Page 38 of Beautiful Losers

‘Nope. I’m a pain-free zone. My demons have long been exorcised.’

‘I’d say someone who dated a man who starts his correspondence with, “Greetings, wisdom warriors” is not okay.’

I glare at Jack and wonder when he started subscribing to Cillian’s newsletter.

‘Fine,’ I say. I’ll scream if you will.’

It’s childish, I know. I face Jack, chin raised. He accepts the challenge and holds my gaze. Neither of us will be the first to break.

‘Okay,’ he says.

‘Grand,’ I reply.

‘Well? Are you going to scream?’

‘Are you?’

‘Folks, please,’ Leonard interjects. ‘Let’s not losesight of why we’re here. We want to celebrate Margaret’s short life and help Ari process her passing.’

‘Sorry,’ Jack and I mumble at the same time, suitably chastened, our eyes briefly locking again and I swear I’m not imagining it this time – something passes between us, an exchange of energy, a spark I haven’t felt in God knows how long.

‘I’ll count to three and you’ll unburden yourselves together, alright?’ Leonard says. ‘One, two, three!’

We scream, self-consciously at first and then competitively and then it feels like the most natural thing in the world, bellowing into the wind like there’s no one watching.

In Ireland, back in the day, it was common practice to have keeners at funerals. Women, often paid with a glass of whiskey, who would flank the body for days, singing laments, vocalising the grief of a family, a community. The tradition eventually died out, the Catholic Church condemning it as a pagan ritual. It wasn’t just the church. Over time, a shame developed around keening. It was considered old-fashioned, an embarrassment to wear your sorrow so openly. You still see displays of public mourning in other parts of the world. Women wailing and tearing at their breasts over lost husbands, sons, daughters. Their sisters and neighbours holding onto them, equally unrestrained in their emotions, refusing to contain their pain. To them, grief is communal, the burden of loss shared out, so no one has to endure it alone.

Leonard asks Ari for his contribution to the shoebox he’s about to lower into the ground. Ari hands him a photo of himself and Margaret, taken on a day trip to Sandycove, and a half-eaten chocolate heart. Leonard places themin the box and lowers it gently into the hole. He invites us to hold hands for the final part of the ceremony. Sabrina rolls her eyes, then looking at Ari exhales loudly and grabs Myriam and Leonard’s hands. Standing beside me, Jack catches my eye, a sheepish expression on his face. He reaches for Ari and then me, the pleasure centre in my brain lighting up like a Bastille Day fireworks display as his palm touches mine.

The circle closed, Leonard rummages for his phone in his pocket. Retrieving it, he scrolls until he finds what he’s looking for and closes his eyes. After a few seconds, ‘Hallelujah’ starts to play. Surprisingly, it’s the Jeff Buckley arrangement of the song and not Leonard Cohen’s original. ‘No offence to the master, I just feel Buckley takes it to a more ethereal place,’ says Leonard, and the rest of us nod in agreement.

As we stand there, watching Leonard toss soil on top of a shoebox (sorry – watching the spirit of Margaret be laid to rest), I feel a shift, a stirring. Aknowing. Like that time in Aix-en-Provence, when I was pregnant with Ari, when I felt in the core of my being that I’d be raising my son by myself. Only this time, I can’t figure out what it is I’m supposed to know.

And even though it all went wrong

I'll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

We take it in turns to throw soil over the box. I feel an unexpected lightness, like something deep within me is being slowly excavated, dusted off and held up to the light. The shoebox gradually disappears, swallowed up by the earth, except for a small, unsullied corner of the lid poking out of the ground, refusing to be buried.

22

Joan was there the day I got my first period. I was late to the menstruation game. The week after Mum left, Aunt Flo arrived. Aunt Flo was not my choice of words. I never got why people felt the need to euphemise body parts and bodily processes. But Joan was of a generation of women shamed into concealing the earthier aspects of the female experience, and so persisted with references to my ‘little friend’ or asking me if ‘the painters were in’.

I came home from school, my underwear stuffed with scratchy industrial toilet paper, and told Joan what had happened. She put on her navy mac, marched straight to the chemist and came back with the biggest packet of sanitary towels I’d ever seen. Jesus, Joan, I’m not bleeding Niagara Falls, I said, as she busied herself with the dusting she had abandoned to help me in my hour of need. Your first cycles are unpredictable, she replied, the gold crucifix around her neck bouncingwith the briskness of her movements. Just like your last ones. You don’t want to be caught off-guard in a cream shift dress at midday mass in St Brigid’s, let me tell you. She made me a hot water bottle and chicken soup, and we watchedGlenroebefore she went home.

