The Railway Station Man Read online

  ‘Will I turn out the lights?’ asked the woman.

  ‘No.’ I got into the back of the car. ‘I hate the dark. I hate coming into a dark house.’ I remembered that I hadn’t got a handkerchief and wondered would I need one. Uncheckable tears flow in the cinema. Maybe at any moment that might happen. I had no precedent, nothing to measure up to. It was cold. The flakes shone under the street lights or whirled black in the shadows. Uncouth gaps in the street’s façade meant war. Snow whirled in the gaps, lying now on the roads and on the birds sleeping along the railing by the river, heads folded down into their bodies.

  The soldiers on the bridge peered into the car and nodded us on.

  ‘Why would anyone shoot Dan?’ I asked again as we drove up the hill towards the hospital. I asked it just to break the silence. They didn’t reply. Why should they. I knew the answer.

  I laughed.

  ‘Maybe it was a dissatisfied pupil.’

  They didn’t move. Their heads remained stiff, staring out of the windscreen. Didn’t smile, gesture. My hands were so cold in their silence. We drew up at the entrance for the ambulances.

  No Parking, it said. Ambulances Only. A tall man was standing at the door. I knew the moment I saw his face that Dan was dead.

  We took him to Dublin and buried him beside the little girl in Mount Jerome. He had had no choice either, I thought, as I stood by the grave, but then, I told myself, we none of us have that choice. Dan’s mother clung to my arm as if she needed my support. My hands were still cold. That is the one thing I know I remember. All the rest is a vague jumble in my mind. Did I feel sorrow? Anger? I hope I felt both of these emotions, but I’m not very sure. My hands were cold. No matter what I did over that two weeks I couldn’t warm them. I would wake in the mornings to find these two cold hands clenched across my warm breasts. They felt as if they belonged to someone else. One of my teachers at school had had flat white hands. They looked always as if no blood moved through them. If she touched me I used to find myself shivering with some kind of panic. I was worried by the thought that my hands might become like hers.

  I worried about Jack. He seemed curiously unperturbed, rejecting almost contemptuously any comfort that I held out towards him. He stood beside his grandmother at the funeral in his school suit, wearing Dan’s black tie. His face was very white, but quite composed. He used to go up to her room in the evenings after dinner and I could hear their voices rumbling on, laughing even at times, being comfortable with each other. The day he went back to school I got on the bus and returned to Derry.

  The house was just as I had left it that evening. Two piles of Christmas cards on the floor in front of the dead fire, a fine dust on all the furniture. I threw the cards in the dustbin and cleaned out the fireplace. Somewhere not too far away there was an explosion, the floor trembled under me, the windows rattled. I knew at that moment that what I had been hiding for the last few weeks from myself as well as the people around me was an amazing feeling of relief, liberation. As I cleared out the fireplace I wondered about guilt and decided against it, where was the point or the time for guilt. In the distance the fire-engines raced to a fire, ambulances, army vehicles. Glass cracked and split. The flames burst out through windows flickering into the street.

  I was startled by my own happiness. The first thing I did after I bought this cottage was to build a small glass porch onto the front, not so much to protect me from the wind, but so that I could walk past packed shelves of plants each time I used the front door. On summer evenings when I water the geraniums they release a warm sweet smell that clings to my hair and clothes. That is the full extent of my gardening activity. I have never had any aptitude for weeding, grubbing, digging. There is room in the porch for one wicker chair. This has become the property of the cat. He curls and stretches on the two green cushions, digging his claws in and out of the covers, which have become feathery and pock-marked with this treatment.

  I sold everything that had been in the house in Derry, apart from my books and, of course, Jack’s curious mess. It seemed the right thing to do. A lot of people turned up at the auction and pawed with a certain evil excitement through the labelled contents of the house.

