Falling out of Heaven Read online

  I knew that the black dot of pain that lay in the centre of his eyes also lay in mine, and that it was a stain that no amount of washing or praying could shift. I think of my loneliness, how it coils around the centre of my being like a long thread of steel and realise that he must have been the same, he stood on the outside of our family condemned as an ogre, just as I do now.

  The Horizon

  They were telling me to calm down. I watched as they moved about me. It was my second or third night there, I can’t be sure. I was doing quite well until I dreamt about you. There was sorrow in your eyes and you turned me away. I stood there and pleaded with you but you walked away and kept walking until the horizon claimed you and you were gone forever. I woke up screaming and in a moment I was surrounded by nurses and doctors. I think that I fought them, I can’t be sure. I remember how they smothered me, laying their bodies across mine and I was sure that my heart was going to explode through my chest, spewing blood across the pristine sheets. I wanted to tell them that I wished them no harm, that I was dying from a lack of love that’s all. But they weren’t in any mood to listen.

  There must have been four of them, all men and though they were being physical with me, they kept talking, whispering reassurances, saying things like relax, Gabriel, try and relax, we’re here to help you.

  Needless to say I didn’t believe them, and somewhere I didn’t trust that I was awake, and then I thought that maybe you had sent them to make sure that I stayed away from you and our child. That made me cry, and for a moment everyone stopped and waited.

  ‘It’s okay,’ one of the younger nurses said. ‘Everything will be alright. You’ll see.’

  Part of me wanted to believe him but all I could see was everything that I had thrown away. I needed the one thing that I knew they wouldn’t give me, the hot fire of whiskey on my throat. It was the only thing that had the power to burn the memory of you from me. It was then that I saw the syringe and I began to fight them again. The young woman doctor had it in her hand as she made her way to me.

  ‘I need his forearm,’ I heard her say. ‘Quick. Quick.’

  Someone else speaks. I hear the words sleep and trust, but my hearing is going, it is mixing with sounds from the past, my first baby words, and my mother’s voice, as soft as surf spilling onto a beach, plates being stacked, the hollow chime of our hallway clock, my sister’s laugh, and then my father’s hard bark like a seal demanding fish.

  The Firebird

  I watched as he patrolled the house, his eyes flicking periodically in my direction, sizing me up, daring me to shatter the silence he had spent the best part of the morning setting in place. It began with the way he responded to my mother’s request that he run her into town. He stared at her as if she had just insulted him and then walked the length of the kitchen and looked back at her, disdain in his eyes. She knew better than to say anything, that she had to let him posture and sulk his way through this latest mood otherwise there would be war.

  From her he moved on to me. I remember I was drawing at the table, it was the picture of a bird in flight, a red bird with bright orange flames for wings. I had spent most of the morning on it, enjoying the feel of the crayons between my fingers. I could feel the heat of his presence as he stood over me; I could smell tobacco and diesel and hear the sharp running of his breath.

  I recall sitting there, my hands frozen in the middle of their task, my brain desperately trying to read the situation. Should I look up at him and smile, careful not to make it too sure or confident, or should I continue drawing? I knew from experience that the best thing was to do nothing. After what seemed an age he moved off and sat by the door of the kitchen and lit a cigarette. I watched my mother, her eyes keeping track of him; aware at all times where he was, and most crucially who he was looking at.

  I felt sorry for her that morning. I loved her; I wanted to kill for her, to smash down the grey walls of her life and to free her. Anger clutched at me as I looked at the man she had married as he sat there, the smoke from his cigarette climbing lazily, his legs crossed.

  He saw it in me as I looked from her to him, my eyes meeting his, in that second he had me. He knew it; I had revealed myself to him. I remember him smiling as if to say go on, let’s see how long you can hold it, let’s see how big you are.

  ‘Seen enough?’ he asked.

  I nodded carefully and took my eyes from him, wondering if he would pursue it, but he didn’t. I was easy prey. I was a pushover.

  My sister broke the silence that morning. She rushed in from playing outside, her hair strewn across her face, her doll Lola pressed to her breast. She threw open the door and yelled.

  ‘Mammy.’

  The wind rushed in, blowing apart the game my father had been playing. It ran through the kitchen like a storm of freshness, banishing the silence, busting it into a thousand little pieces.

  ‘Sssh,’ my mother had said. ‘Your father’s thinking.’

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing. I meant…’

  ‘Don’t take the piss.’

  ‘I’m not. Please, I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you were.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. It just came out. I didn’t mean it that way. Ciara, come here, do this dress up, what have you been doing to yourself?’

  ‘Don’t fuck around with me,’ my father said as my mother fussed over my sister, running her hand across her face, gathering the snot from her nose between her fingers and shaking it into the sink, then running the tap.

  ‘Don’t speak like that.’

  ‘I’ll speak any fucking way I please.’

  ‘Alright. Alright.’