Joan had been cleaning for us every Tuesday and Friday afternoon for four years. I looked forward to her visits. I’d sit on the stool at the breakfast bar when I got back from school and she’d ask me about my day and what I’d learnt and which teachers I’d terrorised. She was a petite woman in her late fifties with a bleached blonde perm and a freakish physical strength that belied her diminutive frame. I came home one day to find her clearing out the attic, at Mum’s request. She hauled skis and horse-riding gear and an easel and a stationary bike – Mum’s short-lived former interests – from the top of the house to the shed at the back of the garden without breaking a sweat.

She was picked up without fail by her husband Tommy, a big, smiling man who said the same thing every time I answered the door to him: ‘Lovely day for it.’ He said it even when it wasn’t a lovely day – meteorologically or figuratively speaking. Mum once said that Tommy had ‘a wee want in him’, Northern Irish speak for a person of dubious mental capacity.

After Mum left, Joan started coming every day. I don’t know whether Dad had asked her to take over the running of the house or maybe she intuited that I needed mothering. She did the groceries, cooked dinner, made sure I did my homework. On rainy afternoons, she’d meet me at the bus stop after school with an umbrella.

I asked Joan once if she’d ever wanted children. She said with all her heart, but that God hadn’t blessed themwith a baby. It was okay. She felt lucky. She and Tommy had good friends and they had their faith. She played bridge with some women from their local GAA club on Mondays evenings. Tommy had his allotment and his call card collection to keep him occupied when he wasn’t working. He’d been a baggage handler at Dublin Airport for twenty years. On Saturday mornings, they swam fifteen lengths together at their local leisure centre, popping into Brenda’s café afterwards where they ordered the same thing every time: a baked potato with cheese and baked beans for Joan, a full Irish for Tommy. In the afternoon, they volunteered at their local hospice, Tommy driving patients to doctors’ visits, Joan helping them with their correspondence.

Mostly, they were happy. Tommy got ‘a bit lonesome in his head’ sometimes, had inherited a melancholia that ran in his father’s side of the family. Joan took him to their doctor shortly after they were married, the first time he said his legs had stopped working and he couldn’t get out of bed. The doctor told him he was fit and healthy, to get more sleep and go for long walks. The second time it happened, after he lost his job during the big recession in the eighties, he didn’t leave their bedroom for a week. When she finally convinced him to come downstairs, he’d sit in front of the TV all day. She’d come home from her job at the biscuit factory and he’d be swirling a fork absentmindedly around the barely touched plate of food she’d made him for lunch, his eyes glued to the screen. One day, she found him in the kitchen, holding the knife she used to carve their Sunday roast, his finger running along the blunt edge, a passive expression on his face. ‘I just want it to stop, Joanie,’ he said, as she gently took the knife out of his hand and laid it on the worktop. She pulled him close to her, stroking his head, andhe let himself be comforted, allowing her to take the full weight of his big bones.

They went to the parish priest – who suggested seeking solace in Our Lord – and another doctor. He warned that if Tommy didn’t snap out of it, he’d end up in St Pat’s, and everyone knew that when you went into the funny farm, you never came back. Desperate for answers, Joan found a woman in the Golden Pages, who was something called a naturopath and ran a health shop in Dalkey. She took the Dart there one Saturday afternoon and walked in the rain along a row of fancy terraced houses facing the Irish Sea until she reached the village. The shop smelt of incense – something foreign, not the stuff the priest uses in mass – its shelves packed with exoticisms like oat bran and lentils. The woman behind the counter listened without interrupting, nodding sympathetically as Joan explained Tommy’s ‘forlorn spells’. She suggested a Mediterranean diet and advised Joan to ditch the deep-fat fryer and start using something called extra virgin olive oil. There was evidence to suggest ginseng was helpful and tablets made from fish. Joan must have spent a small fortune that day. It took weeks before they saw any improvement. But Tommy did improve. Gradually, he started to feel better. He still had his moments, mind, though for the most part they were ticking along. He no longer needed to take time off work, and when he retired in a couple of years, things would be better still, she was sure of it. They were going to move to a small cottage by the sea. They’d been careful with their money, had saved a decent amount.

---