For weeks now I’ve been walking the streets whispering her name and seeing her face in crowds everywhere I go. But she comes to me late at night always after I go to bed and her face is flushed with this kind of an opal light and each time she comes she reaches out as if to touch me and then goes away again.
The night after Armagh I couldn’t sleep thinking about her and how she makes love. Up dark and early and the way I felt as I shuffled to the bathroom I didn’t think I’d ever be able to sleep again. No breakfast, breakfast was the last thing in my head. I closed the front door quietly behind me, stumbled along our path and the three steps down to the street, legs numb one second, sore and heavy the next. I’m not exactly sure why but I knew she’d be there this time, there in the flat, round the corner, down the hill, as if it was ordained. I wasn’t thinking very straight and I’d no idea what I was going to say but I kept telling myself how she’d know to look at me that I loved her. All of her, body, soul, mind, everything. Wouldn’t she?
But here’s a thing. When you haven’t slept and you’re out in the street and the day has hardly started and there’s nobody about you see things you never saw before, not properly anyway, like roofs of houses and the slates dark and glossy from the rain and how big the chimneys are, unbelievable, big as coalsheds some of them, and the pigeons walking about with their hands behind their backs jerking their heads up and down at these invisible particles on the ground and others in the December chill fluffing their feathers and burying their beaks in their breasts and you see what pecking order means when a seagull lands in the middle of them all, oh you see it then all right. There wasn’t another being except a dog outside the chemists hunkered down relieving itself. My heart felt as if it was leaving me at the thought of her, at the thought of the sight of her and the smell of her. And then I heard voices through the open doors of the cathedral and saw the worshippers’ cars parked nose to tail on the hill. Eight o’clock mass it must be and the voices quavering out into the air.
I'll sing a hymn to Mary,
The mother of my God,
The virgin of all virgins,
Of David's royal blood.
O teach me, holy Mary,
A loving song to frame,
When wicked men blaspheme thee
I’ll love and bless thy name.
O Lily of the Valley,
O Mystic Rose, what tree
Or flower, e'en the fairest,
Is half so fair as thee.
Voices like a lament. The happiest hymns always sound like a lament in there. It must be the organist, he must be a depressive. I turned the handle of her street door and it opened and the stairs were in front of me, only the stairs and the door of the flat between us. The music was discordant now, suddenly discordant, twisting in the air, clashing with something, clashing with music from somewhere else, clashing with music coming from above. I pushed the door shut on all the lamenting and stood still. The Flower Duet.
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The Wake - Table of contents
HumorTHE YEAR is 1968 and the Swinging Sixties are still swinging - though not in Ireland. But wait! An old woman dies in a northern Irish town and her wake becomes a rendezvous for lesbians, bisexuals and political revolutionaries. And in there among t...
