FARTHER AWAY

 

 

We spent Christmas Eve at home on the island digging a grave for my Uncle Walter. The place was catching its breath after a week of storms and the air was still and smoky. We dug and panted and sighed and shed our coats and dug. My mother egged us on.

 

‘Come on now, ye two were mad for digging holes at the beach as kids.’

 

That’s not true. I always went in the water when my brother was digging holes. I have never had time for pointless things.

 

The men lowered the coffin in with ropes and with some sense of jubilation we threw the soft soil into the hole. My mother and aunt, Walter’s widow, blessed themselves and murmured. We drank tea while they went to midnight mass. By the time they got home it was Christmas day. The graveyard is behind our house. The church is behind that. It’s a tiny island.

 

 

I did not plan to be home for Christmas. I planned to stay in London in my bedroom. My mother called to say that Uncle Walter had died and I could hear Walter’s wife crying in the background. I knew I would have to go home. Christmas is a terrible time to die; everybody’s thinking about death but nobody is prepared for it.

 

 

My mother and father are terrified of emotions. My brother thinks he’s Flann O’Brien. You’ve met my brother, he works in Canary Wharf. He lives in Clapham. He drinks after work every evening to bring the city to its knees. The city carries on around him. He writes poems and posts them on his Facebook page. Flights home were expensive so my mother told me to get the train and the boat home with my brother. I didn’t have much of a choice. He bought me tickets and that was that. We got the train from Euston on the 23rd.

 

 

Then the boat from Holyhead and the train from Dublin to Galway, then the boat to the island. Fifteen hours listening to Irish people shout their way home for Christmas, trying to get something started. I used to love going back to Dublin. I’d get the last Ryanair out of Stansted on a Friday night and go visit my old gang from college and drink like back then. Three to a bed in the old damp house in Clonskeagh. We didn’t stop in Dublin this time. I had a look at it out the window of the taxi from Dublin Port to Heuston and it looked the same.

 

 

My Dad found Walter, his younger brother, face down in a ditch the morning after the worst of the storm. My mother stopped saying ‘Walter’ after he died and just said ‘the remains.’ My mother treats exposed nerve endings like clumps of grass in her garden; prods them with her toe. She sees a crack and she caulks it. There was no funeral for Walter. The weather was too bad to take him to the mainland they said and my mother said anyway it was too close to Christmas for a funeral. Someone from the hospital came over from Galway and did the official stuff. Someone came from the funeral home. Then they put him in the coffin and left it in our living room in front of the telly.

 

 

My brother and I were close as children. Maybe too close. We didn’t have any friends of our own until we went to separate boarding schools. We barely spoke to one another on the train and boat journey home. He poked at his iPad and we ate sandwiches out of tinfoil. He complained about the price of pints when we were on the boat. ‘Do you know we’re sailing into a recession?’ he said to the barman. The barman was stressed about the long queue behind my brother. ‘Learn English,’ said my brother. When he came back to the table I told him he was extremely ignorant and he just laughed.

 

 

The island is a limestone comma in the Atlantic ocean and when I was a child I was afraid it would sink like a dinghy. I know better than that now but I wonder if it will exist by the time I die. It’s eroding. I check its size on Google maps and try to remember to check it again in a few years to measure the difference.

 

Late on Christmas day we ate dinner together at the big table in the kitchen. My aunt was still there, she’d slept on the couch to avoid the bungalow she shared with Walter on the seafront. My mother took down the Christmas tree and there were no decorations on the table. The big light was on. I sat hunched wearing the t-shirt I slept in and no bra underneath. Nobody took any photos and the crackers stayed in their box for next year.

 

 

I travelled back to London some days later on the same boats and trains.

 

 

In London, I live in Banglatown. There are market stalls on the high street every day. In the morning when I leave for work the traders are shaking out their tarps and affixing metal poles, shouting at one another in a language or languages I don’t know. When I come home in the evenings it is dark and street cleaners in neon vests are pushing brooms against mounds of plastic. The traders take down the metal poles and stack them onto trolleys and push them down the street. They plough through the crowds of people outside the station and along the high street with their trolleys full of livelihood. They stop traffic like a parade and it takes two or three of them to manoeuver the heavy loads in the right direction. At the market I can buy packets of spices and fresh vegetables. If I wanted to I could buy saris and scarves. There is a Boots the Chemist and a giant Sainsbury’s. There is a mosque across the road.

 

 

Last summer, my first summer in London, the Bangladeshis were protesting outside the mosque. I don’t know what it was for but it felt worthwhile. Some held signs and there were chants. It was roasting, the hottest day I had ever known. Living in Banglatown makes me feel farther away. I stood on the street outside my apartment and watched as the crowd called and responded and shook their hand-written signs in the air. Police stood on the fringes with their arms folded pretending to look bored but I bet they were ready. Someone threw a plastic cup full of an orange drink at the police and it landed at their feet and splashed their shoes.

 

 

I went in to the mosque once. It was later that summer or maybe it was September because the awful heat had retreated and I could breathe again. It was the middle of the day and there was nobody else going in or out. I walked up the front steps and through the door into the entrance hall and then remembered to take off my shoes. I was proud of myself. Through the arch I could see rows of people folded over on the carpet and it looked to me like meditation. The air inside the mosque was still and cool and not dissimilar to that of the church on the island where I’d been baptised, christened and confirmed. I stepped forwards and a man emerged from the shadows and hurried towards me. He waved his arms towards the door whispering something like ‘get out’. It was only then that I realised I had entered the men’s section.

 

 

I moved to London after I began to notice everyone else was leaving Dublin. Once I noticed, I couldn’t get it out of my mind and then it became crucial that I get out. I packed two huge suitcases and paid €150 in excess baggage fees. Before I’d had a chance to unpack, my brother decided he was moving to London too. Stop following me, I said. Don’t flatter yourself, he said. He set himself up in a big house in Clapham with three lads from home and I have never seen him in this city. We have never tried to arrange anything. I watch his life on Facebook and get updates by text from my mother and it’s as though he’s at home on the island, far away from me.

 

 

I live alone and my rent is well over half of my monthly pay. Arriving at my apartment after spending Christmas at home on the island is a new kind of silence. It is a silence that envelops the sirens and the car horns and the thumping dance music from the apartment upstairs. This silence takes those sounds to its breast and smothers them.

 

 

My strongest memory of Uncle Walter is of him lying on our kitchen floor trying to ease his back pain. The stone floor was always cold. Walter often carried loads too heavy for his narrow frame and he had thin arms with protruding veins. He balanced stacks of peat briquettes, planks of wood or his steel toolbox on his shoulders and whistled as he worked. He lay flat on his back on the kitchen floor with his legs spread out and my mother worked around him, stepping over him to get to the fridge. My father sat and talked at Walter about the forecast. I watched from the living room and called my brother over to have a look. It frightened me to see Walter lying there. My mother saw us and told us to go outside and play. Walter lifted his head and looked at us, beaming.