  ‘Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  As he left he slammed the door behind him. I remember sitting there looking at my hands, they were shaking. Ciara began to cry, dropping her doll as she put her hands to her face. My mother bent down to her and pulled her close as we heard the sound of my father’s car pulling out of the garage in the yard and roar away from the house. I could imagine him sitting there, his hand ripping through the gears, his eyes blazing with anger, his world small and cold.

  The Fall

  I believed that I was falling. It was as real to me as my next breath. As I lay there in that hospital bed night after night all I could see was the tumble of my body through space. I could feel the moisture of the clouds bathe my face and the wind tugging at my clothes. I could see my life spread out before me like a half-assembled jigsaw. Sometimes I was glad and enjoyed the sensation, happy to be leaving everything behind. Other times fear held my hand as I fell and I would shake and moan as I saw the ground below hurtling towards me. I remember grabbing at the air, trying to find something to hold on to. I had left love behind and my only hope was these men and women who tended to me, whose job it was to bring people like me back from the brink.

  I fell into my past. I walked the hard ground of my childhood again. I saw our marriage. I saw our love begin and end. I became a ghost walking the corridors of the living. They told me later that it wasn’t uncommon for a man in my condition to believe strange things, to think that he is in peril. Some never return from the strange land that they find themselves in. Hell is alive and well in the minds of men such as me, one of the nurses said with a strange grin on his face.

  There were times as I lay in that hospital room when I felt my fear subside, it was as fleeting as a bad man’s smile. For a moment, I was embraced by a sense of peace, and my body’s fever abated. It was in moments like these that I tried to ask God to forgive me, but I was still too angry with him and the words never made it past my lips. I still blamed him for all that my father had done to me. He died a long time ago but he still had a hold on the guts of my being. His hands are always there twisting and pulling. Sometimes when I was falling I could hear him whispering, taunting me.

  I thought of my life, of how I had beli
eved that I was a fortress, standing alone on the horizon of other people’s lives. I saw how much of a lie that was. I had learned the hard way. Here I was, alone, dependent on the kindness of these doctors. I thought of all the pain I had caused, the misery I had brought to my door and the doors of others. At night sometimes when I woke I would call for someone to come and sit with me. If no-one came I would lie there shivering in the dark hoping that my fall was almost at an end.

  The Pier

  I see you as I first saw you, your eyes shining, your face offered to me as I bent to kiss it. We were in a bar in County Clare, behind us people were celebrating New Year’s Eve, and we had slipped away and left them to put the old year to bed. We stood on the small wooden pier that fronted the pub and watched the night sky turn in glitter and ice high above us.

  How long ago that New Year’s Eve seems and yet sometimes in a moment when my weary spirit is caught off-guard, I taste your sweetness once more as if it was all about to happen again. I’ll be ready this time and meet you on the long pier, which divided the sea and held us and our dreams that night long ago.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I know,’ you said.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Do I what? Know that you love me?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Oh you mean…?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do I love you? What do you think?’

  ‘I think yes.’

  ‘Then you think right,’ you said.

  Just after, you smiled and quickly closed your lips over your teeth, and a slight embarrassment flickered across your eyes. It was because one of your incisors was crooked, I’d seen you do it many times, most especially in company. It gave you a vulnerability that made me want you more. I remember I put my fingers to your lips and ran my thumb across them, holding your eyes.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Love isn’t just saying. It’s doing too,’ you said.

  ‘I love your mouth.’

  ‘Gabriel, I’m serious.’

  ‘The wow of your mouth.’

  ‘Gabriel?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you listening?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then show me, Gabriel. Show me.’

  ‘Your lips…so beautiful.’

  ‘Gabriel.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Words are easy. I don’t want that, do you hear, I don’t want that.’

  Eating God

  I see her holding my young body down, her hand on the nape of my neck, forcing me to spit out the prayer. I remember her body shaking as she implored heaven for release.

  ‘Holy Jesus, we implore you…Holy Christ, fruit of the vine…’

  ‘Holy Jesus,’ I said, echoing her.

  ‘Holy Jesus…The one true Lamb…The one true God…Enter me, Lord…Fill me with the sweet Glory of your Love…Come to me, Jesus, in Love, in Sorrow.’

  ‘Mammy,’ I would say. ‘Mammy.’

  Her eyes would glaze over, the look I used to see in the eyes of fish I caught, as they lay on the riverbank and death passed over them. Her head would move from side to side and a film of foam would cover her lips. I would hold her hand and squeeze it until my knuckles whitened. I felt as if I was holding on to her as she dangled above a steep drop and that I was her last hope.

  Then I would feel her leave me, it passed through her body and into mine, the feeling of absence, of flight. She was no longer mine; she was beyond me. She had passed into trance. Then the noise would pour from her. Words half known, bastardised and tangled, child words, woman sounds, all fell from her lips, and God, always God, the word that kept coming, kept shining through like a flame on a dark hillside. It would last for minutes sometimes, her mouth working, sweat forming in the small well between our clasped palms.

