The telephone rings. Its clamour
unsettles the hallway, disturbs me. The question is, do I answer it?
I stare through the panel by the door.
Across the road, houses bake in the sunshine, houses identical to my own. It’s
a prospect I know intimately. I once assumed that I understood it completely.
Now, all I see is questions. Questions disappearing up one another’s backsides,
and never being answered.
Brendan had no questions. You don’t when
you’re that age. When you’re that age, you know it all.
What I should say, perhaps, is that
Brendan has no questions. When I use
the present tense, Brendan materialises here in this hallway where the phone is
ringing. He tilts his head and smiles. His chin juts out with a slight,
instinctive belligerence, just like his father’s. His skin is peppered with the
not entirely convincing facial hairs of the adolescent male.
I watch him go. The much re-watched film
rolls for the millionth time.
It’s early evening, black with the dark
of December. The rain glints on his leather jacket. His combat trousers flap,
accentuating the strut of his walk. He isn’t wearing a hat.
Yet even as this image sears across my
brain, I wonder. Do I remember the exact flare of his nostrils, the velvet of
them, their vulnerability? The problem is, that even if my memory is
impeccable, what I see must be wrong. It’s a fraud, an illusion, because time
has dripped away. Brendan is no longer eighteen-years-old. His birthday has
passed, and in two months, there will be another. Nothing stands still. The buses
lumber down the avenue towards Tallaght, carrying new passengers. The grass
grows and is cut. My Brendan’s clothes would be different; his appearance
altered.
My Brendan would be a stranger.
That first night, I did nothing. Years
ago, after his father ran off to Australia, I vowed I wouldn’t smother Brendan
with love. I wouldn’t ruin him with my need, just because he was my whole
purpose in life. My plan was to let him grow free. That was the theory, anyway.
Actually, when I say I did nothing that
first night, I lie. I called Brendan on his mobile. At 2 AM to start with. When
I didn’t get him, I made excuses for him. I put myself into his shoes. I
strapped imaginary antlers on my forehead and became an eighteen-year-old male.
I downed pints. I pursued girls. I talked a good show to anyone who would
listen.
Yet all the while that I was pretending
to be Brendan, I kept thinking of his head, his wet head as I saw it last,
disappearing under the yellow streetlamps.
That first night was impossible.
Afterwards, it got worse. The rain stopped, the dark lifted, and the sound of
the alarm clock ticking in his empty bedroom grew louder and louder.
I phoned every friend that he might be
with. After that, everyone he knew. I heard nothing, nothing but pleasant
voices, expressed concern. I heard nothing but ignorance. The minutes laboured
by. The net of unreality tightened around me, suffocating me. Where was he?
Where was my son? The air thickened; each step was a struggle.
In the middle of the day, I dragged
myself the distance to the station.
The guard behind the counter was scarcely
older than Brendan. "Kids that age have the habit of disappearing," he
pronounced cheerfully. "Go on home now, and he'll be waiting for you."
It was three long days before a sergeant,
with neat, energetic movements, ushered me inside. "Yes, yes," he said
soothingly. This sergeant was kind, he was attentive. His black shoes were
terribly shiny. I thought, at first, that he cared. He whipped out a notebook,
started asking questions about my son.
Full name? Date of birth? Height? Weight?
Colour of hair? Style of hair? Colour of eyes?
I answered softly, thoroughly.
The sergeant licked his finger, turned a
page, continued. How much did he drink? How often did he drink? Did he take
drugs?
My mind lurched. The sergeant’s tone had
not changed. But his questions had.
"Does he have a father?" the sergeant
asked.
I watched as the sergeant’s brain -- his
busy, oily brain -- slotted a scenario into position. Then he swivelled towards
me in his chair. "The thing is," the sergeant said, "since Brendan is 18 years
of age, he can go where he likes."
The phone is still ringing. It might be
the sergeant, who hasn’t called in months. It might be some tenacious friend
who hasn’t quite given up on me, or even my boss, with some ultimatum about my
job.
Or it might be Brendan.
Those first days, I jumped for the phone,
praying for his voice. I could scarcely bear to go out of the house, for fear
of missing him.
The weeks turned into months. People’s
interest dried up.
I bought an answering machine.
It was then that I started to walk. I’d
always been a keen walker, but now it became my reason for living. Soon I was
criss-crossing the bus route, marking a map until it was wired with my tracks.
I inched through Ballyboden, Knocklyon, Firhouse, Old Bawn. I trespassed in
gardens, stared through windows. I invaded building sites and trudged through
fields, stabbing the scrub systematically. I scaled walls, clambered over heaps
of rubble, peered into skips. I fought my way through undergrowth, ripping
clothes and skin, until the black currents of the Dodder raced beside me.
In the branches over my head, the remains
of plastic bags flapped like ghosts.
I did not relent. The further I went, the
further I was prepared to go.
Even the mountains looming to the south
did not seem impossible, not if I kept on. Did I think that if I struggled
long, hard and far enough, that our paths must cross? Did I hear myself saying,
"Fancy meeting you here?" Or was I searching for something smaller: an
undergarment, say, or a sock, some item that I’d washed and folded, that I
would recognise by the hole in its toe, or the loose thread beneath the
elastic? Did I imagine stumbling across his jacket itself, the leather all
sodden and flayed, a relic of my son?