  Jack never really moved in here with me. He preferred to take on the role of visitor, making quite short and almost formal visits to see me. Most of his holidays he chose to spend with his grandmother in Dublin. I think he must have recognised, without any words being spoken, my reaction to the death of his father and possibly been deeply hurt by it. I hate to think that I caused him pain. Maybe I merely bored him to the bone. Perhaps if he had been allowed to live we might have grown into some kind of understanding, a closeness.

  Who can ever tell?

  He could hear her shuffling round the kitchen. Her clogs or rope soles flapping as always at the heels. The murmur of her voice as she talked to the cat. The inscrutable yellow eyes would stare back at her as she spoke. Then they would close, a slow curtain falling. If he shut his eyes and dug himself further under the clothes, he could pretend maybe that this was a dream. I am not in Knappogue, the back of beyond, I am wrapped in my bed in number eleven, Trinity College, Dublin. Warm and comfortable city sounds thrum in my ears. People breathe in the next room, cough, piss in the lavatory down the passage, try to spit hangovers out of their heads with the toothpaste. Sometimes when his eyes were shut he could remember his room in Derry. That was his pride, his safe joy. When he had had to rip the posters and the pictures from the walls, exposing the pale patterns underneath, he had felt such desolation. He had had to empty all the drawers and the shelves, pack into cardboard boxes all his books, records, tapes, papers, throw out old clothes, the past’s broken toys. He had felt so vulnerable as he stood there in the dusty, empty room with the pale empty patterns on the walls.

  ‘It’ll be all right Jacko,’ she had said behind him. ‘We’ll put the whole thing together again. Everything will be all right.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re leaving here.’

  She had laughed and left the room.

  She was like that. Inscrutable was a word he had often applied to her.

  He could hear her now, coughing. She smokes too much, he thought. She stubs out her cigarettes on plates and saucers. Dead butts and ash beside the crumbs or forlorn in the spilt tea. Filter tips float eternally in the lavatory. Father had hated that. He would rant and rave a bit and tell her she would be dead before she was fifty. She just used to laugh, bend down over the lavatory and pick the butt out with her pinced fingers.

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ she had once said.

  She had been right.

  He heard her going out of the back door.

  The bottom of the door scraped on the kitchen tiles. It had been like that ever since she moved in. She never seemed to notice that you have to push the door quite hard to open it, nor the noise it made as it scraped on the floor. It gritted his teeth. He supposed that perhaps he should do something about it, but he always felt that doing odd jobs around the place committed him to the house in a way that he didn’t wish to be committed. She had run out of cigarettes. The early morning pattern. He could never understand how it was that smokers allowed this to happen so frequently. She would prowl around the house looking for the hidden cigarette, a half-smoked one in a saucer somewhere, one shoved into the back of a drawer. The car was always the last hope. Sometimes she would find one, a box even, lying on the shelf under the dashboard. If she didn’t she would get into the car, just as she was in her dressing gown, hair uncombed, and drive to the village. Of course if he were up and about he would offer to go for her. But he wasn’t. He was tucked in his bed listening. There, the car door banged. The engine coughed a little, as she did so often, before it started. Probably a piece of red dressing gown trailed out under the door as she drove away.

  She would never have lived like this if father had been still alive. He had been a neat, well-ordered man. He believed in tradition, in keeping up appearances. ‘Within the stru
ctures’ he used to say to her, ‘you can be vague, careless, introspective, anything you like, Helen, but you must keep within the structures. Otherwise things fall apart.’ He had, of course, been a mathematician.

  Father had felt she needed protecting from some destructive demon that he could see inside her. He had tried to explain it to Jack one afternoon as they played golf at Portsalon. Pillars of driving rain interrupted their play, sweeping relentlessly down the lough. Five minutes later it would be over and the grass would sparkle and steam under a hot bright sun.

  ‘Your mother’ll be getting wet,’ he had said as they stood under a tree near the fourth green. ‘I bet she hasn’t a coat or a scarf or anything with her.’

  His voice had been filled with irritation.

  ‘I told her it was going to rain, but she didn’t listen, she just went off down the beach with her hands in her pockets … She doesn’t mind getting wet. She never has. She used to say the rain made your hair curl. I remembered laughing when he had said that. She had the world’s straightest hair.

