What she said added to my later tears but there were so many of those and their reasons flowed into each other so easily that I can’t distinguish their flow today.
“Carry me quickly to the last place you remember us being happy together”, was the last thing Séan Curran had written. There it was on a leaf of grimy note paper that I took from the undertaker the day we all buried Curran. Too late. As ever.
On the other side of the note he’d written, ‘To You All of Ye, You Know Who You Are!’.
He was buried in the one suit he owned. A grey, woollen single-breasted job at least twenty years old. He’d popped the note into its inside pocket before going out into town for his last night. The undertakers found it on the Tuesday before the Wednesday burial. As ever, too late for Curran.
The thing with Curran was that he was forever leaving notes about the place. The beginnings of poems and stories, rehearsals for suicide notes. Oftentimes you simply couldn’t tell exactly what he meant.
He had worked for years on the railways doing a variety of jobs. He was tall and slim, dark, he wore spectacles and what used to be known as stout boots. He was an atheist and a small drinker but only on Fridays. I met him on the railways. I met him in the pub. I wouldn’t say we became friends but we certainly became brothers-in-books.
I’ll miss him when it’s all sunk in. When it’s all been soaked up. See, I’ve distanced myself from the process. That’ll happen all by itself. At least I hope so.
Curran emerged from prison a ruined old man. He told me that after several chats with the chaplain a Swiftian descent into religion had caused his loss of faith in God. That said, it also gave him a firm sense of belonging.
“Now”, he wrote, “I have the Pope and all the cardinals on earth!”
He came directly to my home to remind me of our times together. He impressed on me that, before he went into prison, my wife Mary should have been his wife.
Mary, Curran and I had revolved around each other before he had taken up what some called crime and others called patriotism. I’m now convinced that Mary had taken up with me purely out of heartbreak. I adored her with all the adoration I had. I loved her with all my stinking heart. But today, before his funeral, it rankles me that Mary and Curran loved each other.
I always thought the reason that my late wife, Mary, was my wife and not his was because I’d listened to her talk all about Flann O’Brien one pub night. He’d disagreed vehemently with what she said because she’d folded Myles na gCopaleen into her dialogue.
“Different names. Different people!” I remember him yelling, and her laughing.
“Different names. Same man. Different tones”, she replied quietly enough.
Boy, how he’d sulked. How he’d fallen for her.
It turns out that she married me because she thought; she hoped she would love me and there’d be less conflict in the marriage. She told me this in the cancer ward. She felt she had to. I agreed.
What she said added to my later tears but there were so many of those and their reasons flowed into each other so easily that I can’t distinguish their flow today.
She was my friend and we had this glorious house. We had two children, both abroad and doing very well. I talk to her ghost about Curran. I’d like to imagine they’re now chatting to each other, and now she knows the truth.
It’s a relief that I no longer need to hide the fact that Curran murdered her father on his doorstep. He’d told me that when he came to see me after he got out of prison.
