John McGahern - The Pornographer

“He’s gone,” I heard, and I tried to hurry but I wasn’t able.

There was a deep doorway in a lane somewhere off the church whose gates hadn’t been locked across and I went in and sat on the innermost steps.

I heard them searching for me but they never came quite my way. Only once did they get close enough for me to hear their voices and then I couldn’t be sure of the words, “I told you he’s done a skunk. He was only faking being hurt. There’s no need to worry over that gentleman. I’m telling you that cunt will take good care of himself.”

Soon there was no one near, the spasmodic jerky sound of the distant night traffic, some aeroplanes, their landing lights flashing as they came in over the Thames. I felt the cold and it was painful to move my lips and my face seemed numb, one eye was closed; and I was extraordinarily happy, the whole night and its lights and sounds passing in an amazing clarity that was yet completely calm, as if a beautiful incision had been made that separated me from the world and still left me at pure ease in its still centre. I could walk except for a dragging foot, but I hesitated to feel my ribs and face. When I did manage to bring myself to look closely by the light of a streetamp in a barber’s window, I knew I’d have to be very careful not to run into any policeman on the beat.

A milk bar saw me through till morning. I sat in a corner with a newspaper and let the coffee go cold. Using the newspaper as a screen I was able to examine my face in a far mirror but wouldn’t have recognized it except by moving my hands and the newspaper’s angle. The one cut that would need stitches was across the upper lip where the blow had cut it right across against the teeth. For a while everything had that same ethereal clarity, but that went too, in tiredness and stiffness and some pain. As soon as it was light I took a taxi to the airport. At such times, it is a great blessing to have money. It was now extremely painful for me to make the slightest facial movement. One or two people did make gestures towards my appearance in the airport that made me laugh, but the laughing too was painful so that I had to turn and lean against the wall.

Now it was a luxury to be flushed from one end to the other and I got a taxi to a doctor who stitched the lip. He thought there were no bones broken but wanted me to go for X-rays. He said he thought it’d be three weeks or so before I was presentable.

My luck seemed to be holding. There was no telegram waiting for me on the glass-topped table when I got in.

She has lived so long, I thought, let her live for three weeks more. I thought I’d never make the last steps of the stairs once I saw the door. I had just the one simple, fixed idea — to crawl to the bed and sleep. There is nothing that can stand against an overwhelming desire for sleep. It is as strong as death.

I slept late, but my aunt did not wait for my appearance to heal.

Mrs O’Doherty died at four , the telegram said.

I knew by the formality of the name that my uncle had sent the telegram. I watched the coarse paper start to shake in my hand and tried to say, backing away from the emotion I could not fight down, that I had known for a long time she would not get better, and it would be like her to pick this most inconvenient time to go, when my appearance was guaranteed to cause general mirth and head-wagging all over the small countryside: “Did you see the appearance of your man carrying the coffin? He was a sight”; but still emotion kept rising treacherously: her sturdy independence, her caustic laugh, her anger and her kindness, her person, the body of all life, growing, fighting, joying, weeping, falling, and now gone; and suddenly it beat me. I broke, and far off I could hear the wildness in my crying. Guard the human person well even in all its meanness, in its open hand, spite, venom, horror, beauty — profane sacredness, horrible contradiction.

I was so disturbed I needed to tell some person and walked to the end of the road and rang Maloney. I was surprised by my own matter-of-factness as I told him that I’d be out of the city for some days because of my aunt’s death. He received the news with formal gravity. He even asked me her name and where she was likely to be buried.

When I rang my uncle I could tell even on the phone that he was practically unable to move with the sense of his own importance in the importance of the occasion. He insisted that he meet me off the train and when I glimpsed him as the train pulled into the small station he had taken up the most prominent position on the platform, iron-clad in the security of his role.

“Well,” he was coming comfortably towards me with some profundity like She’s gone or an equally swollen silence, when my appearance brought him to a quick check. First I saw disbelief, then outrage, and in a voice that clearly accused me of having done it all to embarrass him, he said, “I take it that the other fella is at least dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I found the laughing painful but couldn’t stop it.

“Well what’s happened?” he cleared his throat, his face an exaggerated version of hurt, and I decided not to lie. His focus was now so sharp that he’d probably be able to tell if I was lying.

“I got beaten up,” I said.

“Tell me more news,” he interposed sarcastically. “You’ll be a wonderful addition for the next few days. You might even make the papers.”

“Anybody can get beaten up. Somebody just turned on me. It wasn’t my fault. There wasn’t even a fight,” but I saw the question did not go from his eyes but held steady. “Yes, there was a woman mixed up in it. It hurts like hell to have to talk.”

“You’ll never learn sense,” he said.

He had brought the big car to the station. After about a mile of silence I said, “It’s done now and I’m sorry. I was hoping she wouldn’t go so soon. The question is what am I to say?”

“Say what?”

“How it happened. I don’t suppose I should tell the truth.”

“Are you joking?” the way he said it I knew all was well. That great institution, the family, was closing ranks.

“Well, what will I say?”

“Didn’t you go to school long enough to think something up?”

“It’s not all that easy when yourself is at the centre of the trouble.”

“Well, why don’t you say”—he cleared his throat, sounding like a sudden change of faulty gears—“Why can’t you say you were in a car crash?”

“Will they believe it though?”

“What do you care whether they believe it or not? As long as they have no way of finding out!”

There were several cars in front of the house. Inside the house all the doors were open.

“I’m sorry,” I shook Cyril’s hand in the hallway.

“I know that.”

“I’m sorry to look like this. I was in a car crash.”

“You’re sure you’re able to be up?” he asked.

“I’m all right. It just looks bad.”

Several people shook my hand, “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

“I know that indeed,” the response had been fashioned for me long years ago. I climbed the stairs to her room. There were four people sitting about the bed on chairs, two women and two men. I knelt at the foot of the bed. I looked at her face, her form beneath the raised sheet, the beads twined through her fingers. What a little heap of grey flesh the many coloured leaping flame burns down to. The two men were drinking whiskey with a chaser of beer. There was port or sherry in the women’s glasses. One of the men was remembering her when she first came to the town as a young girl to work in Maguire’s shop, and how young she was still when she opened her first shop, in this very house, above which she was now lying. They mustn’t have been used to ashtrays, for one of the men pushed his cigarette end into the neck of the beer bottle between his feet where it began to hiss. When I rose from my knees the four people shook my hands and one of the men offered me his chair which I was able to refuse.