  ‘She gets stiff. After all she isn’t twenty any longer. It’s silly not to take care of yourself at her age. At any age. She’s never had much sense.’

  He had looked out through the leaves at the rain. Jack didn’t say a word. He had really been talking to himself.

  ‘I sometimes wonder what would have happened to her if she hadn’t married me. Drift. She’d have drifted.’ He had turned to Jack and spoken almost angrily.

  ‘What’s she up to now? Down there. Miles away on the beach. Wet. Soaking wet. What’s she up to?’

  ‘She can’t be up to very much,’ Jack said.

  ‘In her head. Bring a friend, Molly, Jean, someone you can chat to while we play golf. Have a drink in the bar with. Company. Not a bit of it. She just laughed and said she’d be okay on her own.’

  ‘She likes being on her own.’

  Dan had been silent for quite a long time. The rain was almost over.

  ‘I have given her so much. I can’t damn well work out what else it is that she wants.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she wants anything, Dad. I think you’re just being a little paranoid.’ It had been a new word in his life. He was rather pleased to find an opportunity to use it. Dan laughed.

  ‘Come on. The rain has stopped. Play can be resumed.’

  That had been the end of the summer holidays before Jack had gone back to school, before his father had been killed.

  ‘And all is dross that is not Helen.’ Christopher Marlowe, 1564–1593. Prodigy. Prodigious progidy. Political activist and poet, like Patrick Pearse, d’Annunzio. Heros. Bobby Sands. His heroism was beyond doubt but Jack didn’t think that, had he lived, he would have stood up to the scrutiny of the literati.

  None of them shut their eyes to keep out reality.

  No time to do that if you are to become a prodigy … or even a hero.

  Oh thou art fairer than the evening air,

  Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,

  Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter …

  Helen.

  He wondered what they thought when they had called her Helen. Had they seen all that?

  ‘And all is dross that is not Helen.’

  Or had it been just another name?

  He thought he too would like to die at twenty-nine, prodigiously full of living.

  She called him for his breakfast after she returned from the village with her purchases, not just cigarettes, but also milk for his Cornflakes and the Irish Times. He always washed and dressed before he sat down to eat his breakfast so she had almost finished the paper and her second piece of toast when he arrived into the kitchen.

  ‘The tea’s still hot.’

  ‘Mmm. Lousy day’

  He poured some Cornflakes into his bowl and then some milk. He sat silently looking down at it for a while.

  ‘I hate Cornflakes’

  The last time he had been to stay he had eaten Cornflakes several times a day. She said nothing.

  ‘Really hate them.’

  He sighed.

  ‘Soggy, tasteless, cardboard. That’s what they are, cardboard.’

  ‘Appalled, stunned, sickened, outraged,’ she read the words from the paper. He got up and took his plate across the room to the sink. A grey curtain of rain hid the view from the window.

  ‘God what a bloody day. How can you stick it here when it’s like this, mother?’

  ‘Five times on one page the word outrage. The whole country is outraged.’

  He held the plate of Cornflakes poised over the bowl with holes in it that sat in one corner of the sink.

  ‘What are you doing with your Cornflakes?’

  ‘I’m throwing them away. I hate them.’

  ‘Now I’m outraged. Give them to the cat. Waste not, want not.’

  ‘I don’t believe the cat likes them either.’

  He scooped the mess into the bowl.

  ‘What’s everybody outraged about this time?’

  He put the plate in the sink and turned on the tap.

  ‘The usual.’

  Water bounced into the plate and sprayed up at him.

  ‘You mean the fight for freedom continues?’

  ‘You’re splashing water all over the floor.’

  He fiddled with the tap.

  ‘Jack. You’re making the most awful mess.’

  He turned it off.

  ‘I don’t mean any such thing. I mean a man was alive yesterday and now he’s dead. That’s not fighting for freedom.’