With every step, I fought to keep Brendan
alive and kicking. I pictured his molecules still fixed together in a living
entity. I took each breath with the belief that Brendan breathed the same air.
I watched him sleep, wake, dress and undress, eat and eliminate.
The phone keeps ringing. The black
apparatus has sprouted eyes. They stare, accusing me. Why do I not pick up?
Next to the phone, the answering machine waits. One more ring, and it will kick
in. My hand floats out. My finger flicks off the answering machine. The ringing
does not stop.
As I walk and walk, nobody looks at me
twice. Why would they? I am not quite forty, of average height and build. My
eyes and hair are brown. Who would pick me out of a crowd?
Brendan was on his way to the glass
pyramid of the Square. But by the time the sergeant requisitioned security
videos, most of them were gone, recorded over. I watched what he had until my
eyes ached. "That might be him," I said. "That might be him."
"Might?" the sergeant said.
"For God’s sake," I said hotly. "It was a
Friday. Right before Christmas. There are armies of people, all blotting one
another out.
"Might is not a definite sighting." The
sergeant flicked a speck from his cuff.
I wanted to thump his perfect face, to
stamp upon his too shiny shoes.
"Any of us could disappear," I yelled.
"What about those women in Leixlip? Sealed up in that house for months, and
nobody noticed!" The sergeant was not impressed. "That was different," he said.
Nobody, I think, would notice if I disappeared.
My friends no longer know what to say to me. Acquaintances retreat. I don’t
blame them. I have only the one conversation. People have lavished their
emotional energies on me, and moved on. Only I remain behind, caught in the
past, snagged at that moment when Brendan’s wet, hatless head vanished from my
sightline.
My hair hasn’t always been this weird,
glossy brown. When Brendan disappeared, my hair was peppered with grey. He’d
wanted me to dye it. I refused. "I don’t want you to get old," he said. I think
I embarrassed him.
By which I mean to make it clear that our
relationship wasn’t perfect.
As the sergeant with his questions and
phoney kindness was intent upon ferreting out. Of course we bickered, like any
parent and child. We pressed one another’s buttons. I wanted him to aspire, to
work harder at his studies, to choose his friends more wisely, to make
something out of himself. He wanted me to lighten up. But it was not what the
sergeant made of it.
The difficulty is, that there was money
gone from Brendan’s account. A couple of hundred. The sergeant made a feast of
that miserable two hundred quid. "You see, Mother," the sergeant said, "your
Brendan wanted to do it his way. He took that two hundred pounds and set sail.
Brendan the Navigator, right?"
Did the sergeant really use those words?
Brendan the Navigator? Mother? Set sail? Or are they an invention of my heated
imagination?
"No," I said to the sergeant. Calmly,
this time. "There was nearly six hundred pounds in that account, money earned
from packing shelves at Spar.
If he was going places, he’d have taken
the lot." I hesitated. "It was Christmas time," I said quietly. "Brendan was
going to buy me a CD player."
"Yeah?" The sergeant let the monosyllable
hang between us. "Enough to have gone to England with," he said.
Enough to have been robbed for, I
thought. Enough to have been killed for.
"Or perhaps Australia?" the sergeant
added.
I’ve said that I was of average build.
I’m not. I have grown thin as a pin. A puff of smoke could blow me away. I am
bereft, old inside, instinct with a grey that no hair dye can disguise. I
wander in a world that has become a maelstrom.
It seems to me always to be December now.
When I think back, it was mostly December when people went missing. Their
terrible stories punctuated the season, an undercurrent swilling beneath our
little festivities, tarnishing the tinsel. As I remember, it was mostly the
women who vanished.
When they turned up, it was under bushes
in parks, or in boots of cars, or washed up under cliffs. Or else they wouldn’t
be found at all.
I applied myself only briefly to their
stories. I shuddered, but the full picture eluded me. I gave no consideration
to the louring skies, or the length of the cold, black nights. And I didn’t
think of them out there -- somewhere -- their vulnerable heads exposed.
"It’s not the warmest," Brendan used to
say about his jacket, the black leather that he loved. "But so long as I’m warm
when I put it on," he laughed, "it’s grand."
I open the door. I feel the touch of Brendan’s
fingers on its handle.
I step out. Out into the sunshine, the
black, icy sunshine. I walk with my son down the path, turn towards the avenue.
A heavy lorry thunders by. The road trembles.
Do you see that woman across the road?
The one in the flowered dress? Well, that’s me, pregnant, with Brendan inside.
And that tot in the garden with the ball? That’s Brendan too, sprouting so
fast, you can see it happening. And that youth with the fag, and the man at the
wheel of that Volvo?
Both of them: Brendan!
Sure as eggs, right as rain.
The phone is still ringing. I hear it in
the distance. Echoing in the house that I’ve left behind.
Copyright © Ivy Bannister 2001. All Rights Reserved
