I Could Read the Sky Read online

  21

  WHEN THE LANDLADY’S door is open it’s a sign for Francie that the husband is away at the bus depot and for him to come in. She started him at it the second week we were there and ever after when he saw the crack in the door he made for the stairs like a greyhound. I never got a look inside. “What’s it like in there?” I asked him. “It’s all pink,” he said, like it was a great wonder.

  She barred him once for two weeks when she got mad at him about the smoke. I came into the room from the bath with my hair slicked down and the Tailor’s suit on me for it was Wednesday and I was going to the Bamba dance. Francie was in a chair with his feet up on the bed and the Donegal Democrat spread across his lap. A pig’s head was boiling away in the pot on the gas ring. He was in his work clothes still and his eyes were flickering. “Mind you don’t fall asleep,” I said to him as I left. Maggie wasn’t at the dance, I remember that. I kept a watch on the door. When I got back to Cavendish Road and went into the room there was Francie stretched across the bed snoring, the paper over his face and smoke thick as a mountain mist filling the room, the pot and the pig’s head that was in it both as black as a boot. Mrs Chandler looked at us hard the next morning at breakfast like she was thinking what sentence she would impose on us, the sentence of exile maybe, but she denied him his rations instead.

  I met him one morning on the stairs carrying his shoes. He looked like a rumpled sheet. “She only gave me an hour’s sleep,” he said. “Every time I dropped off she was at me. It’s worse than digging trenches in the rain.” We were laying railway lines that time and it was heavy work. When the green-eyed cat came into the room and leapt onto Francie he drop-kicked it straight through the open window. He could be in bad humour if he didn’t get his sleep. Wherever the cat went it must have passed the kitchen window for straight away Mrs Chandler was in the room in her apron throwing our clothes down the stairs. We headed down the Kilburn High Road. “You can ride the landlady,” said Francie. “But don’t blackguard the cat.”

  22

  WHEN FRANCIE IS away laying the gas lines in Portsmouth I get very lonely in the room. We’re in a basement that time in Quex Road. The room has one picture in a blue wooden frame of a blond boy milking a cow and it makes it worse. The room gets no light. In the week I take a few pints in the Old Bell and make my way back to Quex Road eating something out of a newspaper. One night at closing time I’m walking behind a red-haired man with mud on his boots, the trousers falling off him, the paper rolled up in his jacket pocket and him taking the two sides of the pavement from all the drink and I know it is me. I know it is all of us. On Sunday it’s Mass and the Crown and after two o’clock it’s murder. I lean on the railings smoking cigarettes I don’t like. I read the paper and fail to reach the end of a story. I put on the radio but the words get lost. We have a clock and I look at it. The minutes go by like water dripping from a tap. Some time around six the walls seem to move in on me.

  I know that something bad is going to happen.

  On the top floor is a man from Belfast always wears a suit and a tie. It’s dark under his eyes and dark in them too so you can’t find him, like a cellar with the only light falling through a small dirty window. He has manners like an usher at church. He lifts the hat up off his head whenever he greets you. He’s an actor, he says, Albert Maskey of the Ormeau Road, Belfast. I don’t know how he does it for he’s afflicted with a stutter whenever he tries to explain something complicated. I see him through the dust and the grey light of the stairwell leaving out a saucer of milk for the cat. Whenever he’s not busy with something else he’s cleaning and filing his nails. “Good grooming is essential for an actor,” he says. The right brow travels up the forehead after he says something like that, like what he says surprises him.

  He likes to take a glass of scotch at six every evening and somehow it’s come about that I go up to him on Thursdays. I never saw the bed unmade or even with a dent in the cover. Socks and jumpers folded along a shelf. A glass cabinet for the drink. A cup and saucer with a teapot on the table ready for the morning. In the corner is a little bottle with the top off filled with green liquid to give off the smell of trees. You’d think it was the room of a man would drive a car for a bishop only for the pictures of women in frames along the shelf above his bed. Beside them is a crown made from plaster and painted gold. Had he worn it on the stage? “Not yet,” he tells me, the eyes dark shadows.

  I ask him about the women.

