Donal Ryan - A Slanting of the Sun

I gave a man with dark blue eyes a cheque one day for a share in a seven-star hotel on a heart-shaped island in a shimmering silvery inland sea. He smiled at me and shook my hand and his footsteps rang loud on the floor as he left. Cloven feet, I thought, and laughed to myself, and laughed and laughed. Agata drank champagne with me that afternoon and early evening and sat for a while on my lap. I went home in a taxi, with a light head and leaden balls. The island sank and all the things upon it were drowned and the souls who could not strike for shore were lost. I never again saw that blue-eyed man but I felt his presence once or twice behind me, and turned and there was no one there.

My father was always happy to see me. Ah, there you are, he’d say, and smile, as if we had been in one another’s company all along, filling time in some gentle, pleasant way, and had been momentarily separated. He had a weakness one day and he fell on the street and was taken by force to a hospital where he was poked and scanned and told he was dying. Too much of the good life, he said. Isn’t it grand all the same, he said, to be dying from a good life, and not from a bad life? Aren’t I as lucky as bedamned? And he drove to Coonagh Cross and checked and filled and primed his Cessna and arced that sparrow heavenward and pulled back hard on the throttle and jammed it open. He’d have laughed into the blue and passed into blackness before the rivets gave. I wouldn’t have the guts for that. But nor have I the guts for this.

How long has Agata been standing at the open office door, I wonder, with that look of disgust on her face? How long have my tears been turning my visitors’ documents to pulp? How long has the cleaner been standing beside my chair, shushing me softly, her warm hand on mine?

And to a dot it will return, laden with the weight of everything that ever was.

I SQUEEZE THE rubber ball three times and raise my arm so that my left hand meets his right and he always seems to smile as he takes the ball from me and grips it softly and I nod three times at him in time with his three squeezes. He reaches across himself with his good left arm and takes the ball from himself and repeats the exercise and I take it in my right and so on and so on and so on. The physiotherapist gave us a long-handled stick with a netted scoop at its end to retrieve the ball when we drop it the way we wouldn’t be hauling ourselves up and out of our chairs and exhausting ourselves before we have our exercises done. Why don’t you just give us a square ball the way it won’t roll, I said to him, and he got a bit sour I think, and muttered something about the bones of our hands or some such. He reminded me of a nephew of mine I haven’t seen for a long time. A curly-headed lad, long in the back and longer in the face, my sister Noreen’s boy, gone off to London or somewhere but years and years. A lot of them get lost out foreign, they don’t come back themselves.

We were married at twenty, Pierse and me. He was older by a week exactly. I wore a simple white dress my mother made for me, and he wore a navy suit borrowed from his father’s brother who was about his size. We had our wedding breakfast inside in O’Meara’s Hotel and only our families were there and my friend Theresa who was maid-of-honour and his friend Mossy who was best man. We went for a week to Galway on our honeymoon in a Volkswagen Beetle lent to us by the manager of the co-op, who was a friend of Pierse’s father. Pierse held my hand every minute of every day, hardly letting me go even while we ate. I sat on his lap in our narrow suite and he hugged me fiercely, and he kissed my mouth and face and eyes. We adventured up and down narrow streets and watched fishermen on the quays as they inspected their nets in the mornings and hauled their catches in the evenings and Pierse tried a few words of Irish out on a chap one day and the chap only smiled and didn’t answer and Pierse smiled into the quayside stench and reddened so deeply I thought he’d burst.

Pierse got into auctioneering through another friend of his father’s and he quickly gained a reputation for thoroughness and honesty and there was never a trace of sneakiness that was ever known about him, and people could see that in the first few instants of knowing him. He grew inches at an auction; it was the only place that time he seemed to fit, it was as though his gavel protected him from embarrassment, as though his practised ululations, inscrutable to me, threw up a wall of strength around him. Men as seemingly straight and quiet in their ways as him stood watching, nodding their bids, hardly seeming to care about the outcome. Pierse spoke slowly and clearly to potential buyers of houses, pointing out where work needed to be done, where things could be improved. He couldn’t do the hard sell, he couldn’t stretch the truth. Eventually there was a falling-out and he came home one evening and sat after dinner for longer than he usually did and our son looked with concern at him as he excused himself and went looking for his hurley and ball and he told me after long minutes that he wouldn’t be going back to Woodley and Woodley as there were underhand dealings going on and he couldn’t be a part of them. He started to buy old rundown houses and renovate them and sell them for an honest profit and he made good money and seemed happy with his work, but it never made him as tall as he used to seem at his lectern, sweeping his gaze, am-bidding, gavel in hand.

I wonder what he thinks about all the day long. I should know, I suppose, or would, if I was any kind of a wife. Silence always suited him. That his silence now has been forced upon him by sickness hardly matters. I think a lot about the day he stole into the house through the back porch door and a present in his hand for me of a gold necklace with a heart on it and a diamond set in its centre and I sitting in the dining room at the table with James and his hand on mine and he gripping my fingers so tightly his knuckles were white. And a fool could know what was happening, what had happened, what had been about to happen. And he only punished me for that with silence. He left himself out through the front door and went down the avenue to his car that he had parked down there away from the house the way I wouldn’t hear him coming in and he could surprise me, back early from his trip to the north, and the necklace boxed and bowed and held out before him like a thing being taken altarward in an offertory procession and the thorns of the rosebush opened the skin of my hand as I retrieved it from where he’d flung it and the salt of my tears seared in the tiny wounds.

I finished it with James that day and never took up with another man again. Pierse ended his self-imposed exile from our bed after a few weeks but he got into the habit of staying up watching television at night, and drinking, never very much, but enough so that he’d sleep sedated and the smell of it would drift from his breath across to me. He was never bothered by the silence between us, only the loudness, when I’d burst out with something, to try to goad him, to wound him, to make him react in some way so that I could say There’s the long and the short of it, there’s what he feels; now I can know what I need to do to repay. But all debts are written off eventually, when it’s clear no payment will ever be made, that restitution isn’t possible and everything is then reset to nought.

Pierse took to holding my hand daily again after our son died. As though to stop the shaking in himself, he gripped me, and took both my hands in his, and squeezed his eyes closed and bared his teeth and his breaths would rush and heave from him like silent screams. He’d helped him buy his ticket to Australia; he’d even contacted some people he knew over there to arrange a few weeks or maybe months of work for him on building sites, and he’d driven him to the airport and hugged him awkwardly but tightly at the departure gate and showed no sign of letting go until Stephen pulled back gently laughing from him. He asked me did I want to stop somewhere for a bit to eat on the way home and I said yes and we stopped in Limerick and in a corner table of a darkened restaurant he’d sat in front of a plate of untouched food and said Christ, Maud, I think I’m after making an awful mistake. Letting him off like that. I should have persuaded him to stay here and work away with me. And not three weeks later our telephone rang in the early hours and he took my hand as we walked up the hall from our bedroom and a voice half a world away told us our Stephen was gone, scaffolding had collapsed under him and he had been killed.