Aubade
By Fionnbharr Rodgers
The world is wide when you’re at the end of it. The time had only dragged itself over into seven forty-five and Doreen had given up all hope of notion that she might return to sleeping. She built up a spark of energy, from somewhere dreadful or divine, and swung her legs over the edge. She sat on the edge of the bed, and faced the door; rigidly so, daren’t looking behind her to the still made side of the duvet and headless pillow. Three days prior, she’d woken to find Frank there, mouth agape and not in prayerful song, his skin yellowed and taut over his fine features. Gone. Had her legs just fallen off while she was walking down the High Street, or had the tae pot have metamorphosed into a four inch figure of Josef Stalin who barked a few orders at her before marching in a circle formation around the marmalade on the breakfast table and promptly exploding into a haze of purple dust and pornographic images, she’d dare say she’d’ve been better prepared to handle it and to respond. There are shocks that require immediate action and as such the brain – a marvellous bit of kit, developed over many years of painstaking evolution – releases a hit of adrenaline which is enough to kick the arse and kick the arse in gear. This was different. This was the sort of shock whereby it appears that some beyond-dimensional being had cracked the house open like an egg and proceeded to carve all craic and feeling out from the room with a dull, pewter spoon. Holistically knackered, from sole to soul. Despite this, the days had not stopped. Their house had become the epicentre for a flurry of comings and just as many, though not nearly enough, goings. The community had, as we do, clicked like a ratchet back into the methodology of grieving. The freshly embalmed corpse that had once held a person inside it was placed central of The Good Room; the dining table reserved for Easter Sunday and Christmas Dinner had to be dismantled and placed in the wee caravan out the back, which hadn’t seen a holiday this side of the Euro and now lived out a second act as a shed and, once, when a loud and obnoxious (read: yank) cousin was over, as a second bedroom. The local GAA club had donated a canister the size of a teenage Dalek, meaning that there was an endless stream of taes and coffees to offer the five thousand streaming thru the house, their heads inclined at a cordial angle, a handshake, and a word for ‘your trouble.’ No imagination to the conversation neither. Doreen managed to lift herself off’ve the bed and was now revolving steadily in the shower, enjoying the cascading water bringing warmth and comfort to every side of her skin. For the briefest wee moment her pores were full, she felt herself reprieved from the world and emerged in a fine cocoon, and her mind was most verdantly empty. Gone. Some of the things that had been said to her over the past seventy-two hours reverberated between her ears as she applied rose-geranium shower gel. ‘Sure I didn’t know he was sick,’ (alright, but could ye tell me who on God’s wondrous creation, under the tender eye of Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven, Mother of Christ, gives a scuttering fuck?) ‘isn’t he looking well, hi,’ (he’s dead, ye feckin gombeen). What were shuffling and awkward gazes became brilliantly lit when the merciful distraction of a wee triangle of sandwich was put in front. No one can just stand still: we have to be doing things. Always with the doing things. It was this that troubled Doreen most, so much so she could only freeze: fight and flight being luxuries reserved for stronger men. For the guts of her life she had been with Frank, married. Of course she had a brimming headful of sun-filled memories of life with her father and mother, and siblings, but her daily – day-to-day, hour-to-hour – behaviour of the landslide majority of her time had been formed in coalition with her Frank. To death, us do part. He was in all practical senses the measure of her living. Cut off a leg and hop along on the other, for you have no choice but to be hopping on. Parted; gone. The world is wider when you’re looking at the end of it: an open field, sun most bronzely bearing down on your wee retinas, and no cover nor shade of even the littlest leaf. She turned off the shower. Stepped out and stood a while on the bathmat before reaching for the towel; staring eyes that might’ve just as well have been shut, while the air reacted with her still wet skin and created a not so unpleasant chill. She dried off. She walked back into the bedroom. The night was now done and the window full of unblemished white light, without a trace of lived day upon it. She sat back on the edge of the bed, this time to work a pair of black tights over her feet. A memory flashed to the fore of her thinking: a trip to Connemara they’d took – must’ve been forty years ago; they’d only been married for all of six months, and they wouldn’t even have Joe for another six at least (though that they didn’t know). Christ, but the heavens opened and every angel and his dog pished down on them that first night they were there. A storm, in fact: one of the tent pegs was blown loose and poor Frank had to run out in his keks to stamp it back in. He came back into the tent wetter than a salmon’s jumper; dried himself with his disrobed shirt and climbed into her sleeping bag where they spent the night ensconced in each other’s breathing. They spent the rest of the trip, a week, doing the happiest form of fuck-all: roaming the hills, eating basic cheddar sandwiches washed down with bottles of stout, and putting on hammy voices to read to each other from a Collected Poems of WB Yeats they’d found in Ennis. Doreen was brought to smiling, and for a moment forgot herself; felt herself fill from toe to nose with all the love she’d ever known. Then she snapped out of it. Gone. She dressed; put on a touch of make-up. A small patter of knocks went all on the other side of the door, and Margaret put her head round. ‘Y’alright, ma? Hearse will be here at nine.’ ‘Aye, right love, just give me a minute,’ to which Margaret gave a puffy smile with very sad eyes and restored the door to its frame. After another silent song’s worth of sitting-still, Doreen crept downstairs – the front room thronged as was the three days norm – she went into the kitchen and clicked on the kettle.
Fionnbharr Rodgers is an Irish historian and poet. He has written articles for History Ireland, Northern Slant, and Slugger O'Toole; he has also had poems published in A New Ulster, Blackbird, and Blackbox Manifold.