  “I’ve known them all, you know,” he says. He laughs, but the laugh fades away like the bark of a tired dog. He gets up from his chair and puts on his spectacles. Each one he gives a name. Rita, Eustace, Marie-Thérèse, Lucy. Did he get them from The Lives of the Saints? There’s one he calls Princess with black hair looks like she’s been surprised and likes it. Their teeth have a kind of shining white like you’d see in a star. They have bands in their hair, some of them, and you can see the lines of their bodies because of the tightness of their clothes. One is dressed in a long gown, gold and white, that reaches to the floor, her blonde hair piled up and trailing down her neck, diamonds on her ears. He tells me the story of each romance as he gives them their names. The one he worked with on the cruise out of Barcelona. The one from Dublin was going to be a nun. The one played Cleopatra in Derby he stole from another actor. The one from Greenland he met looking at tombs in the museum. Places like Lisbon, Istanbul and Tangier come into it somehow. “I’ve been busy, I’ve travelled,” he says. “I’ve loved them all.” Again the fading laugh that you can’t believe.

  Francie comes back from the work in Portsmouth and I get a little steadier. We get a meal every evening at the café. We change our shoes before going for a drink. We get through Sunday with cards or a long walk.

  When something is going to happen you can get a warning. Like when the room kept moving but I went still just before Maggie walked into the bar. I sit up in the bed that night like someone’s blown a whistle into my ear. I ease back down onto the pillow but I’m a long way from sleep. It’s ten past two on the clock. There’s a breeze outside and the shadows of the trees in the garden move across the picture of the boy with the cow. I am in the bed by the window and Francie is over by the wall. I see his back go up and down with the rhythm of sleep. What can I do while I’m waiting? I try to think my way through all the notes of “The Green-Crowned Lass”. There’s a noise then, something moving through branches, the splintering of wood, and then a crash like a load of boards hitting the ground from a snapped cable. There’s a slow dying moan and then the silence, more still than before. I cannot hear the breeze. I draw back the curtain. On the ground facing me are the wide dark eyes of Albert Maskey. The top of his head is caved in a little on the side where he landed and his broken arm is stretched across his chest and shoulder, the hand up and open like he’s asking for something. There’s dirt in his mouth. He’s a suit and tie on, everything in place, and he’s wearing the gold crown was up on the shelf above his bed.

  I couldn’t get to the bottom of it.

  The night he told me about the girls I looked at their pictures before I left the room. The way they posed, a hand on the hip, a look over the shoulder. The paper was thin and the edges of some were uneven. He’d cut them from magazines and put them in frames.

  That was bad what happened to Albert Maskey, but it wasn’t the thing I was fearing somehow when the walls were moving in.

  23

  TO GET TO the graveyard you must walk across sand. It is a ring of earth and grass and stone cleansed by the sea wind set in the water and connected to the shore at Baby’s house by the neck of sand. There was rain in the afternoon after Da buried the mare but now there is light. In the evening light the green of the grass deepens, a stitching of silver can be seen in the rocks, gold spreads and dives and sparkles on the water and the shadows of the gravestones are long. All the things are there on the graves. The shoes of children, jumpers half knit, flowers, coins, photographs, a mouth organ and a flat cap. There is a
message on paper rolled into the neck of a bottle of stout. The gravedigger with the blond hair and the lower teeth which come up over his lip is moving along with a broom sweeping where he can. “Taking the bad luck off the graves,” he says again and again.

  On the grave of the mare there is nothing only clods of mud from the afternoon rain. Da says after he’s shot her and put an end to the desperate noise she was making that he means to cut a piece from the tail of her colt and leave it on the grave. I am sitting on the wall watching the sun go down over the graveyard. Matt was there leaving a saucer with blackberries on it on the grave of his wife but now he and the gravedigger are both gone. The shadows lose their edge and fade away as the sun drops. To bury a horse you need a grave twice the length and twice the width of a man’s. I hear then the sound of crying, a gagged and pitiful sound. I can’t find it but I know it is coming from the earth. It falls away from the effort and then rises, a wild complaint. I know this sound. It is the sound of the mare in her sickness. I see then the mud of her grave begin to move, churning, restless, the clods of mud breaking and falling from a struggle below. I can feel the force of it as I grip the stones of the wall, a force greater than the weight of the earth upon it. A hoof breaks through, pawing at the air, a kind of caress. Then the two forelegs, smeared with mud. They thrash and kick, the two hooves embed deep in the mud, there is a surge of halted power from under the earth, and another, and then with a great heave the horse is finally up, wet and stained, the mud falling away, blood still seeping from the wound in the side of her head where Da shot her. She shakes the grave from her and she arches her neck. Then she fixes me with her eye.

  Christ. It’s nearly four o’clock. I feel like I’ve walked off the edge of a scaffold in the dark. The heart is pounding. I hear the footsteps of the girl who lives below me climbing the stairs. She has trouble getting the key in the lock. The drink, I suppose, and why not? A night bus passes outside. Lonely sounds. This is the bed where Maggie remembered her dreams. She could tell you every twist of them. I don’t want dreams now. There’s none I have that don’t cause me bother somehow. Where did I get a horse like that?

