Down the dark chute of the hall the dim
gold kitchen light is on. She is alone, readying the dinner. She talks to
herself now and then. Leonard Cohen, muffled and weary, softens the sound. It’s
her music - a small, bold liberty. Being at that moment useful, doing something
they can’t or won’t, she feels brave enough to add the spice of passive
expression to her drudgery. Pots and pans lisp and clink, accompanying the heavy
tread that has forgotten the finer points of being a woman. The dog licks the
floor. She speaks to it, her grey head bowed over the steaming pot. The deep
blue September evening blackens the trees outside where the birds she also feeds
are roosting. Why should she remember? It has been so long since those days
when she thought that it might have been possible for her to be appreciated.
In an adjacent room the son, who is too
old to be in university, allows himself to be distracted from his all-too-pristine
university textbook by the music. His will, never strong, is always weaker
there. ‘Son’ is the correct word, the only word for what he is. No independent
man, he is also too old by far for the word ‘boy’. He is still the son though
and that is the problem. He hears her trudge to the door and open it and call
them for dinner. Them: he and the father, the other son being absent.
The father gets there first, eager to
show his diligence though he knows from experience that the call is always
quite pre-emptive. The son hears only the intonation as the father’s voice, as wheedling
as a child’s and yet fashioned by years of siege, begins a conversation
entirely on its own terms. Now the kitchen has become even more unappetising. Even
so, hunger drives him away from his book, or else the pretext provides a happy
exit from the nagging fear he feels at his raw idea of the future; he is not
honest enough to know which. As he is heard approaching the door the intonation
flattens out and the talk sputters and dies.
Chicken
stir-fry, thick and salty, sits on a bed of soft white rice at his place. The
table has been pushed up against the wall to accommodate fewer diners since the
days he and his brother were supposed to have matured. He pulls out his chair
and sits down and, as he does so, his gaze meets his father’s and he sees a
fleeting discomfort that such an intrusion should have occurred. Unappreciated
in the stubbornly unfathomable inner worlds that he sometimes senses within the
others, the father has long since withdrawn into a prickly oblivion, the puncturing
of which prompts a sort of vacant, hostile confusion. Knowing that it will
fail, the son nevertheless feels the need to make an opening gambit. If he does
not try it his mother will. And if conversation is to be had it must be about
the one who isn’t there, in this case his brother.
“Did
you enjoy Mark’s performance?” asks the son.
“Sorry…?”
The
eyes radiate shocked disdain. He has been addressed!
“I
said did you enjoy Mark’s show?”
Eyes
round with blank dismay like the corpse of a fish in a supermarket.
“I
can’t hear the…it’s very hard to hear you…the..words?”
Agony.
For a long moment.
Silence
for a little while longer. Then, “It was very professional…without any..
problems. Competent.”
Duty
discharged, he prepares to sink back into his cerebral murk, faculties on hold
like a reptile lurking with only the bare minimum operational.
“Cold
praise”, says the son.
Perhaps
to defuse things the mother steals a furtive laugh, but it is a miscalculation.
Any show of mirth instantly makes the father defensive.
“Can
I not be left in peace? I thought you wanted a critical analysis. I don’t know.
I don’t know! What do you think?”
“Do
you want me to be objective or kind?”
“Don’t
be so evasive!”
“I
hardly think you can accuse me of being evasive..”
“I
don’t care what any of you think!” interjects the mother, terrified of the
irreversible direction the conversation is taking. It is an untruthful and
desperate plea – she wants to know everything they think, but does not want to
have to hear it dragged forth, alluded to or spat but never simply said. The
repression exhausts her even though she encourages it. Her own nature exhausts
her, and the same could be said of the son. It could not be said of the father
who is spared by his contempt for introspection.
Silence
for a while longer. The tense clink of forks on plates for an eternity. Then
someone asks who won the match, because no-one is in the least bit interested
in sport so it is safe. A few sentences are exchanged on the topic in a fragile
simulation of goodwill.
And
then suddenly, from nowhere, the father is up, whirling about the kitchen in a
display of what he believes is praiseworthy behaviour. “Finished?” He leans
over and whips plates from beneath noses in a gesture which fuses such
incompatibles as diffidence, blame, manners, inconsiderateness and efficiency
into a unique and unbearable whole. He scuttles about the room with the
sporadic, stop-start motion of a giant beetle, hunched and vituperative, annihilating
the chance of any sense of repose, firing the cutlery into the cups and the
plates into the washbasin. Mother and son share an eye-roll when his back is
turned, just to keep sane. “Bin? No, yes, no?” he enquires, thrusting a pot of
leftovers under his wife’s nose. “Yes” sends him scurrying to meticulously
scrape out every last residue and flick down the bin lid with a sigh of noble
effort before the hard leather-soled shoes are off again on another critical
errand. The son takes this moment to leave, his shoulders a knot of bottled tension,
a faded memory of the mother’s maxim “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say
anything at all” crushing him like the burden of Atlas.
Leaving
her, to all intents and purposes, alone again. “Tom, I’ll do that, you go and
watch the News”, she begs, but he is too committed to his rigid idea of virtue
to hear the request for what it is - a request for the peace of being truly
alone, switched off and at the task, rather than suffering the paradox of being
stranded alone in his company.
“Ah
no no no”, he says.
Mammy
cooks and I do the cleaning because I am a good boy.
And
those sluts, sure they do nothing at all.