the place cleaned out with something really strong, I don’t want a woman with a mop, I will say, I want a team of men in boiler suits with tanks on their backs and those high-pressure steel rods.
And the garage–we will turn the garage into a studio space, with skylights and white walls, and I will put wide plank flooring over the old cement. Oak.
‘What do you think about oak?’ I will say.
I will rent the house out for a while. And I will be nice to the tenants. And when I am finished. When I am good and finished. When I have beaten the shit out of the place and made it smell, in a wonderfully clean but old-fashioned way, of wood soap and peonies, I will sell it on for twice the price.
Is that all right, Liam?
There he is. Standing at the water’s edge, looking out over the waves.
Is that all right?
He looks like an extra in a film. He is wearing a baggy brown suit, that he would never wear in real life, and a Paddy cap over his young curly black hair. His eyes of Irish blue crinkle at the corners as he looks out into the night. He is not alone. There is another man further up, there is a boy standing on a headland; at each peak and promontory these watchers stand, looking out to sea.
It is like a Guinness ad, but no one moves.
Overhead, a huge plane comes in to land. The first of the day, trailing Arctic frost. New York, Newfoundland, Greenland, Portrane. It is six a.m. Time for me to turn home.
I get in the car, and reach for the key, gone cold in the ignition. It is March. It is nearly five months since Liam died. Ciara’s baby, who met him coming in the door, is now one month old. My own last child, the one I might have with Tom, is getting tired waiting. I turn the key and start the car.
Liam turns to watch me as I go. He does not know who I am, or what the sea is, or what sort of a place Broadstone might be. He is full of his own death. His death fills him as a plum fills its own skin. Even his eyes are full. It is a serious business, being dead. He would like to do it well. He turns from the confusing lights of the car, and sets his face towards the sea.
I drive back up to the main road, but the car does not turn for home. I go to the airport instead and, after a little while, I get on a plane.
37
SUICIDES ALWAYS PULL a good crowd. People push in: they clog the doors and sidle along the back benches, gathering on the rim of the church: they turn up on principle, because a suicide has left everyone behind.
I wish they had stayed at home.
I stand in the church porch waiting for the mourners’ car to arrive from Griffith Way. Tom is chasing Emily along a bench. Rebecca stands beside me and will not let go of my hand. I am glad I have got the distraction of children among these people, strangers and friends, who check my face and will not say hello, or not yet. I fuss around the kids, and scold Emily and send them off with their father: he will need a head start to get them past the box at the top of the aisle.
A woman makes her way towards me through the crowd. I know her from somewhere–if I could just remember from where, then her name might come to me, and what she might want. She has been crying, that is the disconcerting thing. Anyone can slobber over you, I think, once you are dead.
She is tall and pale and black-haired and this should be enough, I should recognise her by this, and by the slightly harried look she has of a woman both wounded and mild. She looks around until she finds me–I knew it was me she was looking for–and she comes over, pushing her way through the other people with awkward grace. She is all hip and shoulder, in a mushroom-coloured trench coat and a beige jersey dress.
And then I remember her from that awful visit Liam made, the one when I had the builders in, and there was no floor in the girls’ bedrooms, in the middle of which mayhem, Liam arrives with this woman who