Gavin Corbett - This Is the Way

The two of us were crying, we had to sit still for three minutes get a hold of ourself, we said nothing, we had to let the laughing pass. We sat there until we were dry and we could laugh no more. And then we were quiet and I heard chairs moving on the floor, I could hear coughing.

Okay I says, I had to get my breath quick. I says okay now Arthur let’s settle.

He took his tea cup in his hand and he lifted it over his head. Leonard Andrews he says looking at it.

I says Arthur serious we’ll get kicked out you don’t whisht.

He coughed and he said nothing then he lowered into his seat.

Ah yes he says. Yes he says. He finished his food.

I didn’t go with him to meet Judith, I let him go on his own. I left the university, I went up Grafton Street and past the Tommy Hilfiger shop I went in those weeks before. I went in Saint Stephen’s Green Park and I couldn’t sit on the ground or the benches because they were wet. I sat by the fountain in the breeze. I heard a strange noise beside me and I seen a group of childer with a bottle of washing liquid making suds in the water. The fella dressed like a guard came walking over and I got up.

I went walking in the paths through the park. The park was quiet, this was a time people were working in offices. The park was dark too, it was the way the trees and leaves came over the paths. The breeze took the water off the leaves. People were disappearing around corners behind bushes their shoulders tense from the water dripping down their back. I had a suspicious feeling because I thought I heard someone running in a bush beside me. I heard a thing move and it was not a bird, it was too big. I got angry at myself. I was after drifting through these paths up the far end of the park now and there could have been someone in the bush looking at me and following me. Next I heard a squeaking noise behind me. I did not think anything about it then I seen what it was. It was coming off a pram with huge rusted wheels and a black skin stretched over the top of it. It was an old pram, I seen my mother’s grandmother had one before. The pram passed me and went ahead of me. I could not see a baby in the pram. There was a mirror clipped to the side of it. The person pushing the pram was dressed in a dark blue skirt down to their ankles. They had a hood pulled over their head. This person was not a woman, I was sure of it, they had no arse. I started to slow in my walk. I seen the same in the person pushing the pram, they slowed too. I stopped and I seen the person stop. I thought I seen them reach in the pram. They were twenty thirty yard ahead of me. I looked about and seen no one else about, then I turned around quick and I wasn’t relaxed until I seen the fountain again. When I was at the fountain I says I am an eejit, that person was a woman, why wouldn’t there be a baby in that pram.

I went off back to Grafton Street and I was in the sport shop when Arthur rang.

He says where are you I been looking for you.

I says hold on I’ll come down.

He was looking at a newspaper this concentrated face on him at the same table in the canteen we had our tea and burgers.

You all right he says to me.

Yes I says, I’m grand. I says did you tell her all about Leonard Andrews.

She didn’t get me to say those words he says.

What words did you say I says. You can’t even read.

I just made something up he says.

What she think of that I says.

He had a proud look.

I’m in the play he says.

My father was always a religious man and he had ideas since before I was born. They say the religious has the most childer but there was just the four in our family so it must have been the religion wasn’t as big with him one point. The ideas started I don’t know when. When he got married he got himself and my mother out the Cliffs and away from their people. He had his eye on a house in a corporation estate come up for sale further in nearer to Dublin where there were settled people living. These were the people he wanted his childer raised up with. And he got the house, fair play to him.

After my mother left with Beggy the ideas and the religion got stronger and the religion was the stronger of the two but the ideas were always catching up, they were never too long behind. His feelings were bad this time. It was the three of his childer went off that hit him the worst. It all happened quick. First was Margarita, married when she was seventeen one summer and gone out west. That was a hard one for him, he could not accept it. Then it was four year later that Aaron was gone, killed himself, then the next spring Beggy was off to the London Borough of Enfield with my mother. Margarita took the things she owned when she went, left the house feeling empty. Beggy took most her things too and the room she had with Margarita was like a jail cell now. Next to it the room I had with Aaron was still cluttered with the boxing prizes. It made you think it is the things people take with them makes them alive.

It was a quiet house now and I did not like that. My sisters and my mother were like the pigeons in the boxes that hadn’t flexed their wings was what they were like, they made the cooing the whole time like birds. But my father was long ago spent, his head was down, his voice was down, and after my mother left another force came damping on him and you would say he was gentle. Soon it was he could talk only in a whisper but a whisper is wrong. It was louder than a whisper but lower than a voice. The voice he spoke to me with was the same voice he spoke to God with. When he spoke to me or to somebody else he saw God looking at him. It was with an eye that way. See me and sorry Lord he thought. Look at me a sinner but a tryer. His whole life my father lived like people were looking at him. He was a serious man, he was a tense man.

It got worse. His mornings and evenings were filled with prayers. I heard him first thing like the Muslims. He said his words before eating, he blessed himself a hundred times before bed. He went in and in himself, and in the television room on the back of the chair he put a picture of the dying Jesus he could not read the words of that said The Spear of Destiny. He went to mass every day but he did not go to the church that was a two minute drive, he got in his car across to the place said the mass in the Latin language of the Romans. I said it to him how could he know what was said and he said it did not matter what was said it was living with the language of the Lord that was important.

There were the meetings after the mass anyhows would bring him up on what was said. He got in with a man the name of Mister FX who told him everything was needed to know. He got friendly with Mister FX not long before my mother left. He said to my mother Mister FX was the closest to God of any person he knew. He said to my mother a lot of nonsense. My father’s religion got to my mother the same as it got to me. I am not saying my mother was not religious but she never seen the like of it the way my father went. I say thank you mother because she left me with him to see it only get worse.

After my mother left Mister FX started coming to the house. I did not like the man. The description of him is he had the wiry white and sandy hair, he wore a jacket made the sawing noise when he moved, he brought with him red biscuits and wine and he smelt of the wood in churches. In his pockets was damp paper with pictures came off on your fingers. He was a dentist but he had teeth that did not look natural. I did not trust him. He told my father they would go to Lourdes to cure my father’s psoriasis of the skin. Until the time came for them to go my father was to suck holy sweet stones. Then one week Mister FX made up in his mind Lourdes was wrong, that the water the sweet stones was made of was wrong, and that a place in Turkey was the new place. I am saying this like I was out to help and protect my father but I was not. I was not out to hurt him neither but.