The Ikon Maker Read online

  ‘What are you trying to express?’ she asked.

  ‘Derek O’Mahony’s guts,’ he said.

  The answer shocked her, and in it she recognized the recrimination. She’d put him in that school. The year of Derek O’Mahony’s murder. For that was now what it seemed to be. The murder of an innocent unexpiated person.

  She moved towards him, withdrew. Anyway, she reckoned there was enough violence on the television screen in the pub across the road to inspire Diarmaid, the violence of Belfast streets or the untold misfortunes of a Belfast child, his face clinging to the grey and the wet of the television screen.

  But over dishwashing she was haunted by his last remark. Derek’s death was still not just jaunting Diarmaid but fixating his mind, pivoting towards a point where death met life. His mind was full of skeletons. The skeletons of an Ireland mangled, lost, an Ireland where cabbage seed grew in neglected gardens. Derek had been victim; Diarmaid sympathized with him. Sympathized so intensely he’d also become the boy, stood beside, smelt the polish from his shoes. And yet Derek had gone beyond Diarmaid, walked out one day, left the world for a grim alternative.

  And all the time people’s voices hushed about the image of the boy, leftover, lost. Derek dangling, regretting his misfortune, putting up with it until with one stroke he’d done what a thousand politicians had failed to do. Condemned Ireland, a country of mediocrity, yet a country which if Derek had remembered, Susan thought, had permitted a relationship as fine as his with Diarmaid, two boys in the same colour pullover wandering over the fields, rugby balls flying, their hands in their pockets, alive to a guilt common to all.

  Susan’s mind was flying over images. She thought and thought. That year of Diarmaid’s in school was one of deep enigma. What had happened? She wasn’t sure. Something of cherished consequences.

  That night, having made a fire, she stroked her hands.

  ‘Diarmaid, do you feel bitter about Derek’s death?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Very.’

  ‘Why?’

  Singularly he said it.

  ‘Because he was killed not just by repression of a whole country. But by the evil of small minds.

  I feel like avenging his death some time.’

  A train started up, smashed its light distantly.

  Diarmaid continued. ‘It’s funny feeling that, but I know I’ll always feel like that.

  In a sense hopeless.

  Why had Derek to die? Because people teased him? No. Because they told him he was a misfit from the beginning.

  That won’t do. You can’t tell a person they were wrong just because they’re being themselves. But it happens all the time. It won’t do. It won’t do.’

  ‘No,’ Susan agreed.

  And she felt her name, Susan, personalized. ‘No, it won’t do,’ she repeated to herself.

  Gradually though the realization dawned. Diarmaid had in his strange way been in love with Derek.

  She dismissed the thought. It was foolish.

  But it lingered. Doris Day on the radio, another old song revived. ‘Secret Love’. She’d washed Diarmaid’s pajamas, was ironing them.

  As she finished ironing them – Diarmaid reading an old book of short stories which lay in the house – she held them to her. Smelt their smell.

  Somewhere the scent of pubic hair clung like spring to bark. Therein was life’s mystery.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Being – being –.’ But she couldn’t think of the word. She left down the pajamas.

  He’d scored a point. She wasn’t able to forward an explanation.

  She sat down beside him.

  Together, before going to bed, they ate flakes in warm milk.

  That done they retired. To what were deeply secret identities now.

  13

  Linen puckered; she was making a dress for the local doctor’s wife. The woman who hadn’t spoken to them at the station one day now had ordered a dress, admiring some of Susan’s work.

  Daily the dress progressed; now Susan was rounding it off.

  Outside the day was singing, happy. Birds took flight and earlier Susan, at dawn, thought she’d see a lark swerve through the air, a happy aspect to it.

  Diarmaid entered; he laid some cowslips on the table. They were entangled. ‘Like a boy’s genitals,’ she thought. Trying to put the image out of her mind she misplaced a button.

  ‘How are you, loveen?’

  He slumped downwards, heavily loaded. He’d gone for a long, long walk. Now he was tired. She looked at him.

  Closely.

