Memory Theme Analysis

It was time they left him alone, is what he wanted to say. Retired men could be let go safely—let the new ones put their minds to the work. All his working life he had dealt with villains. After a few decades of that your faith in human nature is in the ground. It’s a premature burial, pre-dating your own. But he wanted to be a believer again, in something. He wanted to live in his wealth of minutes, the ones he had left anyhow. He wanted a blessed, a quiet time. He wanted—

Outside the window a gull dropped the full height of the frame, a sudden white thing in the corner of his eye, free-falling so abruptly it made him jump.

There he saw the little boy who had arrived at Christmas with his mother, to the Turret Flat, come running into view. He had some sort of unusual stick in his hand. A black cane, with a silver knob—like Fred Astaire might use for dancing. He was flailing it about in the wind. The square of hedges around the sheltered spot that Mr Tomelty had created, or an earlier owner, was bending and shuddering, like a circle of powerful horses. Threshing the bitter grain of life. The little boy was soundless because the window was closed, but Tom adjudged he must be singing. The child was now twirling himself all about, as if the cane had not been enough of a thing to be twirling, in his short trousers, happy in the wind, the cold, oblivious.

He was appalled by his visit to the nick, but at the same time he knew that deep within there was a pride in him, a pride in something that had only seemed terrible and mayhemic long ago. Now it felt like some kind of epic thing scribed on his heart with a tattooing needle. Like those strips of indecipherable Tibetan script on a flag. He couldn’t read the words and symbols but he felt they spoke of things that were just, and integral, and right.

He cradled the memory of his wife as if she were still a living being. As if no one had been crushed, no one had been hurried from the halls of life, and the power of his love could effect that, could hold her buoyant and eternal in the embrace of an ordinary day. The sunlight struck its million pins into the pollocky sea, the whole expanse sparked, and sparkled, as if on the very verge of a true conflagration. Alone, alone, he smiled and smiled. He closed his eyes. He opened them. The sea was still there.

It neatly made him angry now—and he knew it was illogical, he probably looked a great deal put out and vexed, though no one was on the road to see it—that she was always in his mind as the person she had been when she departed. Not young, not old, but human and beautiful. Why would that make him angry? He was angry with who, with what? It was his duty to remember her. It was his duty to remember her. But he was old, he was old, and he had never wanted another, never. He was old and she was gone, never herself to be old.

‘I’m so happy to meet you, I really am. We were in need of a strong presence without fully knowing it. Especially now we have children in the house. That lovely little girl, and her brother.’ She looked at her husband, as if not wanting to exclude him from this conversation. Tom had not seen any little girl. Did she mean the people in the Turret flat?

They didn’t have long in the new house in Deansgrange, in truth, before the little changes. At night she would go to sleep like a body interred—he could barely hear her breathing. She lived so lightly the traces were hard to see. He would hunt for signs of her. Traces of June. Later, a few good years on, he’d come home of an evening and go about the house, looking for her and the children. When he called out to her she mightn’t answer, because sometimes she wasn’t there. In the last times, when he called out, and she was there, she never answered either. Even alive she was every so often like someone you remembered that you had loved.

‘And, Winnie, where are you living?’ he said, suddenly unable to remember. It was very strange. A father should know where his daughter was living, surely. He knew where she was living but where was it? It had just slipped his mind. He was growing demented, he must be. ‘Where are you living?’ he said, in some distress now, a bit of a headache brewing.

‘Deansgrange, Daddy, Deansgrange.’

‘But we’ve left Deansgrange,’ he said, again with the note of panic and misery in his voice.

‘Well, but I’m still there, Daddy.’

‘Not the cemetery!’ he said, with a small cry.

‘Yes, Daddy, the cemetery.’

And if the nuns didn’t know, they must have been blind, dead, and dumb. Because he did it to a dozen girls, over the years, how many I couldn’t say. Oh, and always so nice to him, Father Thaddy this, and Father Thaddy that, they worshipped him, and baking three cakes for him every now and then, [...] and one time he tore me, you know, in the backside, and the doctor had to come, and he said, hmm, hmm, yes, yes, she has colitis, saying it clearly for the nun, the poor little thing, that’s very sore, [...] —yes, Sister Brenda was there, while he was fucking scoping my bits, Tom, and all the tut-tutting of her, and the hands of her going like a butterfly, dear me, dear me, how on earth does that happen.