  The graveyard. Mrs Carney tells me her husband is sick and I’ll have to look after the making of the grave myself. She goes into a shed and comes back out with a spade and hands it me. Dermot’s been drinking whiskey since the day Ma died and it falls to me. “Where am I to dig?” I ask her. “You’ll take up your father’s coffin and make the grave deep enough for the two of them.” She goes back in and closes the door. I look at this door, its red blistering paint, the brass door knocker with their name on it sent by the daughter in Scotland probably. Why couldn’t they even get the paint on right? Why isn’t he fit to dig a grave? I would like to take the spade and drive it through the heart of the door.

  The month of my mother’s death is November. Dark clouds rolling into the hillside as I walk with Carney’s spade across the neck of sand to the graveyard. “They opened her up and the cancer was everywhere,” said Dermot’s wife. “She was black with it. It was a mercy she went.” I find Da’s grave and begin to dig. In the earth there’s splintered wood, a button from a woman’s dress, nails, shells dropped by gulls, a shard of blue delft, a coffee can from America. They opened her up and she was black inside. How much of this can I bear? I dig. Everything is shaking. I dig until I come to Da. The force of the air seems enough to break my bones. I dig around the coffin and I haul it up. Don’t spill out, I beg him. It begins to rain. I get back in the grave to dig some more. I kneel. I ask for help, help from anywhere. When the grave is deep enough I try to get out but I slip in the mud. I grab at clumps of grass and the edges of the gravestones, I pull myself up and I edge the coffin closer to the mouth of the grave. I lie in the mud and guide it down. Please God the wood will hold. I hear him rolling inside. I get the coffin to the base of the grave, I right it and I cover it with grass. What is this thing that is on me? I remember anger from when the paymaster in Blackheath wouldn’t pay me what was owed. I remember Kate Creevy boarding the train. I remember loneliness and the walls of Quex Road. I remember pure sadness. This is not any of those but some of all of them maybe and more. What is the more, though? I see myself running around the graveyard, up over the wall and into the sea. There would be no comfort in sleep or in drink. It is like something is covering me that threatens my breath. It is like something is moving that will break things inside me.

  When I get to London I find that I cannot understand the bricks. The train passes through tunnels and cuttings and past buildings all of them made of bricks the colour of dried blood. The bricks make up the walls and the hard pitted clay makes up the bricks. I think of all the bricks and all the little holes, some the size of pinpricks only. How can there be so many bricks? How can there be so much time to place them into rows? When I lie in bed in Quex Road I think of a building and I think of how many bricks it takes to make up its width. I go upwards from the base and count the rows. I think of the lack of bricks in the doors and the windows and where the building ends for it cannot go through the sky and I try to find the number of bricks in the wall that is facing me as I picture it. There are the front and back of the building and maybe the two sides and still more sides maybe, there are bricks in the inside walls, bricks under the ground, bricks that form roads, bricks in sewers. Bricks in the buildings when I turn out the door, bricks up and down the Kilburn High Road and bricks forever out into the world.

  There are bricks from all the years that make up the walls. When I pass them I try to think of the men who put them there. Who told them where to place the bricks? What way did they shave? What was the drink they liked the best? I fall in among them and among the ages of the city.

  The Horse McGurk is driving the crane. You’d think he was throwing the hammer the way he swings the load of bricks. We’re building flats in Spitalfields. He’s leaving the pallets of bricks down at intervals along the wall. The banksman has given up guiding him for he knows the Horse will pay him no heed. He’s moving closer to where the wall turns and he’ll need to get the pallet in under the scaffolding, the loads swinging and crashing to the ground. I think what it would be like to ride the pallet into the wall. The banksman is smoking a cigarette. All the weight of the bricks swinging at the end of the cable. If he misses the gap the load will smash into a wall or the scaffold. He swings the arm of the crane a little to get the rhythm going. I think of how the bricks will smash into powder and clay. He makes a pass and then pulls back because he’s going to miss. The load begins to swing again. I am seeking the darkness. The load goes back a final time and I leap onto it. Everything in me pulls towards the earth as the load swings down. I begin to feel the great power of the crash before it happens. I see it might move towards the side wall and I try to guide it there with my weight. The powder of the bricks and blood and bone and darkness. The wall gets closer. I can see the holes in the bricks. I wait.