  I knew better than to say anything, I just kept my head bowed and waited for the storm of words and emotion to pass. Then she would fall silent, her body flopping forward as if she was a puppet whose strings had just been cut. The first time she did it, I panicked, thinking her dead. I had grabbed her, pulled at her white face and tugged at her hands.

  ‘Mammy, Mammy, I’m frightened.’

  Then she would sigh and open her eyes and regard me. I would see myself reflected there, I looked so small and scared.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The Lord is with us…All these things, son…All this pain…It’s sent to try us…’

  ‘Yes, Mammy.’

  ‘God sees it all…Remember that…There is nothing He doesn’t see.’

  ‘Yes, Mammy.’

  I wanted to tell her that I understood even though I didn’t. As I knelt over her like a doctor tending a patient I remember wondering why I couldn’t see what she saw, feel what she felt. Why was I different, why had God excluded me?

  ‘Don’t tell your father,’ she said. She always said it.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good boy.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘What, son?’

  ‘That. The…praying.’

  ‘It’s like…’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘No, son…It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Do you see angels?’

  ‘Well, not really…I see light…I see the light…’

  ‘What light?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘Well…I see…I feel the power of God’s love…It’s like the summer sun on my face, only it’s forever, not just one season, or one day…And deep down in my heart I know that everything happens for a reason…That all the good things and all the bad things they all enter our hearts for a purpose. I suppose I feel safe…Like I’m on a big white cloud.’

  ‘Is Daddy there with you?’

  ‘Sometimes…’

  ‘Why only sometimes? Does God not like him?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that, son…God loves all his creatures, bad, good or otherwise.’

  ‘Does he like him even when he…’

  ‘When he what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘When he does really bad things?’

  ‘Son, that’s when God loves him most of all.’

  Code, that’s the way we live, tapping out cloaked messages to the ones we love. We never say it, the thing of something; we never tear the secret from its cave and lay it at the feet of the ones nearest to us. All those years ago as I sat with her she told me that God was by us, that He knelt with me. I felt the rage rise in me, and I wanted to tear down her belief, smash the altar of her faith. I wanted to stand and tell her that God didn’t exist and that if He did He was more like the devil than anything else. How could He be all love? How could He love the pig man who ruled our house as if he was an agent of the damned?

  What You Don’t See

  ‘You can either do it yourself or I will have to do it for you. It’s your choice.’

  I say nothing but hold her with my eyes. I am in a bathroom of some kind but it is more industrial than personal, all chrome bars and wide porcelain sinks. I am sitting on a small folding steel chair. I am still wearing my white gown and I can see the goosepimples on my exposed arms and legs.

  ‘Hygiene is very important,’ she says.

  I don’t feel as alone as I did, maybe it’s the long sleep or the fact that I am getting used to these people who surround me every waking hour telling me that they only have my best interests at heart. She is pretty this young girl in front of me and her face is open and rounded. She has a small plastic basin full of soapy water.

  ‘My name is Naomi.’

  I know she’s trying to get me to speak, but it’s so long since I have that I’m not sure if I can.

  ‘I know that this is difficult…That you feel alone…But you are in good hands…This is a good place, you must trust that…’

  She gently takes my feet and puts them in the
basin. I feel the warmth spreading up my legs. She begins to move the sponge along the line of my calves.

  ‘You’ll feel better for this, you’ll see.’

  Her hands are small like a child’s and I watch as they slide up and down my shins.

  ‘You’re from the North, aren’t you?’

  Still I don’t reply but look at the suds forming in soapy rings on the hairs of my legs.

  ‘It’s great what’s happening up there now. Let’s hope it holds. It must have been tough for you all those years, all that violence…I’m from Waterford. I think sometimes that we had it very easy down here. You know, what you don’t see won’t hurt you…Now I’m going to put this mat on the floor and I need you to stand on it so I can give the rest of you a good scrub. That’s it…Who’s a good boy?’

  May

  Often I would meet her at night on the road as I walked home. She would appear out of the darkness, her shape moving towards me with that jaunty, disconnected gait that I would come to know so well. She lived alone in a crumbling farmhouse about a mile from us, fronted by a line of ancient trees. The only company that meant anything to her were the cats and dogs that she gathered to her like a princess collects suitors. They would follow as she moved about her garden, waiting for titbits or an affectionate ruffle of their coats. They were like her, rejects from their own kind. They huddled together in the face of a violent world, depending on each other for protection and warmth.

  When I met her late at night she would always ask me if I had seen one of her animals, that it had gone missing and that she was worried about it, fearful of foxes or even larger predators that she believed lurked high in the mountain’s undergrowth. She never washed and her face was a large smudge of dirt and wrinkles. Her hair hung together in tangled clumps and her eyes looked at you as if they were regarding you from another world, one that only she had access to. I was attracted to her in spite of her strangeness, because of her strangeness.

  The Dead’s whispers are heard more clearly at night, she would say to me, as we stood on the road, the moon bathing us in its ghostly light. She would stand close to me and indicate with her head that I should listen. I remember the wheeze of her breath and the smell of dog and cat that had overpowered her own human smell.