  ‘None of those words mean anything any more. Overworked. Demeaned. Anyway, why get worked up about a man’s death? We all die. We’re all here one day and gone the next.’

  He clicked his fingers.

  ‘It’s the snatching, playing God … that’s what is the outrage …’

  ‘An overworked word. Anyway what do you care? What does anyone care? A handful of people feel sorrow, fear, pain. Something. Otherwise it’s just words, news. Manipulated words. Pictures of tight-lipped people on the television screen. Not nearly as affecting as a good play. To get back to Cornflakes …’

  ‘Have some toast.’

  ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘I’ll make you some more.’

  She didn’t move, though. He looked at her for a moment and then sat down again.

  ‘Don’t bother. I really don’t mind cold toast.’

  He began buttering.

  He always put too much butter on his toast; the thought of heart disease never worries people in their twenties.

  ‘No home-made marmalade?’ he asked, taking the lid off the jar.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You always used to make marmalade.’

  ‘I have no time.’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d have had all the time in the world.’

  ‘Have some tea?’

  He nodded and pushed his cup across the table … she filled his cup and then poured out some more for herself.

  ‘How long are you staying?’

  ‘Just over the weekend. I really should go on Sunday evening, but I may wait till Monday morning. It all depends …’

  He took a large bite of toast.

  ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘The weather. If the weather turns good, I may not be able to tear myself away. Have you any plans?’

  ‘I never make plans. I thought of clearing out a lot of the junk in your room. I’m sure you don’t want it any longer. There’s a jumble sale next week and I thought most of it could go to that.’

  He laughed.

  ‘My precious belongings. You have a nerve.’

  ‘You brought everything precious to Dublin. What’s in there now isn’t even worthy of the name of jumble.’

  ‘I suppose I can’t stop you.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘If you make a pile … several piles … I’ll …’

  ‘Did you know that the station has been bought?’

  ‘No. Who …?’
>
  ‘A couple of months ago. Some Englishman. I haven’t come across him yet. I thought I might walk over this afternoon and say hello. He’s doing the place up. He has one of the Sweeney boys working full time.’

  He was buttering another piece of cold toast.

  ‘Damian Sweeney.’

  ‘There are so many Sweeneys. I never know which is which. He won’t eat sliced bread according to Mrs Doherty. She has to keep him a pan loaf twice a week when the breadman comes.’

  ‘The Englishman or Damian Sweeney?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Haythorne. Hawthorne. Something like that his name is … according to Mrs Doherty. I used to have to go to tea with horrible Haythornes when I was a child. I do hope he’s not one of them. He wears a black patch over one eye, Mrs Doherty says. I like the sound of that. Pirates and things. Will you come with me?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To spy on Mr Whatsisname.’

  ‘No. There’s a couple of things I have to do. Anyway, it’s raining. You don’t mean to go plodding off there in the rain do you?’

  ‘Rain’ll make my hair curl.’

  He smiled somewhat sourly.

  She poured herself another cup of tea and got up. She wanted to be on her own.

  ‘I’m going,’ she said to him.

  ‘Far?’

  ‘Just out to my shed. I must work. There’s so much work I have to do.’

  ‘Why don’t you get dressed?’

  ‘I’ll get dressed in my own good time.’

  She picked up the cigarettes and put them into her pocket.

  ‘You smoke too much.’

  She walked to the door and then turned around and looked at him.

  ‘Yup,’ she said. ‘I do. I enjoy it. I just love puffing all that poison in and out of my lungs. Anything else?’

  He shook his head. She left him sitting there staring into space.

  It was about two miles uphill all the way to the station house. The road could have been better. It was years since the county council men had been along with the loose stones and the tar machine. Not much need really as the road was little used. The occasional farmer with land high on the mountain would pass that way with his sheep, either on the way up to their mountain grazing, or on their way down to the market. Sometimes tourists would come over the shoulder of the hill and stop their cars to look down at the ocean and its burden of small islands. No one, either farmer or tourist, ever gave the station house a second look; in those days, that was. Now it has become a part of the local folklore.