  ‘You look a bit like your father today.’ He seemed to ignore that for the moment. Then he looked towards her.

  ‘You …’ But he didn’t finish the phrase.

  ‘You … what?’ she wondered.

  Maybe he was going to say, ‘You are obsessed with my father.’ But that wasn’t true. She wasn’t obsessed with his father.

  She was obsessed with him. Growingly. She’s always loved him but now she was afraid for him. There seemed so much within him, so much that had probably happened to him which would lie unexplained now. His walks, his careful meanderings through country lanes, all seemed to stroke backwards towards a time when she caught Diarmaid one day combing Derek O’Mahony’s hair at school.

  Diarmaid was haunted. Simple as that. Not by rain or the gulls which hung over the school but by the fulfilment of these images, Derek O’Mahony’s death.

  That night Diarmaid put bits and pieces together, feathers for a boy’s eyebrows, paper skin, a button in each eye.

  ‘You’re doing a boy.’

  She was tempted to say he looked like Diarmaid but he didn’t really. ‘He’s a drug addict,’ Diarmaid said solemnly.

  ‘Where is that indicated?’

  ‘His eyes are blue.’

  When they were drinking coffee Diarmaid said,

  ‘In London I saw a boy die in a policeman’s arms. He was a drug addict. Heroin-addicted. He was about 20, 22; he had half a moustache. He was crying. I leant my arm towards him. He took it.

  A plane was going by overhead.

  I’ll never forget it. The last thing he said was “Paul”. Who Paul was I don’t know. He seemed to be crying out for someone.

  An ambulance came and took him away. I stayed there for two hours. Then a man with ponytails tried to pick me up. I walked all the way to Camden Town, getting there next morning!’

  It was awful. She made more coffee. ‘The world is full of terrible things.’ And she realized that Diarmaid, basically, was lonely because his friend was gone.

  With him a certain hope. The boy in his little artwork was the boy in London but also a face far back, Derek O’Mahony’s. The cry of a lonesome facade.

  Diarmaid went for a walk. A moon browsed.

  When he returned his mother was crying.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

  She said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve let you slip from me.’

  14

  The tears ceased; there was the desperation of moving towards one another. No one knew why she was crying. She didn’t. Something trundled in her brain. A train taking off from Euston during the war. Back to Galway; 1942. A brief home visit when she visited the city and found a dead seal on the beach in Salthill.

  ‘Diarmaid, I’m sorry.’ But later she thought she was crying because in a sense she’d interned Diarmaid in that school. There he’d taken up a hopeless cause. The cause of that boy. And in a sense she was one of the murderers of that boy. She’d misunderstood the situation. She’d let it carry to a desperate end.

  And now in grief Diarmaid was gone from her. Over in London God knows what he was up to. He’d gone. Stricken-faced. He was meeting the woes of the world on Piccadilly, submerging himself in them.

  Next day they watched a ladybird on the table. It floated away. The stain of red haunted the darkened air. They looked at one another and laughed. It was very fine, the day, and they sat outside
and ate brown bread and slices of cheese. A passing motorist, face covered in dark glasses, stared.

  Diarmaid smiled. That evening, her work done, they walked to a stream. Tears had undone something, made their relationship more perfect.

  They could look at one another like children now. Gracing a hedge one morning they found a snail. Diarmaid looked at it and for a moment Susan considered. This was what his relationship with Derek O’Mahony had consisted of. Little details.

  She was winning a confidence in herself to remark. She was able to see. Gradually picking up the surprise of Diarmaid’s encounter with Derek.

  At close of day now light flushed, heavily pink, and cows trod by. Some like ballerinas. Just a little clumsy. She watched, Susan did. The spectacle. On the street corner a poster draped the wall now. For Duffy’s circus in Ballinasloe.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said to Diarmaid one day.

  And they did. On a Saturday afternoon. She wore a dress she’d worn to a cousin’s wedding. White. Rims of blue on it. And before they went – in Cullen’s – Diarmaid bought a little bonnet for her which she actually wore. The circus progressed.