If he were looking for citizenship, it might be of this miraculous bay. Child of nowhere, he could claim rights over this, this vast vacancy queerly filled, both empty and full. He was just an old policeman with a buckled heart, but if he had known how, he would have sucked the whole vista into himself, every grain of salt and sand and sea, swallowed it whole, like one of those old whales in the loved museum, like a monster in an ancient story. [...] He knew, he knew he was in trouble, he could sense the trouble with his copper’s instinct and didn’t yet know its shape, but the bay also released him somehow, let him go for a blessed minute into some wild freedom, so that his heart and soul were both shaken and renewed, in the same moment, in the same breath.

The only thing he had been good for in his brief sojourn in the army had been sniping. He had just had a steady eye, so unlike many serving soldiers, he had killed a fair number of the enemy. He wished he hadn’t. He wondered now about those lives he had ended. Mostly local men among the Malayan rebels. They had given him an honourable discharge after a year of that. He had begun to be sleepless, and to have nightmares when he did sleep. The army doctor had called it ‘gross stress reaction’. Doctors had to give even terror a name, he supposed. […] As soon as he hit Irish soil, though, mercifully, his symptoms began to subside, slowly, and then he had a notion to try the police. […] They liked his rifle skills, and the recruiter had a great regard for the army. Lucky Tom.

Talk to yourself, Tom, talk to yourself, calm your heart. Hold on by your fingernails. Something was coming, something was coming, but not yet. He was king over time in the wicker chair. Preserving the beneficence of the present. Not smoking, true, his old cigarillos, heeding at last the intimations of his old doctor. For in a very curious way he wanted to live. He wanted to live long enough to get through the dark forest, like a medieval child in the old stories. To get through the tall, dense trees and the dark light that barely merited the name of light. Along the ancient road with its carpeting of the leaves of a thousand autumns. To see at last the sparkle begin in the distance, the diamonds and fires of the sunlight, where the forest would end.

There had been times when he simply didn’t care about himself anymore. He used to be tempted to drive through red lights in his little car, which was truly stupid, and truly murderous when he thought about it. Just now and then. And when that young man, what was his name, Purcell, something Purcell, Tim maybe, waved his army-issue gun around—he was a mechanic in logistics in the army, so why did he have a gun?—Tom didn’t feel anything remotely like fear. He just thought: you had best not shoot your wife. Shoot me instead. So they gave him a medal for that.

He had a sudden strong desire to tell his story to someone, as long as it was someone without ears. So he could speak but they couldn’t hear.

He had the wild sense that, despite the tyranny of dates and time, she was there, not in memory but really, and he was careful not to open those eyes. He knew the second he did so he would be gone. […] They were both away with the fairies and June was alive, she was alive, beautiful and wise, and she would always be there, bursting with life, calm as any old painted Madonna, as long as he did not open his eyes. He lifted both his hands and reached out to hold that longed-for face. To hold it, the soft cheeks, the dark skin, to hold it, to hold it.

He was genuinely shocked when June took their humble bread knife from her gansey. She took it from her gansey, and then she went in under his coat like a bone-collapsing rat, trying to get in in a manner no human ever could. And she wriggled herself up onto his back, using his spine as a great brace, and she flattened herself like a huge plaster, not a human creature at all. He had clearly married a Trickster.

Possible court appearance. If the DPP thought there was evidence. What of the blood sample? Would that be enough? The word of an evil man, himself under scrutiny, judgement, sentence. But what did Tom care? He didn’t. He had served the only soul he cared about, not his own soul, or the souls even of his children, but the girl he had met in the Wimpy café, who had laughed at Billy Drury’s taste on the jukebox, and in laughing, with her bright face, fished out his deathless love.

Even the man highest up thought he should take early retirement, but something deep in him needed to go on to the end. Then the little party and the sombre words and the happy words. Then his niche in Queenstown Castle. His wicker chair, the characterful sea, and the stolid island. And then, those quiet nine months not only of new silence, but also—what could he call it? A sort of blossoming sense of relief, maybe, that the wretched Fates had done with him. Had noticed his great happiness long ago, and emblem by emblem taken it away from him. Then the day that Wilson and O’Casey came to him like Mormons, with the old rhododendron aflame at their backs. The screeching of the door and the whole thing cranked up again, like a Model T Ford.

The hand was delicate and dark, and he wondered, if he extended his own left hand to meet it, would he be able to touch her? And if he could touch her, what did that mean? He was afraid to move in case it made her vanish but at the same time he was brave enough to risk it and he extended his arm a few inches and before he knew it he was touching her warm fingers. He wanted to say something to her now alright but in a way the touching of hands said everything he needed to say. It was like he had just met her, that very same feeling of old in the vanished café, and yet of course in the very same moment he knew everything there was to know about her. The strange privilege of that. The lovely wildness of it.