face. She caressed his belly, felt his heartbeat, his pulsing purr. With her fingers she encircled his neck…Such a small neck, all said. She pressed lightly. With my giant hands I could throttle you, she thought. I could crush your bones, see your eyes open wide with surprise, your sad little head slump over. He looked into her eyes. ‘Yes, you,’ she whispered. She placed her thumbs on his throat and pressed and he meowed and lashed out and fled.

Days passed, then weeks. The grief was so deep her eyes could not weep. All good had gone out of the world. And to think that the world still went on. She saw again children playing, people eating and drinking and laughing, the purchase of life. Birds, books, the notes of a cello, the glossy green heads of ducks in a pond, all indifferent. She put the TV on mute, watched a man on a dust track in India, with trees, water, the setting sun — a huge orange orb lowering itself into the earth. She had never understood that — why the sun and the moon looked so large and near in the East. Intolerably beautiful. She had no armour left. She had no son left. Was there something she had missed? She stared at his photograph. Was there something she could have done to avert it? But the dead don’t talk back. The dead don’t talk. The dead.

On a cold bright Saturday in October, a funeral car collected her for the Memorial Mass. She climbed into the back and embraced Jennifer and the children. She stroked the children’s heads. An image from the past rose up — a boy, a president’s son, stepping forward to salute his father’s casket.

‘How are you holding up, Tess?’ Jennifer asked tenderly.

She had succeeded in keeping feeling at bay all morning. ‘Some days are better than others. You know yourself. When you wake up…’

‘I do.’

‘Everyone is saying we’re all in this together, united in our grief. But…’ She frowned, shook her head.

‘I know. It’s so hard. I don’t want anyone to be part of this either, except you and the children.’

Tess began to cry.

Rachel’s hair was plaited. She stroked the plaits. The child nestled against her.

‘Tess,’ Jennifer said. ‘He never got to tell you. He made contact with his father. About three years ago, he found him.’

‘He told me. The night before he…The night he stayed over.’

Jennifer reached across, touched her hand. ‘They met only once.’

An image crossed her mind, a meeting in a café, an assignation. Momentarily, she felt deceived. ‘Does he know?’

‘Yes. I called him.’

She looked out of the tinted glass window. Your son is dead. Our son is dead.

‘They have no children — he and his wife,’ Jennifer said.

She left her hands flat each side of her on the seat. The smell of the polished leather was overpowering. Why must everything floor her so?

‘Can you braid hair, Nana — do you know how?’ Rachel was looking at her.

She smiled at the child. ‘Yes, sweetheart, I can braid hair. How about I teach you next time you come by? My sister taught me when I was small. Her name was Claire.’ She said it again, abstractedly. ‘Her name was Claire.’

They pulled up at the Church of the Good Shepherd. She looked up at the steps, the three arched doorways. People from the old neighbourhood stood outside, come to pay their respects, Willa among them.

She held on to the handrail as she climbed the steps. ‘Will he be here?’ she asked in a low voice.

Jennifer leaned in, whispered, ‘No, don’t worry.’

In the middle of Mass, for some reason, she remembered that he was left-handed. Theo had inherited this trait. As a toddler she had watched it emerge, become manifest in an almost imperceptible pause, a faltering, before a hand reached out to a toy, as if a brief internal tussle was being played out, a faint quarrel between the two sides of him. In that pause, she intuited a shy soul, a vulnerability, a tender wound at the source, a little wrong that his little body was trying to right. ‘ We need, in love, to practise only one thing — letting go ,’ the priest said and looked vaguely upwards as if an invisible Theo was departing skywards before them. ‘God speed you,’ he added then. She had an image of birds in flight, a tunnel of light, the number Phi.

After Communion, Esurientes . The Magnificat. She had requested it. Anima mea Dominum. Her conversation with God. She tried to recover him, his hands, his sleeping eyes, but he would not be summoned. She could not conjure his face in death. The words and the music engulfed her. She rode on waves, lost, blind, awash in silent grief. She wanted to relish the pain, the sorrow in her marrow, the dark heart taking over. Suscepit Israel puerum suum.

She did not want it to end. When the choir began the final hymn the parting sickness rose in her. The strife is o’er, the battle done.

At a reception back at Theo’s house catering staff in white gloves moved among the mourners pouring wine, bringing offerings on trays. She chose a morsel and chewed it but it lodged drily in her oesophagus. She shook hands with strangers and semi-strangers. She noted their pressed suits, their painted nails. Jennifer was the chief mourner. She heard their stories, laughter, memories of him. She heard them say his name. They had known him for five minutes, all of them, Jennifer too. It was in Tess that images of him dwelt, millions of them. I am his mother , she wanted to cry. I made him. Inside me. With only a drop from a man now barely remembered I forged him, I moulded him, body and soul. She watched their mouths, their moving tongues, eating, speaking, their white teeth. How can you eat, she thought, at a time like this? She looked around for someone who understood. She did not even feel sufficient pity for his children.

In the evening the funeral car arrived to take her home. She asked to be driven to Academy Street. She was hoping for something, a visitation. She sat in the parked car, behind the blacked-out windows, his countless footsteps echoing in the streets around her. The echoes of other mothers’ sons too, and no bodies for souvenirs. She tapped the driver and he drove on, crossing Sherman, Broadway, towards the park. She remembered summer evenings, old men playing chess under trees, a winter’s day when he was four and ran out onto the frozen pond and fell through the ice, a clean vertical drop, almost soundless.

Twilight came. The car turned around, drove south. The city was lighting up. She wondered if he had seen amazing things, nearing death. He, who had been a child of wonder, must have felt astral, aerial, metaphysical. Had the sun spun before him? Had his hands glowed white and luminous? Had he fallen, or fled from flames, his bladder failing, his bowels evacuating, but all of his past — every hour — still contained within him? She began to ponder the precise instant of his death, the tiny subtle intuition when he knew for certain he was going to die. His petrified gaze into mid-air, beyond the threshold of consciousness into the deepest centre of the stars, and then the silent folding, the inward motion, the dissolution into the dark biosphere. How had that moment not registered in her? How had she not felt a disturbance that morning, a little quiver of the self? She closed her eyes. She longed to reach him, lift him under the arms, drape him over her. She looked out the car window, the hum of the engine beneath her. Above her, a sea of tiny stars lighting the sky. She had been here before: night time, being ferried through the streets, enclosed and alone like this. And then it came to her. Stendhal. Mathilde, inside her black-draped carriage with the head of her beloved Julien on her lap, while outside the priests escort his bier to the grave. Then, in the depths of the night, burying his head with her own hands.