  And for a dim moment while a splendidly young trapeze artist performed his tricks – Susan watched Diarmaid’s gaze. It was on the boy. The boy’s hairy chest glistened, soaked gold and brown. His hair was more towards brown. He had a winning smile when he finished his acts and his lips were red. Like a poppy. It occurred to Susan – ingenuously – that her son was a homosexual.

  And then – proudly – she dismissed the thought. What would he be one of those for? Yet it lingered, the thought, and when a clown paraded about Susan’s mind swam with the green of grass and her nostrils exploded with lion’s smell. What had she produced? A homosexual. Yes. Diarmaid and Derek had had a love affair. She wasn’t shocked by the revelation she’d just disclosed to herself. It was like picking a salacious bit of news out of a magazine. Diarmaid, Derek had done some terrible thing together.

  No. Her fancy was slipping. And yet, yet there was a sort of solemn warning about all her thoughts.

  She shouldn’t question so much. It wasn’t right. No one should.

  At home that night she felt like crying again. But something stopped her. One shouldn’t weep in the face of disaster. Had she made her son homosexual? She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. Diarmaid sat, reading his short stories. She leant over his shoulder.

  He was contemplating a drawing of Leo Tolstoy over a story.

  ‘Tolstoy,’ she said with surprise.

  ‘He wrote War and Peace didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She remembered abducting a battered copy of it from an Irish nun in Battersea once and reading a page and a quarter of it.

  15

  The curiosity flourished. It was like opening a very gossipy magazine, seeking details of a venture one wasn’t supposed to know of. Diarmaid was a decidedly strange child. For his own sake she had to find out more.

  ‘Did you have a nice day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He turned. His face glowed. Like a squirrel’s.

  ‘We must have a picnic some day,’ Susan said.

  ‘That’d be nice,’ he reacted.

  ‘Sunday,’ she beamed.

  ‘O.K.’

  Sunday they collected cold chicken, a cake Susan had made, bread, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, premature Easter eggs – small ones that children buy to break the Lenten fast their parents have imposed on them – and they made off.

  Down the village street. It was so bare, so sparse today one would think a cowboy would come riding up it.

  It had that neglected, smelly sense. Like a village you’d see in a Wild West film.

  They made a strange sight. Susan was dressed in a blue and white dress she wore on her return visit to Galway, 1943; her hair and skin bloomed.

  ‘Fresh as a daisy’, as Mrs Conlon would say. Diarmaid wore a grey jumper.

  He’d banded his hair in a string so that he could have been mistaken for an Apache.

  Mrs Conlon could have looked out her window now and deemed both of them misfits.

  By the stream they set down the blanket. Arrayed out in blind flashing bits of food. Diarmaid came back from a few moments’ itinerary.

  ‘I’ve found a statue,’ he said. Sure enough, covered in trees was the statue of a mediaeval Irish saint, old.

  ‘It’s a funny place for it to be,’ Diarmaid said.

  ‘I’m sure someone knows of it,’ Susan said.

  ‘But why don’t they remove it, bring it to the museum or something.’

  ‘People don’t like changing what’s old and sacred.’

  Diarmaid looked at her at this; an inflection disturbed her. It was as though he were going to say something; put forward some disagreement. But, nothing said, he quietly sat down, not unlike an Indian chief – and began eating.

  16

  A quarter to four.

  Susan looked up.

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied. Then he reconsidered.

  He seemed to ask himself the point of her question; he dwelt on some problem in his mind.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh I was just wondering.’

  He thought again, suspected again. ‘I doubt if I’ll ever fall in love,’ he said.

  He got up, walked away. There was a huge silence now; a sort of diseased embryo about. Above the sun was momentarily squashed out.

  ‘Darling, what’s wrong?’

  He faced her.

  ‘I don’t know. Strange, isn’t it? You’d never have dreamt of asking me that last year. You think I had a love affair or something. Well, I hadn’t.’

  Tenderly Diarmaid now spoke. ‘I know what it’s like to love, though.’

  And she saw it clearly, days spent at school, autumn mist veiling the fields, fences closing in on top of cows, shapes sauntering about; the mystery of winter already in the air, winter, a story untold.

  ‘I know you do.’

  But she didn’t want to ask did he mean Derek.

  Instead she concentrated on the butter and recalled an image of Diarmaid long after Derek’s funeral, standing, hands in his pockets, against a background of tennis-playing boys in white.

  Diarmaid’s head was in the air, his whole stance unswerving when she looked up.

  There was a sort of gentle grandeur about him. ‘I loved Derek O’Mahony,’ he said.

  The grub nearly fell out of Susan’s mouth – she’d just eaten a lump of cheese.

  She stared. What was he saying? She felt her ground – tentatively.

  ‘You – you did?’

  She looked down. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Sure I know. You were a great friend of his.’

  ‘I was.’

  He rose, smiled, walked by the stream.

  ‘It’s knowing things like that that almost makes death seem O.K.’

  ‘Knowing what?’

  ‘That you’ve loved. And really loved. Derek died. He must have felt awfully, awfully friendless, but somewhere in him he must have known I cared.

  Because I really did. I remember we once pledged undying support to one another by the lake.

  A football floated. I held his hand.

  Being close to him that day really makes life worthwhile. My life. All lives.

  I could live on and on.

  I couldn’t go back on that.

  It’s like – like picking up the glove of a child that’s dead. I’ll go on and on knowing that I was cared for, knowing that I loved. If he had to die at least it wasn’t in vain. No, I don’t mean that. Of course it was in vain. But something clings.

  Like lightning. It’s as though God spoke from the heart of our relationship. We were – ’, he finished.

  It was as though his flow was getting the better of him. Susan felt a vast excitement.

  It was like listening to poetry she decided.

  He was so unerring her son was.

 
Somewhere he’d chosen rightly; he’d taken up a distant cause.

  They ate on, peaceably.

  And later that night she realized she felt as she had when spring was just about coming and she was looking down roads thinking of her son.

  He sat up in bed; pajamas open, his chest revealed. She sat down on the bed beside him. For a moment she felt like stroking his chest. It was a feeling of overpowering sensuality. One that hadn’t overtaken her since her husband used lie in bed – on mornings – when he wasn’t working.

  The reaction now was one of shame. She withdrew.

  Her son mustn’t know of her feelings. But then, considering, she was glad of her impulse. She felt newly, profoundly alive. She’d go on – past feeling – towards a new dimension.

  This was love, rekindled, newly awakened in her. She loved Diarmaid.

  The time had come not for a relationship between mother and son. But for a new relationship. That between friends.

  The lampshade inheld a yellow ochre light. Around it a semi-dark floated. Diarmaid sat up in this. Like a mediaeval saint.

  And she thought of the truth she’d heard today. The truth stated between them.

  That of a person to a person. Diarmaid to Derek, Derek to Diarmaid. And maybe that in turn situated her to Diarmaid. Far away she heard a cock cry – it was only night, but the cock seemed to crow from Diarmaid’s school, an amount of betrayal. The shrill cry from the heart of Ireland. Yet as she reconsidered there was more to it than that.

  In the blind heart of betrayal hope stepped out. Like a cock. Proudly.

  Such was her relationship with Diarmaid.

  As it had never been before; open, blindly open to new ideas, new consequence. They seemed to be going somewhere now.

  Like two people down a country lane.

  And as she closed her mind off to sleep a gentle old song smote her mind. ‘O to be in Dunaree with the sweetheart I once knew.’ And with that she slept soundly, briskly till morning when the crowing of cocks was over and sunlight lay, a new tomorrow.

  17

  ‘How did you find it after Daddy died.’

  He asked her one night.

  ‘Lonesome,’ she sighed.

  Almost grief-stricken she watched him. ‘I had no one. Then I suppose I had you.’

  He was looking at her quite closely.

  ‘It’s sad, life is. You must make the most of it. And I suppose I did,’ she continued. ‘In my own way. It didn’t matter. It stopped mattering. Life goes on.’